“You know what I mean. Single guy. Hot girl. Flirting. Did anything come of that?”
“No, man. I was just dancing with her.”
“You didn’t have any sexual contact at all?” Rogan was making sure to lock down all of Jake’s various denials, no ambiguities to exploit down the road if they caught him in a lie.
“No. I kissed her-not even, just a peck-when she left. That was it.”
“And no drugs?”
“I told you. I could tell she was drunk, but I didn’t take any drugs. I didn’t give her any drugs. And I didn’t see her with any drugs.”
Ellie interrupted. “Her friend says you were pretty eager to have Chelsea stick around. You didn’t want her to leave.”
“We were having a good time. Did I think maybe it was going somewhere? Sure, but when she said she had to go, she had to go. No means no, right?”
“Not always,” she said.
“It does with me. There’s always another girl.”
“Was there one last night?” Ellie asked.
“No,” Jake said quietly, some of the attitude falling into line.
“All right. Let me talk to my partner for a second,” Rogan said. He waved Ellie to the front of the office, and she followed. “What do you think?”
“I think he’s lying.”
“Well, he’s not coming up with any details.” Innocent people tended to have excellent memories when it came time to account for their whereabouts.
“And I’m not buying all that indignation. Fear? Nervousness? That’s what I would understand from him right now. But he’s so put out by half an hour of conversation?”
“That’s ’cause lying is hard work.”
“And we know he’s lying about the drugs. It’s too much of a coincidence that Chelsea had meth in her system, and we just happen to catch these guys hooking up a girl with meth through Rodriguez.”
“But Rodriguez wasn’t working last night.”
“Doesn’t matter. If he’s dealing out of the club, then he’s probably working with someone else who supplies on his days off. These clubs have more drugs going in and out of them than a Duane Reade. A club can’t be known as a place to score unless they’ve got every night covered. And if Myers is lying about the meth-”
“Then he’s also lying about the girl leaving alone, him leaving without a girl, and everything being Doris Day innocent.”
“Otherwise his friends would back him up,” Ellie said. “Instead, they invoke, and he’s sitting pretty. He’s rolling the dice that we don’t have enough to hold them. The minute we cut them loose, they’ll get together and line up their stories.”
“Not exactly a high-stakes bet,” Rogan said. “No PC for the murder, and the ADA will shoot us down on material witness warrants.”
“So let’s give Mr. Myers what he wants. Let’s go ahead and spring him.”
“So he can get his buddy Nick to vouch that they left together?”
“Nope. Because we’re about to introduce Nick Warden to the overnight comforts of the Tenth Precinct.”
“JAIME RODRIGUEZ. NICK WARDEN. You’re both under arrest for criminal sale of a controlled substance and conspiracy to commit criminal sale of a controlled substance.”
Ellie placed her cuffs on Nick Warden, while Rogan pulled Rodriguez’s wrists behind his back. They might not have probable cause to hold anyone for Chelsea Hart’s murder, but she’d personally witnessed Warden negotiate the drug deal between Rodriguez and that Amazon of a law student.
They walked the two men toward the back of the office, where officers from the Tenth Precinct would take them out a rear exit to complete the booking process.
Jake Myers took a step in their direction. “Whoa, what are you doing?”
Ellie pointed him back toward his corner at the front of the office. “Stay over there. Move again, and I’ll arrest you for obstructing. Someone get Mr. Myers a glass of water to keep him busy, all right?”
The decision to book Warden entitled her to conduct a search incident to arrest. She pulled a money clip from his jacket pocket, and slipped the entire wad into a baggie. If some of the cash came back with Rodriguez’s fingerprints, it would at least corroborate the deal she’d seen go down between them.
“Smile for the camera,” she said, snapping a quick head shot with her cell phone.
Rogan finished a check of Rodriguez’s pockets and gave her a slight head shake. No drugs. Either Rodriguez had sold the last of the ice he was holding to the model, or he had managed to pass off his stash to someone else in the club before he was herded into the back office.
Without anything to corroborate Ellie’s testimony, the defense would argue that she had misinterpreted a harmless conversation between Warden and Rodriguez. Not that it mattered.
As a uniformed officer led Warden through the back door, he shot a look at Myers, who was drinking his glass of water as directed. A night in jail would be a good test of Warden’s loyalty.
Rogan passed Rodriguez off to another officer. “Maybe Warden will wake up tomorrow telling us he didn’t leave with Myers after all.”
“At the very least we’ve bought ourselves some time until tomorrow afternoon’s arraignment. The labs might be back by then.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a witness placing Myers with Chelsea after she left the club.”
“Oh, and by the way,” Ellie said, “that glass of water Myers is drinking from as we speak? He might just leave behind tidy little fingerprints to match the latent on Chelsea Hart’s button.”
“Detectives?” A uniformed officer looked at them apologetically. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s an older couple here asking for you. They’re refusing to leave.”
PAUL AND MIRIAM HART looked out of place at the club’s entrance in their wool sweaters and matching khaki pants.
“Those two men,” Miriam said. “The men who were pulled out of here. Were they the ones?”
Ellie placed a hand gently on Miriam’s forearm. “Tonight we made real progress. But we arrested those two men-for now-only on drug charges. We believe one of them may have information about what happened to Chelsea last night.”
“What about the man Stefanie identified?” Paul asked. “Stefanie called us from the cab. She said she left Chelsea alone with him, and that you’d found him here.”
Ellie swallowed. “We are following up on that.”
“What do you mean, following up?”
She didn’t want to tell them that Rogan was currently cutting Myers loose out the club’s back exit. “I would call him a person of interest for now.”
“You’re arresting him, then?”
She did her best to explain the legal requirements for an arrest and all of the ways that making an arrest too early would jeopardize the chances of a conviction down the road.
“So he just goes home?” Paul said. “We go back to our hotel room and turn off the lights and go to sleep with the knowledge that your ‘person of interest’ is out there doing God knows what?”
Ellie had tossed and turned her way through countless numbers of those kinds of nights, and she wasn’t going to lie to these people. “Yes, that’s exactly what you need to do. And you’ll probably have to do the same tomorrow, and maybe the next day. But I promise you, I would not ask something so painful of you if it weren’t absolutely necessary. We are making progress. I promise.”
“A drug arrest is progress?”
Miriam began to apologize for her husband, but Ellie stopped her. “I know I have no right, but I’m asking you to trust us.”
As she helped the Harts into the back of a patrol car that would carry them to their complimentary suite at the Hilton, she told herself that Nick Warden’s night in the Tenth Precinct would turn out to be more than just another drug bust. It had to.
SLEEP. WHAT ELLIE NEEDED next was sleep. She had been awake for twenty-two hours and desperately needed to catch a few hours of shuteye. The thought of a soft pillow and clean-ish sheets was paradise.