212

by Alafair Burke

  “Way before. Maybe just a couple of weeks after the ladies came into the precinct complaining about the guy. Why?”

  The neighbors had first complained in March. If Carenza mentioned their suspicions prior to the murder, and Dillon had relayed them to Sparks, Sparks could have staged Mancini’s killing to look like a home invasion, knowing that a pending narcotics investigation across the hallway would bolster that theory of the crime.

  She felt a buzzing at her waist. A new text message:

  From Stacy Schecter. Saw guy in photo. Tried to meet me. Call when you

  The message stopped mid-sentence. Had Stacy simply hit the send key prematurely? Or was Ellie’s quickening pulse confirming her worst fears?

  She hit the call button on her phone, grateful that Stacy’d had the piece of mind to identify herself in her message. It rang four times before going to voice mail. She tried again. Another four rings. She tried again. This time the call went directly to voice mail, as if someone had turned off the phone’s power.

  “I’ve got to go.”

  She heard Carenza ask her if everything was all right as she jogged east.

  The first call was to Rogan. He didn’t bother with hello.

  “You ready to switch?”

  “Where’s Sparks?” she asked.

  “Right here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “I’m parked outside Ouest.”

  “West what?”

  “It’s a restaurant. O-U-E-S-T. Broadway at Eighty-fourth. He went inside about twenty minutes ago.”

  A restaurant Rogan knew, and she didn’t. Definitely expensive. “Can you still see him?”

  “Not at the moment, but I’m watching the only door.”

  “Do me a favor, please? Go inside? Make sure you can see him?”

  “If I do that, he’ll make me. He might not hate me as much as you, but he’ll recognize me.”

  “I don’t care. Go check. Please.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “There’s no time. Just make sure.”

  She hung up and placed the next call to Paul Bandon’s chambers. Given the hour, she was surprised when a secretary answered.

  “This is Ellie Hatcher from the NYPD. Is Judge Bandon available?”

  “I’m sorry, Detective, but he’s not in chambers right now. May I take a message?”

  “Where is he?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “When did he leave?”

  “Well, he didn’t. He’s on the bench. We’re all hoping he’ll call it a day any minute now.”

  “But you’re sure he’s there?” Ellie asked.

  “Of course. I’m still here, aren’t I?”

  “I know this sounds crazy, but can you literally see him from your desk?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Can you please do me a favor and make sure he’s physically in his courtroom?”

  “Is something wrong, Detective?”

  Ellie could tell from the secretary’s tone that she was worried about the potential of a threat against the judge. Ellie saw no need to disabuse her of that impression.

  “It’s very important. Please. Just make sure he’s in one piece and accounted for.”

  The secretary returned to the line thirty seconds later. “Yes, he’s still there with the lawyers. Do I need to worry—”

  Ellie hung up and dialed Rogan again. He picked up on the third ring.

  “Got him,” he said. “Pretty sure he spotted me, but—”

  “Who was he with?”

  “He’s with some couple and an absolutely gorgeous woman.”

  “Not Stacy Schechter?”

  “Hello? I think I’d recognize Stacy. What’s going on?”

  Ellie was crossing Second Avenue. She was almost there. She looked again at the text message: Saw guy in photo. Tried to meet me.

  Sparks and Bandon were both accounted for. Maybe Stacy had seen one of them earlier in the day and only just got around to texting her. Maybe there was an innocent explanation for the cut-off text message, the turned-off phone.

  But then Ellie realized that Sparks and Bandon were not the only men in the photos.

  “Forget Sparks. Meet me at Stacy’s place. She’s missing. We have to find her. And we have to find Nick Dillon.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  6:45 P.M.

  Stacy’s apartment was empty.

  They had squandered fifteen minutes tracking down the building super to unlock the door, and all they had to show for it was an empty apartment. No break-in. No signs of a struggle. And no Stacy.

  Ellie tried her cell again, but once again the call bounced directly to voice mail.

  “She was smart enough to text you,” Rogan said. “She should know that if her phone was on, we could use the signal to locate her.”

  Ellie tried to ignore the tormented face of Katie Battle, staring at her from the canvas in the center of the room as if Ellie had failed not only Stacy, but her as well. “I have no doubt Stacy knows that. And so does Nick Dillon. That’s why her phone’s turned off.”

  They had already called in to have patrol officers check Nick Dillon’s house in Riverdale. She called the dispatcher and asked for a progress report. The car that had caught the call had not yet reported on scene.

  “Okay,” Ellie said. “I also need to issue BOLOs for two subjects: Nick Dillon and Stacy Schecter.” She recited the basic identifying information and waited while the dispatcher pulled up the plate information for Sparks’s black Infiniti sedan.

  “Better be some major crime wave up in the Bronx tonight,” she said, flipping her phone shut. “They’re slow as molasses getting to Dillon’s place.”

  “You don’t think you jumped the gun with that BOLO?” A be-on-the-lookout request would go out to every area precinct. “Man’s got a lot of friends on the job. We better be right about this.”

  “We are.” Stacy’s text said that one of the men in the pictures Ellie had shown her had tried to meet with her. Sparks and Bandon were accounted for, but in the photograph of Sparks, Nick Dillon had been standing directly behind him with an umbrella. He was the only other man in the snapshots. “He’s got her. If he’d been anyone but a former cop, we would’ve looked harder at him. He’s the one who knew Narcotics was looking at the apartment across the hall from Sparks’s. He’s the friend who could’ve lined Mancini up with a girl from Prestige Parties, made sure he’d be at the apartment that night.”

  “And now he’s going after Stacy to find Tanya Abbott?”

  “That’s got to be it. He’s still trying to find the woman who was hiding in the bathroom cabinet that night. She’s his one loose end.”

  As prominent as Tanya Abbott’s photograph had been in newspapers and televisions that week, they had never publicly released her connection to the Mancini murder.

  “Or maybe he’s known who she is all along. If he saw something of hers at the apartment—her purse, maybe, her ID—he could have assumed at the time she’d left it behind. He could’ve staged the attack at Megan’s, and now he’s gone after Katie and Stacy, assuming they know how to find her.”

  Ellie shook her head. “Still doesn’t explain those threats on Campus Juice.”

  “Unless he posted those, too,” Rogan said.

  “Look. All we know is Stacy’s missing, and I’m telling you, Nick Dillon has her.”

  “So let’s do better than a BOLO,” Rogan said. “Let’s see if we can get a warrant.”

  She flipped open her cell the second it buzzed. “Hatcher.”

  It was the dispatcher relaying a message from the officers at Nick Dillon’s house.

  “I’ve got a UTL on your two subjects at the address you requested.”

  Unable to locate.

  “Did you tell those officers this guy probably doesn’t want to be located? How hard did they look for him?”

  She heard the dispatcher radioing to the reporting officer at the other end of the call.

 
“They’re saying they knocked on the door. No one answered. No sounds inside. No lights.”

  “What about the Infiniti?”

  “UTL.”

  “Did they look in the garage?”

  More crosstalk. “The only window’s in the back. They’d have to jump a fence to look inside.”

  “Tell them to jump the fence.”

  “The detective’s requesting that you check the garage…. Detective, I’ve got the officer telling me to remind you of the Fourth Amendment. They’re reporting clear on the call.”

  “Do not let them leave the premises.”

  More crosstalk, and this time Ellie thought the dispatcher had placed a palm over the microphone. “Detective, they’re outside the house and will watch until further notice.”

  “Damnit,” she said, flipping the phone shut. “Dillon’s obviously got buddies up there in Riverdale. They probably think this is some spat between him and a girlfriend, and they’re not doing shit to look for him.”

  “Can’t jump a fence without a warrant.”

  “Or exigent circumstances. Don’t tell me for a second that those same assholes don’t claim exigency whenever they don’t feel like bothering with a warrant.”

  “I’ll go up there myself,” Rogan said. “You get to work on the warrant?”

  The image of Katie Battle looked out at her from the canvas.

  “No, I’ll go.”

  She could tell he was thinking about arguing, but he must have realized the futility. “Okay.”

  “Call Max to help. And call Tucker. This is going to crush her, but she needs to know.”

  “You want to stay here and make all those calls, woman? If not, you better stop telling me what to do and get the hell out that door right now.”

  She spotted the cruiser around the corner from Dillon’s house, just yards from where she’d parked the previous night as Tucker had kissed Dillon on his front porch. She pulled parallel to the marked car and rolled down the passenger-side window. The uni in the driver’s seat gave her a how-you-doin’ smile, then did a double take at the fleet vehicle and lowered his window.

  “You here about Nick Dillon’s place?”

  “You know him?” Ellie asked.

  The officer shrugged. “Just to say hi to. He was on the job, you know.”

  His partner leaned her way from the passenger seat. “Pulled his full twenty.”

  The uni in the driver’s seat looked away from her. “We about set? It’s busy out there tonight. Already heard from some wiseasses accusing us of cooping up here.” Cops were always looking for a place to nap in their parked cars.

  “Don’t suppose you knocked on any doors to check if the neighbors have seen Dillon tonight?”

  “No one asked us to do that, Detective.”

  She nodded in silence, knowing full well what she was dealing with. Dillon was an ex-cop and therefore came with a strong presumption of being stand-up. Without the luxury of time to burst their loyal bubbles, she backed her car against the curb behind theirs. She rested her hand on the open driver’s side window of the cruiser.

  “If I’m not back in fifteen, call for backup. Shield 27990. Hatcher. They’ll have me down as Elsa.”

  She ignored the driver’s chuckle and made her way down Dillon’s block, cutting through front yards to keep out of view from his windows. As she approached the perimeter of his property, she ducked low, grateful that the sun had begun its descent. She made her way first across his lawn, over his unoccupied driveway, and then to the outer edge of his garage.

  Just as the dispatcher had relayed earlier, the solid brick along the side of the garage prevented her from peering inside. She leaned over an adjacent four-foot-high fence and spotted a window in the garage’s rear wall. She braced her hands on the fence top and jumped, wincing at the weight of her body against the pointed boards of the picket fence. If she was wrong about this, no one would ever know she peeked. If she was right, she’d save Stacy Schecter’s life and figure out a way to justify it later.

  Through the dusty glass of the back window, she spotted Dillon’s black Infiniti sedan parked in the spot closest to the interior door leading into the house. The other half of the two-car garage was empty. Sam Sparks had parked his Maybach there last night. Dillon’s date, Robin Tucker, had not. She had parked on the street, the way most visitors did.

  Not Sparks. He had parked not on the street, nor even in the driveway. He had pulled into the garage. Like a man who was comfortable here. Like a man who stayed overnight. Like a man who practically lived here.

  She pressed her ear against the glass. No sounds of a cooling engine, but it had been nearly an hour since Stacy’s page. The motor could be long cold.

  She worked her way along the glass toward the attached house. The blinds were all drawn. She leaned against the back wall of the house and closed her eyes. A dog barked somewhere down the block. A car started and left. Total silence.

  The fence at the other side of the property was higher, too high to jump. She worked her way along the back of the house the same way she’d come. As she passed the garage, she peered inside again. This time, she caught sight of an object just beneath the passenger’s side of the Infiniti.

  She looked for a way to open the garage window, but it was a solid piece of glass, strictly for light, not air. She craned her neck for a better look, squinting to focus her eyes on the object beneath the car. She finally made sense of the dark shape. It was the stiletto heel of a woman’s shoe.

  She looked at her watch. Only four minutes since she’d told the uniforms to call for backup in fifteen. She sprinted to the front of Dillon’s house, across his front yard, and down the street to the corner where she had parked.

  The cruiser was gone.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  7:50 P.M.

  “I had a cruiser here five minutes ago. Where are they?” She felt the pressure of her fingers around the radio handset and forced herself to loosen her grip.

  “It’s hopping out there tonight, Detective. There was a DV beef a half mile from your location. That car reported clear and caught it.”

  “They weren’t clear. They were standby. I’ve got a missing person located. I’m going in.” She repeated Dillon’s address twice. “Suspect is Nick Dillon. Known to be armed. I need felony arrest backup.”

  Using familiar radio 10-code, the dispatcher relayed the information and assured Ellie that officers were on their way.

  Ellie pulled her car around the corner, stopping one house short of Dillon’s. Then she waited. She heard the dog barking again, but no sirens. She looked in her side-view mirror. No cruisers.

  She imagined the tiny glimmer of hope Stacy must have clung to as she pressed the send button on the text message to Ellie. She saw that spark of hope fading away with each minute Stacy remained alone with Nick Dillon.

  Still no sirens. Still no black-and-whites.

  Her first homicide case had been on a special assignment with a detective who got himself killed checking out a suspect without backup. But she’d saved another cop’s life and earned a Combat Cross by walking into an armed murderer’s house without a weapon. And even though the NYPD awarded her one of its highest honors for her work on that case, she knew in her heart that she could have stopped the blood spree even earlier if she had thrown out all the rules and followed her own instincts from the beginning.

  This time, she wouldn’t hesitate.

  She opened her purse, removed a L’Oréal powder compact, and slipped it into her pants pocket. Then she hopped out of the car, popped the trunk, and retrieved the standard black baton from the equipment trunk. She followed the path of her own footsteps on the bent blades of Dillon’s grass, across the front yard, along the side of the garage, around the corner to the back.

  Behind the garage, she raised the baton with her right hand, shielding her eyes with her left. She waited in the silence until she heard the bark of the neighbor’s dog, then swung as hard as she could, hoping t
hat the combination of the riled animal and the wall between the garage and the house would muffle the sound of the shattering glass. She used the baton to clear away the broken shards of glass from the frame and then threw the baton to the grass at her feet. She pulled off her jacket and tossed it across the threshold.

  The fabric protecting her hands, she hoisted herself through the window, landing in a crouch on the concrete of the garage floor. She immediately reached for the butt of her Glock and twisted the gun free from her holster.

  Holding her breath, she felt a bead of sweat form at her temple and creep slowly down her cheek, but she remained still, ready for Dillon to appear from the house to inspect the sound of the disruption.

  Nothing.

  The sound of the zippers on her ankle-length boots was deafening in the silence. She stepped out of them in her socks, remembering how she had removed these same boots at Sam Sparks’s apartment on the night Robert Mancini was killed. She tiptoed to the interior door and reached for the knob with her left hand, the Glock held firmly in the right. She turned the knob and allowed herself to inhale as she felt the cylinder retract, grateful that Dillon, like most homeowners, had not bothered to lock the door between the garage and his house.

  She pushed the door open slowly, inch by inch, and then stepped onto the slate tile floor of a mudroom. She saw two steps in front of her, leading to an empty kitchen. She pulled up a mental image of the exterior of the house: the picture window at the front porch probably led to a living room at the front of the house; the sliding glass doors in back must have been for a family room in the back. Given the size of the house’s footprint, Dillon probably had three bedrooms upstairs. Subterraneous windows around the property indicated a basement.

  Dillon and Stacy could be anywhere.

  She took one step up from the mudroom, preparing for the squeaks and creeks that might come with the transition from tile to hardwood. Silence. She took the second step with more confidence, swinging her Glock to the right at the turn from the kitchen into the living room. Still no sign of Dillon or Stacy.