She clicked on the link to pull up the thread concerning Michael Stuart and his supposed STD. The message had been posted an hour earlier, and two people had already responded—one alleging that Stuart lived in her dorm and was a rampant meth fiend, the other claiming to be Michael Stuart himself with some not-so-kind words about the original poster’s cottage cheese thighs.
Megan scrolled through the next three pages of posts. The entire site was devoted to on-campus gossip, insults, and attacks—all naming real names, and yet capable of being posted with complete anonymity if the author so chose.
She had just finished perusing one of the more respectable threads—speculation about the identity of this year’s commencement speaker—when the title of another post grabbed her attention.
She stared at the two words on the screen:
Megan Gunther.
Moving the cursor to the hyperlink, she could not bring herself to click on the text. Something inside of her—whatever instincts humans possess for emotional self-preservation—told her that one click would change everything. She didn’t want to read whatever had been written there for the entire world to see.
Megan jerked at the sound of a book being dropped on the table. She looked up to see Ellen Stein’s eyes directed at her, along with nineteen younger, conspiratorial faces smirking at her embarrassment.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Gunther. Are we interrupting your computer research?”
CHAPTER FIVE
NOON
Ellie had barely made her way from the witness chair to her seat on a bench behind Max Donovan before Judge Bandon opened the floor to argument. As Ellie had predicted, and as Max had warned, Sparks’s lawyer was casting her as some kind of rogue cop on a single-minded anti-Sparks mission: Mark Fuhrman minus the race stuff.
The lawyer’s name was Ramon Guerrero. According to Max, Guerrero was a hard-line anticommunist from Miami who had first applied to law school to help other Cubans apply for political asylum but, as lawyers often do, had since forged another—and more lucrative—path. Now he was one of the few corner-office partners at a five-hundred-plus-attorney law firm who had actual trial experience. He was the charismatic guy the eggheads brought in when the documents had been reviewed, briefs had been filed, depositions were over, and it was time to talk to a judge or a jury.
And on this particular afternoon he found himself in Paul Bandon’s courtroom, demonizing Ellie Hatcher.
“Your Honor, the only reason the NYPD hasn’t made more progress investigating the tragic murder of Mr. Mancini is that the lead detectives, most notably Detective Hatcher, decided early on that wherever Sam Sparks appears, Sam Sparks must be the story. Rather than fully investigate the possibility that someone out there wanted to see Robert Mancini dead—someone violent, someone who’s still at large—they want to pursue a fishing expedition through confidential business and financial records.”
“With all due respect to Mr. Guerrero,” Donovan said, rising from counsel’s chair, “this is not the kind of contractual dispute that he and Mr. Sparks are used to dealing with. This is a murder investigation. And, as you and I both know from the myriad of murder cases we have seen, murder victims—and the people close to them—lose their privacy as a result of the violence directed against them. You have signed countless search warrants for victims’ homes, offices, cars…”
As Donovan continued to hammer away at the list, Ellie’s gaze shifted from the Bic Rollerball braced in his hand to Guerrero’s Montblanc. “Police pore over every document and cookie stored inside a victim’s computer. We review every bank record, phone log, and credit card bill. And it’s all a matter of routine, Your Honor. We’re only here because Sam Sparks is…well, he’s Sam Sparks.”
“The problem with your analysis, Mr. Donovan, is that Sam Sparks was not the victim of this crime. Robert Mancini was.”
“Sparks was a victim, Your Honor. It was his eight-million-dollar apartment that was stormed into. It was his apartment that was riddled with bullet holes.”
“But it was not his body in the bed,” Judge Bandon replied.
“No, but the police believe it was intended to be.”
“Precisely. That is what the police believe. And usually when we talk about what the police believe, we subject that belief to a standard of probable cause. I don’t see probable cause to search through the personal records of Sam Sparks.”
“Exactly,” Guerrero chimed in.
“But, Your Honor, Mr. Sparks is not a suspect. If that’s his concern, we can work out an immunity agreement to placate Mr. Guerrero.”
“Immunity?” Guerrero asked. “Immunity? The last thing Sam Sparks needs is for some newspaper to report that he has received immunity in a murder case. As the police themselves have acknowledged, he had nothing to do with the events at his apartment on May 27. Because he’s at no risk of criminal charges for those events, immunity from prosecution is worthless to him.” Guerrero pressed his weight into his hands on counsel table and leaned forward for emphasis. “The government fails to appreciate importance of public opinion and the privacy of information to Sam Sparks’s significant net worth. His real estate holdings are valuable, yes. But as we all know, the real value to the industry that is Sam Sparks lies in his reputation as a businessman. The fact that someone was shot at one of his properties is not great PR. But if the police are actually investigating Mr. Sparks—even as a potential target—then, before you know it, people are speculating about improperly financed debt, the Mafia…who knows what? And of course the risks of disclosure of information regarding pending deals cannot be understated in this kind of market.”
Ellie found herself tiring of the invest-in-Sam-Sparks-for-your-future sales presentation and began doodling on the notepad she had removed from her purse. She let her gaze move to the left, where the head of what Sparks Industries called its Corporate Security Division, Nick Dillon, sat on a bench behind Sparks and Guerrero.
Before Dillon was associated with either Sparks or Mancini, he’d been a member of the NYPD. After a stint working for a private military contractor, he’d moved on to Sparks. Now he was one of those lucky former cops who collected both a city pension and a private paycheck. Dillon had been Mancini’s immediate supervisor. He had also been his friend.
Ellie and Rogan had spoken to Dillon at least once a week since that initial callout four months earlier. He had done his best to play mediator, but they’d nevertheless wound up here in court. Dillon nodded along with Guerrero’s argument, but Ellie knew from earlier conversations that Dillon would like nothing more than to elbow his boss in the throat for his refusal to cooperate with the police. She liked the image.
“Your Honor,” Max protested, “counsel’s argument assumes that any information disclosed as part of this investigation will become public. The suggestion is an insult to the fine detectives who have worked—”
“Which brings us back to Detective Hatcher,” Guerrero jumped in. “Our background information shows that in the short time she’s been in the homicide division, her name has appeared in forty-nine newspaper articles in a LexisNexis search. Prior to that, she granted various interviews to outlets like People magazine and Dateline NBC about her own family background—”
Ellie looked up abruptly from her notepad. Dillon glanced over with a barely perceptible shrug. The thought of his coaster-sized elbow crushing Sparks’s windpipe was growing more appealing by the second.