212: A Novel Part 36

"And now you're not. I'm sorry, Tanya, but in the years that have pa.s.sed, his family has moved on by casting you as a teenage problem child who seduced Paul Bandon."

"But that's not how it was. They've always taken care of me. Paul loved me."

Her eyes searched sadly for the judge, who was now sandwiched between the ESU negotiator and Rogan.

"The man who stabbed you: you don't know who he was?"

"Of course not. He was wearing a ski mask."

"You a.s.sumed it was whoever killed Robert Mancini."

"So you know I was there?"

"Your fingerprints were on the champagne gla.s.s. We've been looking for you."

"The man who came to the penthouse that night said something about it being stupid to try to blackmail a cop. Then all I heard were the shots. I didn't know who I could trust. I tried to go to your apartment, but I got scared waiting. Some guy was staring at me."

So much for Jess's skills of stealth detection.

"There's something else, Tanya. The man who stabbed you, the man who killed Megan. It was Alex."

"No," she said, shaking her head. "He would never do that."

"I don't have time to argue with you about this. He did it, and that's why he's up there."

Rogan was waving them toward the ESU van. "The kid saw the cab pull up. Wants to know if it's Tanya."

"Talk to him," Ellie said as they made their way toward the van. "Tell him you're not going to testify, that you'll say the person who did it was shorter than him, whatever."

"What about those things?" Tanya pointed to the mattresslike structures that the ESU had inflated beneath the building to break Alex's fall.

"I'm told at that height, they can't be certain of the path he'll take. He's got a knife, too, so there are other ways he can hurt himself. Try to get him down from that roof."

The ESU officer extended the cell phone, and Tanya took it hesitantly. "Alex? It's Tanya."

Rogan leaned toward Ellie and whispered, "Why are we bothering to save this p.r.i.c.k's life again?"

"Because after what he did to Megan Gunther, he doesn't get to decide what happens."

Tanya placed her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. "He says you guys need to move. He doesn't want you to hear."

They looked to the ESU officer for guidance. He nodded, and they all stepped away from Tanya like synchronized swimmers.

They watched as Tanya pleaded. Her eyes to the sky. Him standing at the edge of the roof 150 feet above them. She loved him like a little brother. He hated her so much he'd tried to kill her. So much distance between them, but Ellie could tell that they spoke to each other with the intensity and intimacy of siblings.

She could tell Tanya was crying. She heard her say, "I'm sorry," more than once. She heard something about a promise. She heard the word please. "I'll go with you. I'll turn myself in."

And then Tanya flipped her phone shut, as calm as if she'd just ordered takeout, as sad as if she'd just learned about a family member's death.

"He's on his way down."

The ESU officer radioed the officers waiting inside the stairwell leading to the building roof. "Coming your way."

"Oh, Jesus. Thank you." Paul Bandon rushed toward Tanya with open arms, but Rogan held him back.

"He's turning himself in," she said. "He wasn't up there because he was afraid of being arrested."

"I don't understand," Bandon said.

"I promised him two things, though. First, he wants you to know that Megan wasn't supposed to be home Friday morning. He'd watched her all month. He knew her schedule, and she should have been at a spinning cla.s.s that morning. When she walked out of her bedroom, he panicked. She wasn't supposed to be there."

"And the second promise?" Ellie asked.

Tanya kept her eyes on Bandon.

"I promised him no one would know about us, what happened in Baltimore. He doesn't want Laura to be humiliated. That's what this was about from the very beginning. He says you told them I was threatening to go public."

Bandon opened and closed his mouth like a marionette.

"I have never threatened you. I would never do that to you. Or Laura. Or Alex." Her voice-her entire body-was shaking now.

"But that's what he told them, Tanya." Ellie kept her voice low, knowing how much this was hurting the woman. "He said you had forced your way back into his life."

"And so Alex blamed me?" Her words were sharp and fast like hurled daggers. "He thought this was my fault, instead of yours? And now he and I-our lives are ruined. And Megan, who never did a bad thing to anyone, is dead. She's dead, Paul. She's dead."

Alex Bandon stepped out of the building, ESU officers in Kevlar vests on either side of him. Rogan walked toward them, handcuffs already out. Paul Bandon tried to stop him, but two ESU officers pulled him back. As Rogan recited the familiar Miranda warnings, Alex turned away from his father to face Park Avenue, his wrists behind him to accept the cuffs.

And then Paul Bandon fell to his knees, placed his palms on the dirty concrete, and sobbed alone in the street.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN.

TWO WEEKS LATER.

Just as Laura Bandon had predicted, there she stood, blank-faced and stoic, behind and to the right of her husband as he read from the prepared statement.

Ellie and Max watched from a conference room at the district attorney's office as the network replayed the footage for the umpteenth time. The television pundits could hardly contain their excitement as they pored over the salacious details of the unfolding saga: a rising legal star resigning from the bench, brought down by a nearly two-decade-old s.e.x scandal with a barely teenage girl; the ensuing fifteen-year cover-up in which the Bandon family fell into a bizarre caretaking role with the acquiescence of the girl's mother; the arrest of his seemingly perfect son for murder two weeks earlier; speculation about what would have happened if he'd been confirmed to the federal court prior to the disclosure.

Tanya had said what she needed to get Alex Bandon off that roof, but the NYPD was not bound by her promises. They promptly filed first-degree murder charges, setting forth in the indictment the special circ.u.mstance that the murder was intended to silence the victim of a statutory rape committed sixteen years earlier in Baltimore, Maryland.

Given that Alex was only twenty-one years old, the media had begun asking questions about the ident.i.ty of the parties involved in the original crime. A dogged reporter at the Post had traced Tanya's past to her former neighbor, Anne Hahn, and made the connection to the Bandons from there. Now Bandon was resigning from office, relying on a statute of limitations to avoid prosecution in Maryland while Max's office weighed potential charges in New York for official misconduct.

And, just as Laura Bandon had predicted, the coverage came with plenty of questions about the wife. Why would she stay with this man? How could she have helped him cover this up? How could she have allowed him to pursue a judicial career knowing that this bombsh.e.l.l lay in his background? Comparisons to Elizabeth Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Silda Spitzer flew. Such accomplished and complex women, all lumped together under one big Stepford Wife umbrella, just as Laura had predicted. Just as her son had feared.

One of the anchors held a finger to her earpiece and then interrupted the panel of breathless political a.n.a.lysts to report a breaking story. "I'm getting word here that real estate mogul and infamous playboy Sam Sparks has just put out a statement. Let's go to Jeff Baker, who's reporting live outside the Sparks Industries building."

A sandy-haired correspondent swept his hair back against a bl.u.s.tering wind. "Well, the single ladies of New York are going to have to scratch one eligible bachelor off their list today. Billionaire Sam Sparks has issued a statement essentially coming out, as they say. It's very brief, so I'll read it in full: "As a prominent public servant admits that the secrets he has hidden for years have harmed those he loves most and brought horrific tragedy to innocent people, I have come to realize the danger of a life lived in a lie. Accordingly, I am making clear today that I am a gay man. I will continue to run Sparks Industries as I have for nearly twenty years and thank my colleagues and investors in advance for their continued support. I have now said all that I wanted to say, or will say, about this subject."

"Good for him," Max said.

Paul Bandon's disclosure had been forced by circ.u.mstance, but Sam Sparks's had not. As far as the public knew, Nick Dillon murdered Robert Mancini after Mancini blackmailed him. No specifics about the nature of the blackmail. No details such as the Blagojevich-style hairpiece and wedding band they'd found in his car, props Dillon had worn on his arranged dates with Katie Battle and Stacy Schecter. No mention of Sparks.

She looked at her watch. One p.m. on the dot. "Think they're going to show?"

"Yeah, they'll be here."

"How do you think it's going to go?"

"I don't know. I understand what Tanya's trying to do, but it could be an absolute train wreck."

Tanya's lawyer was still hammering out a plea deal, but most of the big-ticket items were in place. She would plead to fraud charges and serve four years probation with intensive psychiatric counseling. A support center for adult victims of child s.e.x abuse was trying to convince one of the local colleges to admit her. Given the stunt she pulled with NYU, she'd be a hard sell, but one of her former professors was vouching for the work she'd done as Heather Bradley.

But today's meeting wasn't about Tanya the defendant; she had asked for an opportunity to apologize to Megan's parents. To Ellie's surprise, Jonas and Patricia had agreed. Maybe now that they had someone else to blame, they might be able to begin to forgive Tanya Abbott.

The upcoming sit-down between Tanya and the Gunthers was not the only case of strange bedfellows to emerge from the aftermath. Stacy Schecter had stopped by the precinct the previous week to thank Ellie and Robin Tucker. She said they'd saved her in more ways than one, and Ellie believed her. The Craig's List account was closed, and the Erotic Review profile was gone.

As she'd left the building, Jess had been smoking a cigarette as he waited for his sister on Twenty-first Street. He commented on her Boomtown Rats T-s.h.i.+rt. They were still talking when Ellie showed up. She lied and said she had more work to do, and then watched from upstairs as they made their way to Plug Uglies without her.

It wouldn't last. It never did with Jess. But women never seemed to mind.

The unspeakable secret that had plagued Sam Sparks's entire adult life came and went from the television in a flicker as the talking heads bounced directly back to the Bandons. Now the screen displayed a photograph of Laura Bandon, with bullet-point highlights of her bio: Princeton, Georgetown Law School, former a.s.sociate at Covington & Burling prior to the birth of her son.

"I still don't get it." The female anchor sounded as if she had been personally betrayed. "Why in the world would she stay with this guy?"

"So," Max said, hitting the power b.u.t.ton on the remote, "would you stay?"

"Why? Are you planning to scope out the junior high schools this afternoon?"

"You're gross."

"You started it."

"Seriously. I'm a man, and I don't get it. I've had girlfriends-"

"No, you haven't. No one before me."

"Fine. I've had members of the opposite s.e.x throw me in the doghouse for a week just for smiling at someone the wrong way."

"Well, you do have an amazing and unrepentantly flirty smile."

"So much so that it's gotten me in trouble. But then some guy like Bandon gets caught doing the nanny's daughter-and let's set aside the fact that she's a child, for Christ's sake. Seriously, why wouldn't a woman like Laura Bandon take off?"

"Because she loves him."

"It's that simple?"

"Maybe. Love's a powerful thing."

A knock at the door caught their attention. A secretary showed Jonas and Patricia Gunther into the room.

"I'm sorry," Patricia said. "Were we interrupting?"

"Of course not." Max stood and gestured to the unoccupied chairs around the table. "Come on in."

Jonas reached for his wife's hand as soon as they were seated. Maybe Ellie had been wrong about their daughter's death being the beginning of the end for them.

"Is Heather-Tanya, I'm sorry. Is Tanya here yet?"

"I'm sure she will be shortly," Ellie said. "This was very important to her."

Max took a seat at the head of the table. "She'll tell you herself, but I've spent a lot of time with Tanya the last couple of weeks. Her defense attorney suggested it so our office would have a better sense of the person we're dealing with. You'd be perfectly within your rights to be skeptical, but, for what it's worth, I do believe that she never realized she was putting your daughter in jeopardy."

They were interrupted by another knock. The same secretary, this time with Tanya Abbott. She had pulled her hair into a demure knot at the nape of her neck and was dressed in a conservative navy blue skirt and tan turtleneck.

Max handled the awkward introductions. "Mr. and Mrs. Gunther. This is Tanya Abbott."

Tanya stepped into the room with her hands clasped in front of her like a child making a presentation to a cla.s.s. All eyes were on her, but her gaze was fixed somewhere in the middle of the table. She cleared her throat before speaking.

"Thank you for coming here, Mr. and Mrs. Gunther. I'll admit that I didn't know your daughter well. But she was a good person-to me and to her friends. And she was smart and sweet and, just, a really good person." She was starting to stray from her prepared words. "And I just want you to know, and I swear I mean this from the bottom of my heart, that if I could rewind the clock-"

Her voice cracked, and Patricia Gunther choked back a sob.

"If I could rewind the clock and change places with Megan, I would. I really would."

Ellie blinked back a tear forming in the corner of her own eye as Patricia leaped from her chair. Tanya initially flinched as Patricia grabbed her in a tight embrace, but then returned the hug.

"We don't blame you, Tanya. We forgive you. Our daughter was a good person."

Jonas was on his feet, holding on to his wife as she cried. "Megan would want us to forgive you," he said.

As Ellie watched the Gunthers console the woman who set in motion the chain of events that eventually led to the death of their only daughter, she marveled at the ability of human beings to still surprise her. Just as love had kept Laura Bandon at her husband's side, it had helped these two forgive not only Tanya, but each other. It had blinded Sam Sparks from seeing whatever part of Nick Dillon killed Robert Mancini and Katie Battle. It had caused Katie Battle to choose her mother's care over her own security. It had brought a son to kill to protect his mother from public humiliation. And it had kept Tanya Abbott running to the person who abused her as a child, because it was the first feeling of love that she had ever known from a man.

Love was, in fact, powerful.

Powerful enough that for just one second, Ellie thought about the father she had lost, the mother who demanded more from her children than she could ever give as a parent, and the brother who was her best and sometimes only friend, and wondered if there were any limits to what she would do for them. And for just a moment, she held the gaze of the man on the opposite side of the conference table and could believe that the ties of a different kind of devotion might eventually find her.

AUTHOR'S NOTE