EXCLUSIVE
Previously treated as unrelated cases by authorities, the separate disappearances last week of a Manhattan woman and a married father residing on Long Island have been tied together by a surprise tip.
Sources inside the New York and Nassau County police departments have told
A high-tech equipment salesman for the Kiran Group, a subsidiary of telecom giant Armbright Industries, Mr. Sullivan was reported missing by his wife ten days ago when he failed to return home from his corporate office at Pier 14 in lower Manhattan. Ms. Banks vanished under mysterious circumstances several days later after dropping off her four-year-old daughter at an indoor playspace only blocks from her residence.
The new information connecting Sullivan and Banks has been voluntarily provided by a close mutual acquaintance who is said to have come forward out of concern for their safety. While currently protecting this individual’s identity, police are satisfied what they’ve learned from him is credible and have already begun gathering corroborative evidence that points toward the missing persons having a long-standing “boyfriend/kept woman relationship,” as one NYPD investigator characterized it.
The investigator disclosed that Sullivan is sole owner of the condo, which has been occupied by Corinna Banks — described as an attractive, thirtyish blonde — and her daughter since he purchased it sometime last year. Garage attendants in the upscale Chelsea building have further confirmed that Ms. Banks drives a late-model Jaguar X-type sedan that police have found to be leased in Sullivan’s name.
“We believe Sullivan was in Corinna Banks’ apartment a little while before he disappeared, and took the Jaguar when he left there to meet somebody,” a source told
Police said they do not know the nature of Sullivan’s meeting, raising obvious questions about where it was to take place, who he had gone to see, or what might have happened to him in the hours after he left the condominium and the discovery of the Jaguar — now undergoing forensic analysis — outside the Robert F. Wagner Middle School at 220 E. 75th Street.
“We’re still gathering information, chasing down leads, and doing a lot of guesswork,” a police source said.
Both police departments involved with the case are committed to working closely together and may hold a joint press conference within 48 hours in hopes of gaining public attention and bringing potential witnesses to the fore. And while cops admit there is no solid evidence linking Sullivan’s disappearance to that of Ms. Banks, they are convinced it will materialize as their probe widens.
“A man and woman who share a love nest drop into nowhere a few days apart, you can bet it’s not an accident,” said a lead NYPD investigator. “In my eyes coincidences like that just don’t happen.”
Noriko Cousins was already having a supremely bad day, the kind she knew had to be governed by some Bitch Goddess of the Pit who would dispense illimitable random miseries to inhabitants of the world above, tacking on one after another until you wanted to mark the date box on the calendar with a big black X and then blow your vocal cords to shreds screaming for tomorrow to hurry up and come around.
A wretched day already, no question. A day Noriko was convinced would not pass into the next before taking a fairsized piece out of her, chewing it to a pulp, and spitting it into a particularly foul-smelling sewer… which was especially discouraging when she considered that it was only a few minutes past nine o’clock in the morning, and she had barely been at the office long enough to warm the seat behind her desk.
Now she slapped a hand down on her computer mouse and attacked its left button with a finger to close her Internet browser, resentfully casting the front page of
Noriko took a few moments to settle down and think. Maybe there was an upside here, something to console her. The news about Sullivan’s girlfriend and the towaway Jaguar had come as a double-barreled revelation — and while she would rather have learned of those disclosures before they got out to the general public, they did open new lines of independent investigation for Sword. In that respect, she had to grudgingly concede things might just work out. The same probably wouldn’t hold true for Camp SanJo’s decrees and impositions… but what she needed to get into her head was the inevitability of having to accept the variables she couldn’t control, and turn those she could to her benefit.
Noriko sat back, crossed her arms. Okay, she admitted, the situation could have been shaping up much worse. That still didn’t mean she had to like it, or that she didn’t feel it had the potential to turn into a total circus, with her having to don a polka-dotted jumpsuit and flop shoes, climb into a miniature railroad train with the rest of the performing clowns, and tumble humiliatingly out into the ring as it gathered steam. And when she thought about the guy who’d done the most to put her in that position, arriving last week to mention Sullivan’s name in her office for the first time, it grew hard to resist the urge to spread some unhappiness of her own in his direction.
He’d asked a favor from her, refused to take “no” for an answer, and then made sure he got his way regardless.
Time to see how he would appreciate a little tit for tat.
Noriko looked up his number in her company directory, reached for the phone, and started to punch in his area code — which had to be dialed despite being the
Right around digit number eight, Noriko reconsidered her original idea, stopped pushing buttons, and instead got up to fetch her coat from the closet. Why let the phone company and government regulators kill her fun?
Lenny Reisenberg, who had showed up as an emissary of the Bitch Goddess, was about half an hour from finding out there was more than one to fear in the universe.
It would be a pure and distinct pleasure for Noriko to see the look on his face when he did.
“You know my problem with asking favors of people?” Brian Duncan said.
“Honestly,” Malisse said, “I cannot imagine.”
Duncan looked at him across their table in the glassenclosed public plaza outside an office tower entrance on Park Avenue and 55th Street.
“My problem with asking favors of people,” he said, “is that you always wind up having to return them sooner or later.”
Malisse selected a chocolate biscotti from an assortment box he’d bought at his hotel’s gift shop, dipped it into the coffee he’d picked up at an amenities stand across the plaza, and ate it with a little murmur of gratification. This was, he thought, a pleasant enough space. Warm, open, clean, planted with ficus trees and giant philodendron that stood lush and green in mid-January, even while the flower beds on the traffic islands outside were dead and smothered in sooty ice. Across the tiled floor from him a fountain gurgled softly into its shallow pool, reflecting the weak winter sun and low, strung-out clouds above.
His eyes momentarily drifted to a nearby table at which a pair of chess players sat amid a scrum of observers, all white-haired senior males, casually but neatly dressed. Members of a retirement club, perhaps.
Unable to imagine the idleness of life without work, Malisse shrank from the thought that some of them might not be too much older than himself.
He returned his eyes to Duncan — but Time, stripped naked for him like an unlovely exhibitionist, continued to distract. When Malisse had first crossed paths with the FBI surveillance expert — before calling on him
