“All right, that’s enough.” It was not a hair twirl. Maybe a flip, at most. Ellie did have to admit that she’d noticed Donovan looking at her.
She’d noticed other things as well during their brief introduction: Donovan’s height-he must have been about six-one-and solid build. Cool gray eyes and square jaw. A thin-lipped smile that was cute without being cocky. Sort of a John Kennedy Jr. look. No wedding band. That nice truffle smell.
That really was enough, she thought to herself. These loopy teenage daydreams were clearly the result of clinical levels of sleep deprivation. She felt a slight pang of guilt recalling one of the reasons for her sleeplessness-her late night with Peter Morse.
“Ready to pick up our boy Myers?” Rogan asked.
“I’ve been ready since the second he called Chelsea’s friend a bitch.”
THE SIGN THAT WELCOMED them was black marble with silver letters. Universal Capital Management.
It sounded serious. Large. Trustworthy. Established. In truth, it was a ten-month old, four-man shop occupying only half a floor of a midlevel office building on Fifth Avenue and Forty-third Street.
The receptionist informed them they would need an appointment to see Mr. Myers, but Ellie and Rogan ignored her and found their way down a narrow hallway leading to four offices. The first was empty. A nameplate on the desk read Nicolas J. Warden.
At door number two stood a man with a familiar face.
“Detectives. I didn’t realize you’d be coming here.”
Jake Myers apparently left his New Wave wardrobe at home during business hours. In a conservative navy suit and red power tie, and without mass quantities of gel to mold his hair into a gravity-defying shape, he almost didn’t look like an ass.
Rogan grabbed Myers’s arm, pushed him against the hallway wall, and began patting down his suit. “We don’t usually give people a shout-out before arresting them for murder.” He read Myers his Miranda rights while placing him in handcuffs.
“You’re making a mistake,” Myers said. “I didn’t kill anyone.”
Ellie pulled Myers around to face her. “You’re the one who made a mistake. Last night, you were sure your boys would cover for you. Well, tomorrow Nick Warden will be selling short and trading swap futures in his office next door, looking for someone else to help him run the company while you spend the rest of your life in prison.”
“I thought cops were supposed to investigate. You won’t listen to anything I tell you.”
“Let’s take a look at what you’ve told us so far. You told us you didn’t leave the club with Chelsea Hart, do drugs with her, or have sexual contact with her.” She ticked off his lies on her fingers. “So, as far as we’re concerned, everything you’ve ever said to us is a lie.”
Ellie was new to homicide cases, but she had arrested enough suspects to be familiar with the typical responses to confrontation. Regret. Panic. Anger. Defiance. She also recognized the physical acts that tended to accompany these emotions. Regret and panic tended to trigger tears, while anger often brought violence. Defiance was usually accompanied by either an adamant and detailed story of innocence or an invocation of counsel. And sometimes spit. Spit paired well with anger, too. She hated it when the angry and the defiant spit.
But Jake Myers caught her by surprise.
He smiled. He grinned like a man with a well-kept secret. Whatever apprehension they had temporarily instilled in him was gone, and the arrogance she’d initially witnessed at Pulse was back in its full glory. “Fine. Do what you have to do, beautiful.”
Ellie pictured herself delivering a knee strike to Myers’s groin, followed by a left jab into his skinny head. That’s what she had to do. At least a good smack. Something.
Instead, she said, “I take it you’re not answering any questions.”
“Not without a lawyer. You’re welcome to my DNA, however.”
It was Rogan who delivered the slap to the back of Myers’s head, and it wasn’t just in Ellie’s imagination. “Not another word.”
And that was the last they heard out of Jake Myers for three days.
THAT EVENING, at precisely 5:30 p.m., the man watched the entrance of Mesa Grill from a counter at an Au Bon Pain across the street.
He had come across the bartender accidentally the previous night. He had been walking downtown, looking for his next project; given the changes in the city over the last several years, it was his impression that downtown was the best place to look for the kind of girls he liked-girls who had fun, too much fun.
He started in Washington Square Park. A lot of NYU girls there. Hippie chicks. Down-and-outs. But compared to Chelsea, none of the girls he saw had that kind of spark.
From the park, he’d made his way over to the West Village. Spent some time in three different sex shops. He figured any woman who worked in a place like that would eventually be easy to grab. But to his disappointment, the employees had all been men. Most of the customers, too. It was the neighborhood, he figured.
He’d gotten his hopes up at a store called Fantasy when he’d spotted one of the employees from behind. She’d been reaching for a foot-long purple dildo from a top shelf. She must have been six feet tall. Thin. Long, white-blond hair. Then she had turned around, and it was clear that she was a he. Not his type.
From the Village, he had headed to the Flatiron. The district had once been known as Ladies’ Mile, famous for the department stores that drew the country’s most elegant women, shopping for the finest luxuries. First ladies frequented Arnold Constable at Nineteenth Street and Broadway. Tiffany & Co. had sat at Fourteenth Street and University before the jeweler decided that Union Square had coarsened. A century ago, this neighborhood had catered to the choosiest of women. Now, a hundred years later, he hoped that he might find precisely what he was searching for, somewhere on Broadway before he reached Madison Park.
The sidewalks were crammed with hundreds of interchangeable girls in blue jeans and winter coats, carrying shopping bags and designer purses. Most were in groups. Those who weren’t were attached to their cell phones-so uninteresting that they couldn’t stand the idea of being alone with their own thoughts for the handful of minutes it took to move on to the next purchase.
The man wondered if perhaps he was too spoiled in New York. He suspected that in any average city, the majority of these girls he’d written off would shine like flawless D-grade diamonds. Maybe his problem was that he had it too good. So many, many girls, not paying attention.
So he had tried again once he reached Twenty-third Street, making the turn where Broadway met Fifth Avenue. If anything, Fifth Avenue was even more crowded than Broadway. More girls. More shopping. More vacuous phone calls: “Nothing. What are you doing? Where are you? I’m going into Banana.”
He tried to remind himself that this was only his first attempt to find his next project, and less than twenty-four hours since Chelsea Hart. He had decided to call it an evening when he passed a busy restaurant. The brightly painted letters on the front window read “MESA.” High ceilings. Big crowd at the bar. Probably expensive. He was looking in the window, wondering whether it was expensive-stupid or expensive-good, when he noticed the bartender with the blond ponytail. She was pouring from two bottles into a martini shaker and talking to a middle-aged couple at the bar.
He spent a lot of time in bars. Despite the stereotype about bartenders, they really weren’t good listeners. If they were, he’d spend less time in bars. But this girl, she was really listening. She was nodding, laughing, looking the female half of the couple right in the eye, even as she frantically mixed away. Giving the mixer a vigorous shake, she scratched her cheek with her sleeve. Then she laughed about something. He could tell it was a real laugh, from the belly.