212

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

10:43 P.M.

Twenty-two minutes. It had been exactly twenty-two minutes since she took the keys from Rogan.

In what was probably the fourth of the twenty-two minutes, Ellie had ducked into the Borders on the corner. A guard was about to lock the door but made an exception when she’d flashed her badge and pleaded for caffeine. She left one minute later, a large black coffee in hand. Once she was in the car, she took a U-turn and parked on the north, hotel side of Fifty-seventh Street, just west of Park Avenue. Sparks would likely have a driver, and the driver would pull up to the front of the hotel. She was poised to follow.

For the remainder of the twenty-two minutes, her gaze floated between the hotel entrance, her watch, the six awaiting black limos she’d counted between Park and Madison, and—just to help the time pass—the ascending floors of the Four Seasons’ limestone exterior. Ellie had counted fifty-two on the way up, and was on thirty-one on the way down when she spotted Sam Sparks leaving the hotel, Kristen Woods at his side.

She looked at her watch. Twenty-two minutes. Not so fast to be proof of a panic. Not so slow that she should write off the possibility.

One of the six limo drivers—this one double-parked not a hundred feet from the hotel—hopped into his car, pulled forward to the curb, hopped out again, and dashed to the opposite side of the car to open the back door for Sparks.

Ellie started the engine and pulled into traffic four cars behind the limo on Fifty-seventh Street. Without signaling, the limo took a right at the light to head north on Madison Avenue. She followed. Traffic was moving smoothly, and the limo made good time in sync with the lights. She maneuvered into a different lane to get a closer position.

They’d hoped that the confrontation in the hotel might trigger a meeting between Sparks and Bandon. As they continued north on Madison, Ellie worried that the only act in which she’d be catching Sparks red-handed tonight was a return to his town house on Seventy-seventh, but she reminded herself that Bandon also lived on the Upper East Side.

At Seventy-third Street, the driver shifted into the left lane. Sparks’s place was between Madison and Fifth Avenue. Bandon was farther east on Park. He was definitely going home.

When the limo lurched through a yellow light at Seventy-sixth, she chose to stop at the red rather than risk flagging her tail. She watched as the light at Seventy-seventh turned red. The limo stopped. Still no left-turn signal, but the driver hadn’t used his blinker back at the hotel either.

Her light changed to green and she hit her blinker to hang a right to take Park Avenue back to the precinct. But something kept her from tapping the gas. She’d waited twenty-two minutes and driven twenty blocks. She’d stick it out until the limo turned onto Sparks’s block.

The light at Seventy-seventh turned green. But the limo didn’t turn. It went straight. So did she, maneuvering into the left lane to follow.

She trailed behind the limo as it turned left on Eighty-first, then another quick left, south on Fifth Avenue. Had the driver spotted her? She hung back, pulling into the loading zone of an apartment complex on Eighty-first, just in case. She could pause here and catch up after the turn.

She forced herself to count eight full beats and then made a left on Fifth Avenue, holding her breath until she spotted her target. The limo was turning right into the parking entrance for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The museum was dead. Maybe Sparks was turning around in the hope of losing her tail. Or maybe he was meeting someone in the garage. It was open to nonmuseum parking after hours, and if darkened garages worked for Woodward and Bernstein, she imagined they’d work for Sparks as well.

She pulled over on the west side of Fifth behind a southbound M4 bus and watched the museum driveway. No limo. If the driver were taking a U-turn, he’d be out by now. But if Sparks had a clandestine meeting inside, there was no way she could drive through the bottleneck entrance without being noticed.

She waited.

Two minutes later, she was parked in the same spot, but with no bus to cover her, when she spotted the black limo pull out of the driveway. She immediately migrated into the flow of traffic, hoping that the driver wouldn’t spot her as she passed and would eventually overtake her so she could resume the tail. She was just about to pass the limo when it pulled forward for its right turn onto Fifth Avenue. As the chauffeur paused beneath the streetlamp at the end of the driveway, she could make out a silhouette of the car’s interior.

The backseat was empty.

“Damn it,” she said, pulling her car in front of a hydrant in the left lane as the limo flew down Fifth Avenue. She scanned the museum driveway in her rearview mirror. Where was Sparks?

She’d hopped out of the car, ready to cover the parking garage on foot, when she spotted another vehicle exiting the driveway. She ducked back into the driver’s seat and watched as Sam Sparks passed her behind the wheel of a two-tone gray Maybach.

She wouldn’t have known the name of the car except for a brief stint patrolling Central Park when that famous couple had swathed it with bright orange fabric. The artists had viewed their handiwork from a car just like Sparks’s, and one of the other officers racking up easy overtime commented that the vehicle cost nearly four hundred grand. With the real estate market in its current condition, even Sparks had to be feeling the pinch, but he certainly wasn’t going to let anyone know it.

But Ellie didn’t care whether Sparks drove a Maybach or a Honda or a GMC Pacer. What mattered to her was that it was eleven o’clock at night, and he’d ditched his driver and was on the move.

If Ellie had been asked to bet on Sam Sparks’s likely destination as the clock approached midnight, her imagination would have carried her on a luxury excursion through the city: a top-secret avant-garde performance art debut in SoHo, an exclusive club opening in Chelsea, the rooftop bar at the Gansevoort. Instead, she found herself in the burbs. Riverdale, to be exact.

Riverdale was a perfectly decent place. Nice, in fact. Pleasant. Even fancy in parts. And she supposed that it technically fell within the limits of the Bronx and was therefore formally part of the city and not a suburb. But in all the ways that counted, Riverdale was the humdrum boring suburbs.

But something had brought Sam Sparks and his Maybach here as the clock approached midnight.

She had followed him crosstown on Seventy-ninth, and then north on the Henry Hudson Parkway. She had wondered if he was leading her all the way to his upstate country home when he turned off at Exit 22. The winding, hilly residential roads challenged her tailing abilities, but she managed to keep sight of him.

She was one turn behind him when she saw the red blush of his brake lights. He parked on the street behind a blue minivan and turned off his engine. She killed her headlights and backed into a spot at the curb. Despite the angle, she could see his car around the corner if she leaned forward.

With the twists and turns through Riverdale, she had not had a chance to take in the surroundings. Upper-middle-class residential neighborhood. Well-maintained brick Tudors seemed to dominate. Average-size lots. Average-size homes. Not the kind of place she’d expect Sparks to leave a Maybach on the street.

She tried to make out the street names on the perpendicular green signs on the corner, but did not have enough light. Why was Sparks here? And why hadn’t he gotten out of his car?

She waited. She watched. Nothing happened.

Ten minutes later, she sensed a brightening somewhere on the street past Sparks’s car—a porch light—followed by the faint sound of muted voices. She saw the silhouette of Sparks’s head slink down in the driver’s seat.

Rogan had mocked her for grabbing a set of binoculars before they left the precinct, but she was grateful for them now. She rotated the lenses until the street came into focus.

She spotted the couple on the lit porch of a house two lots down from Sparks’s Maybach. Taller guy. Shorter woman with light-colored hair in a low ponytail, keys in her hand. They were kissing—nothing too passionate, but more than just a friendly good-bye.

The kissing stopped, and she heard their muted voices again. The woman turned to leave. She had a bounce in her step. She looked back toward the porch when she hit the sidewalk and then headed toward a white Toyota Camry parked at the curb. The woman was Lieutenant Robin Tucker.

Ellie swung the binoculars back to the porch, where Nick Dillon was waving good-bye. Tucker pulled away from the curb and returned the wave before driving off. When Tucker’s taillights were out of sight, she heard the engine of the Maybach. Sparks pulled forward two lots and turned into Dillon’s driveway.

He remained inside his car, engine idling, as Dillon retreated inside his house. Seconds later, she heard a faint electric hum as one door of Dillon’s two-car garage rolled open. The Maybach pulled inside and the door rolled closed behind it.

Five minutes later after Tucker had left, Ellie saw the white Camry pass her parking spot and turn again onto Dillon’s street. She expected it to pull to the curb in front of the house, but it cruised by, slowing slightly but not stopping.

An hour passed. No one came. No one left. Nothing happened. At one in the morning, Ellie finally gave up and drove home. Something was important enough to bring Sam Sparks to the suburbs to talk to his head of security in the wee hours of the night, but watching Nick Dillon’s house wasn’t going to tell her what that something was.