212 LP: A Novel (28 page)

“Thank you,” she wailed between sobs. “Oh, my God. Thank you.”

Ellie crouched on the floor beside her, rubbing her shoulder as Stacy’s breath started to return to normal. She heard Tucker’s footsteps on the basement stairs and then in the living room above her, followed by heavier footsteps and the sounds of police radios. The backup had finally arrived.

“The cavalry’s here,” Ellie said, tugging the hem of Stacy’s dress over her bare thighs. “Let’s get you put together.”

She helped Stacy to her feet. She wobbled at first but managed the steps slowly as she held Ellie’s hand for support. Just as she reached the final step, she turned to look at Ellie.

“I know what he did to Katie. She tried not to tell him who I was. She tried to protect me. I tried at first, but I just couldn’t do it. I told him about Tanya. I told him she was the girl at that apartment that night.”

Ellie gave her hand a squeeze. “You were strong, Stacy. And Tanya will be okay. He’s gone now.”

9:15 P.M.

T
he Maybach slowed in front of the house. Sparks stepped from the driver’s seat just as the EMTs were rolling Dillon’s gurney out the front door. The change in his face from panic to absolute devastation told a story about his relationship with Nick Dillon—the secret that Dillon had killed to protect.

“Nick,” he cried out. He did not need to see beneath the white sheet to understand the significance of the swarm of police cars and ambulances.

Ellie and Robin Tucker were standing guard over Stacy Schecter as she sat on a bench on the front porch, an EMT wrapping the lacerations on her wrists and monitoring her for signs of shock.

“I’ll be all right,” Stacy said, clearly sensing Ellie’s hesitation to leave. Tucker placed a reassuring hand on the woman’s shoulder as Ellie made her way across the lawn.

By the time she reached Sparks, a uniform officer was holding him back from the cluster of emergency vehicles in the middle of the street. Sparks saw Ellie approaching and held her gaze.

“Please. Please tell me he’s still alive.”

Ellie shook her head, and he seemed to collapse against the uni
form officer. The confused cop walked him back toward the Maybach, where he rested his weight on the front bumper.

“No, oh God no.” He placed his face in his hands. “It’s my fault.”

She stood and let him cry. And talk. He wasn’t in custody. No Miranda warnings were required. And he was about to give them more of a confession than she could ever get through interrogation.

“I should’ve known. I should have said something. I didn’t know. At first, when Robo was killed, I wondered. But I didn’t know.”

“He was blackmailing Dillon.”

Sparks nodded. “It started when Nick was in Afghanistan. Robo found out about Nick—”

“That he was gay.”

“It wasn’t about that at first. It was Nick being stupid, shaking down some opium farmer he stumbled on during a security job in Nangahar Province. Robo and his people came through on patrol and found Nick where he wasn’t supposed to be. Nick made up some b.s. story, but Robo figured out what was going on.”

“You knew about this?”

“Of course not,” he said, shaking his head. “Not until later. Nick would tell me old stories about cops ripping off dealers, but he always made it sound like he was talking about someone else. Robo made it clear to Nick that he expected a job when he was discharged. By the time that happened, I had convinced Nick to come back to New York. He wasn’t happy about working for me, but it was supposed to be temporary, a way for him to bolster his corporate security credentials without being over in that hellhole. Then he’d move on to another company.”

“So he hired Mancini?”

Sparks’s eyes remained glued on the ambulance as Dillon’s body was wheeled into the back. “For a while, things were all right. But then Robo walked in on us once in Nick’s office. It was just a kiss, but still, it was obvious what was going on. Next thing we knew, he was asking for a much better job—well, a non-job really—at an exorbitant salary. I wanted to pay it, but my accounting staff would
have asked questions. And Nick, with those cop instincts, said it would never stop. Robo would just keep asking for more. And then May 27 happened.”

“You had to know it was Nick.”

“I think I was still in denial about the entire situation. When I got the call about a problem at the 212, I made a point to find Robo to deal with it. It’s like I was trying not to be intimidated. To remind him who he worked for. I had no idea
he
was the emergency.”

“But then we told you he’d been killed. The possibility must have crossed your mind.”

He nodded. “That’s probably why I came off as such a prick that night. Part of me was happy that Robo was dead, but I was so angry, wondering whether Nick was somehow involved. So I asked him, of course. But he swore he had nothing to do with it. He told me how people get killed in these mistaken home invasions. He said it could’ve been a robbery attempt. And I’m sure I wanted those explanations to sound plausible. You don’t want to think the person you love has it in him to do something like that. Then the next thing we know, you’re asking about
me
and
my
enemies and
my
finances. I couldn’t cooperate, but I knew it only made me look guilty.”

“If we’d opened your books, we would have found the payments to Prestige Parties,” Ellie said. “Eventually we would have asked the right question and figured out you were the one client of theirs who really was aboveboard.”

“Lots of pretty girls to walk the red carpets with me. Nothing more, nothing less. And I truly didn’t think I had any information that would help you, or I would have turned it over. I believed Nick. And then you showed up at the Four Seasons last night.”

“We said something that made you realize there was more to it.”

“You told me that Robo had been with a woman from the service the night he was killed. It was too big of a coincidence. Robo didn’t know about the escort service, but Nick did. I realized that Nick had set him up.”

Ellie remembered Genna Walsh’s description of her brother and husband snickering about Robo’s “sure thing.” She imagined
Dillon pretending to cede to Mancini’s demands, throwing in all the corporate perks for good measure.

“So you drove here after we confronted you at the Four Seasons.”

He nodded. “Nick looked me in the eye and told me all over again that he didn’t do it. I could tell something was wrong, but I just didn’t want to believe he had that kind of evil in him. I said that to him, you know. I walked out on him and said, ‘You better be telling the truth, because whoever would do something like that is evil.’ Those were the last words I ever spoke to him. He tried to talk to me today outside the office, but I just got into my car and told the driver to leave. Nick did it, didn’t he? He killed Robo.”

“We think he also killed a woman named Katie Battle. He brought another woman here tonight named Stacy Schecter, but she made it.”

“No. No, he would never—”

“He lied to you. I’m sorry.” Fifty-year-old men don’t suddenly go from shaking down Afghan opium farmers to murder to torture. Just as Dillon had managed to fool Sam Sparks for eight years, he had hidden inside the NYPD for twenty.

“But, why? Why would he hurt these women? What did they have to do with Robo?”

Ellie explained how Katie Battle was supposed to be Mancini’s date the night he was killed, but then the trick had been passed off to Stacy Schecter and then ultimately to Tanya Abbott. “We obviously have some loose ends to tie up, but it looks like Nick was trying to find the witness he’d left behind.”

A flash of recognition passed through Sparks’s glazed eyes. “Nick was the one who wanted us to press for information about the woman who was Robo’s date that night.”

“A woman named Tanya Abbott,” Ellie said.

“The girl from the news?”

She nodded.

“But she’s missing.”

“She was attacked earlier in the week. Her roommate was killed, and she’s been on the run ever since.”

“And you think Nick did that too?”

“We don’t know,” she said. “Based on some of the things he said to the woman he kidnapped tonight, we don’t think he knew about Tanya Abbott.”

“And if he didn’t know about her—”

“Then he’s not the one who went after her and her roommate.”

“That’s not much consolation.”

She watched him fall into silence—leaning against the Maybach’s gleaming hood, alone, staring at the ambulance as the engine started and strangers carried away the body of his dead partner. She could feel sympathy for him now, but none of it changed the fact that he had played a role in Dillon’s violence. She finally had to speak.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Sparks. Perhaps it’s cruel of me to say this right now, but when Mancini blackmailed you, why didn’t you just call his bluff?”

He shook his head as he wiped away a tear from his left cheek. “There’s more to it than just being outed. People would’ve started asking questions about the women. The escorts, the money—”

He cut himself off, but Ellie finished the thought for him. “You used a corporate card. And if that had come out, your investors might have asked about other expenses as well. My guess is, they would have found some other creative accounting? The Maybach. Maybe a little too much spending given the current economic climate?”

She took Sparks’s sad nod as resignation, his financial concerns now eclipsed by Dillon’s death. “My entire corporate existence is linked to this image of unapologetic consumption. The truth is, I don’t have as much as the world thinks.” He fought the quiver of his lower lip. “Financing? Advertising? All gone if the world knows Sam Sparks is just another overleveraged developer, and a poof at that. And, even so, I was still tempted. I would have let Robo scream all of it from the rooftops.”

“But Nick?”

“Nick? I’m not sure which he was more worried about, that mess in Afghanistan or the truth about us. Ex-cop. Ex-military contractor
badass. A grown man barely out of the closet to himself. Out of the question.” For the first time, she heard real anger in his voice and knew that this must have been an ongoing struggle between the two men. “And it wasn’t always easy to argue with him. Ask yourself, Detective: How will your colleagues react when they learn that Nick Dillon was queer?”

Ellie wished she could tell Sparks he was wrong. Even so, Dillon had no justification for hurting Katie or Stacy.

“What about Judge Bandon?” she asked.

“What about him?”

“Did you have a deal with him? To protect you?”

“Of course not.”

“You didn’t have some kind of connection to him through Prestige?”

“I went there for the girls, Detective, not middle-aged judges.” A sad smile worked its way through his pained expression, and he seemed to find some comfort in the humor. “You said something about this last night, and I was telling you the truth when I said you sounded like a lunatic.”

“He did throw me in jail for you,” she said. “And hauled my partner in for an update on the case. We figured his special interest in the case was to protect you.”

“Why in the world would the man protect me? It’s fashionable to hate the rich these days, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“But the rich can still help someone like Paul Bandon become a federal judge.”

“Well, Guerrero did tell me he was surprised Bandon was hearing the case.”

“Why was that?”

“Because Bandon worked at Guerrero’s firm for a couple of years before he went on the bench. He didn’t officially have a conflict because I didn’t start using the firm until after Bandon left, but Guerrero told me Bandon usually recuses himself from their cases so he doesn’t have to check on the timing issues.”

Ellie remembered seeing a brief law firm entry beneath Bandon’s
online picture, just between his stint in the Department of Justice and his appointment to the trial court. She’d known from Max that Guerrero was at one of the city’s top firms, but she hadn’t made the connection.

“It never dawned on you that Bandon might be trying to work you for support?”

“If that was part of the plan, he never told me. Or my lawyer.”

Something didn’t sound right, but she believed Sparks was telling her everything he knew. She turned away from him, but he stopped her. “Will I be charged with anything, Detective?”

“That will ultimately be up to the DA.” If Sparks’s suspicions about Dillon had formed only after the fact, she doubted that he had committed any crime, but she didn’t want to make any promises.

“Fair enough. Do you know where they’d take him? The ambulance, I mean.”

“He’ll go to the Bronx Medical Examiner’s Office. It’s on Pelham Parkway at Jacobi Medical Center.”

“Well, the word will be out now for sure. I will insist on viewing his body and making the necessary arrangements, even as I’m sure someone will tell me I’m a non-family member. That should be fun.”

She knew it would not be. She handed Sparks her business card. “You have any problems with the ME, you have them call me.”

9:45 P.M.

I
t was nearly ten o’clock by the time she had a chance to call Rogan. He didn’t bother with greetings.

“It’s about damn time.”

“I was at Dillon’s.”

“No shit. I finally gave up and called dispatch. All she could tell me was there was a homicide. She at least knew it wasn’t an officer down, or I’d be up there myself by now.”

She gave him the short version: Tucker shot Dillon, Stacy was fine, Sparks hadn’t been involved.

“Where are you?”

“Outside Paul Bandon’s apartment. Donovan and I didn’t know what the hell was going on, so we kept working on Dillon’s arrest warrant. See what happens when you don’t call people?”

“I’m sorry. It was total chaos.”

“I gotcha. Just be sure to call your boy, Donovan. I could tell he was worried about you. He was the one who sent me up here to track down Bandon. He wanted to make sure the warrant got signed.”

“You won’t be needing it now.”

She flipped the phone shut, seeing no reason to tell Rogan that her first call—back at Dillon’s, before she’d even started the engine—
had been to Max. She knew it meant something about her feelings for him. Something good.

As she merged onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, she thought about everything she’d learned in the past few hours and realized how off base she’d been. Not unlike those unis who refused to jump a former cop’s fence, she had subconsciously bestowed an irrebuttable presumption of innocence upon Nick Dillon, but he’d been in front of them—guilty—the entire time. He had killed Robert Mancini for threatening to peel away a carefully constructed facade that shielded his most coveted secret—a secret about his very identity, a secret that shouldn’t have to be concealed.

And just as she’d assumed the best of Nick Dillon because he came from her world, she’d assumed the worst of Sam Sparks because he did not. She had rationalized her obsession with him, first because of the way he’d treated her at the penthouse and then for his refusal to cooperate with the investigation. But the truth was, more than ten years after she’d moved to New York, people like Sparks still had a way of making her feel like the little girl from Wichita who hadn’t known which fork to use until an investment banker boyfriend finally told her. If she had set aside her emotions—if she had looked at Sparks more as a person than a stereotype—she might have seen the truth earlier.

She had been right about one thing: Dillon had been using Robin Tucker, manipulating her obvious desire for companionship in the hope of obtaining inside information about the investigation. But Ellie had underestimated her lieutenant. As much as she must have wanted a relationship with Dillon, she had never told him about the missing girl’s connection to the Mancini case, even as Tanya Abbott’s photograph dominated local headlines.

Ellie was confident that they could clear the Mancini and Battle cases, but that still left the question of who killed Megan Gunther. If Dillon didn’t know Tanya was the woman with Mancini that night, then he was not the man who killed Megan and left Tanya for dead. She’d been so off the mark about Dillon and Sparks. What had she missed about Megan and Tanya?

She thought again about the isolated facts they had gathered about Tanya Abbott. She was an only child from Baltimore. Her mother had worked as a nanny. The family was poor enough that Tanya had lost the house when her mother died but somehow still had money set aside for college tuition. A bright and vibrant preteen, she was busted for prostitution by the time she was twenty years old, when she managed to have access to a private counselor to get her out of criminal charges.

It was as if the girl had a guardian angel watching over her until one morning, when her roommate was stabbed to death in front of her and her life fell to shit.

And then Ellie saw what she’d been missing.

Distracted by the noise of Robert Mancini and Katie Battle and Sam Sparks and Prestige Parties, she hadn’t focused on what they’d known about Tanya Abbott. When they’d seen the calls between Tanya and Bandon, they’d been so sure it was part of Tanya’s current life—the one that had taken her into the bed of Robert Mancini on his last night. But maybe this wasn’t about the present at all. Maybe this was all about the past.

Ellie slowed to a crawl in the right lane as she juggled her cell phone and scrolled down to a Baltimore number she had dialed two days earlier.

“Hello?”

Anne Hahn sounded annoyed but not groggy. The call to Tanya Abbott’s former neighbor was late, but at least she hadn’t woken the woman.

“Ms. Hahn. It’s Ellie Hatcher from up in New York again. I’m sorry to call so late.”

“Benjamin, I told you to go to sleep. Now. Before I put you into that bed myself.” Her tone lowered an octave. “Sorry about that. Go on.”

“You mentioned that Tanya’s mother worked for a family of some means?”

“I’m not sure how rich they were, but, yeah, he was some big fancy lawyer.”

“Could his name have been Paul Bandon?”

“Bandon…Bandon. Maybe?”

“His wife’s name is Laura. He has a son named Alex.”

“Alex.” Anne’s voice sharpened in recognition. “Yes. There was definitely a little boy named Alex. Tanya talked about him all the time. She was a few years older and, having been an only child, I think she kind of glommed on to him as a sort of little brother. She was the same way with my older son when she’d babysit him. It was always Alex this, and Alex that.”

“Do you remember when this would have been?”

Ellie realized now why she had recognized the towheaded kid in the photographs with Tanya. She had seen an older version of the same kid in the high school graduation picture on Judge Bandon’s bench when she testified on Wednesday morning.

“Shoot,” Anne said, “probably twenty years ago.”

“Tanya would have been about ten years old?”

“Well, Marion worked for them for a few years, I’d say from when Tanya was ten to—um—probably about fifteen or so?”

“And were these the years when you said Tanya was the teacher’s-pet type or—”

“The Lolita years?”

“Yeah.”

“That period of time would have included both. Tanya started changing when she was about thirteen, if I had to say. At first it seemed like the usual teenage girl insecurities. She got quiet, sort of withdrawn. And then slowly she started acting like someone else altogether—sulky, full of attitude, darn right inappropriate when it came to males.”

In other words, all the signs of sexual precociousness.

“Thanks for your time, Ms. Hahn. Sorry again for calling so late.”

“That’s all right. Now you’ve got me wondering whatever happened to that guy she worked for. I think he was a big deal with the government. Marion used to tell me, just you watch, someday he’ll be on the Supreme Court.”

As Ellie flipped her phone shut, she wondered if that had been before or after Marion Abbott found out what Paul Bandon was up to with her daughter. She took the Seventy-ninth Street exit off the parkway. Bandon’s apartment was right across town.

She had tried to call Rogan in case he was still on the Upper East Side. He hadn’t picked up, but she found her partner sooner than expected.

Turning east off of Park, she slammed on her brakes at the sight of uniformed officers dropping gate-style iron blockades at the entrance onto Seventy-eighth Street. Beyond the stopgap, she spotted two fire trucks, an ambulance, and at least six marked police vehicles, all with lights flashing. Even the NYPD’s version of SWAT, the Emergency Service Unit, had sent an armored van. A swarm of medical, fire, and police personnel stood among the vehicles in the street. And they all appeared to be looking upward.

Her gaze tried to follow theirs, but all she could see from the driver’s seat was the third floor of Paul Bandon’s building and the grimy ceiling of the fleet car’s interior. A car horn blared, followed immediately in New York style by several others, each more urgent and sustained than the previous.

She pulled up parallel against the metal blockades to get out of the way of through traffic on Park Avenue, then flashed her shield to the uniform officers as she stepped out of the car. As she walked around the barriers, she saw Rogan at the epicenter of the chaos, speaking intensely to Paul Bandon. Even from this distance, she could tell he was using what she called his military voice.

What had Paul Bandon done to cause this scene?

Rogan looked surprised when he saw her approaching.

“I’ve been trying to call,” she said. He glanced at the bedlam around him and then gave her a look that said he’d been too busy to answer the phone.

“So you know?” she asked.

“Know what?”

“It’s him.” She pointed at Bandon lest Rogan miss her point. “Tanya Abbott’s mother was the Bandons’ nanny in Baltimore. That’s why he and Tanya were calling each other. He’s known Tanya since she was ten years old.”

She’d already known in her gut that she was right, but if she’d carried any doubts, the expression on Judge Bandon’s face would have washed them away. He’d appeared panicked when she’d first spotted him with Rogan, but now his face fell in that same way she’d seen so many times when a suspect knew it was over. Paul Bandon knew that all of his lies—everything he’d been trying to hide for nearly two decades—had finally caught up to him.

Rogan, however, looked confused.

“This is about Alex. The son. He’s on the roof.”

Ellie looked to the sky and understood now why the crowd in the street had been gazing upward. She made out the dark outline of a body on the roof of Bandon’s building. He appeared to be dangerously close to the edge.

“He saw me,” Rogan said.

“Who?”

“Alex, the son. I was parked around the corner. Right after I got off the phone with you, he came up Park Avenue from the south and saw me. He did a double take, so I knew he recognized me from when we were here the other morning. I figured he’d say something to his father, so I stuck around in case to explain about the warrant. I was about to leave when I saw a woman pointing up at the roof. I called in a response team.”

“You have to get him down,” Bandon said. “You have to save my son.”

Rogan resumed an authoritative tone. “Like I said, everyone here’s gonna work to do that, Judge, but you need to help us help your son. We’ve got ESU here. They’ve got a guy who’s trained to talk to ju—to people who are distraught like Alex.” He had almost slipped and referred to the man’s son as a jumper. “It might help us to know what he’s doing up there.”

Bandon’s lips parted, but no words came out.

“I know what happened back in Baltimore with Tanya,” she said. “Did Alex find out about it?”

He shook his head. “No. Well, I mean, yes. But he’s known about it for years. So has Laura. Jesus—Laura. She’s on a spa trip in the country. I need to call her.”

Tanya Abbott had not been the one to post those messages on Campus Juice. And Paul Bandon had not been the one who tried to kill Tanya, taking her roommate’s life in the process. It had been his son, Alex.

“You need to help us with information right now, Judge.”

“Tanya and I, well, it sounds like you know. We had an affair a long time ago.”

“An
affair
?” She pictured herself delivering a solid right hook to his temple. Sex with a thirteen-year-old girl did not constitute an
affair.

“Nothing happened until she was fourteen. And Tanya was very mature.”

She let him continue. This wasn’t the time to rid Bandon of the rationalizations he had created during sixteen long years of denial.

“When Tanya’s mother found out about us, I told Laura everything. She stayed with me, and we agreed with Marion that we’d help her out financially.”

“You bought her off.”

“We came to an agreement. Our families were very close, Detective.”

Obviously.
She held her tongue. And that right hook.

“You were the one who got her out of that prostitution arrest in Baltimore,” she said.

His eyes were glued to the roof of the building, impatient to get past this conversation but realizing that any attempt to avoid it would only delay turning full attention to his son’s safety.

“That and plenty of other problems back then. We set up a college tuition fund, but the money just sat there, since Tanya didn’t have any inclination. And for the last several years, things had finally quieted down. I thought things were fine. And then she called me at the end of May, saying she was in trouble.”

“After Robert Mancini was killed.”

He nodded. “She said she’d witnessed a murder. I had no idea she was in New York, let alone what she was up to with NYU. I tried to get her to come forward, but she was convinced it wouldn’t do any good. She never saw the man’s face or heard any names, but she remembered hearing him say something to Mancini about blackmailing a cop. She didn’t think she could trust the police, and she was terrified of losing this chance to start over.”

“So when we filed a motion in the Mancini case, you grabbed it.”

“It was a way to keep an eye on the case. Let her know if there were going to be any problems for her. I was trying to keep her at arm’s length, but she kept calling to see if I’d heard anything about the case. Plus the account we set up for her wasn’t enough. She called for money a few times, and I gave her a couple bucks here and there but knew it had to stop. Then she called Thursday, saying her roommate was being threatened on the Internet. She wanted to know if there was anything I could do. All that dysfunction, all that chaos, that I thought my family had finally put in the past when we moved, it’s been one thing or another all summer.”

“And your family knew about this?”

He nodded. “Not at first, but yes, eventually. Laura stopped by my chambers last month when I was on the phone with Tanya. She knew something was up, but even then, I minimized it as a onetime cry for help.”

“But she didn’t believe you,” Ellie said. Like Robin Tucker, so suspicious after an ex-husband cheated on her, Laura Bandon was still broken by her husband’s deception. She would be the kind of wife who snuck occasional peeks at her husband’s phone. She would have seen the calls to and from a Baltimore cell number.