City of Lies
Alafair Burke

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the U.S.A as 212 by HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, NY, 2010

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2010

Copyright © Alafair Burke 2010

Alafair Burke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9781847561107

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2010 ISBN: 9780007363025

Version: 2016-10-04

For Philip, Mary, and Anne-Lise Spitzer

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Part I You Can’t Let This Get to You.

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Part II ‘Go Ahead. Lie to Me.’

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Part III It Was All About May 27.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Part IV Easy Money

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Part V Secrets

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Keep Reading

Author’s Note

About the Author

Other books by

Guide To New York

About the Publisher

Chapter One

May 27

Tanya Abbott noticed the quiver in her index finger as it pressed the three silver buttons in the rain – 9…1…1. Listening to the ring, she found herself mentally calculating the number of days that had passed since she had first arrived in New York City.

Tanya had put the number at twenty-six by the time the dispatcher answered the call. It had been three full weeks and another five days.

‘Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?’

She’d taken the Amtrak to Penn Station three Thursdays ago, and now it was Tuesday night. Twenty-six days in New York. Twenty-six days since she had started over again. Twenty-six days, and already she was calling 911.

‘Hello? Is anyone there? What is your emergency?’

Tanya cleared her throat. ‘The penthouse apartment at Lafayette and Kenmare.’

‘That’s your location, ma’am? Tell me what’s going on there.’

The corner of Lafayette and Kenmare was no longer Tanya’s location, but twenty minutes earlier, she had been inside the luxury penthouse perched on top of the white brick building on the corner. She’d sipped Veuve Clicquot from a crystal flute while leaning against the black granite bar. She had lounged on the low white-leather sectional sofa with her legs crossed modestly as her host pointed out the panoramic SoHo views of the Hudson River, temporarily obscured by cascading sheets of rain. She had followed him into the master suite. She had cleaned herself up with a washcloth in the gleaming marble bathroom when it was all over.

‘A shooting. There’s been a shooting.’ Tanya used her palm to wipe away the drops of water from her eyes, tears mixed with rain. Her attempts were futile, serving only to smear mascara across her clammy cheeks.

‘You heard gunshots?’

‘Inside the apartment.’

‘Ma’am. I need you to use your words. You heard gunshots from inside the apartment? Could you tell what direction they were coming from?’

‘There was a shooting. Inside the apartment at Lafayette and Kenmare.’

‘I’ve got your location as Lafayette and Bond, ma’am. Did you mean to say Lafayette and Bond?…I need you to speak to me, ma’am. Can you tell me if you’re okay? Are you hurt?’

Tanya hadn’t realized that she had run five full blocks before finding a pay phone. She couldn’t even remember crossing Houston. Maybe her heart was pounding because of the running. She found comfort in the thought of some distance between her and the apartment.

‘Lafayette and Kenmare. The penthouse.’

‘Can you tell me your name, ma’am? I’ve got an ambulance on the way. Just keep talking to me. My name’s Tina Brooks. Can you tell me your name?’

Tanya returned the handset to its cradle and sprinted south on Lafayette toward the subway station at Bleecker. She hadn’t given her name to the dispatcher, and she hadn’t used her cell phone. She could move swiftly without prompting attention from the other pedestrians who were also rushing for shelter.

At the same moment Tina Brooks had dispatched an ambulance to the penthouse, she had no doubt sent a police car to the pay phone on the corner of Lafayette and Bond to search for the anonymous caller who had dialed 911. But before either vehicle reached its intended destination, Tanya Abbott would be long gone, drying her face against her damp sleeve and catching her breath on the 6 train.

Chapter Two

Detective Ellie Hatcher and her partner, J. J. Rogan, were soaked. Not damp. Not soggy. Soaked. The rainfall that poured onto Manhattan’s streets that night felt like the kind that meteorologists might measure in buckets per second.

Ellie should have been grateful for the storm. It was the first break in a week-long, record-setting late-May heat wave. For seven consecutive days, the mercury had approached triple digits. Those kinds of oppressive temperatures were never cause to celebrate, but in New York City, atmospheric heat led to an altogether different kind of swelter. Thanks to the combination of heat-retaining concrete and still, breezeless air, the entire city reeked of a unique potpourri of body odor, garbage, and urine. The streets and subways were crowded. People were sticky. People were cranky. People drank more. They stayed out later. And people got dangerous.

In New York City, heat begets violence.

Ellie and Rogan had hoped that the rainfall might wash in their first quiet night of what had been a hectic week. They should have known better.

Their first callout was to the scene of a reported homicide in SoHo. A couple huddled beneath a restaurant awning had made out the image of a man’s prone body in the backseat of a BMW 325 parked on Grand. By the time EMTs found the track marks and Ellie pulled the eighteen inches of rubber tubing from the back passenger footwell, Ellie and her partner were soaked.

They had just reported clear and were looking forward to drying out back in the squad room when the second call came in, this time to a penthouse apartment at Lafayette and Kenmare. As they drove up Crosby, Ellie noticed a small pile of flowers propped up against a stoop at the corner of Broome, a rain-battered memorial to the late Heath Ledger. It had been more than four months since the actor’s accidental overdose; today, the media had announced the death of Sydney Pollack from stomach cancer. When celebrities died, everyone cared, even though the public knew those stars no better than whatever sad sack Ellie and Rogan were about to open a new case file for.

The address at the condo turned out to be 212 Lafayette, but the blue glass sign on the bright white exterior marked the building merely as 212. Whereas builders had co-opted the American West a century ago with names like the Dakota, the Wyoming, and the Oregon, the latest flavor was minimalist titles that managed to evoke images of urban perfection with one discreet word: Cielo, Onyx, Azure. And what could be more quintessentially New York than Manhattan’s famous area code – 212?

Dishwater gray puddles had pooled at their feet by the time the elevator reached the seventh floor. The doors parted to reveal a narrow hallway occupied by a uniform officer standing between two slate-colored doors. The officer nodded in the direction of the open one.

‘Not technically a penthouse,’ Rogan observed as the elevator doors whispered shut behind them. ‘In a real penthouse, you walk directly from the elevator and into the apartment.’

The foyer alone was twice the size of Ellie’s entire apartment.‘I don’t care if a realtor would call it a shanty,’ she said. ‘I’d take it.’

Rogan unbuttoned his trench coat and let it fall to the foyer floor. Ellie did the same with her black slicker. The last thing they needed was a waterlogged crime scene.

As they made their way to the sounds of voices beyond the living room, Ellie took in the apartment’s condition. Beneath a single built-in shelf, books were scattered haphazardly across the floor. The empty drawers of a credenza in the dining room were flung open. Kitchen cabinets, also open.

A pyramid of unlit logs rested picturesquely beneath a mantel sporting a single crystal-framed photograph: a handsome middle-aged man shaking hands with the former president. The man looked familiar.

The person in the picture was not, however, the man they found splayed naked on the white sheets of a king-size bed in the master suite, a used condom knotted neatly on top of the nightstand beside him.

Bullet holes riddled the corpse, the bed beneath the corpse, and the wall behind the bed. The nightstand and dresser drawers were open, as were the doors to two double closets. All empty. By comparison, the adjoining bathroom looked relatively peaceful, with only a stack of towels toppled onto the floor.

A voice from the living room interrupted their inspection of the disarray.

‘Robo? Robo! Where the hell is he?’

‘Detectives. I think the apartment owner’s here.’ A uniform officer stood nervously in the doorway of the master bedroom.

‘Who called him?’ Rogan asked.

The officer shrugged. ‘We called the super. The super must’ve called the owner.’

‘Did someone ask you to call the super, Officer?’ Above Rogan’s clenched jaw, a vein pulsed at his temple. ‘Did we ask you to do that?’

‘I’ll deal with it,’ Ellie said, brushing past the uniform as he muttered a halfhearted apology. She turned in the living room to face a trim, middle-aged man in a black tuxedo and white bow tie. He had closely clipped silver hair and intense green eyes. She recognized him as the man from the photograph on the mantel.

He eyed her up and down, clearly trying to determine how a barefoot woman in a turquoise linen shirt and black pencil-legged pants fit in among an apartment full of uniformed police officers.

‘Who are you?’

‘Detective Ellie Hatcher. NYPD.’ She flipped open the badge holder that was clipped to her waistband.

‘I take it from your bare feet that two of these many shoes on my Ryan McGinness belong to you.’

‘You mean on your rug?’ Ellie looked at the patterned area rug separating her from the man in the tuxedo.

‘It’s art,’ the man said, ‘but you apparently don’t recognize that. Robo, get this cleaned up. Robo – I called him forty-five minutes ago to deal with this shit. Robo –’

He headed toward the bedroom, but Ellie held her hand up. ‘I answered your question, sir. Now it’s my turn. Who are you?’ She still could not put her finger on where she’d seen him before.

‘I’m the man who owns the apartment you all have apparently commandeered. Robo –’

‘Is Robo a well-built guy? Brown hair? Sleeve tattoo wrapped up his right arm, leprechaun tat on his left hip?’

He blinked at her. ‘I don’t even want to process what you’re insinuating.’

‘I wasn’t insinuating anything. Assuming you have never seen the tattoo on the man’s hip, the rest of the description fits?’

The man nodded. ‘Where is he? I don’t appreciate getting called away from an important event by some building superintendent.’

‘Unfortunately, sir, the man you’re calling Robo is dead. He was shot in what is apparently your bed. And he was naked in your bed, in case you were wondering.’

The man stared at her for three full beats before the corner of his mouth crept upward. ‘You’re going to regret this conversation, Miss Hatcher. I won’t ask you to clean up the mess you’ve made lest you accuse me of sexism, but please have one of these lackeys standing guard on taxpayer dollars remove your soggy shoes from what you so eloquently called my rug. It’s worth more than you make in a year.’

‘First I need a name and some identification, sir.’

‘Samuel Sparks.’ He didn’t even feign a reach for his wallet.

‘And who’s Robo?’

‘His name is Robert Mancini. He’s one of my protection specialists. I’ve been calling him ever since I was beckoned down here about some kind of police emergency.’

‘A protection specialist. You mean a bodyguard?’

The man nodded, and Ellie suddenly matched the name to the face: Samuel Sparks was Sam Sparks. That Sam Sparks. Before she scored a rent-stabilized sublet of questionable legality, she had perused countless real estate listings for units in Sparks’s buildings that she could not afford. This was the man who had been rumored to be purchasing the 110-building Stuyvesant Town to convert into condos before a rival tycoon outbid him. He was the mogul who had been photographed with so many A-list women that he himself had become fodder for the tabloids and paparazzi, including some who speculated about the sexuality of the self-declared ‘permanent bachelor’. Ellie assumed those rumors might explain Sparks’s response to her mention of the victim’s exposed hip.

Sparks’s smirk widened into a full-blown smile. ‘You can apologize after these shoes have been picked up.’

Needless to say, Ellie did not apologize.

‘Mr. Sparks, your apartment is now officially a crime scene. I need you to leave.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Did you hear my request, sir?’

‘Of course I heard you, but –’

‘Then I’m ordering you, for the second time now, to leave the premises.’ Ellie intentionally used the kind of I-get-high-on-my-authority tone that made a person want to disobey.

‘I am not leaving my own –’

‘Sam Sparks, you’re under arrest for disobeying the lawful order of a police officer.’ Ellie used her index finger to signal to a uniform officer who’d been observing cautiously from the front doorway. The officer removed his handcuffs from his duty belt.

‘You want to do the honors, or should I?’ the officer asked.

Sparks sucked his teeth and squinted at the officer’s nameplate. ‘Officer T. S. Amos. I’d warn against taking another step in my direction unless you plan to spend the rest of your NYPD career on parking patrol.’

Ellie snatched the handcuffs from the uniform’s grasp. ‘Not to worry, Amos. This one’s all me.’

Part I You Can’t Let This Get to You.

Chapter Three

Four months later…Wednesday, September 24

11: 00 a.m.

Ellie Hatcher raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

But the testimony she gave before Judge Paul Bandon was not really the whole truth. It was a dry, concise recitation of the basic facts – and only the facts – of a callout 120 days earlier. Time: 11:30 p.m. Location: a penthouse apartment at a building called 212 at the corner of Lafayette and Kenmare. Nature of the callout: a report of shots fired, followed by the subsequent discovery of a bullet-ridden body in the bedroom. The dead man: Robert ‘Robo’ Mancini, bodyguard to Manhattan real estate mogul Sam Sparks.

Ellie allowed herself a glance at Sparks, who sat at counsel table with a blank-faced stare next to his lawyer, Ramon Guerrero. According to her police report, Sparks was fifty-five years old, but looking at him this morning, she could understand why he enjoyed the serial companionship of the various models and aspiring starlets who graced his side on the society pages. It wasn’t just the money. With his square jaw, bright green eyes, and a permanent Clint Eastwood squint, Sparks exuded the kind of chiseled intensity that was catnip to a certain kind of woman.

Ellie was surprised that he had bothered to make a personal appearance. It was probably the man’s way of signaling to Judge Bandon that this hearing was just as important to him as it was to the police. The only spectator on the government’s side of the courtroom, in the back bench by the entrance, was Genna Walsh, the victim’s sister. Ellie had told her there was no point coming into the city for the hearing, but she could not be dissuaded. Perhaps Sparks was not the only one trying to send a message.

Assistant District Attorney Max Donovan continued to feed Ellie the straightforward questions that would lay the groundwork for today’s motion.

‘Did the decedent reside at the apartment in which his body was found – the penthouse in the 212 Building at 212 Lafayette?’

‘No, he did not. Mr. Mancini’s personal residence was in Hoboken, New Jersey.’

‘Did he own the apartment where his body was found?’ Donovan asked.

‘No.’

‘Who does own the apartment?’

‘Mancini’s employer, Sam Sparks.’

‘In your thorough search of the crime scene, did you find any evidence to suggest that the decedent was staying long-term at the 212?’

‘No, we did not.’

‘No suitcase, no toothbrush or shaving kit, nothing along those lines?’

‘No.’ Ellie hated the formal back-and-forth that was inherent in testifying. She’d prefer to sit across a desk from Judge Bandon and lay it all out for him. ‘In fact, Mr. Sparks himself told us that very night that the decedent was only using the apartment for the evening.’

Again, Ellie reported just the facts. According to Sparks, he had completed the development at 212 six months earlier and kept the penthouse for himself as an investment and as a place to host the European investors who increasingly preferred downtown’s modern lofts to the more conventional temporary housing stock in midtown. To further justify the space as a corporate deduction, he allowed his personal assistant and security officers to make use of the apartment when the calendar permitted.

Max Donovan had pinned photographs from the crime scene on a bulletin board next to the witness stand. Moving through the sequence of photos, Ellie described the disorder in the apartment – the open cabinets and drawers, the relatively few possessions in the apartment tossed to the floor like confetti.

‘From the looks of it,’ Max said, ‘only the bathroom was spared?’

In the final picture on the board, a single cabinet door in the otherwise tidy master bathroom was flung open, a pile of towels splayed on the tile floor beneath the sink.

‘That’s about right,’ Ellie responded.

‘I guess extra rolls of toilet paper and back issues of Sports Illustrated aren’t the usual targets of a home invasion.’

Max’s comment wasn’t especially funny, but the bar for comedy in courtrooms was notoriously low, and the remark drew a chuckle from Judge Bandon.

The point of the testimony was simple: the violent home invasion on May 27 of a seventh-floor condo overlooking Lafayette Street had nothing to do with poor Robert Mancini until Robo got caught in the crossfire. The bodyguard’s relationship to the apartment was too inconsequential – too tangential – for the dead man to have been the premeditated target of the four bullets that eventually penetrated his naked torso that night.

No, the crime had nothing to do with Mancini. The real target was either a robbery or Sam Sparks himself, and robbery seemed unlikely. Despite the expensive furnishings – two flat-screen televisions, a top-of-the-line stereo system, the rug that doubled as art – nothing was missing from the apartment.

So now the police wanted to know more about Sam Sparks.

From the witness stand, Ellie eyed a silver picture frame behind the bench. In the photograph, a smiling Paul Bandon beamed alongside a perfect-looking wife and a teenage boy in a royal blue cap and gown. Outside this courtroom, underneath the robes, Bandon was a normal person with a real life and a family. She wondered, if she cut through the bull and laid it all out for him, whether Judge Bandon would understand how the series of events beginning on May 27 had led her to the middle of a battle between the district attorney’s office and one of the most powerful men in the city.

Maybe he would understand how she had felt when Sparks had sauntered into the crime scene, in his custom-cut tuxedo, somehow dry and picture-ready on that rain-soaked night, so put out by the disturbance at his pristine penthouse. Maybe he could imagine the disdainful looks Sparks had given the police officers sullying his spotless pied-a-terre, the very officers who protected the appearance of order that allowed Sparks to earn billions in Manhattan real estate. Maybe he would realize that she hadn’t even meant to arrest Sparks and had immediately kicked herself for doing it. All she’d wanted was to wipe that smug look off his face, just long enough for him to give more of a rat’s ass about a dead man in his bedroom than the area rug in his foyer.

If Ellie were telling the whole truth, she’d tell Judge Bandon that there was something about Sam Sparks that got under her skin. And she would try to explain that the only thing that bothered her more than that something was her own inability to maintain control in the face of it.

Sparks’s rigid refusal to cooperate with the police investigation – all because of their first ill-fated encounter, an encounter in which she had played no small part – had contributed to a four-month investigation that led nowhere.

‘So, in sum, Detective Hatcher, would access to the financial and business records we are requesting from Mr. Sparks assist you with your investigation?’ Donovan asked.

‘We believe so,’ she said, now looking directly at Judge Bandon. ‘Mr. Sparks is, as we all know, an extremely successful man. A break-in at one of his showcase personal properties would send a message to him. If he has financial or business enemies, we need to look into that.’

‘And to be clear, is Mr. Sparks himself a target of your investigation?’

‘Of course not,’ Ellie said.

If she were revealing the whole truth, she would have told Judge Bandon that at one point they of course had looked at Sparks as a suspect, but had quickly cleared him.

‘Is there anything you’d like to add to your testimony, Detective Hatcher?’

In polite courtroom discourse, ADA Max Donovan referred to her as Detective Hatcher. But this was not the whole truth, either. If courtrooms had anything to do with the whole truth, he would call her Ellie. And one of them might have to disclose the fact that, just that morning, the testifying detective had woken up naked in the assistant district attorney’s bed.

‘No, thank you, Mr. Donovan.’

Chapter Four

11: 45 a.m.

Megan Gunther rolled her fingertips lightly over the keyboard of her laptop computer. It was a nervous habit. If her typing fingers were positioned at the ready, she had a tendency to keep them moving – tiny little wiggles against the smooth black keys.

She remembered begging her mother to teach her to type at the age of six. Her parents had just purchased a home computer, and Megan would eavesdrop as they sat side by side at her father’s desk, marveling at the wonders on the screen, all attributable to something called the Internet. But Megan had marveled at the speed of her mother’s fingers as they flew across the keyboard.

She glanced at the round white clock that hung above the blank blackboard behind Professor Ellen Stein. Eleven forty-five. Fifteen more minutes. Thirty-five minutes of class had passed, and the only words on her laptop screen were ‘Life and Death’, followed by the date, followed by a single question: ‘Are all lives equally good?’

Megan had enrolled in this seminar because the catalog description had piqued her curiosity: ‘Is life inherently worthwhile, or only if the life lived is a good life? Is death necessarily negative? Is a life not lived superior to a life lived in vain?’

Megan was no philosophy major – she would declare biology next year, and her curriculum was designed specifically for premed. But that course description had grabbed her attention. She figured that it could only serve the medical profession well if a future doctor took the time to contemplate the larger meaning of life and death in addition to learning the science that could extend one and forestall the other.

She should have foreseen, though, that a philosophy seminar with no prerequisites would devolve into a series of free-floating chat sessions during which unfocused undergrads – the ones who would eventually wind up behind a Starbucks counter, or perhaps in law school – attempted to show off their mastery of the most reductionist versions of the various branches of philosophy.

Today’s class, as was often the case, had held momentary promise when Dr. Stein posed the question that was still staring at Megan from the screen of her laptop: ‘Are all lives equally good?’

Unfortunately, the first student to respond immediately played the Hitler card. As in, ‘Of course not. I mean, who here mourns the death of Hitler?’ After just three weeks of a single philosophy course, Megan was convinced that the quality of the national civic dialogue would be noticeably improved by a voluntary prohibition against all analogies to Nazi Germany.

Poor Dr. Stein had done her best to steer the conversation on track, but then the girl who always wore overalls and patchouli oil had set off another frenzy of mental masturbation by wondering aloud whether the mentally disabled enjoyed their lives as much as ‘regular’ people.

Megan found herself contemplating her fingers jiggling on the keyboard again. Not her fingers as much as the keyboard itself. The layout. She understood why the Q and the Z belonged to the whim of her left pinky; Hitler analogies were more common than the use of those letters. But what criteria had been used to determine the keys that would qualify for ‘home base’, as her mother had called it during her early touch-typing training? A, S, D, L – those she understood. But F and J? And the semicolon? How often did anyone use semicolons?

She forced herself to tune back into the conversation around the seminar table. She gathered that the patchouli girl’s comment about the mentally disabled had set off a larger conversation about the value of knowledge when a guy with a paperboy hat and a beatnik growth of hair beneath his lip retorted, ‘Please, go read more Ayn Rand. You’re asked about lives without value, and you pick on the retarded? Of much more questionable value is a life spent absorbing knowledge but then doing absolutely nothing with it.’

At that, Megan thought she noticed a twitch in Dr. Stein’s left eye. Twenty minutes later, the class was still debating whether knowledge was worthy for its own sake, or merely as a means toward practical ends.

‘But even to differentiate between knowledge for its own sake and for its pragmatic import is a fiction,’ the patchouli woman insisted. ‘It assumes an objective reality that stands alone, independent of our own cognitive responses to it. We have no measure of reality other than through our own thoughts, so what precisely do you mean when you say “knowledge standing alone”? Knowledge is reality.’

‘Only if you’re an epistemological idealist,’ the soul patch argued. ‘Maybe Kant would agree with that kind of logic, or even John Locke. But a realist would maintain that there is an ontological reality that is independent of our own experiences. And if we can set aside our narcissism for thirty seconds and accept that premise, then it’s not a lot to ask of the privileged elite that they use their knowledge to make a concrete, objective difference in that reality.’

‘This might be slightly off topic –’

Megan felt her eyes rolling involuntarily away from the speaker, the decent-looking guy who always wore concert T-shirts.

‘This might be slightly off topic, but has anyone else wondered why John Locke on Lost is named John Locke? It explains the inconsistencies in the various narratives. The writers are telling us to take all those flashbacks and flash-forwards with a grain of salt; they are each filtered through the lens of the characters’ personal experiences.’

‘Oh, my God. Did he really just say that?’ The whisper came from the student sitting next to Megan, a guy in a Philadelphia Flyers jersey with a serious case of bed head. ‘I should have saved my trust fund and gone to Penn.’

‘Okay, people, time out.’ Stein rapped her knuckles against the tabletop to call the class to order. ‘Let’s get back to the original question.’

Megan wished she had a dollar for every time Dr. Stein had taken them ‘back to the original question’. The woman no doubt knew her shit, but she had to stop treating these morons as intellectual equals. If this group could be trusted with the amount of guidance provided by the original question, they wouldn’t be talking about Hitler, the mentally disabled, and a television show about island castaways.

She finally caved to temptation and opened Internet Explorer on her laptop. Almost all of the university’s buildings were equipped with wireless Internet access, but a serious professor like Dr. Stein certainly expected her students to refrain from partaking during class time. Barely veiled surfing ran rampant, however, and to Megan it was no surprise. The university’s current regime was, in her view, no different from cutting lines of cocaine on the desktop in front of addicts and telling them not to snort.

She moved her right hand onto the laptop’s mouse pad and checked her Gmail account while making a point of periodically looking up from her screen to deliver a pensive nod. From there, it was on to Perez Hilton’s site for the celebrity gossip. Then to Facebook, where it was her turn in the Scrabble game she was playing with Courtney. She knew that at some point Courtney’s decision not to attend NYU would cut back on their socializing, but for now they remained in daily online contact.

Megan noticed that her neighbor with the bed head was eyeballing her computer screen. She was about to deliver her best warning glare when he nudged his notebook an inch in her direction.

Beneath a series of doodled boxes and circles, he had jotted, ‘You missed HAYSEED for a bingo.’

She turned to her game and confirmed the mistake. Switching the laptop back to her blank class notes, she typed a sad face – a colon, followed by a dash and a left parenthesis.

Her neighbor scribbled another note: ‘campusjuice. com.’

Megan clicked back to her browser, typed the Web site name into the address bar, and gently hit the enter key. ‘Campus Juice.’ White bubble letters against an orange background, followed by a slogan that said it all: ‘All the Juice, Always Anonymous.’

In the middle of the screen was a text box, labeled ‘Choose Your Campus.’

Megan typed in NYU and hit enter. Up came a message board consisting of a list of posts, each with its own subject title.

Craziest Person in Your Dorm

WTF?!: Did Brandon Saltzburg drop out?

Freshman Fifteen (Plus Another Fifteen)

Who’s Sluttier: Kelly Gotleib or Jenny Huntsman?

Hottest profs.

I’ve got a sex tape

Michael Stuart gave me the clap

Megan dropped her right hand beneath the seminar table and flashed a thumbs-up at her neighbor, who doodled an exclamation point in the margin of his notebook.

She clicked on the link to pull up the thread concerning Michael Stuart and his supposed STD. The message had been posted an hour earlier, and two people had already responded – one alleging that Stuart lived in her dorm and was a rampant meth fiend, the other claiming to be Michael Stuart himself with some not-so-kind words about the original poster’s cottage cheese thighs.

Megan scrolled through the next three pages of posts. The entire site was devoted to on-campus gossip, insults, and attacks – all naming real names, and yet capable of being posted with complete anonymity if the author so chose.

She had just finished perusing one of the more respectable threads – speculation about the identity of this year’s commencement speaker – when the title of another post grabbed her attention.

She stared at the two words on the screen:

Megan Gunther.

Moving the cursor to the hyperlink, she could not bring herself to click on the text. Something inside of her – whatever instincts humans possess for emotional self-preservation – told her that one click would change everything. She didn’t want to read whatever had been written there for the entire world to see.

Megan jerked at the sound of a book being dropped on the table. She looked up to see Ellen Stein’s eyes directed at her, along with nineteen younger, conspiratorial faces smirking at her embarrassment.

‘I’m sorry, Ms. Gunther. Are we interrupting your computer research?’

Chapter Five

Noon

Ellie had barely made her way from the witness chair to her seat on a bench behind Max Donovan before Judge Bandon opened the floor to argument. As Ellie had predicted, and as Max had warned, Sparks’s lawyer was casting her as some kind of rogue cop on a single-minded anti-Sparks mission: Mark Fuhrman in the O J Simpson trial minus the race stuff.

The lawyer’s name was Ramon Guerrero. According to Max, Guerrero was a hard-line anticommunist from Miami who had first applied to law school to help other Cubans apply for political asylum but, as lawyers often do, had since forged another – and more lucrative – path. Now he was one of the few corner-office partners at a five-hundred-plus-attorney law firm who had actual trial experience. He was the charismatic guy the eggheads brought in when the documents had been reviewed, briefs had been filed, depositions were over, and it was time to talk to a judge or a jury.

And on this particular afternoon he found himself in Paul Bandon’s courtroom, demonizing Ellie Hatcher.

‘Your Honor, the only reason the NYPD hasn’t made more progress investigating the tragic murder of Mr. Mancini is that the lead detectives, most notably Detective Hatcher, decided early on that wherever Sam Sparks appears, Sam Sparks must be the story. Rather than fully investigate the possibility that someone out there wanted to see Robert Mancini dead – someone violent, someone who’s still at large – they want to pursue a fishing expedition through confidential business and financial records.’

‘With all due respect to Mr. Guerrero,’ Donovan said, rising from counsel’s chair, ‘this is not the kind of contractual dispute that he and Mr. Sparks are used to dealing with. This is a murder investigation. And, as you and I both know from the myriad of murder cases we have seen, murder victims – and the people close to them – lose their privacy as a result of the violence directed against them. You have signed countless search warrants for victims’ homes, offices, cars…’

As Donovan continued to hammer away at the list, Ellie’s gaze shifted from the Bic Rollerball braced in his hand to Guerrero’s Montblanc. ‘Police pore over every document and cookie stored inside a victim’s computer. We review every bank record, phone log, and credit card bill. And it’s all a matter of routine, Your Honor. We’re only here because Sam Sparks is…well, he’s Sam Sparks.’

‘The problem with your analysis, Mr. Donovan, is that Sam Sparks was not the victim of this crime. Robert Mancini was.’

‘Sparks was a victim, Your Honor. It was his eight-million-dollar apartment that was stormed into. It was his apartment that was riddled with bullet holes.’

‘But it was not his body in the bed,’ Judge Bandon replied.

‘No, but the police believe it was intended to be.’

‘Precisely. That is what the police believe. And usually when we talk about what the police believe, we subject that belief to a standard of probable cause. I don’t see probable cause to search through the personal records of Sam Sparks.’

‘Exactly,’ Guerrero chimed in.

‘But, Your Honor, Mr. Sparks is not a suspect. If that’s his concern, we can work out an immunity agreement to placate Mr. Guerrero.’

‘Immunity?’ Guerrero asked. ‘Immunity? The last thing Sam Sparks needs is for some newspaper to report that he has received immunity in a murder case. As the police themselves have acknowledged, he had nothing to do with the events at his apartment on May 27. Because he’s at no risk of criminal charges for those events, immunity from prosecution is worthless to him.’ Guerrero pressed his weight into his hands on counsel table and leaned forward for emphasis. ‘The government fails to appreciate the importance of public opinion and the privacy of information to Sam Sparks’s significant net worth. His real estate holdings are valuable, yes. But as we all know, the real value to the industry that is Sam Sparks lies in his reputation as a businessman. The fact that someone was shot at one of his properties is not great PR. But if the police are actually investigating Mr. Sparks – even as a potential target – then, before you know it, people are speculating about improperly financed debt, the Mafia…who knows what? And of course the risks of disclosure of information regarding pending deals cannot be understated in this kind of market.’

Ellie found herself tiring of the invest-in-Sam-Sparks-for-your-future sales presentation and began doodling on the notepad she had removed from her purse. She let her gaze move to the left, where the head of what Sparks Industries called its Corporate Security Division, Nick Dillon, sat on a bench behind Sparks and Guerrero.

Before Dillon was associated with either Sparks or Mancini, he’d been a member of the NYPD. After a stint working for a private military contractor, he’d moved on to Sparks. Now he was one of those lucky former cops who collected both a city pension and a private paycheck. Dillon had been Mancini’s immediate supervisor. He had also been his friend.

Ellie and Rogan had spoken to Dillon at least once a week since that initial callout four months earlier. He had done his best to play mediator, but they’d nevertheless wound up here in court. Dillon nodded along with Guerrero’s argument, but Ellie knew from earlier conversations that Dillon would like nothing more than to elbow his boss in the throat for his refusal to cooperate with the police. She liked the image.

‘Your Honor,’ Max protested, ‘counsel’s argument assumes that any information disclosed as part of this investigation will become public. The suggestion is an insult to the fine detectives who have worked –’

‘Which brings us back to Detective Hatcher,’ Guerrero jumped in. ‘Our background information shows that in the short time she’s been in the homicide division, her name has appeared in forty-nine newspaper articles in a LexisNexis search. Prior to that, she granted various interviews to outlets like People magazine and Dateline NBC about her own family background –’

Ellie looked up abruptly from her notepad. Dillon glanced over with a barely perceptible shrug. The thought of his coaster-sized elbow crushing Sparks’s windpipe was growing more appealing by the second.

‘Counsel’s comments are wholly inappropriate,’ Max said.

Complete and utter bullshit. She continued to scribble as she listened to her boyfriend’s voice rise half an octave. ‘Two of the NYPD’s biggest collars in the last year. A Police Combat Cross for rescuing another officer in the line of duty. Personal interviews granted only at her peril and only to help her mother, who was widowed in Kansas when –’

Judge Bandon cut him off. ‘I’ve been known to read the occasional People magazine myself. I’m familiar with the circumstances of her father’s death.’

‘My point,’ Guerrero continued, ‘is that Detective Hatcher is relatively inexperienced, and although she has created quite a record for herself in a short period of time, she also has a knack for finding herself in the public eye. She also made it clear with her outrageous arrest of my client that she has a personal grudge against him.’

‘I would hardly call it an arrest,’ Max argued. ‘She placed him in loosened handcuffs after he twice disobeyed a request that he leave the crime scene. Once he was out of the apartment and in the hallway, she immediately removed the cuffs and gave Mr. Sparks another opportunity to stay out of the way, which he wisely took advantage of. Any other citizen in the same situation would have spent the night in Central Booking.’

Judge Bandon cut him off. ‘Are you seriously suggesting that Mr. Sparks should be treated just like any ordinary citizen?’

Max had warned Ellie that Judge Bandon might be starstruck by Sparks, but she had never imagined that she would hear a judge admit on open record the favoritism shown to the rich and powerful. She turned to glance at Genna Walsh, who was shaking her head in disgust.

‘What I mean to say,’ the judge said, catching himself, ‘is that Mr. Sparks was at that point known to Detective Hatcher, both as the owner of the property in question and as a respected member of this community. Those considerations would appear to undercut her decision to arrest him, however briefly. I must admit, I am troubled by what I see here.’

‘As well you should be,’ Guerrero added. ‘That same obsession with Mr. Sparks that caused her to jump the gun on that first night has distorted this investigation from the outset. Your Honor, we are outsiders to this investigation, and even we are aware of at least two far more credible theories as to motive for Robert Mancini’s murder.’

Guerrero ticked off his theories on two stubby fingers. ‘First, the police still – four months after the murder – have not identified the woman who by all appearances had sexual relations with the victim prior to the murder. Second, and separately, we have recently learned that the NYPD is conducting a drug investigation of the apartment directly next door to the apartment where this murder occurred.’

The movement of Ellie’s pen against her notebook stopped.

‘Could this have been a home invasion at the wrong address?’ Guerrero continued. ‘Have the police looked into that possibility?’

Home invasions were often the m.o. of choice in drug-related robberies, so one of the first steps she and Rogan had taken was to look into the possibility of a mistaken entry. Immediately after the murder, she had personally checked the department’s database of ongoing drug investigations. They even reached out to Narcotics to be certain. They found no addresses that might have been confused with Sparks’s apartment, let alone one on the very same floor.

‘With these two very important unanswered questions, Your Honor, it strikes us as quite audacious indeed for the police and the district attorney’s office to stand here demanding private information from my client as part of a fishing expedition while a killer runs free.’

‘I don’t like it either,’ Judge Bandon said, settling back into his overstuffed leather-backed chair. ‘The court is granting Mr. Sparks’s motion to quash the state’s subpoena –’

‘But, Your Honor –’

‘I’ve heard enough, Mr. Donovan. Interrupt me again, and there will be consequences. Under Zurcher v. Stanford Daily, the prosecution does have a right to obtain evidence from nonsuspect third parties, but only upon a showing of probable cause that the party has actual evidence to be found. There has been no such showing here. A written order will follow.’

Max lowered his head momentarily before he began packing his hearing materials into a brown leather briefcase. It was a subtle movement, but Ellie noticed. He was disappointed, and not merely about the court’s ruling. He’d warned her that morning that their chances weren’t good. But that small motion revealed a worry that he had let her down.

He glanced over his shoulder in her direction. His brown curly hair was bushier than usual; for a week he’d been trying to find time for a trim. His gray eyes looked tired, but when she lifted her chin toward him and winked, they smiled back at her.

The private exchange did not last long.

‘Your Honor!’ Guerrero’s exclamation was quickly followed by an audible sucking of air from Sam Sparks. They were both staring at her notebook, still open on her lap beneath her pen.

She felt Judge Bandon’s eyes follow their gaze.

‘I take it there’s more to see than tic-tac-toe boards and vector cubes?’

Silence fell across the courtroom.

‘Your notes, please, Detective Hatcher.’ It took him only the briefest glance before he called her back up to the witness stand. ‘I have a few questions of my own, Detective.’

Chapter Six

2:45 p.m.

Megan Gunther

The twelve letters formed just two words – one name – on a screen filled with many other words about scores of other people on the NYU campus. But those two words – her name, as the header on a subject link of the Campus Juice Web site – had made the last three hours the longest one hundred and eighty minutes of her lifetime.

Megan had closed her laptop the second that Professor Ellen Stein busted her. But that hadn’t stopped Stein from instructing her to stay late after class – an example to all the other seminar students who might have been tempted to ignore the class discussion in favor of more interesting online material.

By the time Stein had finished lecturing her on the importance of group discussion and the empirical research demonstrating the deleterious effects of multitasking on learning, Megan was running late for her biochem lab. She would have blown off a lecture, but the labs counted for 60 percent of her grade and couldn’t be made up. And med schools would care about her biochem grade. No, the lab couldn’t be skipped. And it was impossible to juggle her computer while titrating liquids and triggering chemical reactions over a Bunsen burner.

Now she had finally made it back to her building on Fourteenth Street, three hours after first seeing her name posted on a Web site that promoted itself as the home of the country’s juiciest campus gossip. She walked quickly through the lobby, pressed the elevator call button, and then pushed it several more times as she watched the digital readout on the elevator tick down to the lobby level. As she rode up to the fourth floor, she pulled her laptop and keys from her bag.

She slipped a key into the doorknob – she never bothered with the other locks – and turned. Once inside the apartment, she glanced at what had once been the empty bedroom, the one that now belonged to her roommate.

Megan’s parents had originally justified the purchase of this two-bedroom condo as both an investment while Megan attended college and also a place for them to stay when they visited the city. But with the economy down and Manhattan rents still sky-high, the prospect of additional cash flow outweighed the Gunthers’ desire for a room of their own in the Big Apple: Megan had to tolerate a roommate after all. Heather called the first day the ad hit Craig’s List in May. She was transferring into NYU in the fall and seemed pretty normal, so Megan went with her gut.

The truth was, Heather was easy to tolerate. Today, as on almost every other day, Megan returned home to find Heather’s door closed and the apartment quiet and in exactly the same condition she’d left it. Whether Heather was out or at home, this was the usual state of their shared home. Sometimes Megan wished Heather would come out of her shell and start treating this as her apartment, too, but today she was grateful that her roommate kept to herself.

Inside her own room, she closed the door, flopped down on top of her pale yellow bedspread, and opened her laptop. The connection to her wireless network seemed to take forever. Once the signal was finally established, she opened Internet Explorer, clicked on her history bar, and scrolled down to www.campusjuice.com.

She navigated her way to the NYU message board. All of the posts on the first page were new, entered within the last three hours. She clicked through the board, searching for her name again. What had once appeared on the fifth page of the forum was now on the seventh. The site was clearly getting some use.

She moved the cursor to her hyperlinked name, took a deep breath, and clicked.

11:10 AM – noon? Life and Death Seminar

12:10–3 PM? Bio Chemistry Lab

3–7 PM? Break: Home to 14th Street?

7–8 PM? Spinning at Equinox

The schedule was hers, down to her five-times-weekly cycling classes at the gym. Whoever posted the message obviously knew her comings and goings. They also knew where she lived, or at least which street. The short message was detailed enough to convince her that the final line of the post was no exaggeration:

Megan Gunther, someone is watching

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