THE MAN’S FIRST LOOK AT THE NEWSPAPER ITEM WAS A CASUAL one, followed immediately by a more deliberate perusal. But it was the photograph accompanying the story that had him transfixed.
Caroline Hunter had preoccupied his thoughts in recent weeks, but this was his first opportunity to reflect on her appearance. To his surprise, she reminded him of a girl he had worked hard not to think about for a very long time. So proud. So uppity. Caroline Hunter had the look of a woman convinced of her own intelligence, a woman who assumed she could do whatever she wanted – get whatever she wanted – without any repercussions.
The man wondered if Caroline Hunter had any regrets as those two bullets tore through her body. Maybe for some women it took dying in the street like a dog to reflect upon one’s decisions and the effects they have on others. He felt his muscles tense, crumpling the pages of newsprint in his hands.
Then he placed the paper neatly onto the breakfast table, took another sip of tea, and looked down at the muted traffic in the street below the window. He smiled. Fate was presenting him an even more promising opportunity than he had understood when he first spotted the article. Details remained to be worked out, but he was certain of one thing: Caroline Hunter was only the beginning. There would be more stories, just like this one, about women just like her.
THREE HUNDRED AND sixty-four days later, Amy Davis finished a second glass of red wine, pondering which excuse she should exploit to call it a night. She should have known better than to agree to a first date that started at eleven o’clock. Even by New York City standards, such a late invitation was an unequivocal sign that the guy wanted to avoid the cost of dinner but leave open the possibility of a spontaneous one-nighter.
But then the guy – he claimed his name was Brad – had suggested meeting at Angel’s Share, not one of the usual meat markets. Amy still thought of the cozy lounge as her secret oasis, tucked so discreetly inside a second-floor dive Japanese restaurant on Stuyvesant Street. She decided to take Brad’s awareness of the place as a sign. Then she looked out her apartment window and saw the snow, the first of the season. To Amy, the first flakes of winter were magical, almost spiritual. Watching them fall to the quiet square of grass beneath the oversized bay windows at Angel’s Share would be fantastic, much more satisfying than observing them from the fire escape of her fifth-floor Avenue C walk-up.
And so Amy had taken a risk. None of the previous risks had panned out, but that didn’t mean that Brad wouldn’t. Besides, all she had to lose was another night at home with Chowhound the Persian cat, falling asleep to the muted glow of her television. Three weeks earlier, she had committed herself to this process, and nights like this were the price she would have to pay if she were ever going to find The One.
She knew the date was a mistake precisely one second after she heard the voice behind her at the bar’s entrance. “Are you Amy?” It was a nice voice. Deep, but not brusque. Friendly, but calm. For exactly one second, she was optimistic. For that one second, she believed that Brad with the good voice, who was familiar with Angel’s Share, whose first date with her fell with the first snow, might just make a good companion for the evening, if not more.
Then the second passed, and she turned to meet the man who went with the voice. The truth was, Amy did not care about looks. People said that all the time, but Amy actually meant it. Her ex-boyfriend – perhaps he had never become a boyfriend, but the man she’d most recently dated – had been handsome as hell, but by the time they were through, she found him repulsive. This time, she was putting looks aside to focus on the qualities that counted.
Brad’s face was not unattractive, but neither was it familiar – a surprise to Amy since they had exchanged multiple pictures over the last week. Internet daters posted photographs, so, even though Amy did not particularly care, she looked. It was nice, after all, to have a visual image to go with the instant messages and e-mails. This face in front of her, however, did not match the image she’d carried.
As Brad squeezed through a small group of people to ask the host for a table, she mentally shuffled through the pictures he’d sent and realized that in most, his face had been obscured – sunglasses on both the fishing boat and the ski slopes, a hat on the golf course, a darkened dinner table at some black tie event. One head shot had been pretty clear, but even a toad could eke out one good picture. In retrospect, she realized she had used that one good picture to fill in the blanks on the rest.
Once they were seated, Amy tried to put her finger on precisely what was different. The face was puffier. Older, too. In fact, Brad looked much older than the thirty-eight years he claimed in his profile. Sure, she might have shaved off a couple of years herself, but she was talking much older in his case. She realized there was no point in getting bogged down in the differences. He looked completely different than she had envisioned, and that was that.
By the end of the first glass of wine, she knew it wasn’t just Brad’s face that didn’t match up to his online counterpart. According to Brad’s profile, he was a gourmand and a red wine junkie. She allowed him to order first, afraid she might embarrass herself with a passé selection. After he requested a cheap Merlot mass-produced in California, she proceeded to ask for a Barbera d’Asti. If Brad was going to lie, then she was going to rack up Piedmont prices on his tab.
He talked about work while he drank, pausing only to take big gulps from his glass. Commercial litigation. A motion for summary judgment. Something about jurisdiction and somebody who lacked it. An appeal. His monologue would have been boring at eleven thirty in the morning, but Amy found it sleep-inducing at this late hour.
She tried shifting the conversation, resorting to all of the subjects he’d gone on about in his e-mails – independent films, running, his photography hobby. Each topic was a bust, sparking nothing other than a brief expression of surprise on Brad’s unfamiliar face. Reaching for her coat, Amy did not see Brad order the second round until it was too late.
Nearly an hour into the date, Brad finally took a break from his running legal commentary. “I’m sorry. I’ve been working so hard it’s tricky to turn it off sometimes. I should ask you about yourself.”
The brief glimmer of hope Amy allowed herself was dashed when he proceeded to make good on his perceived obligation. “So which publishing house do you work for?” he asked.
“Pardon me?”
“You’re an editor, right? Which house?” Her confusion must have been apparent. “Oh, right. No, you’re a…a fund-raiser. For the Museum of Modern Art, right? So how’s that going for you?”
It was going, she thought, much better than this date. The jerk had actually mixed her up with some other stupid woman he was duping online. The wine was good, and the view of the snow was wondrous, but nothing was worth this humiliation.
She selected her excuse and went with it. “I know I said I was up for a late night, but I took a painkiller earlier for this problem I’m having with my rotator cuff.” She rubbed her right shoulder for effect. “With the wine on top of it, I’m feeling a little loopy.”
“Let me walk you home,” Brad suggested brightly, clearly spotting an opportunity in her feigned high.
“No, really, I’m fine. I’m just around the corner,” she lied. She might be an idiot for signing on to this endeavor, but she knew better than to tell any of them where she lived.
Amy didn’t bother waiting once he signaled for the check. She yawned conspicuously and began to maneuver out of the booth as she pulled on her coat. Before Brad could rise for the awkward good-night peck, she shook his hand abruptly and thanked him for the wine he had yet to pay for.
Then, after a quick scramble down the narrow staircase, through the exit of the Japanese restaurant, she was out of there. She was alone, free of that lame excuse for a date. It struck her then that two or three times a week, for the last three weeks, she had reached the end of the evening with this same feeling. She had made a ridiculous pact with herself to “get out there,” to finally meet a man she could see for more than a month, to finally meet a man she could trust and even love. But, at the end of a night like this, she was always happier once she was able to get out of there. After an hour with Brad, the idea of watching snow from her fire escape didn’t sound half bad.
Amy walked through the East Village, smoking a Marlboro Light, with a new appreciation of her solitude. She was a thirty-one-year-old woman living in Manhattan. She had a painless enough job in a kick-ass museum. She got to see mind-blowing art every day. She had fifty-one different delivery menus in her kitchen drawer and really good hair. She had a big fat Persian cat named Chowhound. Tomorrow she would treat herself to some street shopping, where only in this city could twenty bucks buy you a seemingly authentic designer handbag. There were worse things in life than being on her own.
The snow was starting to stick by the time she reached the alphabet blocks on the Lower East Side. Amy’s father still didn’t approve of her choice of neighborhoods, but her parents had been overprotective ever since that problem back home. She kept telling him that times had changed since he formed his impressions of the city. Every location in Manhattan was safe now, and the Lower East Side was all she could afford.
She had her key ring in her hand and was already unzipping her coat when she heard the noise from the alley. Mew.
“Chowhound?” she called out, peering into the dark void between two buildings. She looked up at her fifth-floor window above, left open during the last cigarette before she walked out for the night.
Shit. I’ve got to quit smoking. She always made sure to lock the other window, the one by the fire escape. And it would take Jackie Chan to leap from the fire escape to her smoking window. But she forgot that big fat Chowhound was 50 percent fur and had the uncanny ability to squeeze himself through tiny spaces if he knew freedom awaited him on the other side. And Chowhound, in spite of his plumpness, was freakishly aerodynamic. When it came to a pounce to the fire escape, Jackie Chan had nothing on him.
“Come here, Chowhound. Come here, baby.” Amy could see she was going to have to tear him away from whatever disgusting thing he was eating next to the Dumpster. She looked up and down her street. There was no one within a block. She’d be quick.
As she reached down to grab the cat, the man pinned her from behind. She felt arms around her waist, then latex hands around her neck. She felt the frame of his body pressing against her and she knew it was happening. It was real. The moment Amy had always feared – that every woman, at some level, always fears – was happening.
Amy was strong. She fought back. She was not going to make it easy for this son of a bitch. She kicked and twisted, punched and clawed.
But everything she managed to grab – sleeves, coat, collar, gloves – only protected her attacker. Her range of motion was limited by her winter parka. The ground was growing slick now. She could not find the leverage she needed.
Please, God, no. He was no longer just squeezing her neck with those latex-covered fingers. He was crushing her throat. Her tongue was swelling. When he had forced the full weight of her body to the concrete, he placed his head next to hers and gazed into her face.
I know you.
Amy heard the words in her mind, but could not speak them. She knew she had enjoyed the last breath of air she would ever take. As she finally succumbed, she tasted blood, bile, and Barbera d’Asti. It was the taste of death.
With a gloved hand, her killer placed a single piece of paper in Amy’s coat pocket, satisfied with the puzzled and panicked look that had crossed her face in those final seconds. It was a look of recognition. It was a look of profound regret. It had been precisely as he had wanted it. He wondered if the others would flow so smoothly. How many more until they notice?
DETECTIVE ELLIE HATCHER WAS CERTAIN THAT SOMETHING WAS wrong with the victim’s story. She’d spent the last fifteen minutes in an interview room of the NYPD’s Midtown North Precinct working through the man’s report. He hadn’t wavered from his bogus story yet, but she knew she was getting close.
But now it appeared from a loud rap on the door that she had a different problem looming. She turned to find the towering bulk of her lieutenant, Randy Jenkins, filling the door frame. He beckoned her with an upward tip of his prominent chin.
“Hatcher, we need to talk.”
“I’ll be right in, boss.”
“Wrap it up.”
“Five minutes,” Ellie said. She looked at the man sitting across the table. He was still holding the pack of ice to the side of his head. “We’re just about done here, right?”
“Five minutes,” Jenkins emphasized before closing the door.
“They gave you one nasty bump, huh, Mr. Pandey?”
“I am sure that in your position you have seen others who faced far worse.”
“Not too many. I’m still pretty new to this.” Ellie smiled shyly, but then quickly tucked her expression away, pretending to look over the notes she had been compiling. “I’m sorry. Can you run over the timeline again – just to make sure I haven’t missed anything?”
As Samir Pandey related his story for the third time that morning, Ellie searched for the flaw. Car-for-hire drivers were rarely robbed – far easier for the bad guys to go after the yellow taxicabs that deal only in cash and stop on demand for the nearest waving hand. Tack on Pandey’s claim that a man in a ski mask popped out of nowhere, pulled open the back door, and conked him in the back of the noggin at six in the morning while he was driving on the West Side Highway, and the story was about as convincing and original an explanation as I don’t know. Some black guy did it.
“Can you excuse me for a moment, Mr. Pandey?”
Escaping the watchful eye of a suspect always helped Ellie collect her thoughts. She turned the facts over again in her mind as she paced the narrow hallway adjacent to the interview rooms. According to the car service’s dispatcher, Pandey had picked up his last scheduled fare from the Times Square Marriott at five in the morning and dropped her off at her Bronx apartment thirty minutes later. Pandey was late returning to the garage, then called in shortly after six fifteen, groggily reporting that he had just come to after the assault and robbery he suffered on the drive downtown. He was only missing the fifty bucks from that last fare, and he would have had to have knocked himself in the head to get it. Ellie had seen the bump. He wasn’t messing around.
Looking at the old-fashioned, round clock that hung at the end of the hallway, Ellie evaluated her next move. She knew what her training detective would have said during her probation period. He would have told her to save her energy because this was how the system worked: An employee pilfers cash, then blames it on a robbery. The employer uses the police department as a bullshit detector by requiring a report. Sometimes the employee caves and retracts the allegation, afraid of getting in trouble for filing a false statement. More often, he calls his boss’s bluff, knowing the cops are too busy to pursue a robbery complaint with no leads. Ellie knew that a good, efficient detective – one who could prioritize her limited time in sensible ways – would act as a transcriber, file the report, and move on to the real work.
Efficiency, however, had never been Ellie’s first priority. She knew that Pandey was lying, so that made him important – to her at least. She didn’t especially care about punishing the man. He seemed decent enough. What she needed was an explanation for why this decent-enough person would bother. Find the motive, her father used to say. Until she understood Pandey’s motive, this inconsequential robbery report would continue to nag at her.
She was telling herself to defer to efficiency, just this once, when a uniformed officer informed her she had a visitor. A dark-haired, dark-skinned woman in a multicolored maternity sari was waiting down the hall near the entrance to the detective bureau. From the looks of her girth, the baby she carried in her stomach was just about done.
“I’m here about my husband?” the woman explained. “Samir Pandey. I called his employer when he was late coming home. There has been a robbery?”
“He’s fine,” Ellie said. “Just a little rattled. Nothing to worry about – especially when you’ve got enough to keep your mind on. When are you due?”
“One week.” The woman beamed proudly. “A daughter.”
“Well, congratulations. If you want to have a seat, your husband will be out shortly. We’re just about done with his report.”
“Hatcher, aren’t you supposed to be in here?” Jenkins scrutinized her from the doorway of his office.
“Just one more second, boss,” she said, smiling.
It was more like ninety seconds. Ellie found a comfortable chair for Mrs. Pandey in the cramped waiting area, then stopped at her desk. A quick call to the car service’s dispatcher, followed by a few keystrokes on her computer, and she had her answer. She darted to the bureau’s communal printer, removed the spooling page that awaited her, and shook the printout excitedly as she headed back to the interview room.
Pandey wasn’t just out the fifty bucks. He was also out forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes when his extrapregnant wife was waiting for him, wondering why he hadn’t come home. She knew Pandey’s reason for lying, and she had the piece of paper that would persuade him to come clean.
The photograph of Sandra Carr, the woman whom Pandey had driven to the Bronx as his last fare, had been taken courtesy of the New York Police Department after Carr was busted for solicitation a year earlier. Pandey’s face fell when he saw the picture slip to the table from Ellie’s fingertips.
“Forty-five minutes,” Ellie said to her robbery victim. “You were missing the cash from your fare and the next forty-five minutes.”
“Please do not tell my wife,” he said. “It is our first child. I have never done such a thing until today. I almost made it. Just one more week for the baby, then the doctor says we must wait six weeks after that. When I went upstairs with the lady, I could not even-”
Pandey pushed the photograph away, and Ellie thought she heard a sniffle. She understood why he was here. A few lies – even the self-inflicted head injury – were to this man a small price to pay to put this morning’s activities in the past.
“Mr. Pandey, I think we can mark your report as unlikely to be solved if you can behave yourself for the next seven weeks. I hear you’ve got a little girl on the way.”
The driver was still thanking Ellie as he walked out of the station with his wife.
“HATCHER. GET YOUR ass in here.” Jenkins had stepped from his office doorway into the detectives’ room.
“The interview went a little long, boss. Sorry.” Ellie followed Jenkins into his office and rested a hip against a two-drawer file cabinet.
“Seems to happen to you a lot. You ought to be careful about that curiosity,” he warned. “You’re either going to wind up a hero, or dead.”
“Or both.”
“Yeah, well, either one’s a bitch.” Jenkins lowered his dense, muscular frame into his chair, working his jaw like he was still mulling something over. “We have a situation. And I’m not saying anything until you take a seat. You’ve got too much energy, Hatcher.”
Ellie did as she was told, but Jenkins’s jaw was still grinding. The lieutenant did that a lot. Hatcher suspected he maintained that stoic facial expression and the close shave of his dark black skull for a reason. His look was unambiguously serious. Authoritative. One eyeful of him, and the largely white detectives he supervised knew he was the real deal. No handouts when it came to Jenkins. But Hatcher had realized about a month into the detective bureau that the movement of Jenkins’s jaw gave a hint at what went on beneath the hardened exterior. And now it was telling Ellie that he was bothered.
Jenkins was bothered, and she was in his office. Sitting, not standing. Something was definitely up.
“I got a call from a homicide detective this morning.”
“Is everything all right?” She could hear the alarm in her voice. Ellie’s job had nothing to do with the homicide division. She’d made detective just thirteen months earlier and was lucky to work scams and robberies. The one and only time she’d received a surprise call from the police about a dead body, she had been fourteen years old, and the body had been her father’s.
“I suppose that depends on what you mean by ‘all right.’ A detective over there has a couple of dead women on his hands and seems to think you can help figure out who might have put them there.”
“Excuse me?”
“No offense, but I was surprised too. Apparently someone’s got himself a theory and thinks you’re in a unique position to help him. You’ve got a special assignment.”
“To homicide?”
“Now don’t go getting that tone. It’s an assignment. Temporarily. You’ll help out as you can, and then you’ll come straight back here when you’re done playing with the big boys.”
“Of course. It’s just temporary.”
Jenkins looked through the window that divided him from the detectives, working his jaw. “You don’t want it to become more than that. No matter what they say, it can’t come easy. Not to me, and not to you. You better deserve it twice as much as they do. You get what you want too soon, and you won’t be seen as earning it.”
Ellie knew precisely what he meant. She had made detective quicker than most, after four years on patrol, and the assignment had coincided with the wave of media attention thrown her way that year. She knew other cops speculated she got a leg up either because she was female, because of the press, or both.
“Yes, sir. Thank you. I still don’t understand, though. Who’s the detective?” Not that it made a difference. Ellie didn’t know anyone in homicide.
“Flann McIlroy. You ever heard of him?”
“By name, sure.” The truth was she usually heard Flann McIlroy referred to by a slightly different name. McIl-Mulder, as he was called, was a colorful subject of discussion – usually complaints – among other career detectives who resented the singular adoration he appeared to enjoy. In the case that sealed his status as a media darling, a clinical psychiatrist had been pulled from the elevator of her Central Park West building when it stopped at a floor that was supposedly closed for construction. She had been stabbed eighty-eight times. The M.E. couldn’t determine whether the rape came before, during, or after.
“Well, apparently McIlroy thinks he knows something about you,” Jenkins said. “Face it. You’ve gotten more press lately than most of us experience in a career. What the hell that’s got to do with two bodies in New York is for you to figure out.”
Ellie would have loved to explain that she did not want the attention. To start with, the news stories weren’t about her. They were about her father. No, not even. They were about the man her father had hunted – the man who may have killed him. She was a mere human-interest sideshow, the daughter who followed in her dead daddy’s footsteps, who still believed in him.
Instead, she nodded silently. A homicide detective read about her and for some reason thought she could help him. Two dead women, and a role for her in the investigation. Only one explanation for this temporary assignment came to mind: The women were working girls, and the department needed a decoy. She had a sudden image of herself in a sequined tube top and capri pants, roaming Penn Station.
She’d managed to avoid decoy work as a patrol officer, even though her male colleagues had always made a point of reminding her that she was an obvious candidate for a job in vice. She was thirty years old, but heard all the time that she looked younger. She had thick, shoulder-length honey blond hair and pool-blue eyes. Her five-foot-five frame was naturally curvy, but with some added muscles thanks to kickboxing and light weight training. Despite her current job, New Yorkers never seemed surprised when she confessed with embarrassment that she was once first runner-up in a Junior Miss Wichita beauty pageant. She’d been told a few times she was a real “Midwestern knockout.” For some reason, they always threw in that regional qualifier.
She wasn’t doing tube tops, though. Spaghetti straps would have to suffice.
Jenkins had a different kind of advice for her. “This won’t go over well with some people. McIlroy’s got favor with the higher-ups, but his own people? The people in his house? They won’t like this.”
“From what I read about that psychiatrist case, the guy’s smart. Maybe that’ll be enough to protect me.”
Ellie remembered the case from the news. The primary detectives focused on the building’s construction crew because the workers had access to the closed floor. McIlroy, on the other hand, got wrapped up in the fact that the murder was on the eighth floor, and the victim was stabbed eighty-eight times. He even studied photographs of the bloody smears of the crime scene until he was convinced they were shaped in a chain of number eights. The rest of the homicide task force wrote it off as another crazy McIl-Mulder theory, but McIlroy hit the neighborhood homeless shelters and found a paranoid schizophrenic who’d been treated by the victim two years earlier while he was on his meds. Off his meds, he’d been walking the streets on the Upper West Side mumbling to whoever’d listen about the number eight.
Jenkins ran a palm over his head stubble. “I think some people would say he’s lucky. And they’d also say it was bad form, working another team’s case. But what really pissed the task force off were the department’s press releases. McIlroy looked like a lone hero.”
“And we know how that must’ve gone over.” Ellie thought of the barbs about McIl-Mulder she’d overheard among older detectives. She wasn’t sure which seemed to bother them more – his supposedly half-baked theories or the astonishing coincidence that the press always seemed to have a heads-up on the inner workings of his investigations.
Jenkins shrugged. “He’s still the favored boy there, at least with the brass. But he’s got a reputation – well, it sounds like you’ve heard about it. I could tell them I need you here. I can keep my own people when I need to.”
“No, sir. If I can help there and come back when I’m through, that’s what I’d like to do.”
“I didn’t have a doubt in my mind that you’d say precisely that.” He handed her a slip of paper with McIlroy’s name and an address scrawled on it. The tell in his jaw was gone. Ellie took it as a sign of something Jenkins would never say aloud – he had been worried about her ability to handle the scrutiny that would come with the assignment, but he no longer was.
It took Ellie only ten minutes and one box to pack up her desk, and the box was only half full. A picture with her mom and brother taken two Thanksgivings ago back in Wichita, a handful of hair clips, her favorite water glass, a jar of Nutella, a spoon, a cigarette lighter, and the potpourri of pens, Post-its, Jolly Ranchers, and other crap that fell out of her top desk drawer. That was it. All she had gathered in thirteen months.
And somehow those thirteen months had led her to a murder assignment.
ELLIE HATCHER NEVER THOUGHT SHE’D BE A COP. SURE, LIKE ANY little kid modeling herself after a parent, she’d thrown around the idea. But police officer had fallen somewhere on the list between fashion designer and astronaut. Then, after her father died, she believed she’d lost every positive feeling she had about law enforcement. Her father literally gave his life to the job, and it left his family with nothing. No money. No support. Not even answers about his death.
It also left her without the luxury of dreams about her future. When her older brother, Jess, ran off to New York to become a rock star, Ellie and her mother had been on their own. Even if Ellie had been willing to leave as well, the scholarship money she earned in B-level beauty pageants fell far short of out-of-state tuition. That left Ellie as a part-time waitress and a part-time prelaw student at Wichita State University.
She’d probably be a lawyer in Kansas now if it weren’t for Jess – or at least for her mother’s inability not to worry about his pattern of mixing alcohol (and most likely other substances) with a general penchant for recklessness. After two years of watching her mother age ten, Ellie realized the best thing she could do for her mother – and herself – was to leave Wichita to look after her brother.
Then a strange thing happened. She fell in love – not with a man, but with New York City. Young people, living beyond their means in cramped apartments, walking to the corner deli for takeout – tiny specks moving intently, carving out their own patterns among the chaos. Life in the city was exciting and unpredictable, exactly the opposite of the endless enclaves of ranch homes she’d known as a child. She was turned down for every paralegal job she applied for, but she learned not to care. Waiting tables paid more anyway, at least on the good nights.
Then a stranger thing happened. As is inevitable in any relationship, Ellie started to notice the darker side of the city she loved. Beneath the tall buildings, upscale boutiques, and bright lights lived signs of a seedier and more harsh New York. A woman with fading bruises, pausing discreetly at the garbage can outside of the bakery, eyeing the half-eaten croissant lying just under that discarded cigarette butt. A homeless man tucking himself more tightly beneath urine-soaked cardboard boxes, hoping to avoid a roust to the shelters that would not permit his one and only possession – the matted beagle snuggled into the crook of his knees. Too many men waiting at the Port Authority for the young girls who arrive from faraway towns with big dreams but nowhere to sleep.
Ellie tried to look away – to ignore the signs like everyone else. But as she strived for blissful ignorance, the problems only grew more glaring. She realized that only one job would allow her to love this city the way she wanted to: She could be the person who stopped to help instead of looking away. It took three years of part-time classes at John Jay, but she finally became a cop. Then after four years of hard work, she made detective. One serious boyfriend had come and gone along the way, but she still had New York. And she still had her job.
Now that job was taking her to the Thirteenth Precinct, home of the Manhattan South Homicide Task Force, a boxy six-story building on East Twenty-first Street between Second and Third avenues. At the front desk she asked one of a handful of uniformed officers for Flann McIlroy, and he escorted her to the task force offices on the third floor.
“Fourth desk back, on the right,” the officer instructed, pointing across a room crammed with desks, shelves of notebooks, and men. The male-to-female ratio among the detectives here was even higher than what she was used to at Midtown North.
Walking the gauntlet. That’s how it felt. Eyes intentionally followed Ellie and her half-filled brown cardboard box. The eyes’ owners exchanged knowing smiles. Each whisper grew bolder than the last. That must be McIl-Mulder’s Date Bait. Another said something about Scully being a blond. And having a box. A big box.
Ellie pretended not to hear their remarks or notice their lingering glances. In a way, she appreciated them – or at least what they represented. Offensive jokes, lewd gestures, and the open resentment of outsiders often defined the working atmosphere of cops – at least for those who were not yet a part of it. But the veneer served an important purpose. Reinforced daily in small ways such as these, it protected the bonds that lay beneath the thin but often impenetrable cover.
On this specific occasion, the jabs were aimed at her, and she understood why. She’d suffer through until the comments had served their purpose – a purpose that would ultimately benefit her, once these men came to realize, as others had before, that Ellie was no creampuff.
At the fourth desk back on the right sat a man Ellie thought she recognized from various departmental press conferences. He didn’t fit Ellie’s stereotype of a pseudocelebrity law enforcement stud. The NYPD had bred its fair share, and they usually fell into one of two molds – the good-looking buff Italian, or the good-looking buff Irishman. Different coloring, distinguishable jawlines, but the looks were always off the charts. Flann McIlroy, by contrast, resembled an older version of the Lucky Charms leprechaun. He was not unattractive, but he had the look of a child star, decades later – in his forties, but forever destined to resemble a fourteen-year-old redhead with a gap in his teeth.
“Are you Detective McIlroy?”
“Does Keith Richards pick coconuts?” McIlroy’s eyes remained on the report he was reading.
“I think the surgeons might’ve removed that impulse while they were fixing the rest of his brain.”
“Ah, very nice. A woman who keeps up with her pop culture.” McIlroy rose from his chair and offered a thick hand. “You must be Ellie Hatcher.”
Ellie shifted her cardboard box for a handshake, and McIlroy quickly relieved her of the parcel, setting it on his desk. In a framed photograph that he pushed aside, Ellie recognized the men on either side of Flann McIlroy as Rudy Giuliani and Bill Bratton.
“That’s me,” Ellie said, “reporting to duty. Thank you for bringing me over.”
“You make an excellent first impression. Most of my colleagues don’t get my rhetorical questions.”
“Aging rock stars, I get. Throw out any allusions to French literature, and we might have some problems.”
“You must be wondering why you’re here.” McIlroy had a gleam in his eye.
“I go where I’m told,” Ellie said matter-of-factly.
“I got permission from the assistant chief to work a single case exclusively.”
Ellie did her best to conceal her surprise. Lieutenant Jenkins said McIlroy had suck with the brass, but the assistant chief was extremely brassy – he ran the entire Manhattan detective borough.
“My lieutenant’s not particularly happy about it, so the freedom may not last. He’s already threatened to pull the plug tomorrow if it doesn’t go anywhere, but he’s mindful of the politics. If nothing breaks – the case, you, me – we all turn back to pumpkins. So let’s just say you better not unpack this box quite yet.”
“Not a problem. Desks are overrated anyway.” Ellie tried to sound like she was taking it all in stride.
“Unless you’ve got a hearing problem, you probably noticed some comments as you walked in.”
McIlroy hadn’t bothered to lower his voice. Nearby detectives shifted their eyes back to their work.
“No hearing problem, sir,” Ellie said.
“And none of this ‘sir’ stuff. Call me Flann.”
“And call me Ellie. Or my friends just call me Date Bait.” She threw a look to the younger detective at the next desk, and he laughed aloud and smiled. One down, the rest of the room to go, Ellie thought.
“Let’s talk while we drive,” Flann said. “I want you to see something.”
“FRIDAY NIGHT, AROUND three in the morning, two men found a woman’s body in an alley off of Avenue C.” McIlroy flipped down the sun visor on the department-issued Crown Vic as he hung a left onto Third Avenue, followed by another quick left onto Twentieth Street to take them to the far East Side. “The girl’s name was Amy Davis. She lived in the adjacent building. We’ve already determined she was walking home from a date when the bad guy grabbed her. Strangled.”
He pushed a manila folder across the seat toward Ellie. She opened it and removed an eight-by-ten photograph. Amy Davis lay on a metal slab. A white sheet was pulled up to her shoulders, but the rest of the picture told the story. Her face was scarlet. Dark contusions discolored her neck and throat, her eyes protruded from their sockets, and her swollen tongue peeked out from encrusted lips. Ellie could tell from the many marks between Amy’s jaw and clavicle that the killer had used his hands. She had definitely struggled.
“How do you know the date didn’t walk her home and do all of this himself?”
“We called his cell right after we found this in the vic’s coat pocket.” McIlroy handed Ellie two sheets of folded white paper from his own jacket. “That’s a photocopy, obviously.”
Ellie read the string of e-mail messages from the bottom up, starting with the earliest. The first message was sent a week ago, from CameraMan to MoMAgirl: I saw your profile. We seem to have a lot in common. Maybe between my photography and your love of Warhol, we can take the art-world by storm. Check out my profile and let me know. My name’s Brad.
MoMAgirl responded two hours later: You don’t look too bad yourself. What kind of stuff do you usually shoot? Amy (aka MoMAgirl)
The two had e-mailed each other once or twice a day for the next few days, until Brad finally suggested on Friday evening that they meet for a drink that night at eleven o’clock.
“Eleven o’clock on a Friday night? What a cheese ball,” Ellie muttered under her breath.
“The cheese factor, as you put it, gets considerably worse,” McIlroy said. “But he’s not our guy. I called his cell at three thirty in the morning, after we found the e-mails. I think I hit redial six times before he finally picked up. By that time, he was in bed at another woman’s apartment. According to the bedmate, our playboy Brad called her around midnight saying he was in the neighborhood.”
“He could have made that call after the murder to give himself some semblance of an alibi.”
“Except the girl remembers bar noises in the background, and the waiter at Angel’s Share remembers Brad on his cell phone when he signed for the check. Apparently he was pissed off about the price of the wine Amy was drinking.”
“Did you check the call records on Brad’s cell phone?”
McIlroy nodded. “They’re consistent: Two back-to-back calls around midnight. One to a woman in the West Village, which went unanswered. Then another call, which his overnight companion picked up.”
“And he couldn’t have killed Davis between the phone call and the booty call?”
“Nope,” Flann said, smiling. “The booty call, as you so aptly described it, took place next to the Flatiron Building. The security camera in the elevator has him arriving ten minutes after the cell phone call.”
Ellie finished the chain of reasoning. “And it’s impossible to get from the Village to Avenue C, then back up to the Flatiron in even twice that time.”
“I was impressed he made it to the Flatiron in ten minutes.”
“When sex awaits,” Ellie said, refolding the sheet of paper and handing it back to McIlroy. “So the victim had a date that night, but it’s got nothing to do with her murder.”
“Now that I’m not so sure about. Here’s my hunch.”
Ellie raised an eyebrow. According to her lieutenant, one of McIlroy’s misplaced hunches could tarnish her reputation for years.
“Don’t worry,” Flann said, catching her expression. “It’s one notch stronger than a hunch – I guarantee. Did you notice how our victim met this courtly gentleman, Brad?”
“On the Internet. Very Twenty-first Century.” The e-mails had been sent through a company called FirstDate.com. Ellie had recognized the name. From what she could tell, FirstDate was one of the biggest online dating companies around, at least in the New York area. She could hardly ride the subway or pass a bus stop without spotting an ad announcing that true love was waiting for her somewhere out there in cyberspace. If the men on the service were anything like Brad the bed-hopping CameraMan, then Ellie had no remorse about resisting her occasional curiosity.
“I read that you’ve got an interest in high-tech law enforcement,” Flann said. “I’m hoping that’s going to come in handy.”
It was Ellie’s first confirmation that McIlroy knew about her fifteen minutes of fame. In retrospect, Ellie regretted giving any interviews. She’d done it for her mother, hoping that a profile piece might bring more attention to her case against the police department back in Wichita. The strategy hadn’t worked. The case was still pending, the police department was still calling her father’s death a suicide, and her mother was still broke.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Ellie cautioned. “I said I was interested in it, not that I was an expert.”
“Do you remember this murder?”
McIlroy handed Ellie another folded piece of paper. It was a photocopy of a newspaper article, dated just over a year earlier, about the discovery of another young woman’s body – this one shot to death in NoLita, just north of Little Italy.
An aspiring psychologist and author who devoted herself to the study of interpersonal relationships died alone early yesterday morning after she was shot in the trendy NoLita neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, a police spokesman said. Caroline Hunter, 29, was killed on the corner of Spring and Elizabeth shortly after 2 a.m. in what police investigators believe was a botched robbery attempt.
Hunter was pursuing her Ph.D. in social psychology at New York University, where her dissertation examined the role of online relationships in contemporary society. She had justsigned a significant publishing contract to write a book summarizing her findings for a broader audience.
“Carrie, without a doubt, would have emerged as one of the most significant sociological voices of her generation,” said her editor at Penman Publishing, Joan Landers. “We have all lost the opportunity to learn from her.”
The gunshots interrupted a telephone conversation Hunter was having with her mother.
“She often called late because of the time zones,” said Barbara Hunter, of Yakima, Washington. “She’d say good night and let me know all was well. She was in the middle of telling me about a meeting she had with her editor when I heard some kind of scuffle, then two loud bangs.”
Mrs. Hunter believed her daughter may have been walking home to her East Village apartment from a meeting arranged on an Internet dating Web site as part of her ongoing research. Police say they have confirmed that Hunter’s dinner companion was not involved in the shooting. Witnesses have reported seeing a lone man flee with Hunter’s purse. Police had no comment on current suspects, but said the investigation continues.
The photograph accompanying the article jogged a memory somewhere in the recesses of Ellie’s mind. Every once in a while, one of the thousands of gorgeous young women in New York City with a professional head shot fell prey to the random violence of the city. Those were the crime stories that the local papers took hold of. Caroline Hunter had been famous for a few days, then relegated to the unsolved murder files.
Ellie told McIlroy that she had a vague recollection of the story.
“So did I. And when I caught this case and saw how pretty Amy Davis was, I immediately pictured the tabloid headlines. That got me thinking about the last time the media glommed on to one of these cases. Out of curiosity, I pulled the file. Caroline Hunter. Notice anything?”
“Kind of hard not to,” Ellie said. “According to this article, Hunter was shot on the way home from a date she’d arranged on the Internet. She was even writing her Ph.D. on online relationships.”
“Anything else?”
“Two women, both attractive. Both in downtown Manhattan. Approximately the same age. One strangled, though; the other shot.” Ellie knew, however, that killers could change the way they killed, as long as the method itself was not an important part of what they considered their M.O.
“What about the timing?”
She calculated last Friday’s date in her head, then saw what McIlroy was getting at. “Exactly one year apart.”
“To the day. Now you know why I said it’s more than a hunch.”
“I believe you said one notch more,” Ellie added.
“Still, it’s more. And that’s why we’re going to Amy Davis’s apartment. Your charge, Detective Hatcher, is to find me something that says we’re on the right track.”
AMY DAVIS HAD LIVED IN A PREWAR WALK-UP APARTMENT ON Avenue C. This was the Lower East Side, not to be confused with SoHo, Tribeca, or some other fame-infused bastion of downtown coolness. In Alphabet City, gentrification had hit only building-by-building, block-by-block: The gamut ran from unmarked needle-exchange counters to Glamazon-infested martini bars. Davis’s building fell on the shabby end of the neighborhood’s spectrum.
McIlroy pressed one of the roughly twenty doorbells lined up at the building’s entrance. A voice blurted through a speaker under the buzzers. “Dígame.”
“Policía. Estamos aquí con respecto a asesinato.”
Ellie was able to make out a few of the words. They were the police and were here about something. Her Spanish vocabulary could use an influx of nouns.
The door was opened by a man in faded jeans, an oversized flannel shirt, and a coarse goatee. “You speak some pretty good español, man, but I’m fine with English.”
McIlroy took care of a brief introduction. The superintendent’s name was Oswaldo Lopez. His friends all called him Oz, he added, checking out Ellie as he said it. The detectives followed him up the steep, zig-zag staircase that ran through the center of the building.
“How long have you been the super here?” McIlroy asked between deep breaths, already starting to fall behind.
“Around eight months.”
“What can you tell us about Amy Davis?”
“Pays her rent. Comes and goes. Keeps to herself, at least around the building. Like everyone else. It’s that kind of place.”
“Any regular company?” Ellie asked.
“Not that I noticed. But I’m not a doorman in a white-glove high-rise, you know what I’m saying?”
Ellie knew exactly what he was saying. Oz probably responded to about half of the tenants’ complaints, based on who was most generous or persistent. He did not, however, make friends or keep tabs. It was, as he said, that kind of place.
“When can we start showing the apartment?” Oz asked.
“Sometime after we’ve put its current tenant in the ground,” McIlroy said without missing a beat.
“No disrespect, man. The owner wanted to know.”
“If Davis paid her rent, he doesn’t have anything to complain about until the end of the month. Now does he?”
“Like I said, no disrespect.”
When they reached the fifth of six floors, Oz removed a key ring from his belt and unlocked a door in the back corner of the hallway. Ellie and McIlroy entered, and Oz followed. McIlroy looked annoyed but too out of breath to express it.
“I think we’ll be fine here, Mr. Lopez,” Ellie said. “We’ll let you know when we’re finished.”
The super paused, no doubt wanting to get a first-hand view. Murder-related macabre was simply too titillating for even the most complacent people to resist.
McIlroy thanked her once the door was closed and they were alone. “My doc says I need to add more cardio into my workout routine.”
“Hey, at least you’ve got a routine.”
“That’s what he thinks,” McIlroy said, wiping a bead of perspiration from his temple. “I’m surprised you’re not wheezing a little.”
“I live on the fourth floor of a converted townhouse. I’m used to it.”
“Nice of you not to mention the fifteen years you’ve got on me and the obvious fact that you’re more fit than I ever was. But I don’t smoke.”
“Neither do I.”
“Okay,” McIlroy said after a pause. “If you say so.”
“I say so.” Ellie took her first look around Amy Davis’s apartment. “So give me some hint why I’m here. What am I going to lead you to that you couldn’t find yourself?”
“We’ll know when you find it.”
Whatever it was, the search wouldn’t take long. The apartment was an undersized studio, just a few hundred square feet. A double bed and a single nightstand were tucked into one corner. A love seat, tray table, and steamer trunk-cum-TV stand occupied the center of the room. A tiny desk was crammed into a poor excuse for a kitchen. Clothes and shoes were stuffed anywhere they fit.
The items in Davis’s wardrobe spoke to the double life led by so many city women. The modern business-casual workplace demanded tailored shirts, pencil skirts, and fitted pants – not unlike Ellie’s own charcoal gray V-neck sweater and straight-leg black pants. In her free time, though, while Ellie hung out in sweatshirts and Levi’s, Davis hoarded low-rider jeans, bohemian tops, and funky boots.
Ellie opened one of the kitchenette’s cabinets. No dishes, no pans, no food – just more clothes and shoes. Only two bowls were in sight, and they were on the floor – one filled with water, the other empty, with the word Chowhound printed on the side.
“What happened to the cat?” Ellie asked.
“Funny thing about that cat. The first time I came to the apartment, he led me right to the window by the fire escape and started meowing. Like he was telling me something.”
“So where is he now?” Ellie had never stopped to wonder what happened to animals after their people were killed.
“In the bunk room at the bureau.”
“You’re kidding.” No wonder this guy had a reputation as a maverick, Ellie thought.
“I tried taking him home with me, but my seven-pound Siamese was a little intimidated. Chowhound’s an absolute beast. The guys at the house aren’t too happy about the loads he leaves in his litterbox. The vic’s parents are supposed to pick him up tomorrow.”
McIlroy took a look around the apartment and shook his head. “I’ll never understand living in a place like this. Some people think the city begins and ends with Manhattan. On Staten Island, this girl could have bought a house and a yard for what she was paying to rent this dump.”
Ellie smiled to herself as she hit the power button to the laptop on Davis’s desk. McIlroy moved into the bathroom, out of her view.
“I quit,” Ellie called out to McIlroy as she scrolled through the recently viewed files on Amy Davis’s computer. “Smoking, I mean. I quit. Well, basically. Almost.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
Ellie heard rustling and guessed McIlroy had moved on to the medicine cabinet. “I know. But then I couldn’t ask what tipped you off.”
McIlroy chuckled. “You had a lighter in that box of junk you hauled into the division this morning. Plus you had that way of fiddling with your pen in the car, like you were jonesing for a smoke.”
“I’ll have to watch that,” she said, making a mental note. “We should take this laptop in to get a better look at the files.”
Ellie quickly rifled through the nightstand, the desk, and the kitchen cabinets doubling as dresser drawers. She inspected the printer on top of the desk, then walked to the bathroom. It wasn’t big enough for two people.
“Do you mind if I see the e-mails again? The ones between Brad and Amy.”
McIlroy handed her the printout.
“Was the original in black and white like these pages, or in color?”
“Color.”
“You’re sure?”
“Does Donald Trump need a haircut? Yeah, I’m sure.”
Ellie flipped open the top of the printer, removed each of the four cartridges of ink inside, and confirmed that three of them were bone dry.
“Those e-mails in her coat weren’t printed from here,” she said. “This is an ink-jet color printer, but she’s out of colored ink. With just a black cartridge, this is essentially a black-and-white printer.”
McIlroy took another look at the printout. Each message bore a time and date. “She said right in that last message that she was home from work.”
“I noticed that too. But that e-mail wasn’t printed here.” She held up a sheet of paper that was left resting on top of the printer. It was a receipt for a pair of shoes Amy had ordered off the Internet the day before she was killed. “See? No color.”
“So you think she lied? Maybe she was at a boyfriend’s place?”
“I don’t think so. There’s a glass of water and an open book on the nightstand. She’s got hair and makeup stuff scattered all over the bathroom. No. She’s definitely been sleeping at home, and there’s no signs of a man around. The e-mail wasn’t printed out from here because she didn’t print it out. Think about it: Why would she need to? She clearly knew where the bar was – she said it was one of her favorite places.”
McIlroy looked excited. “No one can read a thirty-year-old woman like another thirty-year-old woman. Okay, so now tell me what you think it means if Amy Davis wasn’t the one who printed out the e-mail.”
“Well, it might mean there’s some perfectly innocuous explanation.”
“Or?” He obviously wanted to hear her say it.
“Or it might mean that someone else printed out the e-mail and deliberately planted it in her coat pocket so the police wouldn’t miss the fact that Amy had been using FirstDate.”
“And what would that mean?”
“That someone wants us to know he’s out there.”
It meant that, just possibly, Flann McIl-Mulder had much more than a crazy hunch.
ANONYMITY. THE PROMISE OF AN UNREVEALED IDENTITY. Anonymity is appealing. Anonymity provides a shield, and a shield provides safety. Ellie Hatcher and Flann McIlroy were learning, however, that a shield could also be used as a sword.
FirstDate was not like an old-fashioned dating service. There were no background checks and no interviews to determine shared interests and values. The company purported to know nothing about its individual members, let alone who was best suited for whom. In fact, FirstDate’s refusal to suggest potential matches was precisely what attracted the lovelorn, at least those who believed that chemistry and love were too irrational and unpredictable to be crassly calculated by a computer.
FirstDate left the hunt for these elusive objects to the hunters but made the possibility of a successful end to the hunt seem plausible. It did so by providing a virtual meat market with no geographic or temporal limits. With FirstDate, you could hook up with your next love from your desk, with none of the messiness (or potential lawsuits) inherent in dating a coworker. With FirstDate, you could meet someone on a Saturday morning while you surfed the net in your pajamas in front of the television.
But what really attracted customers to FirstDate was the anonymity provided by cyberspace. FirstDate users went by pseudonyms. No addresses, no phone numbers. Not even e-mail addresses. Members contacted each other – at least initially – directly through the FirstDate site, using the FirstDate mailboxes and messaging systems, rather than personal e-mail accounts. The entire system was set up so that careful members could “meet” and get to know any other FirstDate member without ever disclosing their identities.
Anonymity. Safety. Privacy. It all sounded good. Unless, of course, a killer used the anonymity to ensure safety and privacy from the police.
To find the men who contacted Amy Davis through FirstDate, Ellie and Flann needed access to her account. That simple task was proving to be frustratingly difficult.
The many pages on the FirstDate Web site listed only one telephone number, and that was for members of the media. Everyone else was supposed to make contact via e-mail. Ellie called the number, and a public relations representative eventually put her through to a customer service representative. Much to Ellie’s surprise, even after she identified herself and explained the nature of her inquiry, the FirstDate employee informed her that she would need a court order before the company would release any personal information regarding Amy Davis.
“The poor woman is dead,” Ellie protested. “I think if she were here, she’d be more concerned about the police finding the man who killed her than about her privacy.”
There had been an uncomfortable silence, followed by the comment, “We at FirstDate assume that our customers value privacy above all else. We will, however, comply with any lawfully issued court orders.”
Anonymity. Safety. Privacy.
After their efforts with FirstDate petered out, they tried the department’s computer technicians, but were told the staff was too backed up to look at Amy’s laptop. Apparently McIlroy’s suck with the honchos didn’t trickle down to the crime analysts.
“Aah, why bother? Corporations and crooks take all of the techies worth having anyway.” He and Ellie sat side by side at his desk, staring at Davis’s laptop screen. McIlroy picked up the phone. “I know an A.D.A. who will help us get a court order. We’ll force FirstDate to open Davis’s account.”
Ellie waved him off. “That’ll take forever. Let me try a few things.”
She pulled up the log-on page at FirstDate. She typed “MoMAgirl” in the user name box, offered a few random letters for the password box, then hit enter. The computer responded with an error message informing her that the user name and password did not match.
“No shit,” McIlroy said. “You really think you’re going to stumble upon it?”
“Nope.” Ellie clicked on the hypertext beneath the error message: Forgot your password?
Ellie smiled when the next screen appeared. The screen contained three prompts: the e-mail address the member had used to register, the member’s date of birth, and the name of the member’s pet. “For a company that values privacy, they sure haven’t done much to protect it.”
She had seen a few e-mails printed out on Amy’s desk at her apartment. They had all listed an e-mail address in her name at the Museum of Modern Art. She typed that address into the first box on the screen, followed by Amy’s date of birth, followed by “Chowhound.” That was a good cat name. Good and memorable.
She hit enter, mentally crossing her fingers. Then she received another message. Sorry but the information you provided does not match our records.
McIlroy reached again for the phone. “I’m going to make that call to the D.A.’s office now. Good thing I didn’t bring you onto the case for your computer skills.”
“Don’t you dare,” Ellie said, holding up her hand. “And here I thought you were starting to have some faith in me.”
She pulled up the member profile for MoMAgirl. The photograph of Amy Davis was flattering, but with enough shadows to maintain some mystery. Her dark hair was windblown, and she wore sunglasses. She was smiling, seemingly happy to be wherever she was when the picture was taken.
In the box of basic information, next to her photograph, and above a lengthier statement Amy had written about herself, MoMAgirl listed her height (5’3”), hair and eye color (brown and blue, respectively), body type (athletic), ethnicity (white), and age (29).
“Got it,” Ellie said, clicking back to the password reminder page. “Amy wasn’t twenty-nine, but she wanted FirstDate to think she was.”
Ellie typed in the requested information again, this time shaving two years off Amy’s birth year. When she hit the enter key, a message popped up informing her that her FirstDate password had been sent to the member’s e-mail address.
“Call MoMA, please? Ask them how employees check their e-mail from home. And make sure you get her log-in information.”
A few minutes later, McIlroy had the information they needed to access Amy’s work account. Ellie logged in and found eighty-two messages waiting. The most recent was from FirstDate, reminding Amy that her password for the profile MoMAgirl was “Colby.”
“Hot diggity,” Flann said, rubbing his palms together.
They were finally where they needed to be, logged in to Amy Davis’s FirstDate account. Now it was time to find out just who tried to get to know Amy Davis. Anonymously. Safely. Privately.
AT AN INTERNET café in Midtown Manhattan, the man who strangled Amy Davis sipped a cup of coffee and smiled. He smiled because he liked what he saw on the screen of his laptop.
He had been keeping an eye on MoMAgirl’s profile. Until Saturday evening, he had seen the words “active within 24 hours” posted above that pretty picture of hers. Then it morphed to “active within 48 hours.”
Patience, he told himself. Even the stupidest police officer could figure this one out. After all, the unsubtle clue left for them in Amy’s coat pocket had a purpose. Her e-mails would point the police directly to that insipid poseur she met that night at Angel’s Share. He would undoubtedly be of limited intelligence. Even so, sooner or later, he would persuade the cops of his innocence, and they’d start to dig for another suspect.
Now it appeared he had gotten what he was waiting for: another change in the text above MoMAgirl’s picture. “Online now!” the screen declared.
He caught himself smiling, then forced himself to stop. Smiling would bring attention to himself. He didn’t want the attention. Not yet, anyway. Not on him.
He read the words again. Online now. How thrilling. Amy Davis, of course, could not be the computer user who was online as MoMAgirl. He had made sure of that in the alley on Friday night. It had required more of a fight than he anticipated, but he had put her down for good. And now someone had logged into her FirstDate account. The police had made the connection. The game was on.
He was surprised that he didn’t feel at least some guilt. He’d expected some pangs of discomfort. But nothing. In fact, taking out Amy was a piece of delicious karmic balance. More than five years earlier, in a spontaneous act of curiosity, he had Googled the name, wondering what had ever become of Amy Davis. Lo and behold, she was in New York, where he had recently moved himself. It had been a few years since he’d thought about her, but when the moment presented itself, there she was. Still in New York. Still at the museum. Still single and lonely, living in that same apartment. It was as if fate had held her there for him, ready to be used at just the right time.
On further contemplation, he decided there was no reason for him to be surprised at his lack of remorse. The average person didn’t truly care whether other people lived or died; they just convinced themselves they did because they were supposed to. He, however, knew better than to assume any kind of ingrained benevolence. In his entire life, he had known only one truly good human being.
He clicked on the Message Me button. He liked this particular function, which allowed FirstDate users to chat on the screen in real time. Spontaneous, but anonymous.
He stroked the keys lightly with his fingertips, mentally composing the text he wanted to send. He allowed himself to type words in the dialogue box: I know you’re not Amy.
He reread the single sentence, then added another. I know because I strangled the life out of her.
He let his index finger rest – lightly – on the Enter key, exhilarated by the possibility.
Sighing, he deleted the letters, one by one, then closed the messaging box. It wasn’t time. Not yet. He’d had enough personal experience with police to know they had procedures to follow, clues to chase down, and mistakes to make before the fun could begin. Between Amy Davis and Caroline Hunter, they had plenty of work to do. And he had another love-starved woman to stalk.
ELLIE TURNED FIRST to Amy Davis’s work e-mail, reading through all of the messages in her in-box and trash can. The only one related to FirstDate was a solicitation she’d received nearly five weeks earlier, inviting her to enjoy a thirty-day free membership on the service. Amy had left the message in her in-box for a full week before taking FirstDate up on its offer. Ellie shook her head, knowing that if Amy had deleted the message immediately, she would be the one sitting in front of her laptop right now.
Ellie closed Amy’s museum account and moved into her FirstDate account. She clicked through a random sampling of messages.
“She didn’t tell anyone on FirstDate her work e-mail address. She used her first name, and it doesn’t look like she told anyone where she lived.” She opened a few more messages. “Even when things moved beyond e-mails to phone calls, she insisted on calling them. She was being pretty safe.”
“Apparently not safe enough,” McIlroy added dryly.
“Okay, this should be pretty simple.” She directed McIlroy’s attention to the computer screen. “There’s a feature here called Connections. When you click on it, the FirstDate site takes you to a page that keeps track of all the other users Amy had contact with. Then you can click on each one” – she clicked on one of the photographs on the screen – “and it shows when the last contact was with that connection. And, from there, you can click on E-mails to see all the messages to and from that connection. Since she only contacted the online dates through her FirstDate account, we should be able to find all the old messages here. We can compile a list and go from there. What about the first victim? Caroline Hunter?”
“I’ve got a huge stack of notes that her mother had in storage. They just arrived this morning.”
“You called her mother about this already?”
“I told you – it was slightly more than a hunch. If the same man killed both victims, then working the Caroline Hunter case is a legitimate way to solve ours.”
“So what’d you find out?”
“The mom says everyone loved her daughter, she always knew it had to be someone who didn’t know her, that kind of thing. She sent everything, including a list of her profile names and passwords on FirstDate.” He pulled a piece of paper from a file drawer in his desk and placed it in front of Ellie.
“A list?” Ellie asked, scanning the names that filled the entire page.
“Apparently you can be twenty different kinds of women online, and Caroline was trying all of them out as research for her book. Different personalities, different photos, different people. She had so many profiles, she kept them posted on a bulletin board above her desk for reference.”
“Let’s see if we can even access those accounts now. They’ve probably expired.” Ellie moved through several screens on the Internet. “Okay, see how this works. One of her names was new2ny. If you’re just some FirstDate user out there in cyberspace and try to search for new2ny, you can’t find her. Hunter didn’t renew her subscription because – well, you know why. So, new2ny is a dead profile. She can’t be contacted. But dead on FirstDate isn’t really dead. It just means dead to the outside world. New2ny still has an account that can be logged into with the password.”
She typed in the corresponding password on the list, and Caroline Hunter’s smiling face appeared on the screen. According to the profile, new2ny was a twenty-six-year-old fashion publicist who had moved to the city after graduating from Indiana University. In the photograph posted with the profile, Caroline wore her hair pulled back with a paisley headband, making her appear younger than her actual age.
“It’s in the company’s interest if users can go active and inactive with the same user name,” Ellie speculated. “They think they finally found that special someone, so they take themselves off the market. But then when they’re single again, they can hop right back on, using the same online handle. If you’re unsubscribed-”
“Meaning, if you’re not paying.”
“Right. If you’re not paying, you can still log in to your account, but you can’t contact anyone.”
“And other people can’t find you or contact you.”
“Exactly. But that’s fine for our purposes.” Ellie clicked on the link to new2ny’s connections. Hunter had more messages than Amy Davis had accumulated in three weeks, just under this one user name. Depending on the extent of Caroline Hunter’s online activities under her other profiles, they could be looking at several hours of work. Less than half an hour remained in her shift, but Ellie knew her borderline OCD wouldn’t allow her to stop sifting through the messages until she was done. If she got paid for all the free overtime she’d donated to the NYPD in her five years as a cop, she might actually have a savings account.
“We’ll have a list by tomorrow.”
“I’ll call my A.D.A. buddy and give him a heads-up. Late morning?”
“Sure.”
When McIlroy left to make the call on his cell, Ellie didn’t bother asking where he was heading. By her count, it was McIlroy’s third trip to check on Chowhound in the men’s locker room since they returned from Amy’s apartment. The previous visits had been brief, but this time, he didn’t return for nearly twenty minutes.
“We’ve got a fuller morning than we thought,” he announced. “My guy’s willing to help us out, but first we’ve got to do a drop by at FirstDate.”
“Did you tell him we already tried?”
“Yeah, but he wants us to go through the drill in person. Tell them we really mean it about the court order. I called the corporate filings office and finally tracked down an address near Battery Park. Maybe they’ll cave when they see our smiling faces.” He removed his coat from the back of his chair and pulled it on. “I’m heading home. I suggest you do the same.”
Ellie assured him she’d be close behind, but for three additional hours, she remained glued to the computer screen, reading every last message in every last one of Caroline Hunter’s accounts.
Not a single name overlapped. No one person had contacted both Caroline Hunter and Amy Davis, at least not using the same profile name. Maybe her lieutenant had good reason for his concerns. Maybe McIlroy was seeing shadows. Two women dead, both among thousands of other women on FirstDate. Maybe there was no connection between their murders.
She found herself fiddling with the pen she held between her index and middle fingers. She’d been telling herself that quitting was easy – a self-imposed contract to go cold turkey, the only way to go – but all that energy in her right hand made it clear she was still craving a smoke.
She was about to shut down the computer when she took a closer look at the e-mail message on the screen. It was sent to Caroline Hunter, posing as a thirty-two-year-old pediatric resident who went by the handle BrooklynHeidi, by Chef4U, who – according to his profile – was a thirty-eight-year-old who lived on the Upper East Side and would love nothing more than to cook a Julia Child recipe for his perfect date. Ellie took in Chef4U’s photograph, thinking that it would be nice to go home to a man with moppish blond hair, bright blue eyes, and a pot of beef bourguignon. For now, though, all she had to go home to was an empty apartment.
She picked up the thick binder of notes that Caroline Hunter’s mother had sent to Flann and began reading. Interspersed among summaries of dates, quotations from various e-mails, and draft chapter outlines, Ellie found random notes jotted in the margins – Caroline’s miscellaneous reminders to herself about hair appointments, phone calls, and grocery lists.
From what Ellie could piece together, the book was shaping up to be less about the men Caroline met online than about her own self-discovery. By creating different personalities on the Internet, she experienced a kind of independence she’d never felt before. At the same time, these desperate, fleeting encounters with men who shared no common social connection made her feel profoundly alone in the world.
Having read Caroline’s scribbled words, Ellie somehow felt lonelier as well. Caroline Hunter was smart, reflective, and had something original and provocative to say. She should still be alive. Ellie closed the notebook and finally resolved to go home.
THAT EVENING, IN A WOOD-FRAMED RANCH HOUSE IN WICHITA, Kansas, Roberta Hatcher was doing exactly what she did every night. She was watching her shows on a console television set and pouring herself a vodka on the rocks from the bottle of Smirnoff that rested on the tray table next to her reclining chair.
When she married Jerry Hatcher thirty-five years ago, she never expected to be a widow. No one ever thinks about those possibilities when they are young. Even if she had considered the fact that one of them would have to go first, and the statistical likelihood that it would be Jerry, she certainly never would have anticipated that she’d be left a widow so early, with a daughter just starting high school and a son who barely managed to finish.
It had been more than fifteen years since her husband died. That’s how she always worded it: Jerry had simply died. The newspapers and the police department said Jerry shot himself. That was the official account, so of course that’s what they said.
Ellie, however, always made sure that her father was the object of the sentence, not the subject. At first, Ellie insisted on saying that her father “was murdered.” Over time, though, even Ellie tired of the reaction those words triggered – looks of sympathy for a fatherless girl of questionable mental health. Over time, Ellie adopted a tamer version of her father’s death. He “was killed,” she usually said.
Last year, when the national news briefly cared about the long-delayed capture of the College Hill Strangler, Ellie had hauled out the M-word again. I truly believe my father was murdered by William Summer. She repeated that same sentence to whatever reporters would listen. She willingly played the role she’d come to despise at the age of fourteen – the haunted fatherless child. She even spun the story of a young female cop following in her father’s footsteps, as if he had encouraged her in that direction. As if it weren’t his son that traditional, conventional Jerry had always pushed to be a cop. As if Jerry had even noticed his little daughter desperately offering her own theories about the killer named for his preferred stalking territory in the otherwise quiet College Hill neighborhood south of WSU.
Ellie didn’t care whether the papers got her story right. She only cared about one truth. Ellie swallowed her pride, played the game, and did everything she could to get the news, the city, the police department – anyone – to take another look at Jerry’s death.
At the time, she insisted that she was doing all of this for herself. According to Ellie, she needed to see that son of a bitch William Summer – the man finally connected to the College Hill Strangler pseudonym – take full account for his victims, including Detective Jerry Hatcher. She needed to see her father vindicated.
But Roberta knew there was more to it. Her daughter rarely did anything for herself, and this campaign to declare her father’s death another College Hill murder was no different. Ellie was doing it for her family. That is what Ellie had done for nearly as long as Roberta could remember – taken care of her and Jess.
Ellie knew that, more than ever, Roberta could use that money from Jerry’s life insurance and pension, long ago denied to her. Suicides, Roberta had been informed, were not in the line of duty. And death by suicide was what they called it.
Her husband was found in the driver’s seat of his car, pulled to the side of a country road north of Wichita. A single bullet was discharged from his service revolver, into the roof of his mouth, through his brain and skull, and lodged into the roof of his Mercury Sable. Gunpowder residue was found on Jerry’s hands, in a pattern consistent with a self-inflicted gun wound, she was told. He left no note, she pointed out repeatedly. That wasn’t uncommon, the department’s shrink explained. Jerry had, after all, been raised Catholic.
Jerry had also been depressed, the department emphasized. And obsessed. And disenchanted. On these points, Roberta could not argue. Her husband had certainly changed from the man she knew twenty years before his death. She, Jerry, their marriage, and their family had all begun to change on February 2, 1978, when he was called out to what became one of the city’s most notorious crime scenes.
The dead were a single mother and her two children. All three of the victims were bound, blindfolded, and strangled. Semen on a rag found near the twelve-year-old daughter’s body suggested that the killer got to the young girl last and -
Roberta tried to block out the details of the scene as she took another sip of vodka. Unfortunately, the images – and those from the murders that would come later – were far too ingrained in her memory. She could only imagine how they affected her daughter. Little Ellie, sneaking all the time into that damn basement to be a part of her father’s hobby. Roberta should have insisted on a padlock.
In theory, Jerry should have stopped working the case when the Wichita Police Department disbanded the College Hill Strangler task force a few years after his last known kill. When the trademark communications and murders appeared to stop, everyone assumed the man was either dead or in prison.
But not Roberta’s husband. The files, the photographs, a killer’s self-aggrandizing letters to police and the media – the College Hill Strangler investigation itself – continued to decorate tabletops, nightstands, and every surface of her basement walls for another decade. After Jerry’s death, the department seized it all. All that Roberta and her children were left with were the memories – of Jerry, and of the case he could never put behind him.
After all these hours of all these nights over all these years, she honestly didn’t know what to believe about the facts surrounding her husband’s death. But she knew that, regardless of who pulled the trigger on Jerry’s gun, William Summer was responsible for what happened to her and her family.
The repeat she was watching of a sitcom about nothing ended, and the network moved on to a drama about police officers who solved crimes by analyzing physical evidence. Roberta changed the channel with a click of the remote control, then took another sip of vodka.
She glanced at the digital clock that sat on the top of the television. Nine o’clock. Pretty soon Ellie would be calling to check in on her. Just as she always did.
THAT SAME NIGHT, in New Iberia, Louisiana, another mother was thinking of her daughter. Evelyn Davis sat on a small settee in her art studio, next to her daughter’s best friend, Suzanne Mouton.
On further reflection, Evelyn thought, perhaps Suzanne was no longer Amy’s best friend. In fact, Suzanne may never have been Amy’s best friend at all. Suzanne had been part of Amy’s group in high school. That much she was sure of. She remembered how the other members of the group always loved to call this particular girlfriend by her full name. Suzanne – pronounced the Acadian way, Susahn – Mouton. It did have a very nice sound to it. But Suzanne Mouton had always just been one of the crowd, not one of the two or three girls who took shifts being inseparable from Amy.
The reasons Evelyn was close to Suzanne now, nearly fifteen years later, had more to do with the fact that Suzanne had been the only one of Amy’s friends to stay in Louisiana. And when Suzanne’s own mother died when she was a junior at LSU, Evelyn Davis had stepped in to help her get through it.
Amy’s trips home had already begun dwindling back in college. At the time Evelyn assumed that her daughter was just too busy with her classes at Colby to fly all the way down from Maine. But then Amy’s visits became briefer, even during breaks.
Evelyn couldn’t say she was surprised that she and her only child had grown apart. Amy had always been her father’s daughter. Like her father, she would have preferred to live in Houston. Or in San Francisco or New York for that matter. Anywhere but what she called “da buy-you.” She worked hard to avoid picking up a regional accent, sure it would hamper her once she finally escaped the land of sugar cane and gators.
And her hatred of Louisiana had always translated into resentment toward her mother. Amy knew that Evelyn was the one who insisted that the family stay in the only state she had ever known. It had been a condition when she married Hampton. Evelyn had insisted, ironically, because her own mother needed her.
Something had begun to change in Amy, however, just in the last few years. Possibly it was because she was finally living in a city of her choosing. Or perhaps it was the job at the museum, which Amy loved so much. Evelyn, after all, was the parent who had encouraged her interest in art. Or maybe it was simply the process of growing up and realizing that every story, every person, and every marriage has two sides.
But now all that was moot. Evelyn had to pack a bag, fly to New York, and return her daughter’s body to the town she always hated.
“Thank you so much, Suzanne, for being here.” The tissue that Evelyn held was shredded to pieces.
“Of course I’m here.” Suzanne handed Evelyn a new tissue and tossed the other in a wastebasket. “Are you sure you don’t want me to fly to New York with you? I could make J.D. watch the kids for a few days.”
“I’ll be fine. Hampton’s flying up there from Dallas.”
Suzanne was silent, but her expression said enough. She felt sorry for Evelyn – not just because of what happened to Amy up north, but because Amy’s father couldn’t cut short the deal he was brokering in Dallas to mourn with his wife. Evelyn had learned not to complain. She, after all, was the one who insisted that he keep his law firm’s Lafayette office as home base. Travel was part of his life. He knew it was hard, he explained – for both of them – but it just didn’t make sense for him to spend a day traveling home, just to leave again for New York. They’d meet tomorrow at LaGuardia instead.
“If I tell you what I need to bring, Suzanne, can you pack a bag for me?” Evelyn asked. “I just can’t bring myself to leave this room. I shouldn’t have changed it. She should have had her bedroom. Her things should still be here. An artist’s studio – what vanity.”
Suzanne did her best to console her, but they both knew there was nothing one can say to a mother who has to bury her child. Her only child. Her baby, strangled in an alley and left beside a Dumpster like garbage.
“How could this have happened?” Evelyn was sobbing now into her tissue. “She was always so careful. Ever since she left for college, she was always so very, very careful. She was in her thirties, and still-”
Suzanne made soothing noises and patted Evelyn gently on the back as she cried. People overused the word ironic, but Amy Davis becoming a murder victim was indeed ironic. A statistic. Another woman killed while walking alone at night in an area where others would say that single women ought not walk alone. It was ironic because Amy had always been, as her mother said, so very, very careful. She was so careful about letting men get to know her that she was still walking alone at night.
“All these years, Suzanne, she could never trust anyone. Maybe if that awful business had never happened. Maybe she wouldn’t have been in the city. Or at least she wouldn’t have been alone.”
Evelyn knew that Suzanne, of all people, remembered the incident to which she referred. Amy had learned her lesson. She had to be careful. Careful with men. Careful with trust. Careful with the unpredictability of human emotions. These were valuable lessons, but Amy had learned them too young, and she had probably overlearned them. Plenty of women were unmarried after thirty, but Amy had never even had a serious relationship. She was too careful, too untrusting, too unwilling to be vulnerable.
Evelyn’s crying had subsided and her breathing was more regular now. She stood, straightened her sweater set, and began to gather the things she would need for her trip. “I will pack my own bag, but I do need one very huge favor. Can you make room in your home for a cat? He’s a Persian. I did my best to lobby Hamp, but he’s allergic.”
FIRSTDATE’S CORPORATE OFFICES WERE HOUSED ON THE EIGHTEENTH floor of a midsize tower on Rector and Greenwich streets in the city’s financial district. A red-haired receptionist stood guard behind a sleek black desk that rested between the elevator and a set of double glass doors. Through the glass, Ellie spotted a dozen or so workers clicking away on keyboards in cookie-cutter cubicles on the floor, with a few private offices scattered along the perimeter.
The redhead wasn’t much of a guard. She hunched in her high-backed chair, twirling a lock of wavy hair with her fingers, speaking animatedly into her cell phone. A couple of light taps of Ellie’s nails against the receptionist’s desktop triggered nothing but a nod. A flash of her detective’s shield finally caught the woman’s attention.
“I’ll call you right back.” The redhead flipped the phone shut, straightened her posture, and asked how she could help. McIlroy asked to speak with someone who might be able to assist them with some profile names that had come up in an investigation.
“I’m sorry. We have a firm policy against disclosing information about our users.”
Apparently all FirstDate employees received the same training.
“We were hoping to talk to someone about that,” McIlroy said. “We certainly understand the reasons for your policy, but this is a little unusual. Our case is a double homicide. Two women are dead, and they were both active on FirstDate. I’m sure you can see the urgency.”
The receptionist’s eyes widened at the mention of a double homicide, a description that wasn’t precisely accurate since the two victims were killed an entire calendar year apart. But people mislead for a reason. Ellie watched the woman’s fingers move toward a directory of telephone extensions that was taped next to the telephone.
“I’m really not sure how I can help you-”
“We just need to talk to someone who might be in the position to look up a few names for us,” Ellie interrupted. She and McIlroy had agreed in advance that Ellie would play the bad cop if necessary to get to the company CEO, Mark Stern.
“There’s only one person I can think of who might have the authority-”
“Why don’t you go ahead and call that person?” McIlroy asked.
“He has a very busy schedule. Can you, like, call later to schedule an appointment?”
Ellie stepped in. “If we have to get a court order and FirstDate ends up on the front page of the New York Daily Post as a stalking ground for serial killers, I suspect Mr. Stern will want to know who turned us away when we tried to make a quiet courtesy call. Is this the name I should give him when he asks?” She held up the nameplate that rested on the desk.
As it turned out, looks really couldn’t kill. Once Ellie and the receptionist came to that mutual realization, a set of manicured pink nails tapped a four-digit extension into a phone, and, after a terse conversation, Ellie and McIlroy were escorted to a corner office.
“Mr. Stern, these are the detectives who wanted to speak with you.”
The chief executive officer of FirstDate lived up to one’s expectations of a man who made his living selling the romantic fantasy of realistic love. He was probably approaching forty and wore a platinum wedding band, a conservative navy blue suit, and a not-so-conservative lime green tie. His hair was on the long side for an executive, with the right amount of gray at the temples. Message: I was young once myself but found the right girl, fell in love, and remained loyal and happy. The silver-framed photograph of his beautiful wife in her beautiful wedding dress, placed prominently on his desk, wasn’t exactly subtle, but selling love, after all, was how Mark Stern made his money.
McIlroy handled the introductions, then got to the matter at hand. “We’re investigating the murder of two women – similar ages, killed precisely one year apart. Both women were killed outside of their homes, apparently by strangers. Both women were using FirstDate.”
Stern nodded a few times, taking in the information. “That sounds quite tragic, detectives, but I’m not sure how I can possibly help you.”
“We have a list of the men who contacted our victims through your service. We need your help to track them down.”
“If you have a list of suspects, I’m not certain what more I can add. Checking them out sounds like police work to me.”
“A list of user names,” Ellie corrected. “We have a list of FirstDate profile names and need to know the identities behind them. Coming up with that list, and figuring out that you’re the one with our answers – that was our police work.”
Stern smiled, more at Ellie than at McIlroy. “I’ll presume that you accessed the accounts lawfully.”
“We did.”
“And you have an entire list of users who contacted both of these poor women before they died?”
Ellie interrupted. “The two poor women had names, Mr. Stern: Caroline Hunter and Amy Davis. And, no, we don’t have a list of men who contacted both of them, but we do have a list of men who contacted either of them. And as you know, a single person can use multiple user names. In fact, Caroline Hunter was using your service to do precisely that. We need the names so we can look for overlap between the lists, among other things.”
“Among other things? You mean things like prying into the backgrounds of our users to see who might seem murderous?”
Ellie gave him her best sardonic smile. “We’ll cross-reference it with registered sex offenders, mental patients, gun records. Sounds like you know police work after all.”
“Let me see if I can save the two of you some time. From what I gather, you have two murder victims who were both FirstDate customers, and so you assume there must be a connection. That’s a logical conclusion only if you assume that the use of my service is unusual. Isn’t that how these things work? You discover two victims use the same tiny dry cleaner, and you track down that lead?”
Neither detective spoke, but Stern caught the glance between them.
“Okay, so here’s where the logic falls apart. FirstDate’s no longer the corner dry cleaner. We have tens of thousands of customers in the New York metropolitan area alone.” Stern was in full-blown sales-speak now. “People are busy. Dating at work’s a no-no. A service like ours has become as common as joining a gym. What you see as a coincidence between two women is yet another indication of just how common FirstDate has become in the lives of city singles. It’s no more coincidental than if both of these women read the New Yorker or bought groceries at D’Agostino’s.”
Ellie gave McIlroy a look that said, Get a load of this guy.
“We have more than coincidence,” McIlroy argued. “The killer left us a message.”
The bluntness of the assertion caught Stern off guard. “I certainly wish we could have started the conversation there. The person who killed these women contacted you?”
McIlroy clarified the nature of the so-called message: the e-mail found in Amy Davis’s coat pocket, printed from somewhere other than her apartment. As Ellie heard the explanation through a stranger’s ears, she realized how tenuous their theory was.
So did Stern, crossing his arms. “I’m sorry, officers-”
“Detectives,” Ellie clarified.
“Of course. Detectives. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I really can’t help you.”
“Can’t? Or won’t?”
“Both. With all frankness, it sounds like you’re grasping at straws. And, under those circumstances, I can’t just let you comb through our records at will. Now, if you come up with individual names, and can offer me some good reason why you need the information, maybe we’d be in a different boat-”
“Maybe?” Ellie asked. “I don’t think you understand how this works. We’ve got a city of eight million people, and we’ve winnowed our attention down to these few. And we’ve given you a reason-”
“But not a reason for looking into the lives of every single person on that list. Even if I treat your theory generously, there is at most one person on that list who deserves your attention. The rest deserve privacy, which is one of the most important assets FirstDate provides. If our customers can’t trust us, we won’t have many clients. And our service only works if we have a vast and diverse clientele.”
“Trust? You want to talk about trust?” Ellie pulled two crime scene photos from a manila envelope. “Caroline Hunter and Amy Davis chose to trust. They took a leap of faith. They put themselves out in front of a world of strangers because your company lures people in with the potential of companionship. Now they’re dead, and you’re saying you won’t help us. You won’t help them.”
“I’d like to help, but I was hoping you’d understand my dilemma. I’m sorry that you don’t.”
“You’re sorry, all right.” Ellie muttered the comment under her breath as she turned to leave. McIlroy followed, but Stern stopped them.
“Oh, and detectives. I hope you realize the prudence of keeping this theory you’re working on quiet. Without more, you might want to be reluctant to send a good percentage of the city’s dating population into chaos.”
“You mean you don’t want any media coverage sending your company’s profits down the tubes.”
Stern, still in diplomat mode, smiled again. “If you’re able to confirm this theory, or find out that one man knew both of these women, please call my lawyers and I’ll be happy to help. Until that happens, if I hear anything further on the subject, I think the phone call to the lawyers will be my own.”
On the way to the reception area, Flann suddenly turned on his heel, leaving Ellie in the hallway outside the closed door. He returned a few minutes later.
“You went back in to apologize for my behavior?”
“Sorry. Just trying to smooth the waves, in case we need him later.”
“Don’t apologize, Flann. It’s exactly what you should have done. Did you lay it on thick and juicy? Call me the B-word? Tell him you can’t believe you’re stuck working with some quota queen dyke?”
“You’re having way too much fun with this,” Flann said, smiling.
On their way to the elevators, the redheaded receptionist asked the detectives if they had gotten the information they needed. Unlike her boss, she sounded concerned.
“Yeah. We found out that Mr. Stern doesn’t care that two of the women using his site were murdered,” Ellie said, wondering if she was relishing the bad cop casting a little too much.
The woman looked disappointed, even saddened. Before Ellie walked out the door, she took another look at the receptionist’s nameplate. Christine Conboy. The name of one person at FirstDate who might give a rat’s ass.
THE SUPREME COURT BUILDING AT 60 CENTRE STREET HAD SEEN its fair share of notorious trials – Lenny Bruce, Son of Sam, a motley crew of rap stars, mafiosos, and Wall Street crooks to mark the passing of eras in New York City. In a small courtroom at the back of the second floor that afternoon, the show was considerably more modest – the trial of a bouncer accused of selling Ecstacy out of a Chelsea nightclub.
Ellie and McIlroy sat two rows behind the prosecution’s counsel table and listened patiently while the testifying police officer walked through the chain of custody of the drugs that were seized from the club’s back office. When the court recessed for a break, the prosecutor leaned across the railing behind him to confer with the detectives.
“Who’s the new partner?” he asked. His Asian face was round, almost cherubic, and he smiled at Ellie. It was a warm, friendly smile, and she returned it with a firm handshake.
“Ellie Hatcher, and I’m not a full partner. Just on temporary assignment.”
“Jeffrey P. Yong. And I’m not a full prosecutor. I just play one on TV.”
“A word to the wise. Never listen to a word Jeffrey P. Yong says. The man’s a born liar. A thief, too – has about three grand of my hard-earned salary.”
“That’s Flann’s way of saying I’m a better poker player than he is, which isn’t saying much.”
“You’ve got a regular poker game?”
“Does Howard Stern enjoy a lap dance?”
Yong, apparently accustomed to Flann’s rhetorical questions, didn’t acknowledge the remark. “More like a poker game for the irregular, but, yeah, something like that.”
“What’s up with all the chitchat?” Flann asked. “Jeff usually gets business out of the way before starting in with his bad jokes.”
“If I have such a tell, why do you keep losing your money to me?”
“Why are you avoiding the subject of our court order?”
The frustration in Yong’s exhale was obvious. “I found a note on my chair at lunch.”
Ellie knew to leave the talking to Flann.
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“Nope. Not good. Did you see the people at FirstDate this morning?”
“As you asked us.”
“You get anywhere?”
“To the magical land of the pissing match. He told us to pound sand and keep our mouths shut. We made clear there was more to come. So what do you need from us for the subpoena?”
“Tell me again how you think FirstDate can help you?” The look on Yong’s face read problem.
Flann walked Yong through the victims’ shared connection to FirstDate and the e-mails he found in Davis’s purse. “We looked in their FirstDate accounts already. Lots of men, lots of messages. We need to know who those men are.”
“Any common link between the two of them? One man who was e-mailing them both?”
“Not that we know of. But if our guy’s smart, he’s signing up under different user names to hide his trail. That’s why we need to see what’s lying behind the user names.”
“Except that the printout of the message would suggest that he wants you on his trail.”
“Why do I feel like I’m getting cross-examined?”
“Because I know what FirstDate’s attorneys are going to argue when their business is ruined and they sue everyone involved with this subpoena. Please tell me that you have something else. What did the department’s computer wizards say?”
“That I should get in the back of the line. Besides, what do you expect them to tell us? That the Internet’s a wonderful thing but with potential dangers? That bad people can use it to commit all sorts of nefarious deeds that we’re not sophisticated enough to track?” Flann’s tone was growing increasingly exasperated. “You didn’t sound concerned about any of this yesterday. You said to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, then come down here for our subpoena.”
Yong sighed and placed one hand on top of his shiny black hair. “That was before the note on my chair.”
“I was wondering when you’d get back to that.”
“The note was from my unit supervisor, and the message apparently came down from above – I can’t authorize a subpoena until you have a suspect.”
Flann threw him a skeptical look. “You’re kidding me, right? Did you miss the part where I explained that the reason we need a subpoena is to help us identify a suspect?”
Yong shook his head. The smile was gone now. “I know. It’s bullshit. It sucks. It ain’t right. But having me as your poker partner’s not doing you any good on this one. I’m just a cog in the machine – a tiny, powerless cog who knows what a note left on my chair during trial means. I’m sorry, man. If I’d had time, I would have called to save you the trip.”
“How would that kind of message hit your supervisor so fast?”
“I don’t know, but you’ve pissed off someone with some serious suck.”
“Your office has taken off bigger fish than the president of some fledgling Internet company.”
Yong looked just as stymied as McIlroy. “I thought the same thing. I did a quick Google search to see if Stern was a real player, but I turned up five other guys named Mark Stern before I hit anything on him. I only had so much time to snoop – given this.” He gestured to the courtroom. “If it’s any consolation, when my trial’s out, I can sniff around and see where the strings were pulled in my office.”
“And then what?”
“And then you’ll know.”
“We need those names. We need to know who contacted our vics before they died. That’s what we need.”
“Then you need to find someone above you to go to someone above me, or you need to find another way to get a suspect.”
“And what if I’m convinced that the only way to get a suspect is to know what FirstDate knows?”
“I guess you’d have to find another way to get that information. Maybe an insider to do it for you, without the government’s hands on it. But I’m not the one who said that.”
The judge reclaimed his seat at the bench, and Flann lowered his voice to a whisper.
“What happens if I call a contact in the press? Let the story leak – the possible connection between the two women, and a company that won’t help the city’s finest catch a killer.”
“I doubt any reporter would run it with what you’ve got – even for you. And if they did, Mark Stern would probably sue the paper, along with the police department and the two of you. I’d strongly recommend against it,” Yong deadpanned. The judge cleared his throat and threw them an impatient look. “Sorry, guys. Gotta go.”
Following Flann out of the courtoom, Ellie was so dejected at leaving without a subpoena that she barely noticed the man sitting in the back row. She assumed he was there for Yong’s case – a friend or relative of the defendant.
She was wrong.
Charlie Dixon was there to make sure of two things. First, that Jeffrey Yong had gotten the message. And second, that the message made its way to the city detectives asking questions about FirstDate. Dixon couldn’t make out the entire conversation, but he noticed that the detectives left the courtroom empty-handed. He was pleased, at least for the moment.
THEY WERE GREETED AT THE PRECINCT BY A CIVILIAN AIDE, probably just out of high school, holding a plastic cup of soda the size of a bucket.
“There’s a couple people waiting here to see Detective McIlroy. I think they’re your victim’s parents. Something about a cat?” He gestured to an attractive couple sitting quietly on a bench down the hall.
Hampton Davis was tall and tan, with every black hair combed neatly in place. His wife, Evelyn, was petite with a light brown, chin-length bob. They both wore suits – his navy, hers powder blue.
McIlroy handled the introductions. “Mr. and Mrs. Davis, I’m Flann McIlroy. We spoke on the phone this weekend. This is Detective Hatcher. She’s also working on your daughter’s case.”
McIlroy led Ellie and the couple to an interview room adjacent to the homicide bureau. The four of them waited in awkward silence to see who would speak first. When Flann finally offered his condolences, Ellie could tell that although he’d no doubt spoken some variant of the same words many times before, he was still uncomfortable with them. He appeared more at ease once he began laying out his theory that Amy’s murder may have been related to her use of an Internet dating site.
“There must be some mistake,” Hampton said. “Our daughter would never use a service like that. She was extremely cautious with men she didn’t know.”
“Amy was being cautious,” Ellie vouched. “The service she used is anonymous, and she was very careful not to give out her last name or address.”
Hampton shook his head. “If you found her listed with one of those companies, then someone else put her there. I’ve read stories about that. Some crazy person gets obsessed and wreaks havoc on a person’s life by posting all kinds of nonsense on the Internet.”
“Amy’s had problems like that before,” Evelyn interrupted. A northeasterner would have described the woman’s accent as southern, but having been raised in Kansas, Ellie knew that not all southern accents were identical. This woman’s cadence was new to Ellie – southern, but not in a way she’d heard before, almost with a touch of Brooklyn thrown in like a hint of cayenne pepper.
“Back in high school, a boy in town wouldn’t leave her alone. It went on for months. Don’t get me wrong. Amy brought a little of it on herself. I guess this boy changed some grades for her. She was under a lot of pressure. She really wanted to go out of state for college, somewhere nice. Somewhere away from home.”
Hampton placed a hand gently on her forearm. “Evelyn, the detectives don’t need to hear this right now.”
Evelyn gave her husband a firm look. “What I’m telling the detectives is that Amy learned an early lesson. This boy I’m talking about kept calling her and writing her letters, even after she left for Colby. Then when she came home for Christmas break, he showed up at the mall where she was shopping. You can call her friend Suzanne Mouton to verify. She’ll tell you. The whole experience was just awful.”
Ellie realized that Evelyn’s story was going nowhere, but took down the number anyway because she understood why this was important to Amy’s mother. Evelyn wanted to talk about her daughter in a personal way. She wanted to tell the detectives about a time when she knew what her daughter’s fears were, when she was familiar even with the bad things her daughter did as a consequence. To feel close again, Evelyn had to go back to Amy’s high school years, when Amy had apparently permitted a troubled boy to alter her transcript so she could escape the bayou.
When his wife finished, Hampton Davis cleared his throat. “You’ll have to forgive us if we seem to dwell on the past,” he said, looking at Evelyn. “But the experience my wife’s talking about was a horrible one. I ultimately had to go to court for a restraining order. The boy was actually arrested after the incident at the mall, and then – well, let’s just say things got worse from there. Amy blamed herself for years.”
“Our point,” Evelyn insisted, “is that our daughter would not have agreed to go on dates with strangers.”
“I’m very sorry,” McIlroy said, “but we’ve confirmed that Amy did sign herself up for an account with this service. In fact, she had a date that very night with a man she’d met online.”
“Well, then, that’s the man you should be looking at,” Hampton insisted.
“That was one of the first things we did,” McIlroy said patiently. “We were able to confirm his alibi, but we’re continuing to do everything we can-”
“No,” Hampton said, slapping the table. “You’ll have to check him out again. I refuse to believe that Amy would agree to meet men this way.”
Ellie tried to help by explaining how common it was for women Amy’s age to use services like FirstDate, but her efforts only served to upset the couple further.
Hampton cut off the conversation abruptly. “Unless you require anything else of us, Detectives, we’ll thank you for your time and let you get back to Amy’s case.”
Ellie and McIlroy walked the Davises out, pausing briefly at the men’s locker room, from which McIlroy retrieved the makeshift carrier he had fashioned for Chowhound. As Ellie watched Hampton take the awkward cardboard box from McIlroy, she couldn’t help but feel that these people were owed something more.
She heard the words come out of her mouth before she’d decided to speak them. “We’re going to find him.”
JOHNNY’S BAR ON Greenwich Avenue is roughly the size of a typical suburban closet – the walk-in kind with enough room to accommodate the typical suburban wardrobe. In Greenwich Village, however, people are not typical, and Johnny’s Bar has just the right dimensions for a kick-ass watering hole.
Ellie wasn’t sure how she even knew the bar’s name. The sign out front read Bar. She arrived forty minutes after the time she told Jess to expect her. By her brother’s standards, that wasn’t the same as being forty minutes late. It meant Ellie would have to sit alone for another fifteen. But she’d learned over the years that she needed to be the one to arrive first. Jess couldn’t be relied upon to wait. Jess could not be relied upon at all.
The woman behind the bar was called Josie. Josie had long curly black hair, pulled into a giant floppy knot at the top of her head. She wore a black tank top and jeans, accessorized with tattoos and piercings. She managed to look comfortable perched on top of the counter, her feet resting on the bar. She argued with a regular about whether it was finally time for Steinbrenner to go. Johnny’s was the kind of place where people talked baseball even with snow on the ground.
It was also the kind of place where a bartender like Josie remembered an occasional customer like Ellie – as well as her drink.
“Johnny Walker, right?”
“Black. On the rocks.”
Josie scooted off the counter and reached for a bottle on the top shelf. “We don’t get too many people in here for the good stuff. Hey Frank, Hatcher here is a full-blown detective on the NYPD.”
“Prettiest cop I ever saw,” Frank grumbled, turning his attention to the television. A football game of some kind was playing.
“Your brother’s late again?” Josie was pouring.
“No, I’m early.” Josie turned back to the game, leaving Ellie alone with her thoughts after a long two days.
Ellie let the whiskey warm her chest and stomach, untangling the knots she’d felt since Evelyn and Hampton Davis arrived at the precinct. They were good people, but, like a lot of parents, they knew nothing about their adult child. They still saw her as a precocious little girl, an ingenue just out of college – not as a woman who was already lying about her age on an Internet dating site. They were naive enough to believe their daughter would be safe forever. They thought nothing evil could ever get to her – all because she learned a few lessons in caution from a bad ex-boyfriend after high school.
What the parents from Louisiana didn’t realize is that most women have a similar story somewhere in their past – a boyfriend who can’t let go, a classmate who sits too close, a coworker who insists despite all reason that he’s more than just a friend. Bumping into a creep early in life back in Louisiana simply made Amy Davis a little smarter, a little sooner. It didn’t make her safe. Nothing does.
But Ellie could identify with the Davises’ grief. Since she was fourteen years old, she had known how hard it could be to accept the death of a family member at the hands of a monster. For more than fifteen years, she lived with the belief that her father had been murdered, without possessing even an image of the face of the man she hated, let alone a suitable punishment. She had her theories – a white guy, probably in his early twenties for his first kill in 1978. Rigid. Ordered. Bossy, compensating for insecurities. A wannabe cop. One of her reasons for leaving Kansas was her inability to pass a man of a certain age and demeanor without wondering, Is that the man who shot my father? To lose a child that way – she could not begin to imagine.
McIlroy had handled the parents the way a homicide detective should. He was compassionate but professional. He gave them the cat they had come for and made sure they knew the department was giving the case its highest attention. But Ellie had crossed a line when she spoke the words you were never supposed to utter: We’re going to find him. McIlroy wasn’t happy about it. He made that much clear after the Davises left.
But Ellie had no regrets, despite the assurances she handed to McIlroy. The Davises might not have believed it, and perhaps neither did McIlroy. Ellie, however, was sure of it. When she made that promise to Amy Davis’s parents, she made a promise to herself.
Ellie had just ordered a second Johnny Walker when Jess walked in. She and her brother had little in common. He was brunette, tall, and wiry – hard and dark against her soft and light. They often joked that the Wichita hospital had switched at least one of them at birth.
“Knocking them back again, baby sis?”
“You know me. I’ve got a problem with the booze.”
They both knew she didn’t. Jess might, but they rarely mentioned it. As much as they joked about the hospital switch, the one thing Jess and Ellie had in common was that they were clearly their parents’ children. Ellie looked like her mom and acted like her dad. The opposite was true of Jess, and Mom’s behavioral genes did not mix well with alcohol.
“You picking up the tab?”
“For a little while at least.” Ellie glanced at her watch.
“God bless the NYPD.” Jess asked Josie for a shot of bourbon with a bourbon chaser and took a seat next to Ellie.
“How’s life as a crime fighter?”
Ellie smiled at her brother. He was so predictable.
“What’s going on, Jess?”
“Nothing. I can’t get with my sister every once in a while for a drink and some chat?”
In addition to being predictable, Jess was also frustrating.
“We’ll chat after you tell me what’s up.”
“You still got that extra key?”
Ellie sighed heavily and shook her head. “What happened to your apartment?”
She used the second-person possessive pronoun loosely. Other than a couple of guitars, a pair of work boots, and a gym bag of clothes, very little in this world belonged to Jess Hatcher. The last she heard, though, Jess had a place to crash in Williamsburg.
“My buddy needed to find a roommate who actually paid some rent.”
“Funny how that works. And the job?” Against her better judgment, Ellie had helped Jess with yet another employment placement, this time as a short-order cook at a diner in the Garment District, not too far from the Midtown South precinct, where Ellie once worked a beat. The seventy-year-old Swede who ran the place always had a weakness for Ellie. Apparently not enough to hang on to the likes of Jess.
“The old man had a few too many morning shifts for me. It’s hard to fry up the bacon at six when you’re frying up a little rock and roll till four.” He threw in a little air guitar for comedic flair.
“It wouldn’t be that hard on you if you did your gig, went to work, then slept later.” Ellie fished the spare key from her purse. She always carried it when Jess asked to meet her.
“Chat time now?” Jess tucked the key in the front pocket of his blue jeans. He gave Ellie the same boyish smile she had been looking up to as long as she could remember. It was the grin of a bashful chipmunk, so out of place on Jess’s lined, unshaven face.
“I’ve got a murder case.”
The shy grin faded. “I thought you were ‘quite happy solving your everyday garden variety felonies.’”
It was the line she gave Jess and her mother whenever they worried that she didn’t have the psychological makeup to stick it out as a cop. For completely different reasons, it was also the line she used to give Bill, her ex-boyfriend, to settle his completely separate concerns. Bill wondered how long she was going to work her job. Her family wondered how long it would take before Ellie’s job started working her.
“I was happy. I am happy. But working a homicide – this is different. I stood yesterday in a woman’s apartment, reading her mail, smelling her clothing, touching the contents of her medicine cabinet, all the while knowing that someone out there killed her. And then her parents came to the precinct to pick up their daughter’s cat.”
“You met her parents?”
Ellie ignored the question. “Another woman died exactly one year earlier. There are some commonalities.”
“You’re working a serial case? Ever dawn on you that might not be the best idea?”
“I’ll be fine. This is important, Jess. Some guy is out there right now, picking his next victim.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to be the one to stop him. You really feel like going down that road?”
Ellie knew what road he was talking about. “I won’t be like that. You can be a good cop without cutting yourself off from every other part of life.”
“And exactly what else do you have going in your life right now, El? You dumped Bill a year ago and have no prospects in sight.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“You know what I mean.” Jess gave her two months of healing time after she moved out of Bill’s apartment but had since been trying to throw Ellie back into the dating world. They both knew the efforts were ridiculous, since most of Jess’s friends had the kinds of backgrounds that could land her in the middle of an I.A. investigation. And never mind that Jess couldn’t commit to anyone other than his fellow band members.
“Besides, what happens if you actually find the guy? What happens when a man who kills women for sport gets an eyeful of you? Have you thought about that?”
She hadn’t, but she also did not want to. She had imagined her father’s death too many times. She had pictured him, forced at gunpoint behind the wheel of his car for his own staged suicide. Had he known he was about to die? Had he thought of his family in those last seconds? She did not want to imagine herself like that – outmatched, resigned, absolutely finished.
She sipped her drink in silence, and Jess stopped fighting her. Since Ellie had followed her brother up to New York nearly ten years ago, they had learned to simply accept each other.
“So how’s Mom?” Jess finally asked.
“Wondering what you’re up to, as always.”
“And the case against the city?”
“Cluster fuck, as usual. The attorney’s not getting anywhere, and Summer and the WPD are both still saying there were only the eight victims.”
“The Wichita Police are the same bozos who insisted he stopped at six kills all those years ago. Now they say it’s eight because he confessed to two more. They never would have known about those if that arrogant prick hadn’t given them all the information himself. What makes them so sure he isn’t still playing games with them? I’m sure he gets off knowing that he’s got one more kill in his back pocket they don’t know about. A cop, to boot.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, Jess. I’m just telling you what I know.”
After the Wichita police finally arrested William Summer, the man formerly known only as the College Hill Strangler, Ellie had immediately retained yet another attorney to represent her mother in yet another claim against the city for her father’s pension. For a year and a half, the attorney had been fighting the city for access to the evidence collected against Summer. He had also been fighting the state for access to Summer himself. But until they found proof tying Summer to her father’s death, Jerry Hatcher remained a suicide, and the contrary suspicions carried by his family for the past decade and a half remained exactly that. Ellie hated the word closure, but she had to hope that an answer about her father’s death might snap her mother out of her limbo of grief.
“I’m heading home. Want to come back with me to call Mom?”
“There’s an open mic night at The Charleston in Williamsburg.”
“And a ten-minute phone call to Mom will keep you from playing?”
“No, it’ll put me in a serious funk and screw up the rest of my night. I’ll pass.”
Part of Ellie wanted to do the same. But while Jess did what he wanted, Ellie did what she thought she was supposed to do. It had always been that way in the Hatcher family. Ellie swallowed down the rest of her drink, then left enough money with Josie to cover a few more rounds of her brother’s bourbon.
JESS HAD SAID HER LIFE WAS EMPTY EXCEPT FOR HER JOB. THE accusation was unfair. Her job was part of her life. It would be like saying Jess’s life was empty without his music, or that a mother’s life was empty without her children. Remove the things that matter, and any life looks empty.
Jess of all people knew how important her work was. It was precisely because the job was part of her identity that Ellie no longer lived with Bill. Despite what Jess thought, Bill wasn’t a bad guy. She’d met him, ironically enough, at one of Jess’s gigs in the West Village. Bill was immediately smitten and, after five months, persuaded Ellie to leave her rented room behind and move in with him. He was a hard worker, an investment banker who liked to enjoy the little time off that he had. And what he enjoyed the most – flattering enough – was having Ellie at his side, giving him her full attention. Bill assumed she’d happily leave the job once he offered to take care of her. He assumed that was what every woman wanted. He was envious, in fact, that women enjoyed that as a lifestyle option.
But, despite his every assurance that she didn’t need to work, Ellie insisted that she did. After a few months of wrangling, she realized Bill was spending more than a few nights after work having cocktails with a woman in his marketing department. Knowing Bill, Ellie was sure it wasn’t a physical affair. But she could see the end coming, so she made way for Bill to have the kind of future he wanted – one that didn’t involve the NYPD. She told him she was moving out, and he didn’t try hard to stop her. That’s what convinced her it was never the real thing. It had been far too easy, for both of them, to leave.
In a switch of roles, Jess was the one who helped Ellie get settled after the breakup. He had an old girlfriend who was grateful for a watch-cop on her Lower East Side sofa for two weeks, and, before Ellie knew it, Jess had found her this sublet of a friend of a friend of a friend. Ellie suspected the original tenant was lying on a beach somewhere in Fiji, but as long as she had a place of her own, she wasn’t going to shed a tear for her landlord. It was a big step down from Bill’s Upper East Side junior four, but it was all hers, and she could afford it. Barely. It had taken several months and a few coats of paint, but the one-bedroom illegal sublet in Murray Hill finally felt like home.
She nestled herself onto her couch in front of the television, then muted the set and reached for the telephone, ready to get the nightly call to her mother out of the way.
“Hello?”
“Hey Mom. Sorry I’m a little late. I just wanted to say good night.”
“Were you working?” Roberta sounded happy, but artificially so, assisted no doubt by a little vodka. Ellie and Jess called it their mother’s nighttime voice. “Did you make a case on those forged theater tickets?”
“We’re still working on it. I just had some paperwork to take care of.”
“Your father used to always complain about the paperwork. Remember how he used to say if he had a donut for every piece of paper he generated in his career, he could feed every cop in America?”
“Did you hear anything else from the lawyer?” Ellie asked, hoping to cut off her mother’s muddled trip down memory lane.
“The city told him that Summer kept mementos from all the murders. That’s how they linked him to the cases they pinned on him. He also had photographs.”
“Did he tell them we already knew that?”
From the beginning, the College Hill Strangler had a fondness for sharing images of his crime scenes. In one letter mailed to the Wichita Eagle in 1981, he included a sketch of one of the murder scenes – so graphic and accurate that police speculated it was drawn from a photograph. After another the next year, he sent the police an actual photograph along with an audiotape of the victim struggling to breathe. For years, that package was the College Hill Strangler’s last known communication.
Then precisely twenty years later, a reporter at the city newspaper received an envelope containing a necklace and a Polaroid picture. The necklace was one police had been looking for since 1978 – stolen from the single mother who was the College Hill Strangler’s first victim. The picture was of the corpse of another woman, the victim of a still-unsolved murder in 1997. With hopes of revival, EMT’s had rushed her immediately from the bedroom where she was found strangled to the hospital where she died. Only her killer could have a photo of her body.
The College Hill Strangler was back. The anonymous mailing was his way of announcing that to the police. While the city was comforted by false theories of his death or incapacitation, he still lived among them, killing. Over the next eleven months, he would dole out six more envelopes of surprises – letters, drawings, even poems. His desire to gloat finally led to his own capture when an alert teenager jotted down the license plate number of a car peeling rubber as it sped away from the neighborhood mail drop.
“They’re trotting out the same old story,” Roberta said. “He was meticulous about his mementos and his diaries. They found evidence linking him to the eight named victims, and that’s all.”
“That’s bullshit,” Ellie said, quickly apologizing to her mother for the language. It would be just like Summer to gloat to the police about all his other killings, except for the one cop who almost caught him.
“Maybe you could help if you came down here,” Roberta offered. “I have a hard enough time on my own without all of this going on.”
“Mom, I told you I’d come down once there was a reason to. I’ll take as much time off as I have to. If we get access to the evidence, I’ll go through it myself, piece by piece. Or if they’d just let me talk to him-”
“You know I don’t like that idea.”
Ellie recognized that she fell directly in the center of William Summer’s preference zone. Right age. Clean-cut. Warm personality. She was convinced that if she had him in the box, he would be unable to resist the temptation to torture her the only way he could – mentally. He would try to torture her by describing what he had done to her father.
“Let’s not fight about this, Mom. I promise you: When the time comes, I’ll fly to Wichita, and we’ll figure out where to go from there – together.”
There was a brief silence on the line, then Roberta asked about Jess. “I haven’t heard from him lately.”
“He’s great. He dropped by here earlier. He wanted to talk to you, but his band had a big gig tonight.”
“Good for them. I keep telling the folks around here about Dog Park, but so far no one’s heard of them. You know how it takes forever for anything big to make it to Kansas.”
Ellie told her mother she loved her before she said good night. She made a point of telling her mother she missed her. Roberta said she loved and missed Ellie too, then hung up sounding as lonely and helpless as she always did at the end of their calls.
THE WHISKEY WAS still working on Ellie’s brain an hour later, along with images of her mother, Amy Davis’s damaged neck, and the empty look in her parents’ eyes as Flann helplessly handed them their daughter’s cat. Her mind’s eye leaped back to a memory of her father, sitting alone at the garage sale desk in the basement, surrounded by crime photos, rereading old police reports he had memorized eight times over. Hanging at the center of his gruesome montage was the smiling face of an impish-looking blond woman named Janice Beale.
Detective Jerry Hatcher had been most shaken by that one. By the time Beale was killed, two weeks before Christmas, 1984, the College Hill Strangler had already killed five people. Five people. Three days. Six years. Ellie’s father could never shake the guilt that perhaps Beale’s death could have been prevented. If they had put the pieces together, if they had warned the public, maybe she would have been spared. That was the thought Ellie’s father could never elude.
Like Amy Davis, Janice Beale was single, young, lived alone – a death by strangling. Ellie shook the comparison from her head. She was not going to let this happen. She was not in her father’s shoes. Amy Davis had been dead for less than a week. This was not a cold case. If she and Flann worked hard enough, it never would be.
With sleep futile, she climbed out of her bed and reread all of the e-mails Amy had exchanged on FirstDate. She picked the three men who were most interesting. Nothing dangerous. Nothing threatening. Just a hunch about these three. Then she signed up for FirstDate, calling herself “DB990.” DB for Date Bait, followed by her badge number. She wrote a profile along the lines of others on the site and uploaded a dark, grainy photograph that Jess had snapped of her with his cell phone one night at the Blue Note. She sent “flirts” to the three men she had selected. Clicking on another user’s flirt command didn’t require her to say anything. It just meant she was interested. And she was.
When she was finished online, she called the precinct and asked a clerk in the records department to run Christine Conboy, the redheaded receptionist at FirstDate. Conboy had a few old driving offenses on Long Island and a current phone number in Queens. Ellie checked the clock and saw it was past eleven, but she dialed the number anyway. A friendly voice said hello.
“Christine? This is Detective Ellie Hatcher. We met this morning?”
“Um, yeah?”
“I was hoping you could help me with something. I have a-”
“I’m not supposed to talk to you. The company says that any communications from law enforcement are supposed to go to the CEO.”
“The company says? You mean Mark Stern announced this today after we left?” Ellie took the silence on the other end of the line as confirmation. “Just hear me out, okay? Your boss will never know.”
“Can I trust you on that?”
“Did I seem to be buddies with Mr. Stern?”
That got a laugh in response. “I have to say, he didn’t seem to be real fond of you.”
“Well, don’t tell him, but the feeling’s mutual. You, on the other hand, seemed to actually care that we’re trying to catch someone who killed two women.”
“Of course I care. I just have no idea how I can possibly help you.”
“I have a list of profile names – people who were in touch with our two victims. I just need to know who they are. If we had that, we could start trying to put some pieces together.”
“I’m the receptionist. I don’t know how to get that information. Trust me, I wish I could. I’m not just an employee, I’m a customer.” Ellie got the reference to the old hair club ads, but the attempt at humor was awkward. “Really. We don’t have access to personal information.”
“But someone must. It’s stored in your database somewhere. It just needs to be turned over.”
There was a long pause. “I can’t help. I’m sorry.”
“Can I at least talk to you in person?” Saying no is always harder in person.
“If Stern sees me talking to you, I’ll lose my job. He’s a total control freak.”
“He won’t see us. I can come to your house. I can meet you on your break. Your lunch hour?”
“One o’clock. There’s a noodle place on Rector and Broadway. Much too lowbrow for the boss.”
Ellie took down the intersection and thanked Christine profusely. Then she climbed back into bed and shut her eyes. She left the bedroom door open so she could hear Jess come home. Once he did, she fell into a deep slumber.
IN THE MORNING, ELLIE FOUND JESS LOUNGING ON THE SOFA, her laptop open on his chest.
“You seem bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning,” she said. “One might even say you appear fully employable, and it’s only eight a.m.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m still up from last night. I figured I’d take advantage of your computer before catching some z’s.” He eyed her with obvious amusement, apparently waiting for some response.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing. I’m just glad to see you getting out into the world, El.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Welcome to FirstDate? Sorry, but I noticed the subject line in your in-box.”
“Get out of my e-mail!”
“Um, hello? Who’s got their computer set up to open e-mail automatically when you log in? I couldn’t help it. Besides, I think it’s cool. It’s about time you started getting laid again. You’ve got to be the only attractive woman in Manhattan who’s not getting her freak on.”
“I’m sure having you on my couch will be very conducive to that. And, I hate to break it to you, but my participation on FirstDate is part of that case I mentioned.” She told him about Flann McIlroy and his theory about FirstDate. She could sense Jess wanted to say something about the wisdom of her assignment, but he kept his thoughts to himself.
“Well, I hope he’s kissing luck’s butt for handing him the only cop in New York who works cases off the clock. The last cop I’d want on my ass is Ellie Mae Hatcher.”
“I am the cop on your ass.” When Ellie first joined the department, she and Jess struck a deal meant to balance the obvious differences, and potential conflicts, in their lifestyles. Ellie made sure Jess knew the difference between keeping bad company and becoming a criminal accomplice. Jess made sure he never crossed that line. Tolerating his intermittent presence on her sofa was one way Ellie helped him to keep his end of the deal.
“Maybe there’ll be an added benefit to this FirstDate research. Maybe you’ll actually find someone decent while you’re at it.”
“I told you. It’s only for the case.”
“Um, maybe not anymore. I sort of flirted with a few guys who looked good for you.”
“You did what?”
“The e-mail from FirstDate had all your account info, and I got curious. The next thing I knew, I was sending flirts to people. I finally had to stop because it was feeling a little gay. But, trust me, I picked way better guys than the ones you flirted with.”
“Jess. I picked those men because they seemed like people who might be homicidal maniacs, not because I thought they were dreamy.”
“Sorry. My bad.”
When Jess continued to insist that there might be a personal upside to Ellie’s research, she finally fessed up that her curiosity was piqued. She showed him the profile for Chef4U, the thirty-eight-year-old Upper East Sider she first noticed in Caroline Hunter’s FirstDate account. He had sandy blond, wavy hair and smiling eyes.
Jess took one quick look. “What a cornballer.” He read dramatically from the screen: “Brainy women are sexy. It’s what’s on the inside that counts.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Because if he has to say it out loud, he doesn’t mean it. Trust me. I’m a guy, I know how we operate. It’s just a line to lure in women who don’t think they’re pretty enough to do better than him. He cooks Julia Child recipes? In Manhattan? I bet you fifty bucks he doesn’t even own a frying pan.”
“As if you’ve got fifty bucks.”
Still, Ellie reread the profile and saw it in an entirely different light. In every other part of her life, she trusted her instincts. She never hesitated about moving to New York. She never second-guessed her decision to bypass her school plans to study criminal justice at John Jay. On the job, she read suspects, witnesses, and supposed victims better than officers with decades more experience.
But when it came to men, Ellie was as naive as she’d been in the ninth grade when she accepted her first car date with the high school quarterback Gil Morton. He opened the passenger door of his pickup and asked her what she felt like doing. Whatever. He suggested ordering pizza and renting Lethal Weapon. Fifteen minutes later, she found herself on his sofa, with no pizza and no movie, beneath one hundred and eighty pounds of sloppy kisses and groping. She walked to Quik-Trip and called Jess for a ride before things passed the tipping point, but she had never quite absorbed the lesson.
Ellie was a woman who expected men to value the same things she did. She expected men to want not just a lover but a friend, a challenge, and an equal. The problem, Jess always told her, wasn’t in her expectations. Plenty of men out there met them. The problem was that Ellie, despite all her intuitive strengths, had absolutely no ability to distinguish the poseurs from the real thing.
“Here, give me that,” Jess insisted, reaching for the laptop. “I’ll find you a worthy suitor.” Jess began clicking away, and Ellie found herself involuntarily intrigued. These men were total strangers. She could develop relationships with them without ever telling them what she did for a living. They might get to know her without the hindrance of the immediate “female cop” stereotypes. Online, she could be a completely different person.
Jess grabbed a pen and a crumpled paper napkin from the coffee table and scribbled down the names of what he called “the keepers,” men with good jobs, at least one creative comment in their self-descriptions, and absolutely no disqualifying bullshit. Ellie snatched the running list from him and began crossing names from it.
“What are you doing, El? Those are perfectly good prospects.”
“I’m scratching out the ones who fail my litmus tests,” Ellie replied. “Let me ask you something, Jess. You’re thirty-five years old. If you were to fill out one of these surveys, what would you put down as the age range for your ideal mate?”
“For me? Um, I guess twenty…-four to thirty-five.”
Ellie made a noise of disgust and swatted her brother across the shoulder. “Even you? My own flesh and blood? You are a thirty-five-year-old man with a birthday in four months, and you’re telling me that you wouldn’t even consider going out with a woman who turned thirty-six yesterday?”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t consider it. Obviously if I met a woman and I liked her, and she turned out to be a little older, I wouldn’t care. But if you ask me who I picture in the abstract, then yeah, I guess I picture someone my age or younger.”
Ellie rolled her eyes. “Well, at least you include your own age. My litmus test – the men I’m crossing off – are the ones who cap their age range below their own age. Half the men on here, no matter how old they are, say their perfect woman is somewhere between her midtwenties and exactly one year younger than he is.” She continued crossing off names, clearly disgusted. “I mean, what is it about the midtwenties?”
Jess’s eyes glazed over as he hung his tongue from his mouth in mock bliss. Ellie pretended to shoot a roundhouse kick in his direction.
“All right, Gloria Steinem. But I bet you a million bucks that the women on there are just as superficial. They’re just screening for different qualities. Money, power, prestige. It’s market forces, little sis.”
“On that very romantic – and totally depressing – note, I think you’ve convinced me that my online surfing should remain strictly professional.”
The telephone rang and Jess beat her to the handset.
“You’ve reached the marvelous Ellie Hatcher… Oh, you’re just the man I’d like to talk to. I hope you know how lucky you are to be working with my sister.”
Ellie smacked him on the arm and grabbed the phone. “Sorry, Flann. My brother got out of the butterfly net.”
“I just got a call from ballistics. They got a cold hit. The gun that killed Caroline Hunter a year ago was used to shoot another woman nine months earlier. Our guy’s been at it longer than we thought. There’s a third victim.”
AN HOUR LATER, Charlie Dixon hung up his telephone. He was angry. He did not like bad news. Only eighteen hours earlier, the FirstDate situation appeared to be under control. NYPD’s investigation had nothing to do with him. They were chasing down some stupid theory cooked up by a detective known as a wing nut. He had gotten worked up over nothing.
Now this.
He picked up his telephone again, punched in a familiar number, and asked for his boss. He tried to calm his nerves while he listened to the Muzak.
“Mayfield.”
“I’m sorry to bother you, sir, but there’s been a development.”
“I heard. Snow by six.” Dixon’s boss had a dry way about him, even in the face of stressful developments. That trait might explain where he sat in the hierarchy. Barry Mayfield oozed confidence, able to control any situation and the people involved in it without ever changing the serious but restrained tone of his voice.
Dixon, in contrast, honestly did not have the best personality for this job. Two years ago, during a particularly unpredictable turn of events, he ripped himself an ulcer that felt as if his intestines were marinating in Tabasco. Now Dixon was thinking about that ulcer again, convinced he was starting to feel the familiar hot inside of his gut.
“It’s about FirstDate.”
“I had an inkling. Those detectives again?”
“Afraid so.”
“Did they find a way to a court order? I told you before it wasn’t worth worrying about. The chances of this leading back to you-”
“It’s something else.” The something was worse than a fishing expedition at FirstDate. “I got a call from my PD source. Flann McIlroy just requested the file on the Tatiana Chekova murder.”
“Now, that is a problem.”