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Manhattan South Detective Borough, Ellie was usually happy to leave the driving to Rogan, but after the last twenty-four hours, she wanted control over her own movements. Rogan obliged, tossing the keys across the hood.
    “We’ve had this case four months now,” she said, turning over the ignition as Rogan climbed into the passenger’s seat. “We checked out the obvious angles first: sex and money.”
    A guy gets filled with bullets after leaving his semen inside a knotted condom on the nightstand, and the first theory is sex. But when it came to sex, everyone who knew Robert Mancini said he was uncomplicated. Thirty years old. Unmarried since a startermarriage to a high school sweetheart had ended eight years earlier. No children. If he had a girlfriend—and he didn’t at the time of his death—he was with that woman, and that woman only. If he didn’t have a girlfriend, he hooked up and made it clear that hooking up was all he was interested in. Apparently there was no shortage of women willing to play by those ground rules.
    Unfortunately, they’d been unable to locate the woman who played the game that particular night. The 212’s overnight doorman had no memory of either her or Mancini, and had since been fired for routinely leaving his post to play video games with the teenage son of a tenant. Without a video recorder, the building’s monitoring system was useless, and Mancini’s phone records and e-mail messages had also led nowhere.
    Then there was money. But again, with money, the picture seemed equally uncomplicated. Mancini had been working at Sparks Industries for almost a year before his death. Prior to that, he’d served in the U.S. Army, where he met a private contract worker named Nick Dillon in Afghanistan. When Dillon hung up the Middle Eastern travel and became the head of the corporate security division of Sparks Industries, he offered Mancini a job back home, which Mancini accepted as soon as his military commitment was up. His salary was in the low one hundreds, a figure that Rogan and Ellie had confirmed as the going rate for a decent corporate security gig.
    He owned a two-bedroom condo in Hoboken, only two and a half miles from the childhood home where his sister’s family still lived. He was up to date on a moderate mortgage. He had no unusual debts, no irregularities in his bank records.
    “Sex and money didn’t get us shit,” Rogan said. “And when sex and money and gambling didn’t get us shit, we took a close look at Sam Sparks and cleared him. I think that’s now the third time we’ve agreed on that.”
    But the notes Ellie had scribbled during the motion hearing were asking them to revisit that determination. And Rogan wanted to know why.
    As she drove up Centre Street, Ellie hit the wigwag lights on the dash to cut through the standstill traffic that was blocking the intersection at Canal through Chinatown.
    “We looked at Sparks before he decided to stonewall us. Now that we know just how much he wants to be off our radar, we have to look at him again.”
     
    “Holy crap, Hatcher. Rogan told us you got into some shit at the courthouse, but we didn’t think he meant literally.”
    John Shannon was a portly detective with light blond hair and ruddy skin. He sat directly behind Ellie in the squad room and had a bottle-a-week Old Spice habit.
    “I got two hours of sleep on a mattress thinner than the layer of fat around your neck, Shannon; haven’t eaten since I bit into the mystery meat burger they handed me for dinner; and spent the last twenty-four hours in city-issued underwear approximating the consistency of eighty-grit sandpaper—”
    “And she’s still better looking than anyone you ever dated, Shannon,” Rogan interjected.
    “I’m just saying, cut me some frickin’ slack.”
    Rogan draped his suit jacket on the back of his chair. As he took a seat at the gray metal desk that faced Ellie’s, he threw Shannon a look that sent the detective’s attention