work.” Ellie could see in Judge Bandon’s reassuring smile that he appreciated his son’s concern.
“Where’s Mom?”
“She ran to Citarella for some milk, but you know how she is. You mind going down and seeing if she needs some help with the bags?”
He glanced back to his room, but then nodded and left the apartment.
“That’s a nice-looking kid you’ve got there,” J. J. offered.
Ellie wouldn’t have dared to comment on the judge’s family given the situation, but the remark appeared to soften him.
“Smart, too,” he said. “Senior year at Columbia with a three-point-eight. Off to Harvard Law School next year.”
It seemed early for a college senior to know his next academic destination already, but people like the Bandons obviously enjoyed the benefits of the insiders’ track.
“Thank God he agreed to live at home for undergrad to save the folks some money. The kid reads Plato with his headphones on. I’m surprised he realized anyone was here. In any event, as you can see, I’ve got a full house here and much to do. And, as you can imagine, your coming here this morning—for the reasons you’ve come here —well, it’s a lot for me to deal with. If you’re looking for some sweeping, sobbing confessional to take back to your colleagues, you won’t be getting it, at least not today.”
Rogan started to rise from his seat but settled back into his chair. “We don’t need to go down the road we initially started out on, Your Honor. We are not here to sweat you on your sex life. You’ve got a wife, a son—we understand the need for discretion, and as you can imagine, we tiptoe around witness secrets all the time in our job.”
“I don’t need a lecture from you about discretion, Detective Rogan.”
Rogan held up his palms in a peace-making gesture. “I didn’t mean to lecture. My only point is that we have other priorities. Your number wasn’t the only one in those phone records, but it was one of the most frequent, so we didn’t come here without reason.”
Bandon clenched his jaw and sighed. He was figuring out what the phone records would look like. He was smart enough to realize that, despite his initial instincts, they were the ones with the power in this situation.
Ellie leaned forward with her elbows against her knees. “Honestly, we don’t care about the nature of whatever…arrangement you might have with Tanya Abbott. We need your help finding her. There was a girl stabbed to death yesterday near Union Square—an NYU student.”
“I saw that on the news,” Bandon said.
“Well, Tanya Abbott was that girl’s roommate.”
He sucked in his breath.
“Tanya was also hurt in the assault. She’s fine, but she left the hospital and is missing. Her cell phone’s off, and she’s probably replaced it by now with something untraceable. But she may reach out to you.”
“Well, I don’t see why—”
“You might not consider yourself a close friend, but she’s on the run. She’s alone. She most likely needs money. And from what we can tell, you have contact with her almost every week.”
He looked down at the Persian carpet beneath his slippered feet, avoiding her eyes.
“If she’s still in town, she’s going to call,” she said.
“And then what?”
“We need you to get as much information as you can without tipping her off that you’re cooperating with us. Set up a meet if possible. At least get a callback number for her. Then contact us immediately.” She handed him her business card, as did Rogan.
“Okay,” he said, slipping the cards into the front pocket of his slacks. “I can do that.
“But if she does,” Ellie said.
He nodded. “I will help in whatever way I can.”
“Thank you, Your Honor. Thank you very much.”
They rose to leave, but Bandon stopped them as Rogan reached for the apartment’s front door.
“Is there a way to keep this between us?” he asked. “Just the three of us, I mean. My career, my family, I —”
He stopped at the sound of the crack in his own voice, and Ellie looked to Rogan, knowing what her own answer would be.
“Thank you again for your assistance, Your Honor. We’ll be in touch.”
Outside the apartment in the hallway, Ellie asked Rogan, “Do you think she’s going to call?”
“Anyone’s guess, but I’ll tell you one thing: If she does, he’s going to help us. We’ve got him scared.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
9:52 A.M.
As Ellie made her way to the brick walk-up on 128th Street, she reached back to her days on patrol to identify the tags of gang graffiti that marked the East Harlem neighborhood. BBV for the Bronx Bound Vets. The numbers 031, code for “I’m a Blood.” CK for Crip Killaz. ADR, short for Amor de Rey, or the Love of Kings, a local offshoot of Chicago’s notorious Latin Kings.
She suppressed an involuntary shudder as a rat the size of her purse scurried along the sidewalk near a stack of black garbage bags lining the curb.
The building she was looking for stood out as the best on the block. Brushed bleach stains against the brick walls and concrete steps revealed someone’s stubborn tit-for-tat against unwanted spray paint. On the third floor, recently planted begonias popped from a planter outside a window. Still, standing outside Keith Guzman’s apartment building, Ellie could see why the DJ had felt so threatened by his ex-girlfriend’s world.
Tanya’s phone records remained their best hope of finding the missing woman, so Rogan was working those. He was also nudging CSU again about running the latent prints Tanya had left behind in the apartment. If she had a habit of invoking aliases, she could have been arrested under another name that she was using now that she’d left Heather Bradley behind.
In the meantime, Ellie wanted to find out more about the woman Keith Guzman had known as Heather Bradley.
It took five minutes of persistent buzzing on Apartment 3B’s bell before she heard footsteps against the wood staircase inside. Seconds later, a disheveled Keith Guzman headed toward the glass of the front door, still buttoning his jeans.
“Yo, it’s early, woman,” he said, opening the door.
“It’s nearly ten in the morning, Keith. I think you’ll live.”
“I was at Gaslight till four. Good crowd, too. Would’ve been hot to play, too, if you hadn’t taken all my shit. Now get the hell off my porch before you wind up with my TV, too.”
He tried to shut the door, but Ellie snuck her black boot inside just in time.
“Now why do you have to be so rude, Keith? Especially when I come bearing gifts.”
She reached inside her backpack and pulled out the laptop she’d seized from him at Gaslight. The pressure of the door against her foot eased.
The begonias belonged to Apartment 3B.
“Nice flowers,” she remarked as she took a seat in a green upholstered chair by the window. She was careful not to let her weight disrupt the linen cloth that had been draped against the chair back, presumably to conceal the tatters that were starting to rip in the fabric.
“My moms likes them.”
She placed the laptop on the coffee table in front of her.
“So the geek squad cleared you on the Campus Juice postings. No visits to that site in the last six months,
