32

DeMarco, having had no luck in getting anyone to admit they’d seen Ella Fields, headed over to Starbucks on Chambers Street—Sarah’s office away from the office—hoping she’d been more successful than him. When he walked in, he saw her chatting with a good-looking young guy with longish hair and soulful eyes. DeMarco couldn’t help wondering if he was the reason Sarah preferred to work at Starbucks.

He took a seat across from her, and Sarah said, “This woman has done everything she can to stay off the grid. I did a credit check on her—I got her social security number when we got the passport information—and her credit rating is worse than mine, and not because of student loans. Her problem is she’s never borrowed any money, so she has no credit history. She’s never had a mortgage or a car loan. She doesn’t have credit card debt, because as near as I can tell she doesn’t use credit cards, which is almost impossible not to do.”

“Huh. What else?” DeMarco said.

“I’ve used four of those people-finder Internet sites, like the one that turned up her marriage to Cantwell. She has no past-address information.”

“I can understand that,” DeMarco said. “In Phoenix, Cantwell rented the house where they lived and everything was in his name. It’s like the guy was trying to protect her by not listing her as being a tenant.”

“Something else is weird,” Sarah said. “I went to Justine’s office and called the IRS and told them I was her.”

“You little devil.”

Sarah smiled. “Anyway, I told whoever I talked to to call the DA’s public number so he’d know he was really talking to an ADA. When the guy called back, I said I wanted to know if Ella Fields had ever filed a tax return. He said no. I then asked him if Bill Cantwell had ever filed one and he said yes. When I asked him if I could get copies of Cantwell’s returns, he said, Not without a subpoena. I said, The guy’s dead! And he said, Not without a subpoena. So I asked him if he could tell me just one tiny thing: Did Cantwell file as single, married filing jointly, or married filing separately? He said Cantwell filed as single.”

“Huh,” DeMarco said again. “So he didn’t want her on his tax returns so later, when he got busted for income tax evasion, she wouldn’t go down with him.”

“Maybe,” Sarah said. “Or maybe she wouldn’t let him put her on his tax return. She never took his last name after they married.”

“So how do we find this woman, Sarah? We’re running out of time here. The trial is only a few weeks away.”

“Do you still think she’s here in New York?”

“Yes.” DeMarco had no evidence to support that conclusion, just his instincts, but he trusted his instincts.

“Well, in the past,” Sarah said, “Cantwell always rented some swanky place—like the penthouse apartment in Seattle and the house in Phoenix where he was paying twelve grand a month. What I can do, I guess, is start calling property management companies that rent out high-end places and see if they’ve rented to a lady named Ella Fields.”

DeMarco groaned, lowered his head, and rapped his forehead three times on the table. Sarah looked over at the young guy she’d been talking to and rolled her eyes, her expression saying: Hey, what can I tell you? He’s a nut.

DeMarco worked with Sarah for the next four days, calling property management companies that leased expensive houses and apartments in New York—and he knew they weren’t getting to all of them. Folks advertised on their own when they wanted to sublease; they stuck pieces of paper in coffee shops where you could rip off a slip with a phone number on it; they posted on fucking Craigslist. DeMarco was hung up on; placed on terminal hold; promised somebody would get back to him and no one ever did. He was told that client information was confidential, and, as his mood grew increasingly worse, he screamed that he’d get subpoenas and disrupt their fucking businesses for weeks if they didn’t cooperate. Do what you gotta do, asshole, he was told. Most people, however, cooperated, but the answer was always the same: We have no client named Ella Fields.

After he couldn’t take it anymore, he gave Sarah the sort of clear, precise directions a true executive gives a subordinate. He said, “Just do something, I don’t know what, but find that goddamn woman.”

“What are you going to do?” Sarah asked.

“I’m gonna go talk to people face-to-face so I can hit them if they give me any shit.”

Actually, he didn’t know what he was going to do.