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back to his own work.
    “Just because the man’s stonewalling us doesn’t mean he’s our guy.” Rogan reached for a tin of Altoids on his desk and popped a mint in his mouth. “Rich assholes shit on us all the time. They usually aren’t murderers. You don’t think this has something to do with Bandon throwing you in the clink?”
    She gave him her middle finger and her friendliest smile. “Did I say anything about investigating Bandon? I’m talking about Sparks. All we wanted was a closer look at his financials. Just a way to check on his enemies. Why go to court over something like that?”
    “Donovan said going into it that we were probably going to lose. We didn’t have PC.”
    She opened her top desk drawer and removed a jar of Nutella. She’d long ago given up offering any to Rogan. “So?” she asked. “Most innocent people cooperate with us even when we don’t have squat.”
    “Like I said, not the assholes.”
    “No, but even the jerks usually have a reason. I was sitting in the courtroom watching Guerrero bill four hundred dollars an hour to fight us. Sparks even showed up personally, and his time’s got to be worth way more than Guerrero’s. Why?”
    Ellie’s father had always told her that the key to good police work was to scrutinize people’s motives. “Find the motive,” he used to say, “and the motive will lead you to the man.”
    She understood why the innocent citizens of Bushwick didn’t cooperate when some Trinitarios took out another banger. In a neighborhood run by gangs, a conversation with the police could be followed by a knock on the door in the middle of the night by a machete-wielding messenger. She even understood when some corporate bureaucrat wouldn’t open the company records without a warrant. Regular people had jobs to protect.
    But Sparks wasn’t a regular person. He was the boss. He was a billionaire. This was his call, and he’d made the wrong one.
    Rogan leaned his weight back in his chair and rested his palms on top of his closely shaved scalp. “Sparks showed up personally, huh?”
    “Yep.”
    “Shit,” he said, letting his weight bring his chair back to the floor. He pointed a finger at her across the desk. “You know I never liked Sparks for it.”
    From the very beginning, Rogan had firmly believed that a man as savvy as Sam Sparks wouldn’t eliminate a threat inside an apartment he owned. She, however, had believed it was just the kind of reverse psychology that someone as arrogant as Sparks would employ. Me? But why would I draw attention to myself by having the man killed inside my own apartment?
    “J. J., you know as well as I do how quickly we eliminated him asa suspect. All that mattered to us was the time line, the call records, and the personal assistant.” The same assistant was in charge of both Sparks’s personal calendar and the schedule for the 212. According to her, Mancini hadn’t asked to use the apartment until 2:30 on the day of the murder, and she had never mentioned it to Sparks. She insisted that Sparks could not have known that Mancini would be at the apartment that night.
    And because they had scratched Sparks from the list of possible suspects, they had never scratched beneath the surface of Sparks’s public persona to unearth whatever secrets Mancini could have stumbled on.
    “You win,” Rogan said. “We look at Sparks again.”
    Ellie smiled as she took another bite of Nutella.
    “You go tell the Lou, though. She was on the warpath yesterday.”
    “At me or Bandon?”
    “A little of both. A lot of both, actually. She’ll want to know you’re back.”
    “Yeah, okay.”
    She started toward her lieutenant’s office, but then turned again to face Rogan. “Do me a favor?”
    “Burn those clothes you’re wearing?”
    “Track down that guy we talked to in May at Narcotics. Tell him to expect us at about”—she looked at her watch and calculated the time she’d need for another stop—“five