212

by Alafair Burke

  Don’t bother looking for me. You won’t find me. And if you look for me, I’ll look for you…and your families.

  Rogan leaned back in his chair. “We kicked ourselves for getting distracted by this Web site, but we looked precisely where Tanya wanted us to focus. It’s like those magicians with the sleight-of-hand tricks. The harder you try to find the quarter, the easier it is for the magician to dupe you into looking left while he’s pulling a coin out of your right ear. Tanya knew Megan’s schedule, and she used it to make us look left. We saw those posts and just assumed Megan was the target. This woman’s coldhearted. She killed a girl she lived with for months, just as a distraction.”

  “Jesus, Rogan. This message was posted less than an hour ago.”

  Immediately after they’d caught the Gunther murder, they’d asked one of the computer technicians to track any new comments about Megan on Campus Juice. He assured them he could write a simple computer program that would alert him of any replies posted to the threads containing the threats. Apparently the program had worked.

  “I know,” Rogan said. “I was notified within two minutes and immediately called Jabba the Hutt out in Long Island for the Internet provider information.”

  “The fact that we’re sitting here tells me that didn’t pan out.”

  “She used that cloaking device again. The chick’s out there somewhere, threatening us, but we have no idea where. She’s an electronic ghost.”

  “We’ve got her picture up all over the city. The news is running it twenty-four/seven. Eventually someone’s going to spot her.”

  The only thing the media loved more than young, attractive murder victims were young, attractive missing women. The story of one who had walked away from a hospital and disappeared after surviving a murder attempt was like the crack cocaine of tabloid crime reporting. Patrol officers throughout the borough were tracking down the wingnut calls that were flooding the tip line, but so far, none of the spottings had panned out. Now Tanya had upped the ante with this threat.

  “Rogan, if Tanya had any details about our personal lives, she would have used them, just like she posted Megan’s schedule on Campus Juice to scare her. Threatening our, quote, ‘families’ shows that she doesn’t know anything about Sydney.”

  “Or Jess,” Rogan added.

  “Or Jess.” But even as she tried to convince herself that Tanya would be more worried about disappearing than targeting the family members of police officers, she used the camera in her cell phone to take a snapshot of Tanya’s Maryland ID. She e-mailed it to Jess, then followed it with a text message: “Crazy chick making threats. Likely BS, but just in case, photo in your e-mail.”

  She hit the send button and asked Rogan if she should send the picture to Sydney as well.

  “I kept her up late enough watching the news that she knows that girl’s face just fine by now,” he said. “I’ll call her myself to tell her about this latest garbage. She doesn’t always take the job in stride, at least not when it comes home with me.”

  Rogan’s phone rang.

  “Yeah, this is Rogan.”

  Ellie’s cell buzzed in her hand. A reply text message from Jess: “Crazy chick’s hot. Will definitely be on the lookout.”

  She was about to text a response to Jess when Rogan’s side of the phone conversation caught her attention.

  “Yeah, the Megan Gunther case. You got a hit?” She recognized the excited look on his face. There was news. Ellie reached across him to hit the refresh button on the Web browser. No new messages on Campus Juice.

  “What?” she whispered urgently. “What?”

  Rogan shook his head to shush her.

  “No shit?…You’re sure?…Sweet. I need you to do me a favor, though. We’re going to need DNA to confirm it…. No, we don’t have a sample. Send someone back to pull hair from the shower drain?…Cool. Thanks.”

  When he returned the handset to the cradle without speaking, she wanted to nudge his words out with a hard elbow to the back.

  “That was CSU getting back to us on Tanya Abbott’s fingerprints. Guess the girl’s not a ghost after all.”

  “That prostitution bust in Baltimore wasn’t her only arrest?”

  He shook his head. “They got a hit, but it wasn’t from IAFIS.” The Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System contained fingerprint and criminal history data from crime records throughout the country. “It was in the NYPD’s very own collection of unsolved cases. You want to guess what case we got a hit on?”

  “Not in the mood for twenty questions, J. J.”

  “The prints Tanya Abbott left behind in Megan Gunther’s apartment match the latents we found on the champagne glass at the Robert Mancini shooting. I’ve got them pulling hair out of the shower drain at Megan’s place trying to find a DNA sample for confirmation, but the print match is solid.”

  Tanya Abbott was the missing mystery woman from Robert Mancini’s last fatal date.

  PART IV

  EASY MONEY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  2:30 P.M.

  Usually when a lieutenant summoned detectives into the office for a case update, it was for a quick conversation. Summarize a few witness interviews. Run through the forensic results. An overview of the next steps. But when Robin Tucker beckoned Ellie and Rogan into her office this afternoon, she got more than she could have possibly expected. Rogan used a purple marker and a rolling whiteboard to diagram all the connections.

  Tanya Abbott was, as far as they could tell, the last person to see Robert Mancini alive. She was also the last person to see Megan Gunther, with whom she shared an apartment under the alias Heather Bradley. And through Stacy Schecter, they’d also connected her to Katie Battle, murdered two nights ago at the Royalton Hotel.

  Tucker’s eyes roamed the board as she processed the new information.

  “CSU’s sure about the prints?” she asked.

  “Abbott left prints all over her apartment,” Rogan said. “They’ve got fourteen match points to the latent on the champagne glass from Mancini’s mystery date. She’s our girl from the 212.”

  “It was right in front of us,” Ellie said. “In the phone records. On May twenty-seventh”—Rogan circled the date written next to the Mancini murder for emphasis—“that’s the date Katie Battle called Stacy Schecter to cover a date for her. Stacy couldn’t cover it, so she called Tanya Abbott. The client was Robo Mancini. I can’t believe I didn’t make the connection earlier.”

  “I didn’t think a wunderkind like you missed anything, Hatcher.”

  Ellie didn’t miss the sarcasm in her lieutenant’s tone.

  “Well, I did. When I told Katie’s mother about her death, the caretaker at the nursing home mentioned that the mom had a stroke the same day Sydney Pollack died. I remembered hearing the news the day of the Mancini murder. I should’ve seen it. I messed up.”

  “Jeez,” Rogan said, “not this again. I never told you the date of those phone calls. All I said was they were four months ago. You would’ve needed ESP.”

  “So lesson learned,” Tucker said. “Make sure your partner knows everything you know.”

  “The same could be said for lieutenants.” Ellie cursed herself for letting Tucker’s comment get to her, but she was still irked about the lieutenant’s date with Sparks’s head of security.

  “Go ahead, Hatcher. Say what’s on your mind.”

  “The only thing that’s on my mind is how to find Tanya Abbott.”

  “And whoever’s helping her,” Rogan said, spotting an opportunity to break the tension in the room. He placed a check mark next to the Mancini case. “Abbott could’ve shot the hell out of Mancini as part of some botched robbery, but no way did she kill Megan Gunther on her own.” He underlined the name Megan Gunther. “Abbott had real injuries. She went to St. Vincent’s in a meat wagon. Stabbing herself like that? Possible, but not likely. And then there’s the question of the murder weapon. None of the knives at the apartment were consistent with the
injuries to either Megan or Abbott. Someone carried the weapon away, and since Abbott was wheeled out to an ambulance, it wasn’t her.”

  He drew another line beneath another name. “Next we’ve got Katie Battle.”

  “Tanya covered a date for her on May 27, and four months later Battle ends up dead in a hotel room?” Tucker was making sure she was following all the connections.

  “Correct,” Rogan said. “We just heard from the ME. The official cause of death was asphyxiation. She was strangled. But she was also tortured. Her fingers were broken. Her skin was sliced in twenty-seven different places. She was hog-tied. The pressure alone from the restraints would have been—”

  “I get the picture,” Tucker said.

  “But we don’t know that she was raped,” Ellie added. “Or at least we don’t have any medical findings of sexual assault. The ME found no signs of seminal fluids on the body, and so far CSU has none at the scene.”

  “The injuries Rogan described sound sexual.”

  “Agreed,” Ellie said. “The motivation could be sexual without any physical evidence to prove that.”

  Forced vaginal or anal penetration usually caused tearing and bruising, but oral sodomy was not always detectable. And violence could be sexually motivated even if not carried out with a sexual assault. The College Hill Strangler in Wichita had masturbated near the bodies of his victims. Whoever killed Katie Battle could have been smart enough not to leave bodily fluids behind.

  “So let’s assume she’s got an accomplice,” Tucker said, tucking a pen behind her ear. “Why are the two of them killing these people?”

  Find the motive, and the motive will lead you to the man.

  “We wondered the same thing,” Ellie said. “Picture this. Tanya came to New York to start over. Got herself into NYU as Heather Bradley and was trying to go legit. But she couldn’t cover all the costs, so she’s still turning tricks. She sees the opportunity for easy money at the 212 with Mancini. She assumes an apartment like that’s going to have valuables: jewelry, cash, silver, computers. She didn’t know the place was just for show. She and her boyfriend plan a robbery, but somehow it turns to shit. Mancini was an army badass; maybe he fights back.”

  “I can see that,” Tucker said.

  “Meanwhile, Megan finds out more than she’s supposed to know about her roommate—about either Tanya’s true identity or her whereabouts on May 27, or maybe it was just the prostitution. She learns enough that she becomes a danger to Tanya’s new life. Tanya posts the threats on Campus Juice as a distraction, then she and her accomplice stage the attack at the apartment. But when Tanya gets to the hospital, she realizes that the search for Heather Bradley’s medical insurance is going to turn up dry. And if we booked her for the fraud on NYU, her prints would come back to the Mancini crime scene. Now there is a risk that everything would come out.”

  “What about the real estate agent? Why kill Katie Battle?”

  “Our best theory is that Tanya’s partner got a taste for killing when he stabbed Megan Gunther. Shooting Robert Mancini was just part of a robbery. No real thrills. But stabbing Megan was different. Up close. Personal. Intimate. He may have even known her. Next time, he books Katie Battle and takes his time.”

  “And you know for sure that Tanya left the hospital before Battle was killed?”

  Ellie and Rogan exchanged a glance. They knew their theory rested on multiple assumptions, but now that they were hearing it out loud, they were seeing all of the holes.

  Rogan shook his head. “Unfortunately, Tanya walked out of the hospital without telling anyone. A hospital employee asked about her insurance just before five and then left when her shift ended. Based on the entries in her medical chart, we know she got her dinner at five thirty, and she was gone by the time we got there at eleven thirty.”

  “No one went in her room for six hours?”

  “Someone went in to get her dinner tray,” Ellie explained, “but the covers were pulled up on the bed, and they assumed the patient was sleeping. Tanya had padded the bed with extra blankets. In any event, it’s certainly possible Tanya got out in time to go to the Royalton. Katie Battle checked in to the Royalton at six thirty-seven, and her body was found around eight. Even if Tanya missed the action, whoever helped her kill Mancini and Megan could have been acting on his own.”

  Tucker shook her head. “Been a while since I’ve seen a woman kill anyone other than a lover or a kid. She strikes you as the type to do all this?”

  “According to Megan’s boyfriend, a kid named Keith Guzman, Tanya had some kind of secret guy in her life.” They had decided to hold off on telling Tucker about Judge Bandon’s connection to Tanya for now. “She said something about always having a man who takes care of her, that it started with the first person she ever slept with. She said she even saw a therapist about it. She might have the kind of character that would make her subservient to a violent personality.”

  “A shrink, huh?” Rogan asked. Ellie hadn’t mentioned this fact when she gave him the initial rundown of her visit to Guzman’s apartment.

  “Supposedly. Why, does that mean something to you?”

  He shrugged. “Probably nothing. That pop she took in Baltimore did require counseling to get the case dismissed. There was a doctor’s name scribbled on the dispo sheet the DA faxed me from the file. I noticed because, at least up here, that kind of counseling’s done by the probation department, not an actual MD.”

  “Not unique to New York,” Tucker said. “No jurisdiction bigger than Mayberry can afford to have full-fledged shrinks doing hand-holding on misdemeanor prostitution cases. If she had a doctor vouching for her, he would’ve been private.”

  Ellie took the assumption to the next level. “Which raises the question of how a twenty-year-old street prostitute can afford a private therapist.”

  Tucker wagged her ballpoint pen in their direction. “Sounds like the wunderkind may have just figured out something important about our mysterious Tanya Abbott.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  2:30 P.M.

  Stacy Schecter blew her bangs out of her eyes and swirled a sip of pinot noir on her tongue as she contemplated the painted canvas in front of her. The splotches of muted color on the skin were about right, but there was something about the expression on the woman’s face that was still off.

  This painting was something entirely new for Stacy. For the last two years, she’d worked on little other than the abstract yet soothing stretched canvases that could fetch her a couple hundred dollars on the street. She had hoped to be featured in solo exhibitions in Chelsea’s best galleries by now, but in reality, the only paintings she’d ever sold went to people who cared more about aesthetically pleasing wall decor than actual art.

  Stacy hadn’t painted anything representational since college. Her parents had sent their troubled daughter to the West Coast believing that four years of open space and fresh air, away from her overly precocious New York friends, might somehow prove transformative. The hippie college in Washington to which they had steered her, just an hour’s drive from her older sister’s house in Seattle, was supposed to provide an outlet for her creativity and rebellious ways. Stacy figured she’d met all expectations by becoming an art major and had exceeded them by graduating in the top half of her class.

  Apparently her parents had some other understanding of whatever transformation was supposed to have occurred during those four years. When she returned home with the same basic attitude and no employable skills, her parents had cut her off.

  Stacy tried to be legit, and in the next four years she learned more than she’d ever picked up in college. She applied for design jobs, then marketing, then assistant positions, and then finally moved down to waitressing. But the money was never enough.

  She might still be waiting tables if it hadn’t been for that night at the Bowery Ballroom. She and her friend Carmen had gone to see Morrisey two decades after a young Stacy first discovered the Smiths and declared to her mothe
r that she was no longer a carnivore because Meat Is Murder. Three cocktails in, still waiting for the show to start, Carmen went off on a slurred rant about a girl she knew who was turning tricks for extra cash. Stacy found herself defending this woman she didn’t know and the choice that she had made for herself. And long after Morrisey finished his finale of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” she couldn’t put the idea to rest.

  A little more than a year later, she could pay her bills and still have plenty of time left over to paint.

  Stacy certainly didn’t boast about the way she earned her money, but she also didn’t see the problem. At any expensive club or restaurant, on any given night, countless girls were on first dates with hedge-fund assholes. They spent the night sipping from the bottle service in the VIP lounge or nibbling on a two-hundred-dollar tasting menu with the expectation that they’d put out for the night and never be spoken to again. What Stacy did was no different, but she skipped the bullshit conversation and got to spend the money as she saw fit. If anything, those gold-digging date-girls were bigger whores than she was.

  She usually had no problem separating her primary income source from the rest of her life. As Stacy, she scrunched up her shagged hair with molding paste, piled on the eyeliner, sported a wardrobe of black, leather, and denim, and cursed more than a pissed-off ex-con. When she dated, she smoothed her hair with straightening gel, donned clothes that a Long Island housewife might call “classy,” and smiled a lot through a thin layer of age-appropriate makeup. And when she was done with the date, she stopped thinking about that part of her life entirely. It hadn’t been easy, but that’s what she’d trained herself to do.

  But now the fake life was bleeding into the real one. And with real blood.

  She looked again at the canvas. The facial expression. It wasn’t right.