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Alafair Burke
Alafair Burke Read online
212
A Novel
Alafair Burke
For Philip, Mary, and Anne-Lise Spitzer
Contents
Chapter One
Tanya Abbott noticed the quiver in her index finger as it…
Chapter Two
Detective Ellie Hatcher and her partner, J. J. Rogan, were soaked.
Part I
You Can’t Let This Get to You.
Chapter Three
Ellie Hatcher raised her right hand and swore to tell the…
Chapter Four
Megan Gunther rolled her fingertips lightly over the keyboard of her…
Chapter Five
Ellie had barely made her way from the witness chair…
Chapter Six
The twelve letters formed just two words—one name—on a screen…
Chapter Seven
Rogan snatched a gallon-size Ziploc bag from the grasp of…
Chapter Eight
Ellie rapped her knuckles against the glass window that separated…
Chapter Nine
Megan Gunther stood in the lobby of the Sixth Precinct, fighting…
Chapter Ten
Katie Battle rang the doorbell first, just to be safe, and…
Chapter Eleven
Rogan was waiting for Ellie at his desk when she…
Chapter Twelve
The Fifth Precinct of the NYPD is located on Elizabeth…
Chapter Thirteen
“ADA Donovan has an update for us on the Sparks…
Chapter Fourteen
Inside the tiny efficiency studio that Glen Forrest Communities called…
Chapter Fifteen
If there was a bar in the East Twenties that…
Chapter Sixteen
Eight-fifteen a.m. on Friday.
Part II
“Go Ahead. Lie to me.”
Chapter Seventeen
Despite two large coffees and a cherry Danish, Ellie still…
Chapter Eighteen
Inside Apartment 4C, Ellie counted three officers from the crime…
Chapter Nineteen
She found Rogan leaning over the desk in Megan Gunther’s bedroom.
Chapter Twenty
The half-mile drive to St. Vincent’s was a straight shot west…
Chapter Twenty-One
Like every other Web site on the Internet, campusjuice.com was…
Chapter Twenty-Two
Morningside Heights got its name from Morningside Park, which lines…
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ellie had parallel-parked on Twenty-first Street and was about to…
Chapter Twenty-Four
In the bedroom of her Upper East Side Yorkville apartment,…
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jess didn’t know the real name of the man he…
Chapter Twenty-Six
Katie Battle made certain to keep her knees together beneath the…
Part III
It was All About May 27.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
With more than a decade passed since the move from…
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Police presence at the Royalton Hotel was glaring. The streets…
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Hey, Rain Man. Get around this idiot, will you?”
Chapter Thirty
Stacy Schecter was a different woman without the makeup. The rock-and-roll…
Chapter Thirty-One
Ellie hated nursing homes. They looked like 1972 and smelled…
Chapter Thirty-Two
Ellie returned to the detective squad just as Rogan was…
Chapter Thirty-Three
Ellie knew the moment that she stepped from the elevator…
Chapter Thirty-Four
She takes a triangle stance in her stall at the…
Chapter Thirty-Five
As Ellie made her way to the brick walk-up on…
Part IV
Easy Money
Chapter Thirty-Six
Usually when a lieutenant summoned detectives into the office for…
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Stacy Schecter blew her bangs out of her eyes and swirled…
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Words—tiny, meaningless details scribbled on yellowed sheets of paper—could make…
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“Niiicccce.”
Chapter Forty
It turned out that Jasmine was her actual, legal name.
Chapter Forty-One
“I don’t know how many times I need to explain…
Chapter Forty-Two
“We’re missing something.” Ellie tossed back the rest of her…
Chapter Forty-Three
Stacy’s music was cranked to ear-numbing decibel levels again. This…
Chapter Forty-Four
Despite a natural aversion to his father’s profession, Jess turned…
Chapter Forty-Five
Twenty-two minutes. It had been exactly twenty-two minutes since she…
Part V
Secrets
Chapter Forty-Six
“Not to be rude or anything, Hatcher, but I think…
Chapter Forty-Seven
Stacy Schecter was wearing new shoes, or at least new to…
Chapter Forty-Eight
Ellie woke up knowing that something had happened. She knew…
Chapter Forty-Nine
Stacy had instructed tonight’s client to meet her at the…
Chapter Fifty
As promised, Tony Carenza was on the southwest corner of Union…
Chapter Fifty-One
Stacy’s apartment was empty.
Chapter Fifty-Two
“I had a cruiser here five minutes ago. Where are…
Chapter Fifty-Three
The Maybach slowed in front of the house. Sparks stepped…
Chapter Fifty-Four
It was nearly ten o’clock by the time she had…
Chapter Fifty-Five
Tanya Abbott let the paperback drop to the floor beside the…
Chapter Fifty-Six
Wherever Tanya had been hiding, it could not have been…
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Just as Laura Bandon had predicted, there she stood, blank-faced and…
Author’s Note
About the Author
Other Books by Alafair Burke
Credits
Copyright
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 granit
e 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, 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.”