212

Ellie didn’t like to think about what would happen to her when she was old. No way would she ever be in a place like this. But no way would she ever do what her father did. There had to be other choices.

Behind a gray metal desk in the lobby sat a heavyset woman, her eyeglasses dangling from a rainbow striped nylon cord. A copy of People rested on her ample bosom. Ellie watched the woman’s eyes shut and then snap open as she approached sleep only to have it snatched from her. After three separate cycles, Ellie held up her shield and announced her presence.

“I need to see a resident named Phyllis Battle.”

“Sorry about that,” the woman said, suppressing a yawn. “Graveyard shift gets rough.”

“Been there.”

“Room 127, Officer, but it’s very late. I’m sure Mrs. Battle would prefer that you return in the morning.”

“I need to speak with her now.”

“Is there a problem? Because, well, at least around here, Mrs. Battle has earned that last name of hers, if you know what I mean. You’re better off not waking her.”

“I’m afraid I have some hard news for Mrs. Battle. It’s about her daughter.”

“Katie? She’s not in trouble, is she?”

“You know the daughter?”

“I wouldn’t call it knowing her. She’s good about seeing her mother. Not all of them are. She appreciates that I get on better with Mrs. Battle than some of the other workers here, so she makes a point of making sure I can reach her. She’s always messing with her gadgets, you know, checking her messages and such.”

“And Katie pays for her mother’s care here?”

“I wouldn’t be knowing that for sure. You’d have to check billing, but yes, my guess is Katie takes care of the bulk of it. She’s Mrs. Battle’s only visitor. And very regular lately. Her mother had a stroke a few months ago. She and I were watching the television together, and they announced that Sydney Pollack had died. Mrs. Battle was saying that The Way We Were was her favorite movie, and then all of a sudden she couldn’t talk anymore. It’s funny how those kinds of things get filed away in the brain together.”

Ellie’s mind worked the same way, but her random connections tended to be linked to her cases. She remembered that same rainy day. She and Rogan overheard the news when they ran into a corner deli for some hot coffee. It was the same day they’d found Robert Mancini dead inside Sam Sparks’s apartment. Sydney Pollack and Sam Sparks were now forever coupled in her mental library. She hated the fact that she was thinking about the Mancini case. Now. Here. When she had Katie Battle and Megan Gunther to worry about.

“So how did Katie handle the stroke?”

“I think it was the first real scare Katie had about her mother. She dropped everything and came here right away. Even managed to beat the ambulance and rode to the hospital. Since then, she’s been real regular with her visits.”

“And what are your thoughts about how Katie pays for that care?”

“She’s a very successful real estate agent. Busy, busy, busy. Mrs. Battle is so proud. She drives the other ladies crazy, going on and on about Katie.”

“And that’s her only source of income?”

“What are you getting at, Officer? Has Katie done something wrong?”

“No,” Ellie said, shaking her head. “But like I said, I have some bad news.”

“Not about Katie.”

“It’s bad news, ma’am. I need to speak with her.”

“Everything’s okay though, right?”

“If you could point me to her room.”

“I’d better go with you. This will—well, this could kill her, quite frankly.”

As the woman rose from her seat, Ellie caught her wiping a tear away from her cheek. Maybe Ellie was missing the point of places like Shady Pines and Glenn Forrest. Katie Battle had not been the only person to care about her mother.

Stacy Schecter stared at the pages and pages of phone records that the good-looking black detective had spread in a layer across the laminate tabletop. She’d initially been skeptical of this enterprise. She did not want to think she was the common link.

But a lot had happened since the blond detective suddenly ran off. Now her partner had more than just Miranda’s cell phone and the records of whatever phone number they were so curious about. Now they had her phone records, too. Going way back.

And as she focused on the section of the itemized list of phone calls from May 27 of last spring, the detectives’ theory was hard to deny. And by the look on this detective’s face, he wanted her to make the connections faster than her thoughts were moving right now.

Stacy could feel a chain forming in her brain, but it was as if she didn’t really want the sections to come together. She didn’t want to believe that the choices she’d made were going to put her in the middle of whatever this was turning out to be.

Her choices. As if she’d had many.

Whether out of decisions of her own making, or simply random fate, she was actually here, now, in a police interrogation room, staring at these records and putting together the pieces.

It was all about May 27.

That was the day that someone had called Stacy’s cell phone from a landline at an apartment on Fourteenth Street. It was the phone number that Stacy hadn’t recognized.

But now that she was reviewing the records of her own cell phone for that day, she saw the significance of the date. On May 27, two hours before she had received a call from that mysterious number, she had also received a call from the woman she’d known as Miranda. Now both of the women who had called her were dead.

Obviously there was a connection, but she just couldn’t remember. Four months was a long time.

“Look at the other numbers on the list,” the detective urged. “Who else were you in touch with that day? It might help jog your memory.”

“This is just a bunch of numbers to me. I don’t know my friends’ numbers. I just pull up their names in my cell phone.” She hated the sound of stress in her voice. She hated stress.

“That’s fine, then. That’s good, in fact. If you’ve got all those numbers stored away in your phone, we just have to find them. We’ll work through your entire directory until we match these numbers up. You start from the top of your directory, read off the number, and I’ll check these logs for a match.”

And with that they started a methodic pattern of cooperation—her reading off the numbers stored in her phone, the detective repeatedly responding with a series of nopes, occasionally encouraging her with a “Keep going” or a “We’ll find it.” Twice they’d matched numbers in her phone to entries on her phone log, but one was to the deli down the block and the other was to her sister in Seattle—nothing to help her remember the specifics of that day, let alone how Miranda fit into them.

After what must have been eighty numbers, the pattern finally changed. She rattled off ten digits, but didn’t hear the expected “Nope.” Instead there was a pause.

“Got it. There’s a match. That’s the first number you dialed after Katie Battle called you. It’s only a minute long. Ninety minutes later, you got a call from Megan Gunther’s apartment.”

“It’s a number for this girl I know. Tanya something. I only know her first name. Wait, I’m starting to remember now. Miranda—God, I mean, Katie—she called me a few months ago. It must have been that day. Her mom was in the hospital, and she needed me to cover a date for her that night. I couldn’t do it, but she was freaking out about her mom, saying she didn’t know what she was going to do. So I said I’d find someone for her. And then I called Tanya. I’d met her just the previous week; some guy found us both on Craig’s List.”

She was hoping she wouldn’t have to explain the concept of a threesome to the detective, but he waved her on when she paused.

“Anyway, she was the first one I thought of under the circumstances. She called me back later. Maybe that’s the call you’re talking about.”

“Tanya’s got a long-distance area code. Four-one-oh.”

“It’s her cell from wherever she came from, just like mine’s from Connecticut. She lives in the city now.”

“Wait a second. Wait, wait, wait. This area code. Four-one-oh. It’s from Baltimore.”