Read 212 LP: A Novel Online

Authors: Alafair Burke

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General

212 LP: A Novel (10 page)

BOOK: 212 LP: A Novel
2.12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

11:35 A.M.

S
he found Rogan leaning over the desk in Megan Gunther’s bedroom. He was scrolling through a cell phone that was not his usual Motorola, his notebook open in front of him.

“Is that the vic’s?”

“I’m assuming. It was on a charger beneath the desk.”

“How’s it look?”

“She’s got a mess of friends in her directory, almost all of them listed only by first names. I’m writing down the outgoing calls—we’ve got her parents, a few different girls, mostly one named Courtney—”

“Got a boyfriend yet?”

“Two calls to someone named Kendall?”

“With their generation, that’s probably a female.”

“I thought the same. Then we’ve got a bunch of other outgoing numbers that weren’t in her contacts list.” He tapped his pen against his notebook, indicating that he was jotting them down. “Unfortunately, it looks like her parents have been hitting redial over and over this morning trying to reach her, so it wiped out her entire incoming call list.”

“The super says the roommate’s name was Heather, last name unknown.”

“She’s Heather Bradley. I found it on a political science paper that was on the desk in her room—‘Two Views of American Federalism.’”

“Your detecting skills are profound, J. J. Rogan.”

“As is your affectionate sarcasm, Hatcher.”

“Well, between your discovery of the cell phone and my trip to see the super, we’re pretty much tied for who found the parents’ phone number first. You want to call, or should I do it?”

“You mind?”

“Yeah, no problem. You all right?” Ellie could tell that whatever had caused Rogan to snap earlier at Officer Colombo still had him in a mood.

Before Rogan could answer, they heard the loud crackle of a police radio in the living room outside of the bedroom.

“Colombo, it’s Eng. You still Code 11?”

“Copy. Did you
see
me walk out of the building? Yeah, I’m still here.”

“We got a problem downstairs.”

Ellie poked her head out of the bedroom to better hear the exchange between Officer Colombo and the man she presumed was his partner posted in the building’s lobby.

“I’ve got a Mr. and Mrs. Gunther here—first names Jonas and Patricia. I’ve explained that we are controlling access to the fourth floor because of a police inquiry right now, but they say their daughter lives in 4C? They’re getting pretty animated.”

Ellie made out another male voice on the radio, this one in the background. And considerably angry. Something about owning the apartment. About how they couldn’t ban him from entering his own property. About how this better not have anything to do with their daughter. In that final sentence, despite his vocal force, Ellie heard more desperation than anger.

“Megan’s parents are in the lobby,” she said to Rogan.

He looked at the bloodstains smeared across the white cotton bedspread, the pale wood floors, and the back of the bedroom door. “No way they can walk into this.”

“I’ll go down,” she offered. “Colombo, tell your partner to grow a pair. He’ll be pulling tunnel watch duty for the next year if he lets those people up here.”

 

The mother’s eyes.

As soon as Ellie locked eyes with Patricia Gunther, she was certain that the woman already knew what was coming. She knew her entire life was about to change. She knew she was going to learn that her daughter was dead.

Ellie quickly looked away toward the dignified but surprisingly brawny man standing beside the woman. His long face was somber, his brow furrowed. He was worried. Worried and sad. And royally pissed off. But he didn’t know. Not yet. Not like his wife.

“Mr. and Mrs. Gunther?”

“That’s right,” the man said. Next to him, his wife’s head fell forward as she cried out.

“I’m Ellie Hatcher. I’m a detective with the New York City Police Department. We’ve responded to an act of violence in your daughter’s apartment.”

As she delivered the news—two girls, one critical, one who didn’t make it (their daughter, according to the super)—Ellie tried to recite the facts in just the right way. No false melodrama. Enough compassion not to appear cold.

When she was finished, she turned away to allow them a moment of privacy. She went so far as to close her eyes when she spotted their embrace in the reflection of the lobby’s glass door—the strong, tall father crying into his wife’s hair, the mom sobbing against her husband’s chest. She blocked out the sound of their cries by evaluating her own performance.

She had done her best, but she nevertheless knew that Jonas and Patricia Gunther would always remember this scene—Ellie in her black turtleneck and slim gray skirt, this antiseptic lobby with its reproduced abstract art and fake marble floors, Officer Eng posed awkwardly outside the elevators with his hands clasped behind
him—as the very worst kind of collision between the impersonal and the intimate.

 

Once the Gunthers were ready to talk, Ellie borrowed Andrei Gorsky’s office on the second floor. Before the couple was even seated in the two metal folding chairs crammed between the superintendent’s desk and the wall, Mr. Gunther made no secret about where he placed the blame for his daughter’s death.

“This is your people’s fault. We tried to tell you. Just yesterday. We begged you for help.”

“Who, Mr. Gunther? You begged who for help?”


You.
The police. There must at least be some kind of report. We were there for nearly an hour.”

Patricia placed a calming hand on her husband’s forearm. “She doesn’t know what you’re talking about, Jonas. She’ll understand better if we just explain it to her.”

“Fine. You explain to her what we tried to tell them yesterday, while our daughter could still be protected.”

“We went to a precinct yesterday. On Tenth Street.”

“The Sixth Precinct,” Ellie clarified.

“Right. The Sixth. We spoke with a Sergeant Martinez. Our daughter was being stalked on a Web site. It’s called Campus Juice dot com. They told us they’d already talked to the district attorney, and they couldn’t do anything about it.”

“Megan was terrified,” Jonas added. “Whoever was posting that…filth, knew her schedule. He said he was watching her. And you people wouldn’t do anything.”

“The sergeant said they’d had complaints about the site before,” Patricia explained. “Some kind of First Amendment thing that the police couldn’t touch.”

“It was threatening. It was stalking. What are the police for if they—”

“I am very sorry, Mr. Gunther. I’m not going to defend what took place yesterday because I simply don’t know anything about it.
I take your word on what occurred, and God knows you’re entitled to be furious right now and forever. But the faster I can figure out who we should be talking to now about what happened in your daughter’s apartment, the sooner I can give you some answers.”

Jonas nodded sternly. “Campus Juice dot com. I assume that today, unlike yesterday, you will be able to make the Web site tell you who was harassing Megan.”

Ellie wrote down the name of the Web site.

“Wait,” Patricia said. “I still have the printouts we showed the sergeant.”

She opened a large brown leather shoulder bag, removed a thin stack of folded white paper, and handed it to Ellie. Ellie skimmed the pages.

“We will definitely contact the Web site to track down whoever wrote these things about your daughter. But did Megan have a sense of who the author might be?”

Jonas shook his head. Patricia quickly followed suit, but Ellie noticed the short pause.

“Mrs. Gunther? Were you going to say something?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head once again. “Megan didn’t have any enemies.”

“Sometimes we have enemies we don’t think of in that way. A boyfriend, maybe? An ex? I noticed she was wearing a heart-shaped pendant.”

“Our daughter was premed,” Jonas said. “She was focused on school.”

Patricia said nothing.

“I see. Because, you know, if there was anyone,
anything
, you can think of—no matter how far-fetched—it could prevent us from wasting time chasing down false leads. You never know…even someone who was just a friend might have noticed something unusual. It could really help.”

“There was a boy,” Patricia said. Her husband turned quickly in surprise but said nothing. “His name was Keith. I don’t know all the details, but he wanted more from Megan than she was in a position
to give. He was clingy, I guess you could say. Last I heard, Megan broke it off a few months ago.”

“Did he give her any trouble about that?” Ellie asked.

“Not that I know of. But, you know, before the breakup, it was on and off, here and there. Megan didn’t tell me much, but I could see she was stressed. I was worried it would get in the way of school, so I was relieved when she finally cut the cord.”

Ellie recalled what the superintendent had said about seeing a guy with a pierced lip accompany Megan to and from her apartment.

“Did Keith happen to have a pierced lip?”

“I’m not sure,” Patricia said. “Wait. Maybe. I don’t know. Megan said something once about how we wouldn’t approve of him, even at first sight. Something like that. So maybe.”

“Do you know anything else about this Keith? A last name? Where he lives? Is he a student?”

Patricia shook her head. So did her husband, but for a different reason.

“You knew this? Why didn’t you say anything yesterday? The sergeant—he was on our side there at the end, but he said there was nothing he could do. If we’d known this boy’s name, he could have called him. Scared him. Told him to back off.”

“Don’t, Jonas. Don’t say that.”

“Why didn’t you say something? Was I that hard on Megan? You couldn’t even trust me enough to let me know she had a boyfriend? Even yesterday? Even with those messages?”

“I’m very sorry,” Ellie said, interrupting. “It would be helpful if you could make a list of some of your daughter’s friends. We can follow up with them.”

She pushed a pad of paper and a pen across the desk toward Patricia, who looked relieved by the distraction.

When Ellie finally escorted the Gunthers back to the lobby of their dead daughter’s apartment complex, she noticed that they did not hold hands on the way out of the elevator, as they had on their way up to the superintendent’s office. As she watched them walk into the sunlight of University Place, she wondered if that
meager oversight—the failure to grab a spouse’s hand—was just the beginning.

For the next few months, they would be grateful to have another person who cherished Megan. But as time passed and they began to long for at least one hour during which they did not think about what they’d lost, Jonas might begin to wish that Patricia’s nose wasn’t pointed at the tip the way Megan’s had been. And Patricia might look away when Jonas jutted his jaw out, the way Megan had.

And Ellie wondered if she had witnessed the beginning of the transformation: that moment in Gorsky’s office. Jonas asking why Patricia hadn’t spoken up yesterday. Patricia thinking, but not saying, that she would have—Megan would have—if Jonas hadn’t been so overbearing.

Resentment. Fault. Blame.

She wondered if whoever killed Megan Gunther had also destroyed the very best of what she had known in her parents.

 

She had shoddy reception inside the building, so she stepped outside to call Max. He picked up after just one ring.

“Hey, you.”

“Hey.”

“I hear you got another callout.”

“You’ve got spies tailing me? We may need to have a little chat about boundaries.”

“No spies,” he said with a chuckle. “I was with Rogan this morning when he got your message.”

“Yeah, how’d things go with Bandon? J. J.’s been a little jumpy since he showed up.”

“It was fine. Just Bandon pretending to be principled, thorough, and objective. Of course, that didn’t stop Rogan from going on a tear both before and after we were in chambers.”

“But he was on good behavior for the middle part at least?”

“Yeah, he held it together. What have you been up to?”

“New callout. Still figuring out who’s who.”

“Which means you probably weren’t calling me to whisper sweet nothings in my ear.”

“Sweet nothings.”

“Wow,
so
hot.”

“What can you tell me about Web site postings?” She gave Max a quick summary of what she had learned from the Gunthers and the complaint they had made yesterday about Campus Juice.

“Sounds like the cop they talked to at the precinct had it about right, although he should have filed a report to build a record.”

“We don’t like being told to write stuff down that’s never going anywhere. If that sergeant had been told by the DA’s office that nothing could be done, that’s the only part of the discussion he’s going to remember.”

“The DA’s office was involved?” he asked.

“According to the parents, that’s what this sergeant told them.”

“You just need to know any identifying information for whoever posted those messages. Is that right?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, give me the dates, times, and titles of the posts.”

Ellie flipped through the printout the Gunthers had given her and recited the information Max had requested.

“All right. Let me look into it, and I’ll call you right back.”

“Thanks.”

“It was the sweet nothings that did the trick.”

Ellie was on her way back to the apartment building when Rogan stepped outside.

“Got word from the hospital. The roommate’s conscious.”

“She’s going to make it?” Ellie asked.

“Yeah. At least one of them had luck on her side.”

As they turned the corner onto Fourteenth Street, Ellie could see that the lunch-hour rush at the Union Square green market was under way. The skateboarders who transformed the south park steps into stunt ramps dodged shoppers juggling canvas tote bags filled with organic greens and heirloom tomatoes. Dog walkers tugged on leashes, pulling their hopeful charges past the enticing displays of
fresh food. Only a few passersby even stopped to glance at the gathering of official city vehicles that had descended upon the corner of Fourteenth and University.

BOOK: 212 LP: A Novel
2.12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

The Forsaken by Ace Atkins
Aztec Century by Christopher Evans
Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera
The Shapeshifters by Stefan Spjut
Awaken Me Darkly by Gena Showalter
Cape Storm by Rachel Caine
Marrying the Marquis by Patricia Grasso
Social Democratic America by Kenworthy, Lane
To Tempt A Viking by Michelle Willingham