City of Lies. Alafair Burke
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of group discussion and the empirical research demonstrating the deleterious effects of multitasking on learning, Megan was running late for her biochem lab. She would have blown off a lecture, but the labs counted for 60 percent of her grade and couldn’t be made up. And med schools would care about her biochem grade. No, the lab couldn’t be skipped. And it was impossible to juggle her computer while titrating liquids and triggering chemical reactions over a Bunsen burner.
Now she had finally made it back to her building on Fourteenth Street, three hours after first seeing her name posted on a Web site that promoted itself as the home of the country’s juiciest campus gossip. She walked quickly through the lobby, pressed the elevator call button, and then pushed it several more times as she watched the digital readout on the elevator tick down to the lobby level. As she rode up to the fourth floor, she pulled her laptop and keys from her bag.
She slipped a key into the doorknob – she never bothered with the other locks – and turned. Once inside the apartment, she glanced at what had once been the empty bedroom, the one that now belonged to her roommate.
Megan’s parents had originally justified the purchase of this two-bedroom condo as both an investment while Megan attended college and also a place for them to stay when they visited the city. But with the economy down and Manhattan rents still sky-high, the prospect of additional cash flow outweighed the Gunthers’ desire for a room of their own in the Big Apple: Megan had to tolerate a roommate after all. Heather called the first day the ad hit Craig’s List in May. She was transferring into NYU in the fall and seemed pretty normal, so Megan went with her gut.
The truth was, Heather was easy to tolerate. Today, as on almost every other day, Megan returned home to find Heather’s door closed and the apartment quiet and in exactly the same condition she’d left it. Whether Heather was out or at home, this was the usual state of their shared home. Sometimes Megan wished Heather would come out of her shell and start treating this as her apartment, too, but today she was grateful that her roommate kept to herself.
Inside her own room, she closed the door, flopped down on top of her pale yellow bedspread, and opened her laptop. The connection to her wireless network seemed to take forever. Once the signal was finally established, she opened Internet Explorer, clicked on her history bar, and scrolled down to www.campusjuice.com.
She navigated her way to the NYU message board. All of the posts on the first page were new, entered within the last three hours. She clicked through the board, searching for her name again. What had once appeared on the fifth page of the forum was now on the seventh. The site was clearly getting some use.
She moved the cursor to her hyperlinked name, took a deep breath, and clicked.
11:10 AM – noon? Life and Death Seminar
12:10–3 PM? Bio Chemistry Lab
3–7 PM? Break: Home to 14th Street?
7–8 PM? Spinning at Equinox
The schedule was hers, down to her five-times-weekly cycling classes at the gym. Whoever posted the message obviously knew her comings and goings. They also knew where she lived, or at least which street. The short message was detailed enough to convince her that the final line of the post was no exaggeration:
Megan Gunther, someone is watching
Thursday, September 25
2:00 p.m.
Rogan snatched a gallon-size Ziploc bag from the grasp of the booking clerk at 100 Centre Street.
‘I’d get that smile off your face real fast, son.’
The clerk lowered his eyes and continued to complete the release form Ellie would sign as the official termination of her sentence for contempt of court.
‘“What if Sparks did it?”’ Rogan asked Ellie in a hushed voice. ‘How about, what in the big bad fuck were you thinking?’
What if Sparks did it? It had been a little more than twenty-four hours since Judge Paul Bandon read those words in Ellie’s notebook. She had scribbled them next to a cartoon drawing of a stick figure with stubbly hair and a striped jumpsuit, standing behind prison bars.
‘Apparently I was thinking that we’d been too quick to give Sparks a pass.’ She removed her tiny gold hoop earrings from the plastic bag and began looping them through her lobes.
Rogan held the bridge of his nose and shook his head. ‘Like jewelry’s gonna do anything for you looking like that.’
Partners were like families that way: the booking clerk had best keep his mouth shut, but for Rogan, the subject of her incarceration was fair game.
Ellie had been replaying the scene in the courtroom for twenty-four hours, and she still couldn’t believe Bandon had pulled the trigger on her. She was convinced that until that moment – when Bandon had said, ‘Your notes please, Detective Hatcher’ – she hadn’t even been aware of the words and images that were forming in her scribbles.
Her mistake had been trying to persuade Bandon of that fact. If she had simply admitted to carrying vague suspicions that she hadn’t disclosed on the stand, she probably would have gotten off with a lecture.
But instead Ellie had tried to explain. And Bandon, instead of understanding, had accused her of being ‘cute’. And then when she argued even more insistently, as Max tried to quiet her down, Bandon had concluded that she was lying. To him. Personally. And that, no judge would tolerate.
And now because Bandon thought she was a liar, she had spent the night in a holding cell.
‘No bo-hunk boyfriend to bail you out?’ Rogan asked.
‘You didn’t bail me out. I was released after fully serving my twenty-four-hour sentence.’
‘Whatever. Where’s your man, Max?’
‘I didn’t want to chance Bandon finding out about us. I’m obviously on his shit list now. No need to add Max to that picture. Besides, you’re the one who insisted on picking me up. I could’ve gotten back to the precinct on my own.’
‘What? And miss the opportunity of you doing the walk of shame in your jelly slippers?’
Ellie looked down at her black leather flats, happy to have her own shoes back. ‘Please tell me that smell in my nostrils is just the memory of my overnight sojourn at the lovely Centre Street inn.’
‘Sorry, chica. I’m afraid you absorbed the permeating funk of your surrounding atmosphere.’
‘I’m so happy that my personal and professional misery has brought you such happiness.’
‘So are you going to explain those notes that landed you in this shit pile?’
‘My mind was wandering in court. We both get some of our best ideas when we aren’t even trying.’
‘Are you forgetting that we looked real close at him early on? Real close.’ Rogan’s arms were crossed, fingertips tucked beneath his underarms. Always well dressed, today Rogan wore a black wool suit, a crisp lavender dress shirt, and an Hermès tie worth more than Ellie’s entire outfit. He might have a cop’s blue-collar values, but, thanks to a grandmother who married well late in life, he could live beyond a cop’s salary.
‘Look, you mind if we talk about this in a slightly less depressing environment?’
Ellie led the way out of the holding floor onto the street, and Rogan didn’t stop her. By the time they reached the fleet car that Rogan had parked on Centre Street, she was ready to talk.
‘So we took a look at Sparks and cleared him.’
Rogan glanced back at the building from which they had just exited. ‘Pretty sure I was the one saying