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.’
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.
