212 LP: A Novel (29 page)

“She looked at my phone and saw all the calls. She was furious. We fought. She said I had to make it stop. Tanya was ruining our lives again. I didn’t know what to say. I told her that Tanya was blackmailing me.”

“Was she?”

“No, but I was afraid what she might do if I pushed her away.”

“When did Alex find out Tanya was back?”

“The same day. It was the end of August. He overheard us fighting. I went to his room afterward and explained the whole thing.”

“Along with the blackmail embellishment?”

He nodded. “But I never told him where Tanya lived or the alias she was using.”

Bandon was reaching for some piece of evidence that might exonerate his son. If Alex had not known where to find Tanya, then he could not have killed her.

“Have you met with Tanya since you talked to Alex about her? Is it possible he saw you?”

She could tell that Bandon wanted to deny the possibility, but the flash of recognition in his face was unmistakable. “A couple times since then,” he said. “I slipped out of the apartment to give her a little cash.”

If Alex had trailed his father on one of his outings, he could have followed Tanya home from there. He’d had a full month to nail down her schedule and plant the postings on Campus Juice as a diversion.

“You told us how proud you were of your future Harvard law student. You knew he was disturbed enough to kill an innocent woman, and didn’t get him some help?”

“I had no
idea
. He ran into the apartment fifteen minutes ago yelling that the cops knew and were after him and everything was over for our family.”

“But Tanya must have told you.”

“No. She called me from the hospital. She said the man who stabbed her wore a ski mask. She assumed that whoever killed Mancini had finally tracked her down. The next thing I know, her face is on the front page of the paper as a missing person and the two of you are at my door. I haven’t heard from her since.”

They’d been so consumed by Tanya’s cell phone records that they had never bothered asking for a list of the calls from her hospital room.

“Now, please, do something. Alex is—oh Jesus, he’s up there. He’s going to jump.”

Ellie heard a commotion near the barriers at Park Avenue and turned to find a cameraman jumping out of an NY1 van.

“Jesus,” Rogan said. “How the hell do they manage to get here before our negotiator? Hey,” he yelled to the unis, “get them the hell out of here.”

“Wait,” Ellie said, holding out her arm to stop him. “Let them film. But on three conditions: they have to announce the address; they have to say we’ve got a twenty-one-year-old male Columbia student on the roof; and they need to mention that detectives involved with the Tanya Abbott case are on the scene.”

Rogan turned to deliver the instructions.

“What are you doing?” Bandon asked.

“I’m trying to save your son. Tanya doesn’t know Alex is the one who hurt her. She still has childhood pictures of him. At least as of last night, she was in the city, and she’s probably following the news.”

“You think she’ll come here,” he said.

“She might. And if she does, she could be our best chance of talking your son off that roof.”

10:20 P.M.

T
anya Abbott let the paperback drop to the floor beside the sofa. The mystery novel had kept her occupied for the entire day since she’d found it in the nightstand drawer, but now it was over. She wasn’t ready to sleep yet either. She was stir-crazy.

She’d walked out of St. Vincent’s on Friday night, knowing that once the hospital dug further for insurance information, they’d realize the real Heather Bradley was buried in Arizona. She thought about going to Penn Station and catching the first train down to Baltimore, but she knew herself too well. Once she was back home, she’d crash with Mark. Or Trent. Or maybe Saundra. Either way, she’d fall into her old ways. Drinking too much. Floating bad checks. Taking cheap dates. Feeling lucky not to get busted.

So instead she’d come here.

When she’d moved to New York last spring, it was supposed to be a truly fresh start. New name. New place. New age. None of the same bad habits. She had an entire summer before classes started so she could adjust to her new life.

But the money hadn’t been enough. Maybe it would have been fifteen years ago when the Bandons first set up the college fund. But college tuition had outpaced the interest on the account. The fund
would barely cover tuition through graduation, not the cost to live in New York.

She thought about going to the Bandons for more, but knew it was no use. They’d always been good about helping her in a jam, but a few bucks here and there wasn’t the same as a lump sum. The one and only lump sum had been paid with the college fund. She’d found that out for sure when the bank sold the house. Maybe Paul was willing to do more, but her mother had always made it clear that Laura’s family was the one with the real money. Fair enough. She had, after all, made a deal.

And so Tanya had supplemented her income, the same way she always had. Craig’s List made it easy to jump back in, even in a new city. It was still a new life, only with a bit of a transition from the old one.

She tried to look at the bright side: but for the dates, she wouldn’t have had this apartment to hunker down in for the weekend. Granted, she also wouldn’t have been at the 212 that night and therefore wouldn’t need this place, but that was another issue.

She’d dated Henri twice a month since May, but still didn’t really understand what his job was. An equity something-or-another. He lived with his wife and two children in Paris, but worked in his New York City office every Thursday and Friday and kept an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Every other week, he delayed his return trip until Saturday morning. His wife thought the extra nights were for business dinners.

They were not.

She’d shown up for their date on Friday as planned, making up an elaborate story about a horse-riding accident to explain the bandages. Henri had been sweet. Even tender. She did find a way of pleasing him, even under the circumstances.

And as the time came for him to leave for JFK in the morning, she’d complained from the shower that the bandages were slowing her down. He trusted her to close the door behind her. Instead, she’d helped herself to the extra key in the top drawer of the kitchen, leaving only for a quick dash to the Gristedes on Eighth
Avenue—and for that one ill-fated attempt to find the blond detective on her own.

Only two more nights until Henri returned. She needed a plan.

When four months had passed after that awful night at the 212, she thought she might have actually pulled through. No cops. No questions. Even after that maniac attacked her and Megan on Friday morning, she had wanted to believe it was whoever wrote those creepy Internet posts. It wasn’t until the next day, when the news anchor said that the woman killed at the Royalton had led a double life as a call girl named Miranda, that she realized she was in danger.

She flipped on NY1 to catch the mid-hour headlines. She’d been watching incessantly for anything new—about her, about Megan’s death, about any connection to last May’s murder.

The correspondent was breathless with the pressing report: a twenty-one-year-old male Columbia student was on a building roof at Seventy-eighth and Park, reportedly threatening to jump. He did not know the source of the man’s despondence, but detectives looking for the missing woman Tanya Abbott were apparently on the scene.

By the time he promised to keep viewers apprised of any new developments, Tanya was already out the door.

10:55 P.M.

W
herever Tanya had been hiding, it could not have been far. Twenty-five minutes after NY1 went live, the woman for whom they’d been searching for three days stepped out of a cab on the corner of Park and Seventy-eighth Street.

Her eyes fell first on Paul Bandon and then directly on Ellie. She looked five pounds thinner and ten years older since they’d first seen her in the hospital. She looked her own age.

Ellie waved her past the blockade, and Tanya wasted no time on explanations.

“Where’s Alex?”

Ellie pointed to the sky. “We’ve had a negotiator on the phone with him for forty minutes. Alex hung up at one point, saying he was going to jump, but I called him back and said you were on your way—that he should at least talk to you first.”

“I don’t understand. Why would he do something like this?”

“Because you came back into their lives.”

“But we used to be so close,” she said.

“And now you’re not. I’m sorry, Tanya, but in the years that have passed, his family has moved on by casting you as a teenage problem child who seduced Paul Bandon.”

“But that’s not how it was. They’ve always taken care of me. Paul loved me.”

Her eyes searched sadly for the judge, who was now sandwiched between the ESU negotiator and Rogan.

“The man who stabbed you: you don’t know who he was?”

“Of course not. He was wearing a ski mask.”

“You assumed it was whoever killed Robert Mancini.”

“So you know I was there?”

“Your fingerprints were on the champagne glass. We’ve been looking for you.”

“The man who came to the penthouse that night said something about it being stupid to try to blackmail a cop. Then all I heard were the shots. I didn’t know who I could trust. I tried to go to your apartment, but I got scared waiting. Some guy was staring at me.”

So much for Jess’s skills of stealth detection.

“There’s something else, Tanya. The man who stabbed you, the man who killed Megan. It was Alex.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “He would never do that.”

“I don’t have time to argue with you about this. He did it, and that’s why he’s up there.”

Rogan was waving them toward the ESU van. “The kid saw the cab pull up. Wants to know if it’s Tanya.”

“Talk to him,” Ellie said as they made their way toward the van. “Tell him you’re not going to testify, that you’ll say the person who did it was shorter than him, whatever.”

“What about those things?” Tanya pointed to the mattresslike structures that the ESU had inflated beneath the building to break Alex’s fall.

“I’m told at that height, they can’t be certain of the path he’ll take. He’s got a knife, too, so there are other ways he can hurt himself. Try to get him down from that roof.”

The ESU officer extended the cell phone, and Tanya took it hesitantly. “Alex? It’s Tanya.”

Rogan leaned toward Ellie and whispered, “Why are we bothering to save this prick’s life again?”

“Because after what he did to Megan Gunther, he doesn’t get to decide what happens.”

Tanya placed her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. “He says you guys need to move. He doesn’t want you to hear.”

They looked to the ESU officer for guidance. He nodded, and they all stepped away from Tanya like synchronized swimmers.

They watched as Tanya pleaded. Her eyes to the sky. Him standing at the edge of the roof 150 feet above them. She loved him like a little brother. He hated her so much he’d tried to kill her. So much distance between them, but Ellie could tell that they spoke to each other with the intensity and intimacy of siblings.

She could tell Tanya was crying. She heard her say, “I’m sorry,” more than once. She heard something about a promise. She heard the word
please
. “I’ll go with you. I’ll turn myself in.”

And then Tanya flipped her phone shut, as calm as if she’d just ordered takeout, as sad as if she’d just learned about a family member’s death.

“He’s on his way down.”

The ESU officer radioed the officers waiting inside the stairwell leading to the building roof. “Coming your way.”

“Oh, Jesus. Thank you.” Paul Bandon rushed toward Tanya with open arms, but Rogan held him back.

“He’s turning himself in,” she said. “He wasn’t up there because he was afraid of being arrested.”

“I don’t understand,” Bandon said.

“I promised him two things, though. First, he wants you to know that Megan wasn’t supposed to be home Friday morning. He’d watched her all month. He knew her schedule, and she should have been at a spinning class that morning. When she walked out of her bedroom, he panicked. She wasn’t supposed to be there.”

“And the second promise?” Ellie asked.

Tanya kept her eyes on Bandon.

“I promised him no one would know about us, what happened in Baltimore. He doesn’t want Laura to be humiliated. That’s what
this was about from the very beginning. He says you told them I was threatening to go public.”

Bandon opened and closed his mouth like a marionette.

“I have
never
threatened you. I would never do that to you. Or Laura. Or Alex.” Her voice—her entire body—was shaking now.

“But that’s what he told them, Tanya.” Ellie kept her voice low, knowing how much this was hurting the woman. “He said you had forced your way back into his life.”

“And so Alex blamed me?” Her words were sharp and fast like hurled daggers. “He thought this was
my
fault, instead of
yours
? And now he and I—our lives are ruined. And Megan, who never did a bad thing to anyone, is dead. She’s dead, Paul. She’s dead.”

Alex Bandon stepped out of the building, ESU officers in Kevlar vests on either side of him. Rogan walked toward them, handcuffs already out. Paul Bandon tried to stop him, but two ESU officers pulled him back. As Rogan recited the familiar Miranda warnings, Alex turned away from his father to face Park Avenue, his wrists behind him to accept the cuffs.

And then Paul Bandon fell to his knees, placed his palms on the dirty concrete, and sobbed alone in the street.

TWO WEEKS LATER

J
ust as Laura Bandon had predicted, there she stood, blank-faced and stoic, behind and to the right of her husband as he read from the prepared statement.

Ellie and Max watched from a conference room at the district attorney’s office as the network replayed the footage for the umpteenth time. The television pundits could hardly contain their excitement as they pored over the salacious details of the unfolding saga: a rising legal star resigning from the bench, brought down by a nearly two-decade-old sex scandal with a barely teenage girl; the ensuing fifteen-year cover-up in which the Bandon family fell into a bizarre caretaking role with the acquiescence of the girl’s mother; the arrest of his seemingly perfect son for murder two weeks earlier; speculation about what would have happened if he’d been confirmed to the federal court prior to the disclosure.

Tanya had said what she needed to get Alex Bandon off that roof, but the NYPD was not bound by her promises. They promptly filed first-degree murder charges, setting forth in the indictment the special circumstance that the murder was intended to silence the victim of a statutory rape committed sixteen years earlier in Baltimore, Maryland.

Given that Alex was only twenty-one years old, the media had begun asking questions about the identity of the parties involved in the original crime. A dogged reporter at the
Post
had traced Tanya’s past to her former neighbor, Anne Hahn, and made the connection to the Bandons from there. Now Bandon was resigning from office, relying on a statute of limitations to avoid prosecution in Maryland while Max’s office weighed potential charges in New York for official misconduct.

And, just as Laura Bandon had predicted, the coverage came with plenty of questions about the wife.
Why would she stay with this man? How could she have helped him cover this up? How could she have allowed him to pursue a judicial career knowing that this bombshell lay in his background?
Comparisons to Elizabeth Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Silda Spitzer flew. Such accomplished and complex women, all lumped together under one big Stepford Wife umbrella, just as Laura had predicted. Just as her son had feared.

One of the anchors held a finger to her earpiece and then interrupted the panel of breathless political analysts to report a breaking story. “I’m getting word here that real estate mogul and infamous playboy Sam Sparks has just put out a statement. Let’s go to Jeff Baker, who’s reporting live outside the Sparks Industries building.”

A sandy-haired correspondent swept his hair back against a blustering wind. “Well, the single ladies of New York are going to have to scratch one eligible bachelor off their list today. Billionaire Sam Sparks has issued a statement essentially coming out, as they say. It’s very brief, so I’ll read it in full:

“Good for him,” Max said.

Paul Bandon’s disclosure had been forced by circumstance, but Sam Sparks’s had not. As far as the public knew, Nick Dillon murdered Robert Mancini after Mancini blackmailed him. No specifics about the nature of the blackmail. No details such as the Blagojevich-style hairpiece and wedding band they’d found in his car, props Dillon had worn on his arranged dates with Katie Battle and Stacy Schecter. No mention of Sparks.

She looked at her watch. One p.m. on the dot. “Think they’re going to show?”

“Yeah, they’ll be here.”

“How do you think it’s going to go?”

“I don’t know. I understand what Tanya’s trying to do, but it could be an absolute train wreck.”

Tanya’s lawyer was still hammering out a plea deal, but most of the big-ticket items were in place. She would plead to fraud charges and serve four years probation with intensive psychiatric counseling. A support center for adult victims of child sex abuse was trying to convince one of the local colleges to admit her. Given the stunt she pulled with NYU, she’d be a hard sell, but one of her former professors was vouching for the work she’d done as Heather Bradley.

But today’s meeting wasn’t about Tanya the defendant; she had asked for an opportunity to apologize to Megan’s parents. To Ellie’s surprise, Jonas and Patricia had agreed. Maybe now that they had someone else to blame, they might be able to begin to forgive Tanya Abbott.

The upcoming sit-down between Tanya and the Gunthers was not the only case of strange bedfellows to emerge from the aftermath. Stacy Schecter had stopped by the precinct the previous week to thank Ellie and Robin Tucker. She said they’d saved her in more ways than one, and Ellie believed her. The Craig’s List account was closed, and the Erotic Review profile was gone.

As she’d left the building, Jess had been smoking a cigarette as he waited for his sister on Twenty-first Street. He commented on her
Boomtown Rats T-shirt. They were still talking when Ellie showed up. She lied and said she had more work to do, and then watched from upstairs as they made their way to Plug Uglies without her.

It wouldn’t last. It never did with Jess. But women never seemed to mind.

The unspeakable secret that had plagued Sam Sparks’s entire adult life came and went from the television in a flicker as the talking heads bounced directly back to the Bandons. Now the screen displayed a photograph of Laura Bandon, with bullet-point highlights of her bio: Princeton, Georgetown Law School, former associate at Covington & Burling prior to the birth of her son.

“I still don’t get it.” The female anchor sounded as if she had been personally betrayed. “Why in the world would she stay with this guy?”

“So,” Max said, hitting the power button on the remote, “would you stay?”

“Why? Are you planning to scope out the junior high schools this afternoon?”

“You’re gross.”

“You started it.”

“Seriously. I’m a man, and I don’t get it. I’ve had girlfriends—”

“No, you haven’t. No one before me.”

“Fine. I’ve had members of the opposite sex throw me in the doghouse for a week just for smiling at someone the wrong way.”

“Well, you do have an amazing and unrepentantly flirty smile.”

“So much so that it’s gotten me in trouble. But then some guy like Bandon gets caught doing the nanny’s daughter—and let’s set aside the fact that she’s a child, for Christ’s sake. Seriously, why wouldn’t a woman like Laura Bandon take off?”

“Because she loves him.”

“It’s that simple?”

“Maybe. Love’s a powerful thing.”

A knock at the door caught their attention. A secretary showed Jonas and Patricia Gunther into the room.

“I’m sorry,” Patricia said. “Were we interrupting?”

“Of course not.” Max stood and gestured to the unoccupied chairs around the table. “Come on in.”

Jonas reached for his wife’s hand as soon as they were seated. Maybe Ellie had been wrong about their daughter’s death being the beginning of the end for them.

“Is Heather—Tanya, I’m sorry. Is Tanya here yet?”

“I’m sure she will be shortly,” Ellie said. “This was very important to her.”

Max took a seat at the head of the table. “She’ll tell you herself, but I’ve spent a lot of time with Tanya the last couple of weeks. Her defense attorney suggested it so our office would have a better sense of the person we’re dealing with. You’d be perfectly within your rights to be skeptical, but, for what it’s worth, I do believe that she never realized she was putting your daughter in jeopardy.”

They were interrupted by another knock. The same secretary, this time with Tanya Abbott. She had pulled her hair into a demure knot at the nape of her neck and was dressed in a conservative navy blue skirt and tan turtleneck.

Max handled the awkward introductions. “Mr. and Mrs. Gunther. This is Tanya Abbott.”

Tanya stepped into the room with her hands clasped in front of her like a child making a presentation to a class. All eyes were on her, but her gaze was fixed somewhere in the middle of the table. She cleared her throat before speaking.

“Thank you for coming here, Mr. and Mrs. Gunther. I’ll admit that I didn’t know your daughter well. But she was a good person—to me and to her friends. And she was smart and sweet and, just, a really good person.” She was starting to stray from her prepared words. “And I just want you to know, and I swear I mean this from the bottom of my heart, that if I could rewind the clock—”

Her voice cracked, and Patricia Gunther choked back a sob.

“If I could rewind the clock and change places with Megan, I would. I really would.”

Ellie blinked back a tear forming in the corner of her own eye
as Patricia leaped from her chair. Tanya initially flinched as Patricia grabbed her in a tight embrace, but then returned the hug.

“We don’t blame you, Tanya. We forgive you. Our daughter
was
a good person.”

Jonas was on his feet, holding on to his wife as she cried. “Megan would want us to forgive you,” he said.

As Ellie watched the Gunthers console the woman who set in motion the chain of events that eventually led to the death of their only daughter, she marveled at the ability of human beings to still surprise her. Just as love had kept Laura Bandon at her husband’s side, it had helped these two forgive not only Tanya, but each other. It had blinded Sam Sparks from seeing whatever part of Nick Dillon killed Robert Mancini and Katie Battle. It had caused Katie Battle to choose her mother’s care over her own security. It had brought a son to kill to protect his mother from public humiliation. And it had kept Tanya Abbott running to the person who abused her as a child, because it was the first feeling of love that she had ever known from a man.

Love was, in fact, powerful.

Powerful enough that for just one second, Ellie thought about the father she had lost, the mother who demanded more from her children than she could ever give as a parent, and the brother who was her best and sometimes only friend, and wondered if there were any limits to what she would do for them. And for just a moment, she held the gaze of the man on the opposite side of the conference table and could believe that the ties of a different kind of devotion might eventually find her.