to say. At first it seemed like the usual teenage girl insecurities. She got quiet, sort of withdrawn. And then slowly she started acting like someone else altogether—sulky, full of attitude, darn right inappropriate when it came to males.”
In other words, all the signs of sexual precociousness.
“Thanks for your time, Ms. Hahn. Sorry again for calling so late.”
“That’s all right. Now you’ve got me wondering whatever happened to that guy she worked for. I think he was a big deal with the government. Marion used to tell me, just you watch, someday he’ll be on the Supreme Court.”
As Ellie flipped her phone shut, she wondered if that had been before or after Marion Abbott found out what Paul Bandon was up to with her daughter. She took the Seventy-ninth Street exit off the parkway. Bandon’s apartment was right across town.
She had tried to call Rogan in case he was still on the Upper East Side. He hadn’t picked up, but she found her partner sooner than expected.
Turning east off of Park, she slammed on her brakes at the sight of uniformed officers dropping gate-style iron blockades at the entrance onto Seventy-eighth Street. Beyond the stopgap, she spotted two fire trucks, an ambulance, and at least six marked police vehicles, all with lights flashing. Even the NYPD’s version of SWAT, the Emergency Service Unit, had sent an armored van. A swarm of medical, fire, and police personnel stood among the vehicles in the street. And they all appeared to be looking upward.
Her gaze tried to follow theirs, but all she could see from the driver’s seat was the third floor of Paul Bandon’s building and the grimy ceiling of the fleet car’s interior. A car horn blared, followed immediately in New York style by several others, each more urgent and sustained than the previous.
She pulled up parallel against the metal blockades to get out of the way of through traffic on Park Avenue, then flashed her shield to the uniform officers as she stepped out of the car. As she walked around the barriers, she saw Rogan at the epicenter of the chaos, speaking intensely to Paul Bandon. Even from this distance, she could tell he was using what she called his military voice.
What had Paul Bandon done to cause this scene?
Rogan looked surprised when he saw her approaching.
“I’ve been trying to call,” she said. He glanced at the bedlam around him and then gave her a look that said he’d been too busy to answer the phone.
“So you know?” she asked.
“Know what?”
“It’s him.” She pointed at Bandon lest Rogan miss her point. “Tanya Abbott’s mother was the Bandons’ nanny in Baltimore. That’s why he and Tanya were calling each other. He’s known Tanya since she was ten years old.”
She’d already known in her gut that she was right, but if she’d carried any doubts, the expression on Judge Bandon’s face would have washed them away. He’d appeared panicked when she’d first spotted him with Rogan, but now his face fell in that same way she’d seen so many times when a suspect knew it was over. Paul Bandon knew that all of his lies—everything he’d been trying to hide for nearly two decades—had finally caught up to him.
Rogan, however, looked confused.
“This is about Alex. The son. He’s on the roof.”
Ellie looked to the sky and understood now why the crowd in the street had been gazing upward. She made out the dark outline of a body on the roof of Bandon’s building. He appeared to be dangerously close to the edge.
“He saw me,” Rogan said.
“Who?”
“Alex, the son. I was parked around the corner. Right after I got off the phone with you, he came up Park Avenue from the south and saw me. He did a double take, so I knew he recognized me from when we were here the other morning. I figured he’d say something to his father, so I stuck around in case to explain about the warrant. I was about to leave when I saw a woman pointing up at the roof. I called in a response team.”
“You have to get him down,” Bandon said. “You have to save my son.”
Rogan resumed an authoritative tone. “Like I said, everyone here’s gonna work to do that, Judge, but you need to help us help your son. We’ve got ESU here. They’ve got a guy who’s trained to talk to ju—to people who are distraught like Alex.” He had almost slipped and referred to the man’s son as a jumper. “It might help us to know what he’s doing up there.”
Bandon’s lips parted, but no words came out.
“I know what happened back in Baltimore with Tanya,” she said. “Did Alex find out about it?”
He shook his head. “No. Well, I mean, yes. But he’s known about it for years. So has Laura. Jesus—Laura. She’s on a spa trip in the country. I need to call her.”
Tanya Abbott had not been the one to post those messages on Campus Juice. And Paul Bandon had not been the one who tried to kill Tanya, taking her roommate’s life in the process. It had been his son, Alex.
“You need to help us with information right now, Judge.”
“Tanya and I, well, it sounds like you know. We had an affair a long time ago.”
“An
“Nothing happened until she was fourteen. And Tanya was very mature.”
She let him continue. This wasn’t the time to rid Bandon of the rationalizations he had created during sixteen long years of denial.
“When Tanya’s mother found out about us, I told Laura everything. She stayed with me, and we agreed with Marion that we’d help her out financially.”
“You bought her off.”
“We came to an agreement. Our families were very close, Detective.”
“You were the one who got her out of that prostitution arrest in Baltimore,” she said.
His eyes were glued to the roof of the building, impatient to get past this conversation but realizing that any attempt to avoid it would only delay turning full attention to his son’s safety.
“That and plenty of other problems back then. We set up a college tuition fund, but the money just sat there, since Tanya didn’t have any inclination. And for the last several years, things had finally quieted down. I thought things were fine. And then she called me at the end of May, saying she was in trouble.”
“After Robert Mancini was killed.”
He nodded. “She said she’d witnessed a murder. I had no idea she was in New York, let alone what she was up to with NYU. I tried to get her to come forward, but she was convinced it wouldn’t do any good. She never saw the man’s face or heard any names, but she remembered hearing him say something to Mancini about blackmailing a cop. She didn’t think she could trust the police, and she was terrified of losing this chance to start over.”
“So when we filed a motion in the Mancini case, you grabbed it.”
“It was a way to keep an eye on the case. Let her know if there were going to be any problems for her. I was trying to keep her at arm’s length, but she kept calling to see if I’d heard anything about the case. Plus the account we set up for her wasn’t enough. She called for money a few times, and I gave her a couple bucks here and there but knew it had to stop. Then she called Thursday, saying her roommate was being threatened on the Internet. She wanted to know if there was anything I could do. All that dysfunction, all that chaos, that I thought my family had finally put in the past when we moved, it’s been one thing or another all summer.”
“And your family knew about this?”
He nodded. “Not at first, but yes, eventually. Laura stopped by my chambers last month when I was on the phone with Tanya. She knew something was up, but even then, I minimized it as a onetime cry for help.”
“But she didn’t believe you,” Ellie said. Like Robin Tucker, so suspicious after an ex-husband cheated on her, Laura Bandon was still broken by her husband’s deception. She would be the kind of wife who snuck occasional peeks at her husband’s phone. She would have seen the calls to and from a Baltimore cell number.
“She looked at my phone and saw all the calls. She was furious. We fought. She said I had to make it stop. Tanya was ruining our lives again. I didn’t know what to say. I told her that Tanya was blackmailing me.”
