“Where’s Sparks?” she asked.
“Right here.”
“Where’s
“I’m parked outside Ouest.”
“West what?”
“It’s a restaurant. O-U-E-S-T. Broadway at Eighty-fourth. He went inside about twenty minutes ago.”
A restaurant Rogan knew, and she didn’t. Definitely expensive. “Can you still see him?”
“Not at the moment, but I’m watching the only door.”
“Do me a favor, please? Go inside? Make sure you can see him?”
“If I do that, he’ll make me. He might not hate me as much as you, but he’ll recognize me.”
“I don’t care. Go check. Please.”
“What’s going on?”
“There’s no time. Just make sure.”
She hung up and placed the next call to Paul Bandon’s chambers. Given the hour, she was surprised when a secretary answered.
“This is Ellie Hatcher from the NYPD. Is Judge Bandon available?”
“I’m sorry, Detective, but he’s not in chambers right now. May I take a message?”
“Where is he?”
“Pardon me?”
“When did he leave?”
“Well, he didn’t. He’s on the bench. We’re all hoping he’ll call it a day any minute now.”
“But you’re sure he’s there?” Ellie asked.
“Of course. I’m still here, aren’t I?”
“I know this sounds crazy, but can you literally see him from your desk?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Can you please do me a favor and make sure he’s physically in his courtroom?”
“Is something wrong, Detective?”
Ellie could tell from the secretary’s tone that she was worried about the potential of a threat against the judge. Ellie saw no need to disabuse her of that impression.
“It’s very important. Please. Just make sure he’s in one piece and accounted for.”
The secretary returned to the line thirty seconds later. “Yes, he’s still there with the lawyers. Do I need to worry—”
Ellie hung up and dialed Rogan again. He picked up on the third ring.
“Got him,” he said. “Pretty sure he spotted me, but—”
“Who was he with?”
“He’s with some couple and an absolutely gorgeous woman.”
“Not Stacy Schechter?”
“Hello? I think I’d recognize Stacy. What’s going on?”
Ellie was crossing Second Avenue. She was almost there. She looked again at the text message:
Sparks and Bandon were both accounted for. Maybe Stacy had seen one of them earlier in the day and only just got around to texting her. Maybe there was an innocent explanation for the cut-off text message, the turned-off phone.
But then Ellie realized that Sparks and Bandon were not the only men in the photos.
“Forget Sparks. Meet me at Stacy’s place. She’s missing. We have to find her. And we have to find Nick Dillon.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
6:45 P.M.
Stacy’s apartment was empty.
They had squandered fifteen minutes tracking down the building super to unlock the door, and all they had to show for it was an empty apartment. No break-in. No signs of a struggle. And no Stacy.
Ellie tried her cell again, but once again the call bounced directly to voice mail.
“She was smart enough to text you,” Rogan said. “She should know that if her phone was on, we could use the signal to locate her.”
Ellie tried to ignore the tormented face of Katie Battle, staring at her from the canvas in the center of the room as if Ellie had failed not only Stacy, but her as well. “I have no doubt Stacy knows that. And so does Nick Dillon. That’s why her phone’s turned off.”
They had already called in to have patrol officers check Nick Dillon’s house in Riverdale. She called the dispatcher and asked for a progress report. The car that had caught the call had not yet reported on scene.
“Okay,” Ellie said. “I also need to issue BOLOs for two subjects: Nick Dillon and Stacy Schecter.” She recited the basic identifying information and waited while the dispatcher pulled up the plate information for Sparks’s black Infiniti sedan.
“Better be some major crime wave up in the Bronx tonight,” she said, flipping her phone shut. “They’re slow as molasses getting to Dillon’s place.”
“You don’t think you jumped the gun with that BOLO?” A be-on-the-lookout request would go out to every area precinct. “Man’s got a lot of friends on the job. We better be right about this.”
“We are.” Stacy’s text said that one of the men in the pictures Ellie had shown her had tried to meet with her. Sparks and Bandon were accounted for, but in the photograph of Sparks, Nick Dillon had been standing directly behind him with an umbrella. He was the only other man in the snapshots. “He’s got her. If he’d been anyone but a former cop, we would’ve looked harder at him. He’s the one who knew Narcotics was looking at the apartment across the hall from Sparks’s. He’s the friend who could’ve lined Mancini up with a girl from Prestige Parties, made sure he’d be at the apartment that night.”
“And now he’s going after Stacy to find Tanya Abbott?”
“That’s got to be it. He’s still trying to find the woman who was hiding in the bathroom cabinet that night. She’s his one loose end.”
As prominent as Tanya Abbott’s photograph had been in newspapers and televisions that week, they had never publicly released her connection to the Mancini murder.
“Or maybe he’s known who she is all along. If he saw something of hers at the apartment—her purse, maybe, her ID—he could have assumed at the time she’d left it behind. He could’ve staged the attack at Megan’s, and now he’s gone after Katie and Stacy, assuming they know how to find her.”
Ellie shook her head. “Still doesn’t explain those threats on Campus Juice.”
“Unless he posted those, too,” Rogan said.
“Look. All we know is Stacy’s missing, and I’m telling you, Nick Dillon has her.”
“So let’s do better than a BOLO,” Rogan said. “Let’s see if we can get a warrant.”
She flipped open her cell the second it buzzed. “Hatcher.”
It was the dispatcher relaying a message from the officers at Nick Dillon’s house.
“I’ve got a UTL on your two subjects at the address you requested.”
Unable to locate.
“Did you tell those officers this guy probably doesn’t want to be located? How hard did they look for him?”
She heard the dispatcher radioing to the reporting officer at the other end of the call.
“They’re saying they knocked on the door. No one answered. No sounds inside. No lights.”
“What about the Infiniti?”
