“Let’s just say I’ve got dirt on him that might not land him upstate, but would cost him big at home.”
“Bigger than serving three to five for running a prostitution ring?” Rogan asked.
“Don’t ask me why, but my sister-in-law, Carmen? She loves that fat slob. Worships the ground he walks on. She’ll visit him every week in prison and won’t give a damn whether you take every last nickel from their bank account. She’ll find it in herself to forgive him, but not if she knows he brought my girls into it. She loves them like they’re her own. It would break her heart. And even though my brother’s a pig, he just couldn’t live with himself.” She stopped and called out to her brother. “You hear me, Dave? You be nice to these detectives, or I’ll be here with my cell phone calling Carmen right in front of you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving her to leave him in the relative peace of the run-down interrogation room.
They were interrupted by a knock on the door, followed by the tentative peek of the civilian aide who monitored the front desk. “Detective Hatcher. There’s a woman here to see you. She was very persistent but won’t give me her name.”
Rogan waved her to go. “I think Dave and I are just fine now. Let’s see if we can’t get a laptop in here.”
The woman was waiting in the rickety wooden chair next to Ellie’s desk. Her perfectly tailored jade green suit and freshly set hair looked out of place among the dinge and dishevel of the squad room.
“Mrs. Bandon.” Ellie offering her outstretched hand, Laura Bandon gave it a limp shake.
“Thank you for making time for me, Detective. I hope you’ll understand why I didn’t want to give my name to the young man up front.”
Ellie took a seat across from her at the desk. “I’m not sure that I do, actually.”
“I’m aware of the subject of your visit to my apartment yesterday morning. I thought as a woman, I might implore you to treat this as a private matter between me and my husband.”
“It’s not just a matter of privacy. There are crimes involved. And your husband is a judge. He used to be a prosecutor. I’m sure at some point he has sent someone to jail for doing what he did here.”
Laura crossed her manicured hands in her lap. “Paul has plenty of failings as a man, and I suppose being a hypocrite is one of them. But we have a son, and a family, and, if you must know, a certain understanding.” She held Ellie’s gaze. “I was aware of this woman—not her specifically, but of her existence—if it makes any difference to you.”
“It doesn’t make any difference as far as the law is concerned.”
“Well, it probably should. I’ll spare you the details of my own shortcomings, but the truth is, we’re both happier if he has his outside activities. He’s still very much devoted to me and our son. And if this becomes public, my husband won’t be the only one harmed by it. My son will enter Harvard Law School a laughingstock. I will become that woman with the stoic stare during her Stand By My Man moment. You saw what happened to Eliot Spitzer’s wife. Here was a woman who had been a successful lawyer in her own right at one of the best law firms in the nation. And just because of a private decision she made with her husband, she’s mocked now by the entire city as some brainwashed, antifeminist Stepford Wife.”
Ellie had Googled Laura Bandon just yesterday and could understand why the woman empathized with New York’s former first lady. Like her, Laura had graduated from the country’s top schools, had worked several years at a big law firm, and then served on numerous charitable boards even after she stopped practicing law.
“She was in that sort of spotlight for a moment,” Ellie said. “But who knows? She could be secretary of state in a few years.”
“It’s not worth the humiliation. Please, I’m begging you, Detective. All I’m asking is that, before you decide, please give some thought to the other lives you’ll be affecting. This isn’t just about Paul.”
She rose and walked away without waiting for a response.
“Yeah, here it is. Friday night.” On the laptop screen in front of him, David Taylor pointed to a spreadsheet entry for the night of Katie Battle’s murder. “She had an initial meet-up at six o’clock at the bar of the Royalton Hotel. She called in safe. That’s a nice joint. Went there once in the nineties and saw Bryan Adams, standing right there in the lobby. He was a good guy. Let me take a picture—”
Rogan tapped Taylor on the back.
“Yo, watch it.” Maybe it was more than a tap.
“Enough with the reminiscing,” Rogan said. “Who was the date, Uncle Dave? Who met Katie at the Royalton that night?”
“Doesn’t say.”
“What do you mean, it doesn’t say? You’ve got to have a phone number or a credit card or something.”
“Well, we usually do.”
“So why don’t you have it this time?” Rogan asked.
“’Cause apparently Cadence booked it anonymously.”
“I didn’t think you did that,” Ellie said. “Isn’t that the whole reason these girls give you half the money? They figure if the johns are giving you their names and phone numbers, there’s a layer of accountability built into the process. They assume they’re safe.”
Taylor shrugged. “Yeah, well, that’s the ideal, but it ain’t always realistic. It’s like that pregnant girl said about abstinence—”
Ellie shook her head. “Bad analogy, Dave.”
“Look, all I can tell you is Cadence booked the date the day before. We usually get some kind of contact information, but some guys are nervous. They got girlfriends, wives. They’re afraid of cops. Whatever. So we use our, you know, our
“Just because someone
“Baah, Ted Bundy. If that guy had walked into my bar, I would’ve known he was wrong. You’re a detective. You gotta know what I mean. It’s instinct. I probably shouldn’t tell you how long we’ve been doing this, but we go on our guts, and we’ve never had a problem.”
“Sure, until now. I think what happened to Katie Battle qualifies as a problem.” Ellie made a mental note to put Katie’s mother in touch with a lawyer. With any luck, David Taylor would wind up paying for the care her daughter couldn’t quite afford.
“I know, you’re trying to make me feel guilty. You don’t think I’ve spent the last day and a half wondering if I could have done something more to protect that girl? I’m not a monster. But you know what? She’s the one who made that choice for herself. I don’t force anyone to do nothing they don’t want to do. Plus, take a look at this. This checkmark right here? That means the guy specifically asked for Miranda. We keep track of that sort of thing in case she can’t make it, you know? You can’t just send some other girl if he asked for a certain one. And, speaking for Cadence, I gotta think that she figured anyone who already knew the girl had to be one of her former customers. She figured he was all right.”
Rogan leaned over to get a better look at the laptop. “If the guy already knew her as Miranda, he might’ve known her through your service.”
“Could be. She’d been working for us for about a year.”
“Can you pull up a list of all the clients you ever booked for her?”
“Yeah, no problem,” Taylor said.
If they were lucky, they’d find someone whose background overlapped with Tanya Abbott’s. Maybe someone from Baltimore.
Taylor laughed and shook his head as he examined the list of calendar entries he’d pulled up on the screen. “Now that one there could’ve been worth a mint. If I’d really been smart, I should have closed up shop and gotten into the blackmail business before this shower of crap came pouring down on me.”
“What are you talking about?” Rogan asked.
Taylor pointed to a charge on a credit card belonging to the SDS Group. “Let’s just say the person behind that corporation is someone we’ve all heard of.”
“Names, Taylor.”
The glint in Taylor’s beady eyes might as well have been dollar signs. He was working through the blackmail angle, wondering whether he might raise some cash for a legal defense fund.
“We can call the state for information about the corporation. That’s how we found you, remember?” Rogan raised his hand for another light tap of the back, but Taylor stopped him.
