212

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 glass 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 hell 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 sexual assault. 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 sexual.”

“Agreed,” Ellie said. “The motivation could be sexual without any physical evidence to prove that.”

Forced vaginal or anal penetration usually caused tearing and bruising, but oral sodomy was not always detectable. And violence could be sexually motivated even if not carried out with a sexual assault. The College Hill Strangler in Wichita had masturbated near the bodies of his victims. Whoever killed Katie Battle could have been smart enough not to leave bodily fluids behind.

“So let’s assume 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 assumes 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 shit. Mancini was an army badass; 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 identity or her whereabouts on May 27, or maybe it was just the prostitution. 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 assumptions, 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 assumed 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 prostitution cases. If she had a doctor vouching for her, he would’ve been private.”

Ellie took the assumption to the next level. “Which raises the question of how a twenty-year-old street prostitute 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.”