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
Thursday, September 25
2:00 p.m.
Rogan snatched a gallon-size Ziploc bag from the grasp of the booking clerk at 100 Centre Street.
‘I’d get that smile off your face real fast, son.’
The clerk lowered his eyes and continued to complete the release form Ellie would sign as the official termination of her sentence for contempt of court.
‘“What if Sparks did it?”’ Rogan asked Ellie in a hushed voice. ‘How about, what in the big bad fuck were you thinking?’
What if Sparks did it? It had been a little more than twenty-four hours since Judge Paul Bandon read those words in Ellie’s notebook. She had scribbled them next to a cartoon drawing of a stick figure with stubbly hair and a striped jumpsuit, standing behind prison bars.
‘Apparently I was thinking that we’d been too quick to give Sparks a pass.’ She removed her tiny gold hoop earrings from the plastic bag and began looping them through her lobes.
Rogan held the bridge of his nose and shook his head. ‘Like jewelry’s gonna do anything for you looking like that.’
Partners were like families that way: the booking clerk had best keep his mouth shut, but for Rogan, the subject of her incarceration was fair game.
Ellie had been replaying the scene in the courtroom for twenty-four hours, and she still couldn’t believe Bandon had pulled the trigger on her. She was convinced that until that moment – when Bandon had said, ‘Your notes please, Detective Hatcher’ – she hadn’t even been aware of the words and images that were forming in her scribbles.
Her mistake had been trying to persuade Bandon of that fact. If she had simply admitted to carrying vague suspicions that she hadn’t disclosed on the stand, she probably would have gotten off with a lecture.
But instead Ellie had tried to explain. And Bandon, instead of understanding, had accused her of being ‘cute’. And then when she argued even more insistently, as Max tried to quiet her down, Bandon had concluded that she was lying. To him. Personally. And that, no judge would tolerate.
And now because Bandon thought she was a liar, she had spent the night in a holding cell.
‘No bo-hunk boyfriend to bail you out?’ Rogan asked.
‘You didn’t bail me out. I was released after fully serving my twenty-four-hour sentence.’
‘Whatever. Where’s your man, Max?’
‘I didn’t want to chance Bandon finding out about us. I’m obviously on his shit list now. No need to add Max to that picture. Besides, you’re the one who insisted on picking me up. I could’ve gotten back to the precinct on my own.’
‘What? And miss the opportunity of you doing the walk of shame in your jelly slippers?’
Ellie looked down at her black leather flats, happy to have her own shoes back. ‘Please tell me that smell in my nostrils is just the memory of my overnight sojourn at the lovely Centre Street inn.’
‘Sorry, chica. I’m afraid you absorbed the permeating funk of your surrounding atmosphere.’
‘I’m so happy that my personal and professional misery has brought you such happiness.’
‘So are you going to explain those notes that landed you in this shit pile?’
‘My mind was wandering in court. We both get some of our best ideas when we aren’t even trying.’
‘Are you forgetting that we looked real close at him early on? Real close.’ Rogan’s arms were crossed, fingertips tucked beneath his underarms. Always well dressed, today Rogan wore a black wool suit, a crisp lavender dress shirt, and an Hermès tie worth more than Ellie’s entire outfit. He might have a cop’s blue-collar values, but, thanks to a grandmother who married well late in life, he could live beyond a cop’s salary.
‘Look, you mind if we talk about this in a slightly less depressing environment?’
Ellie led the way out of the holding floor onto the street, and Rogan didn’t stop her. By the time they reached the fleet car that Rogan had parked on Centre Street, she was ready to talk.
‘So we took a look at Sparks and cleared him.’
Rogan glanced back at the building from which they had just exited. ‘Pretty sure I was the one saying that back there a couple of minutes ago.’
‘Keys.’ She held up her right hand for the catch. In the six-plus months they’d been partners in the homicide task force of the Manhattan South Detective Borough, Ellie was usually happy to leave the driving to Rogan, but after the last twenty-four hours, she wanted control over her own movements. Rogan obliged, tossing the keys across the hood.
‘We’ve had this case four months now,’ she said, turning over the ignition as Rogan climbed into the passenger’s seat. ‘We checked out the obvious angles first: sex and money.’
A guy gets filled with bullets after leaving his semen inside a knotted condom on the nightstand, and the first theory is sex. But when it came to sex, everyone who knew Robert Mancini said he was uncomplicated. Thirty years old. Unmarried since a starter marriage to a high school sweetheart had ended eight years earlier. No children. If he had a girlfriend – and he didn’t at the time of his death – he was with that woman, and that woman only. If he didn’t have a girlfriend, he hooked up and made it clear that hooking up was all he was interested in. Apparently there was no shortage of women willing to play by those ground rules.
Unfortunately, they’d been unable to locate the woman who played the game that particular night. The 212’s overnight doorman had no memory of either her or Mancini, and had since been fired for routinely leaving his post to play video games with the teenage son of a tenant. Without a video recorder, the building’s monitoring system was useless, and Mancini’s phone records and e-mail messages had also led nowhere.
Then
