212: A Novel Part 23

When he returned the handset to the cradle without speaking, she wanted to nudge his words out with a hard elbow to the back.

"That was CSU getting back to us on Tanya Abbott's fingerprints. Guess the girl's not a ghost after all."

"That prost.i.tution bust in Baltimore wasn't her only arrest?"

He shook his head. "They got a hit, but it wasn't from IAFIS." The Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System contained fingerprint and criminal history data from crime records throughout the country. "It was in the NYPD's very own collection of unsolved cases. You want to guess what case we got a hit on?"

"Not in the mood for twenty questions, J. J."

"The prints Tanya Abbott left behind in Megan Gunther's apartment match the latents we found on the champagne gla.s.s at the Robert Mancini shooting. I've got them pulling hair out of the shower drain at Megan's place trying to find a DNA sample for confirmation, but the print match is solid."

Tanya Abbott was the missing mystery woman from Robert Mancini's last fatal date.

PART IV.

EASY MONEY.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX.

2:30 P.M.

Usually when a lieutenant summoned detectives into the office for a case update, it was for a quick conversation. Summarize a few witness interviews. Run through the forensic results. An overview of the next steps. But when Robin Tucker beckoned Ellie and Rogan into her office this afternoon, she got more than she could have possibly expected. Rogan used a purple marker and a rolling whiteboard to diagram all the connections.

Tanya Abbott was, as far as they could tell, the last person to see Robert Mancini alive. She was also the last person to see Megan Gunther, with whom she shared an apartment under the alias Heather Bradley. And through Stacy Schecter, they'd also connected her to Katie Battle, murdered two nights ago at the Royalton Hotel.

Tucker's eyes roamed the board as she processed the new information.

"CSU's sure about the prints?" she asked.

"Abbott left prints all over her apartment," Rogan said. "They've got fourteen match points to the latent on the champagne gla.s.s from Mancini's mystery date. She's our girl from the 212."

"It was right in front of us," Ellie said. "In the phone records. On May twenty-seventh"-Rogan circled the date written next to the Mancini murder for emphasis-"that's the date Katie Battle called Stacy Schecter to cover a date for her. Stacy couldn't cover it, so she called Tanya Abbott. The client was Robo Mancini. I can't believe I didn't make the connection earlier."

"I didn't think a wunderkind like you missed anything, Hatcher."

Ellie didn't miss the sarcasm in her lieutenant's tone.

"Well, I did. When I told Katie's mother about her death, the caretaker at the nursing home mentioned that the mom had a stroke the same day Sydney Pollack died. I remembered hearing the news the day of the Mancini murder. I should've seen it. I messed up."

"Jeez," Rogan said, "not this again. I never told you the date of those phone calls. All I said was they were four months ago. You would've needed ESP."

"So lesson learned," Tucker said. "Make sure your partner knows everything you know."

"The same could be said for lieutenants." Ellie cursed herself for letting Tucker's comment get to her, but she was still irked about the lieutenant's date with Sparks's head of security.

"Go ahead, Hatcher. Say what's on your mind."

"The only thing that's on my mind is how to find Tanya Abbott."

"And whoever's helping her," Rogan said, spotting an opportunity to break the tension in the room. He placed a check mark next to the Mancini case. "Abbott could've shot the h.e.l.l out of Mancini as part of some botched robbery, but no way did she kill Megan Gunther on her own." He underlined the name Megan Gunther. "Abbott had real injuries. She went to St. Vincent's in a meat wagon. Stabbing herself like that? Possible, but not likely. And then there's the question of the murder weapon. None of the knives at the apartment were consistent with the injuries to either Megan or Abbott. Someone carried the weapon away, and since Abbott was wheeled out to an ambulance, it wasn't her."

He drew another line beneath another name. "Next we've got Katie Battle."

"Tanya covered a date for her on May 27, and four months later Battle ends up dead in a hotel room?" Tucker was making sure she was following all the connections.

"Correct," Rogan said. "We just heard from the ME. The official cause of death was asphyxiation. She was strangled. But she was also tortured. Her fingers were broken. Her skin was sliced in twenty-seven different places. She was hog-tied. The pressure alone from the restraints would have been-"

"I get the picture," Tucker said.

"But we don't know that she was raped," Ellie added. "Or at least we don't have any medical findings of s.e.xual a.s.sault. The ME found no signs of seminal fluids on the body, and so far CSU has none at the scene."

"The injuries Rogan described sound s.e.xual."

"Agreed," Ellie said. "The motivation could be s.e.xual without any physical evidence to prove that."

Forced v.a.g.i.n.al or a.n.a.l penetration usually caused tearing and bruising, but oral sodomy was not always detectable. And violence could be s.e.xually motivated even if not carried out with a s.e.xual a.s.sault. The College Hill Strangler in Wichita had m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed near the bodies of his victims. Whoever killed Katie Battle could have been smart enough not to leave bodily fluids behind.

"So let's a.s.sume she's got an accomplice," Tucker said, tucking a pen behind her ear. "Why are the two of them killing these people?"

Find the motive, and the motive will lead you to the man.

"We wondered the same thing," Ellie said. "Picture this. Tanya came to New York to start over. Got herself into NYU as Heather Bradley and was trying to go legit. But she couldn't cover all the costs, so she's still turning tricks. She sees the opportunity for easy money at the 212 with Mancini. She a.s.sumes an apartment like that's going to have valuables: jewelry, cash, silver, computers. She didn't know the place was just for show. She and her boyfriend plan a robbery, but somehow it turns to s.h.i.t. Mancini was an army bada.s.s; maybe he fights back."

"I can see that," Tucker said.

"Meanwhile, Megan finds out more than she's supposed to know about her roommate-about either Tanya's true ident.i.ty or her whereabouts on May 27, or maybe it was just the prost.i.tution. She learns enough that she becomes a danger to Tanya's new life. Tanya posts the threats on Campus Juice as a distraction, then she and her accomplice stage the attack at the apartment. But when Tanya gets to the hospital, she realizes that the search for Heather Bradley's medical insurance is going to turn up dry. And if we booked her for the fraud on NYU, her prints would come back to the Mancini crime scene. Now there is a risk that everything would come out."

"What about the real estate agent? Why kill Katie Battle?"

"Our best theory is that Tanya's partner got a taste for killing when he stabbed Megan Gunther. Shooting Robert Mancini was just part of a robbery. No real thrills. But stabbing Megan was different. Up close. Personal. Intimate. He may have even known her. Next time, he books Katie Battle and takes his time."

"And you know for sure that Tanya left the hospital before Battle was killed?"

Ellie and Rogan exchanged a glance. They knew their theory rested on multiple a.s.sumptions, but now that they were hearing it out loud, they were seeing all of the holes.

Rogan shook his head. "Unfortunately, Tanya walked out of the hospital without telling anyone. A hospital employee asked about her insurance just before five and then left when her shift ended. Based on the entries in her medical chart, we know she got her dinner at five thirty, and she was gone by the time we got there at eleven thirty."

"No one went in her room for six hours?"

"Someone went in to get her dinner tray," Ellie explained, "but the covers were pulled up on the bed, and they a.s.sumed the patient was sleeping. Tanya had padded the bed with extra blankets. In any event, it's certainly possible Tanya got out in time to go to the Royalton. Katie Battle checked in to the Royalton at six thirty-seven, and her body was found around eight. Even if Tanya missed the action, whoever helped her kill Mancini and Megan could have been acting on his own."

Tucker shook her head. "Been a while since I've seen a woman kill anyone other than a lover or a kid. She strikes you as the type to do all this?"

"According to Megan's boyfriend, a kid named Keith Guzman, Tanya had some kind of secret guy in her life." They had decided to hold off on telling Tucker about Judge Bandon's connection to Tanya for now. "She said something about always having a man who takes care of her, that it started with the first person she ever slept with. She said she even saw a therapist about it. She might have the kind of character that would make her subservient to a violent personality."

"A shrink, huh?" Rogan asked. Ellie hadn't mentioned this fact when she gave him the initial rundown of her visit to Guzman's apartment.

"Supposedly. Why, does that mean something to you?"

He shrugged. "Probably nothing. That pop she took in Baltimore did require counseling to get the case dismissed. There was a doctor's name scribbled on the dispo sheet the DA faxed me from the file. I noticed because, at least up here, that kind of counseling's done by the probation department, not an actual MD."

"Not unique to New York," Tucker said. "No jurisdiction bigger than Mayberry can afford to have full-fledged shrinks doing hand-holding on misdemeanor prost.i.tution cases. If she had a doctor vouching for her, he would've been private."

Ellie took the a.s.sumption to the next level. "Which raises the question of how a twenty-year-old street prost.i.tute can afford a private therapist."

Tucker wagged her ballpoint pen in their direction. "Sounds like the wunderkind may have just figured out something important about our mysterious Tanya Abbott."

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN.

2:30 P.M.

Stacy Schecter blew her bangs out of her eyes and swirled a sip of pinot noir on her tongue as she contemplated the painted canvas in front of her. The splotches of muted color on the skin were about right, but there was something about the expression on the woman's face that was still off.

This painting was something entirely new for Stacy. For the last two years, she'd worked on little other than the abstract yet soothing stretched canvases that could fetch her a couple hundred dollars on the street. She had hoped to be featured in solo exhibitions in Chelsea's best galleries by now, but in reality, the only paintings she'd ever sold went to people who cared more about aesthetically pleasing wall decor than actual art.

Stacy hadn't painted anything representational since college. Her parents had sent their troubled daughter to the West Coast believing that four years of open s.p.a.ce and fresh air, away from her overly precocious New York friends, might somehow prove transformative. The hippie college in Washington to which they had steered her, just an hour's drive from her older sister's house in Seattle, was supposed to provide an outlet for her creativity and rebellious ways. Stacy figured she'd met all expectations by becoming an art major and had exceeded them by graduating in the top half of her cla.s.s.

Apparently her parents had some other understanding of whatever transformation was supposed to have occurred during those four years. When she returned home with the same basic att.i.tude and no employable skills, her parents had cut her off.

Stacy tried to be legit, and in the next four years she learned more than she'd ever picked up in college. She applied for design jobs, then marketing, then a.s.sistant positions, and then finally moved down to waitressing. But the money was never enough.

She might still be waiting tables if it hadn't been for that night at the Bowery Ballroom. She and her friend Carmen had gone to see Morrisey two decades after a young Stacy first discovered the Smiths and declared to her mother that she was no longer a carnivore because Meat Is Murder. Three c.o.c.ktails in, still waiting for the show to start, Carmen went off on a slurred rant about a girl she knew who was turning tricks for extra cash. Stacy found herself defending this woman she didn't know and the choice that she had made for herself. And long after Morrisey finished his finale of "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," she couldn't put the idea to rest.

A little more than a year later, she could pay her bills and still have plenty of time left over to paint.

Stacy certainly didn't boast about the way she earned her money, but she also didn't see the problem. At any expensive club or restaurant, on any given night, countless girls were on first dates with hedge-fund a.s.sholes. They spent the night sipping from the bottle service in the VIP lounge or nibbling on a two-hundred-dollar tasting menu with the expectation that they'd put out for the night and never be spoken to again. What Stacy did was no different, but she skipped the bulls.h.i.t conversation and got to spend the money as she saw fit. If anything, those gold-digging date-girls were bigger wh.o.r.es than she was.

She usually had no problem separating her primary income source from the rest of her life. As Stacy, she scrunched up her s.h.a.gged hair with molding paste, piled on the eyeliner, sported a wardrobe of black, leather, and denim, and cursed more than a p.i.s.sed-off ex-con. When she dated, she smoothed her hair with straightening gel, donned clothes that a Long Island housewife might call "cla.s.sy," and smiled a lot through a thin layer of age-appropriate makeup. And when she was done with the date, she stopped thinking about that part of her life entirely. It hadn't been easy, but that's what she'd trained herself to do.

But now the fake life was bleeding into the real one. And with real blood.

She looked again at the canvas. The facial expression. It wasn't right.

Part of her wished those detectives hadn't shown her the pictures. If she hadn't come across as such a c.u.n.t at first, if they had trusted her to cooperate, maybe they wouldn't have felt forced to place those photographs in front of her. Maybe she wouldn't have seen what happened to Miranda. To Katie Battle.

But she had. And now, like those first thoughts after the Morrissey concert about Carmen's friend, she could not stop thinking about those photographs.

She placed her half-full winegla.s.s on the table next to her palette, plopped onto her bed, and opened her laptop. She clicked on her bookmarks menu and pulled up www.TheEroticReview.com. Within seconds, she was looking at her profile on the site. Shunning the faux-glamour pseudonyms so frequent in the trade-Angel, Destiny, Cherry, and the like-she went simply by Ess, short for Stacy, when forced to use any name at all. She scrolled her way down the page, past the description of her appearance, past the list of services offered, and saw that a new review had been posted. A user calling himself Carlo had given her a 9 for both appearance ("model material") and performance ("I forgot it was a service"). She'd take it.

She'd first learned of the site more than a year earlier. When she saw its description of a "community of escorts, hobbyists, and service providers," she was certain it was a sting, some kind of trap by law enforcement. But then some of the other girls vouched for it. "The amazon-dot-com of the s.e.x trade," one girl had called the site. Even Stacy had found herself flinching at the rawness of the language as she clicked yes or no to the various services one could offer. But eventually the site had enabled her to leave the escort services behind and go out on her own. Between the hardcore hobbyists who found her on this site, and the more casual clients who used Craig's List, she had more than enough business.

Next she checked her Hotmail account, the one that was untraceable, the one she used for her Craig's List postings.

She saw her ads as a form of creative writing-not a particularly challenging form, but a form nevertheless. Like dirty little greeting cards, her online listings all followed the same cliched storylines-bored housewife looking for adventure, pent-up sales executive needs to indulge her fantasy life, graduate student available for private modeling. In the norms of the s.e.x industry, potential johns saw these ads for what they were-a thinly veiled cover for an illegal offer of s.e.x for money.

The one strain of continuity through all of her ads was the description of herself as an "honest and attractive brunette." Stacy didn't let her dates have her phone number. Being untraceable minimized the chances of getting caught.

But she didn't mind regulars. If someone wanted to date her again, and she wanted to accept, she told them all they had to do was peruse the Craig's List postings. Women Seeking Men. Look for the "honest and attractive brunette."

She scrolled through her in-box on Hotmail, past the inevitable v.i.a.g.r.a and diet-related spam, searching for any mention of Craig's List in the subject lines of the new messages. She found one toward the bottom of the page and clicked on it.

Someone had responded to the ad she'd placed that morning.

I am an honest and attractive brunette. I came to New York for adventure but am having difficulty finding a place to stay for the night and hopefully will find a good man to take care of me. This is for real. Please write back with your phone number if you are interested.

She opened the reply and immediately noticed the return address: Someone had apparently created an account specifically for this message. Probably had a suspicious wife who snuck too many peeks at his BlackBerry.

I'm sorry to hear that your search for adventure has left you stranded. I think I can help you out if you can meet with me tomorrow night. I'm very generous towards the right kind of woman under the right terms. No phone number to offer, but e-mail me back with a photograph and a place where you'd feel comfortable meeting, and we'll work out the details in person.

Stacy was accustomed to discovering that she was not the only half of the transaction who required anonymity. She could tell this guy was a repeat player. There were no explicit references to s.e.x for money, lest she be a decoy working a police sting. But all of the not-so-subtle hints were there: veiled references to generosity, terms, details. He knew the drill.

She clicked on the reply b.u.t.ton but found herself hesitating as she began to type the text that would finalize the particulars of the date. She rose from the bed and stood again in front of her easel.

This time, she realized what had been bothering her about the woman's face. It was her mouth. It was too relaxed. Too tranquil. Even more than the strangling marks on her neck, what had been so disturbing about those pictures of Miranda had been her lips-twisted unnaturally, the kind of bizarre facial expression sometimes captured in the awkward timing of a bad snapshot. Stacy still could not believe that Miranda had died with her mouth frozen in that state.

She painted over the mouth in putty gray, using the tip of her brush to sketch more angular lines that she would eventually trace over with color.

That blond detective had lectured her about the dangers of what she was doing. She had tried to manipulate her into "changing her lifestyle," as she put it. And she'd used the horrible things that had been done to Miranda in an attempt to persuade her. She could still hear that tough and somehow slightly condescending tone in the detective's voice when she'd told her, "The next time, it could be you." The detective even forced Stacy to add her cell number to her phone so she'd have it any time she needed-"even just to talk, Stacy."

Using her name with her, like they were friends. Ironically, it was a move Stacy used with her dates-or at least the ones who seemed to want some semblance of intimacy.

Well, the detective was wrong. Miranda didn't deserve what happened to her. No one did. But Miranda had never been street-smart. She didn't have that intuition that could tell her right away if a guy was a problem or not. Stacy did. She was a good judge of character. And she was smarter than Miranda.

And she knew the police were full of s.h.i.t because they also warned her to stay away from Heather. Maybe Heather-or Tanya from Baltimore-had bolted. But there was no way she had anything to do with those heinous things that had been done to Miranda. She probably just got scared when she saw Miranda's picture on the news after she was killed. She probably decided to give up the life and get the h.e.l.l out of Dodge-sort of like what that blond detective wanted for Stacy.