the city’s top firms, but she hadn’t made the connection.
“It never dawned on you that Bandon might be trying to work you for support?”
“If that was part of the plan, he never told me. Or my lawyer.”
Something didn’t sound right, but she believed Sparks was telling her everything he knew. She turned away from him, but he stopped her. “Will I be charged with anything, Detective?”
“That will ultimately be up to the DA.” If Sparks’s suspicions about Dillon had formed only after the fact, she doubted that he had committed any crime, but she didn’t want to make any promises.
“Fair enough. Do you know where they’d take him? The ambulance, I mean.”
“He’ll go to the Bronx Medical Examiner’s Office. It’s on Pelham Parkway at Jacobi Medical Center.”
“Well, the word will be out now for sure. I will insist on viewing his body and making the necessary arrangements, even as I’m sure someone will tell me I’m a non-family member. That should be fun.”
She knew it would not be. She handed Sparks her business card. “You have any problems with the ME, you have them call me.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
9:45 P.M.
It was nearly ten o’clock by the time she had a chance to call Rogan. He didn’t bother with greetings.
“It’s about damn time.”
“I was at Dillon’s.”
“No shit. I finally gave up and called dispatch. All she could tell me was there was a homicide. She at least knew it wasn’t an officer down, or I’d be up there myself by now.”
She gave him the short version: Tucker shot Dillon, Stacy was fine, Sparks hadn’t been involved.
“Where are you?”
“Outside Paul Bandon’s apartment. Donovan and I didn’t know what the hell was going on, so we kept working on Dillon’s arrest warrant. See what happens when you don’t call people?”
“I’m sorry. It was total chaos.”
“I gotcha. Just be sure to call your boy, Donovan. I could tell he was worried about you. He was the one who sent me up here to track down Bandon. He wanted to make sure the warrant got signed.”
“You won’t be needing it now.”
She flipped the phone shut, seeing no reason to tell Rogan that her first call—back at Dillon’s, before she’d even started the engine—had been to Max. She knew it meant something about her feelings for him. Something good.
As she merged onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, she thought about everything she’d learned in the past few hours and realized how off base she’d been. Not unlike those unis who refused to jump a former cop’s fence, she had subconsciously bestowed an irrebuttable presumption of innocence upon Nick Dillon, but he’d been in front of them—guilty—the entire time. He had killed Robert Mancini for threatening to peel away a carefully constructed facade that shielded his most coveted secret—a secret about his very identity, a secret that shouldn’t have to be concealed.
And just as she’d assumed the best of Nick Dillon because he came from her world, she’d assumed the worst of Sam Sparks because he did not. She had rationalized her obsession with him, first because of the way he’d treated her at the penthouse and then for his refusal to cooperate with the investigation. But the truth was, more than ten years after she’d moved to New York, people like Sparks still had a way of making her feel like the little girl from Wichita who hadn’t known which fork to use until an investment banker boyfriend finally told her. If she had set aside her emotions—if she had looked at Sparks more as a person than a stereotype—she might have seen the truth earlier.
She had been right about one thing: Dillon had been using Robin Tucker, manipulating her obvious desire for companionship in the hope of obtaining inside information about the investigation. But Ellie had underestimated her lieutenant. As much as she must have wanted a relationship with Dillon, she had never told him about the missing girl’s connection to the Mancini case, even as Tanya Abbott’s photograph dominated local headlines.
Ellie was confident that they could clear the Mancini and Battle cases, but that still left the question of who killed Megan Gunther. If Dillon didn’t know Tanya was the woman with Mancini that night, then he was not the man who killed Megan and left Tanya for dead. She’d been so off the mark about Dillon and Sparks. What had she missed about Megan and Tanya?
She thought again about the isolated facts they had gathered about Tanya Abbott. She was an only child from Baltimore. Her mother had worked as a nanny. The family was poor enough that Tanya had lost the house when her mother died but somehow still had money set aside for college tuition. A bright and vibrant preteen, she was busted for prostitution by the time she was twenty years old, when she managed to have access to a private counselor to get her out of criminal charges.
It was as if the girl had a guardian angel watching over her until one morning, when her roommate was stabbed to death in front of her and her life fell to shit.
And then Ellie saw what she’d been missing.
Distracted by the noise of Robert Mancini and Katie Battle and Sam Sparks and Prestige Parties, she hadn’t focused on what they’d known about Tanya Abbott. When they’d seen the calls between Tanya and Bandon, they’d been so sure it was part of Tanya’s current life—the one that had taken her into the bed of Robert Mancini on his last night. But maybe this wasn’t about the present at all. Maybe this was all about the past.
Ellie slowed to a crawl in the right lane as she juggled her cell phone and scrolled down to a Baltimore number she had dialed two days earlier.
“Hello?”
Anne Hahn sounded annoyed but not groggy. The call to Tanya Abbott’s former neighbor was late, but at least she hadn’t woken the woman.
“Ms. Hahn. It’s Ellie Hatcher from up in New York again. I’m sorry to call so late.”
“Benjamin, I told you to go to sleep. Now. Before I put you into that bed myself.” Her tone lowered an octave. “Sorry about that. Go on.”
“You mentioned that Tanya’s mother worked for a family of some means?”
“I’m not sure how rich they were, but, yeah, he was some big fancy lawyer.”
“Could his name have been Paul Bandon?”
“Bandon…Bandon. Maybe?”
“His wife’s name is Laura. He has a son named Alex.”
“Alex.” Anne’s voice sharpened in recognition. “Yes. There was definitely a little boy named Alex. Tanya talked about him all the time. She was a few years older and, having been an only child, I think she kind of glommed on to him as a sort of little brother. She was the same way with my older son when she’d babysit him. It was always Alex this, and Alex that.”
“Do you remember when this would have been?”
Ellie realized now why she had recognized the towheaded kid in the photographs with Tanya. She had seen an older version of the same kid in the high school graduation picture on Judge Bandon’s bench when she testified on Wednesday morning.
“Shoot,” Anne said, “probably twenty years ago.”
“Tanya would have been about ten years old?”
“Well, Marion worked for them for a few years, I’d say from when Tanya was ten to—um—probably about fifteen or so?”
“And were these the years when you said Tanya was the teacher’s-pet type or—”
“The Lolita years?”
“Yeah.”
“That period of time would have included both. Tanya started changing when she was about thirteen, if I had
