“Correct,” Rogan said. “Think about it. The real Heather Bradley had already made her transfer decision. The family would have contacted Stanford to notify them that Heather wasn’t coming, but there was no need to call the schools she had turned down.
“All Tanya had to do was tell NYU she changed her mind. She gives them a change of address, and Heather Bradley’s family has no idea that their dead daughter’s enrolled in school.
“I called the NYU admissions office and learned more than I ever wanted to know about some federal statute restricting their ability to release academic records, but I also got an unofficial, off-the-record confirmation that that’s what happened. And homegirl must’ve been doing some magic sex tricks in the bedroom, because I more or less confirmed that our girl wasn’t on any financial aid. The rest of it is pretty standard identity theft. Fake Maryland ID card. Managed to open a checking account from there. And she found the room in Megan Gunther’s apartment on Craig’s List without the formalities of a credit check and references.”
“You call all this the little news?”
“Yep. Here’s the kicker. Any doubts we had about Tanya being the one behind Megan’s murder and her own stabbing would appear to be resolved by this.” He used his mouse to open a new browser window, clicked on his recent history, and scrolled down to campusjuice.com. From there he navigated his way into the recesses of old postings until he found the most recent thread about Megan Gunther. A new reply had been added.
Don’t bother looking for me. You won’t find me. And if you look for me, I’ll look for you…and your families.
Rogan leaned back in his chair. “We kicked ourselves for getting distracted by this Web site, but we looked precisely where Tanya wanted us to focus. It’s like those magicians with the sleight-of-hand tricks. The harder you try to find the quarter, the easier it is for the magician to dupe you into looking left while he’s pulling a coin out of your right ear. Tanya knew Megan’s schedule, and she used it to make us look left. We saw those posts and just assumed Megan was the target. This woman’s coldhearted. She killed a girl she lived with for months, just as a distraction.”
“Jesus, Rogan. This message was posted less than an hour ago.”
Immediately after they’d caught the Gunther murder, they’d asked one of the computer technicians to track any new comments about Megan on Campus Juice. He assured them he could write a simple computer program that would alert him of any replies posted to the threads containing the threats. Apparently the program had worked.
“I know,” Rogan said. “I was notified within two minutes and immediately called Jabba the Hutt out in Long Island for the Internet provider information.”
“The fact that we’re sitting here tells me that didn’t pan out.”
“She used that cloaking device again. The chick’s out there somewhere, threatening us, but we have no idea where. She’s an electronic ghost.”
“We’ve got her picture up all over the city. The news is running it twenty-four/seven. Eventually someone’s going to spot her.”
The only thing the media loved more than young, attractive murder victims were young, attractive missing women. The story of one who had walked away from a hospital and disappeared after surviving a murder attempt was like the crack cocaine of tabloid crime reporting. Patrol officers throughout the borough were tracking down the wingnut calls that were flooding the tip line, but so far, none of the spottings had panned out. Now Tanya had upped the ante with this threat.
“Rogan, if Tanya had any details about our personal lives, she would have used them, just like she posted Megan’s schedule on Campus Juice to scare her. Threatening our, quote, ‘families’ shows that she doesn’t know anything about Sydney.”
“Or Jess,” Rogan added.
“Or Jess.” But even as she tried to convince herself that Tanya would be more worried about disappearing than targeting the family members of police officers, she used the camera in her cell phone to take a snapshot of Tanya’s Maryland ID. She e-mailed it to Jess, then followed it with a text message: “Crazy chick making threats. Likely BS, but just in case, photo in your e-mail.”
She hit the send button and asked Rogan if she should send the picture to Sydney as well.
“I kept her up late enough watching the news that she knows that girl’s face just fine by now,” he said. “I’ll call her myself to tell her about this latest garbage. She doesn’t always take the job in stride, at least not when it comes home with me.”
Rogan’s phone rang.
“Yeah, this is Rogan.”
Ellie’s cell buzzed in her hand. A reply text message from Jess: “Crazy chick’s hot. Will definitely be on the lookout.”
She was about to text a response to Jess when Rogan’s side of the phone conversation caught her attention.
“Yeah, the Megan Gunther case. You got a hit?” She recognized the excited look on his face. There was news. Ellie reached across him to hit the refresh button on the Web browser. No new messages on Campus Juice.
“What?” she whispered urgently. “What?”
Rogan shook his head to shush her.
“No shit?…You’re sure?…Sweet. I need you to do me a favor, though. We’re going to need DNA to confirm it…. No, we don’t have a sample. Send someone back to pull hair from the shower drain?…Cool. Thanks.”
When he returned the handset to the cradle without speaking, she wanted to nudge his words out with a hard elbow to the back.
“That was CSU getting back to us on Tanya Abbott’s fingerprints. Guess the girl’s not a ghost after all.”
“That prostitution bust in Baltimore wasn’t her only arrest?”
He shook his head. “They got a hit, but it wasn’t from IAFIS.” The Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System contained fingerprint and criminal history data from crime records throughout the country. “It was in the NYPD’s very own collection of unsolved cases. You want to guess what case we got a hit on?”
“Not in the mood for twenty questions, J. J.”
“The prints Tanya Abbott left behind in Megan Gunther’s apartment match the latents we found on the champagne glass at the Robert Mancini shooting. I’ve got them pulling hair out of the shower drain at Megan’s place trying to find a DNA sample for confirmation, but the print match is solid.”
Tanya Abbott was the missing mystery woman from Robert Mancini’s last fatal date.
PART IV
EASY MONEY
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
2:30 P.M.
Usually when a lieutenant summoned detectives into the office for a case update, it was for a quick conversation. Summarize a few witness interviews. Run through the forensic results. An overview of the next steps. But when Robin Tucker beckoned Ellie and Rogan into her office this afternoon, she got more than she could have possibly expected. Rogan used a purple marker and a rolling whiteboard to diagram all the connections.
Tanya Abbott was, as far as they could tell, the last person to see Robert Mancini alive. She was also the last person to see Megan Gunther, with whom she shared an apartment under the alias Heather Bradley. And through
