exorbitant salary. I wanted to pay it, but my accounting staff would have asked questions. And Nick, with those cop instincts, said it would never stop. Robo would just keep asking for more. And then May 27 happened.”
“You had to know it was Nick.”
“I think I was still in denial about the entire situation. When I got the call about a problem at the 212, I made a point to find Robo to deal with it. It’s like I was trying not to be intimidated. To remind him who he worked for. I had no idea
“But then we told you he’d been killed. The possibility must have crossed your mind.”
He nodded. “That’s probably why I came off as such a prick that night. Part of me was happy that Robo was dead, but I was so angry, wondering whether Nick was somehow involved. So I asked him, of course. But he swore he had nothing to do with it. He told me how people get killed in these mistaken home invasions. He said it could’ve been a robbery attempt. And I’m sure I wanted those explanations to sound plausible. You don’t want to think the person you love has it in him to do something like that. Then the next thing we know, you’re asking about
“If we’d opened your books, we would have found the payments to Prestige Parties,” Ellie said. “Eventually we would have asked the right question and figured out you were the one client of theirs who really was aboveboard.”
“Lots of pretty girls to walk the red carpets with me. Nothing more, nothing less. And I truly didn’t think I had any information that would help you, or I would have turned it over. I believed Nick. And then you showed up at the Four Seasons last night.”
“We said something that made you realize there was more to it.”
“You told me that Robo had been with a woman from the service the night he was killed. It was too big of a coincidence. Robo didn’t know about the escort service, but Nick did. I realized that Nick had set him up.”
Ellie remembered Genna Walsh’s description of her brother and husband snickering about Robo’s “sure thing.” She imagined Dillon pretending to cede to Mancini’s demands, throwing in all the corporate perks for good measure.
“So you drove here after we confronted you at the Four Seasons.”
He nodded. “Nick looked me in the eye and told me all over again that he didn’t do it. I could tell something was wrong, but I just didn’t want to believe he had that kind of evil in him. I said that to him, you know. I walked out on him and said, ‘You better be telling the truth, because whoever would do something like that is evil.’ Those were the last words I ever spoke to him. He tried to talk to me today outside the office, but I just got into my car and told the driver to leave. Nick did it, didn’t he? He killed Robo.”
“We think he also killed a woman named Katie Battle. He brought another woman here tonight named Stacy Schecter, but she made it.”
“No. No, he would never—”
“He lied to you. I’m sorry.” Fifty-year-old men don’t suddenly go from shaking down Afghan opium farmers to murder to torture. Just as Dillon had managed to fool Sam Sparks for eight years, he had hidden inside the NYPD for twenty.
“But, why? Why would he hurt these women? What did they have to do with Robo?”
Ellie explained how Katie Battle was supposed to be Mancini’s date the night he was killed, but then the trick had been passed off to Stacy Schecter and then ultimately to Tanya Abbott. “We obviously have some loose ends to tie up, but it looks like Nick was trying to find the witness he’d left behind.”
A flash of recognition passed through Sparks’s glazed eyes. “Nick was the one who wanted us to press for information about the woman who was Robo’s date that night.”
“A woman named Tanya Abbott,” Ellie said.
“The girl from the news?”
She nodded.
“But she’s missing.”
“She was attacked earlier in the week. Her roommate was killed, and she’s been on the run ever since.”
“And you think Nick did that too?”
“We don’t know,” she said. “Based on some of the things he said to the woman he kidnapped tonight, we don’t think he knew about Tanya Abbott.”
“And if he didn’t know about her—”
“Then he’s not the one who went after her and her roommate.”
“That’s not much consolation.”
She watched him fall into silence—leaning against the Maybach’s gleaming hood, alone, staring at the ambulance as the engine started and strangers carried away the body of his dead partner. She could feel sympathy for him now, but none of it changed the fact that he had played a role in Dillon’s violence. She finally had to speak.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Sparks. Perhaps it’s cruel of me to say this right now, but when Mancini blackmailed you, why didn’t you just call his bluff?”
He shook his head as he wiped away a tear from his left cheek. “There’s more to it than just being outed. People would’ve started asking questions about the women. The escorts, the money—”
He cut himself off, but Ellie finished the thought for him. “You used a corporate card. And if that had come out, your investors might have asked about other expenses as well. My guess is, they would have found some other creative accounting? The Maybach. Maybe a little too much spending given the current economic climate?”
She took Sparks’s sad nod as resignation, his financial concerns now eclipsed by Dillon’s death. “My entire corporate existence is linked to this image of unapologetic consumption. The truth is, I don’t have as much as the world thinks.” He fought the quiver of his lower lip. “Financing? Advertising? All gone if the world knows Sam Sparks is just another overleveraged developer, and a poof at that. And, even so, I was still tempted. I would have let Robo scream all of it from the rooftops.”
“But Nick?”
“Nick? I’m not sure which he was more worried about, that mess in Afghanistan or the truth about us. Ex- cop. Ex-military contractor badass. A grown man barely out of the closet to himself. Out of the question.” For the first time, she heard real anger in his voice and knew that this must have been an ongoing struggle between the two men. “And it wasn’t always easy to argue with him. Ask yourself, Detective: How will your colleagues react when they learn that Nick Dillon was queer?”
Ellie wished she could tell Sparks he was wrong. Even so, Dillon had no justification for hurting Katie or Stacy.
“What about Judge Bandon?” she asked.
“What about him?”
“Did you have a deal with him? To protect you?”
“Of course not.”
“You didn’t have some kind of connection to him through Prestige?”
“I went there for the girls, Detective, not middle-aged judges.” A sad smile worked its way through his pained expression, and he seemed to find some comfort in the humor. “You said something about this last night, and I was telling you the truth when I said you sounded like a lunatic.”
“He did throw me in jail for you,” she said. “And hauled my partner in for an update on the case. We figured his special interest in the case was to protect you.”
“Why in the world would the man protect me? It’s fashionable to hate the rich these days, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“But the rich can still help someone like Paul Bandon become a federal judge.”
“Well, Guerrero did tell me he was surprised Bandon was hearing the case.”
“Why was that?”
“Because Bandon worked at Guerrero’s firm for a couple of years before he went on the bench. He didn’t officially have a conflict because I didn’t start using the firm until after Bandon left, but Guerrero told me Bandon usually recuses himself from their cases so he doesn’t have to check on the timing issues.”
Ellie remembered seeing a brief law firm entry beneath Bandon’s online picture, just between his stint in the Department of Justice and his appointment to the trial court. She’d known from Max that Guerrero was at one of
