ENTERING THE EIGHTH FLOOR OF ONE POLICE PLAZA, ELLIE WAS as excited as a four-year-old on Christmas morning. She was anxious to catch a first-hand look at the department’s fancy new Real Time Crime Center. It might not wear a plush red suit or sport a jolly white beard, but the center was the high-tech feather in the department’s crime-fighting cap, a vast computerized clearinghouse to link information gathered throughout the city’s many precincts. The idea was to place a wealth of databases – parole records, prior complaints, 911 calls, tattoos and aliases, criminal histories – at the fingertips of detectives, in one centralized location.
Ellie thought the location looked just as it should, like the hub of an intergalactic star chamber. She marveled at the various maps blinking from at least twenty different flat-screen televisions hanging from a single wall.
“That’s the data wall.”
Ellie turned from the screens to find a smiling woman about her own age, with shiny, straight blond hair held back from her face by a barrette.
“I’m Naomi Skura. I’ve got your partner over there.” She gestured down an aisle of cubicles, where Ellie saw Flann peering out at her.
“What am I looking at?”
“Those maps track every piece of action going down in the city right now, in real time. Every 911 call, every arrest, every call-out. If we know about it, it’s there.”
It was the twenty-first-century version of the “hot spot” policing that had made Rudy Giuliani and his crime-reducing efforts nationally famous, even before September 11. Ellie followed Naomi Skura past the data screens to a long row of cubicles, one of which held a waiting Flann McIlroy.
“Did you tell her?” Flann asked excitedly.
Naomi gave a small laugh. “I haven’t exactly had time.”
“Naomi’s one of the crime analysts here. She works her tail off making sure the databases hold what they’re supposed to.”
The blond woman interrupted to clarify. “The commissioner unveiled the center before all of the databases were up-to-date. It was a good move – makes sure all of the new information going forward is entered and accessible. But we’re still working on configuring all of the old databases so we can get maximum accessibility. One of the databases that isn’t quite up-to-date is for tracking ballistic images.”
Ellie was vaguely familiar with the technology. “That’s where they break down information about a bullet so it’s something like a fingerprint?”
Naomi nodded. “During the manufacturing process, the metal of a gun’s barrel is shaped and molded. When a bullet is subsequently fired through that barrel, the gun leaves its individual mark – a fingerprint, as you said. We used to compare bullet fragments and casings by hand, under a microscope. The idea behind ballistics tracking is to computerize the ballistic fingerprint, so comparisons can be made in a matter of milliseconds.”
“That’s amazing.”
“But,” Flann interjected, “I’ve been told it’s not a priority.”
Naomi rolled her eyes at what was obviously a familiar conversation. “Hey, in theory we could have a federal database containing the ballistic images of every gun sold in the United States. But the gun lovers say that’s too close to gun registration. We here in the socialist republic of New York don’t have a problem with that, however. We just don’t have the money.”
“Like I said, not a priority. The point is, despite all that, Naomi went out of her way for us. After I put Caroline Hunter’s case together with Amy Davis’s, I asked Naomi to run the bullet from Hunter through the database. No hits, but she told me how the database was backed up. So I put her to work looking for vics of a similar profile. If a gun was used, maybe the bullet hadn’t been tracked for ballistics yet.”
“I looked at unsolved murders of white women between the ages of twenty-five and forty, killed on the street in the last three years. Your two vics were in Manhattan, educated, upper middle class. I found a couple of similar cases, but they’re suspected domestics still under investigation. Most of the other victims were demographically dissimilar – drug users or working girls. But since Flann was ragging about our substandard ballistics tracking” – she smiled at him – “I went ahead and took the bullet information from those women and added them to the database.”
“And it paid off,” Flann said.
“I ran Hunter again and got a match. Her name was Tatiana Chekova. She was shot almost two years ago – with a. 380 semiautomatic, just like Caroline Hunter. I haven’t had it verified by human eye yet, but the computer says the two guns were one and the same.”
“And the computer’s reliable?” Ellie asked.
“More so than the human eye, in fact, but the technology’s new enough that we still do it the old-fashioned way for the lawyers. Want me to send it to ballistics?”
“Does John Daly love chicken wings?”
“Who?”
“See what I mean? They go right over the head.” Flann cut his hand over his head to mark the point. “Just have ballistics call me when they’re finished.”
THE FIRST OF the three men with whom Ellie had flirted on FirstDate called himself Mr. Right. Despite the oh-so-original name, Ellie had chosen him because his etiquette was oh-so-wrong, filled with inappropriate innuendo. When Amy said she liked independent films, Mr. Right took it upon himself to ask whether she meant “snooty highbrow movies with subtitles or tastefully artistic home videos for personal use.” And then there was that comment about the picture she’d sent him of herself at Mardi Gras: “Did you show off your ta-tas?”
The traffic on the FDR was heavy this time of day, so Flann used his lights until he found them some clear road. He checked the rearview mirror before switching lanes, then asked Ellie about the other two men she’d honed in on during the previous night’s perusal of FirstDate profiles.
“A guy named Taylor. Quasi stalker. From what I can tell, Amy met him once for coffee, then blew him off. He e-mailed her a few times the next week, asking her what was wrong, insisting they had a real connection, wondering if she was afraid of commitment – that sort of thing. Then it looks like she blocked him from her account.”
“You can do that?”
“Yeah. There’s a block function on the FirstDate Web site. It’s as simple as typing in the other person’s user name, and voilà, they can’t e-mail you anymore. Taylor’s the only user name on Amy’s block list. She cut him off about a week ago, so, yeah, we’re interested in him. I also sent a flirt to a guy who calls himself Enoch.”
“Eunuch? He’s advertising a lack of balls?”
“No,” she said, laughing. “Enoch. Could be the name of his first dog for all I know. At first, he didn’t stand out. His online profile’s about as bland as you can get – one cliché after another.”
“Yeah? And what’s considered cliché in the online world?”
“Oh, come on. We both read a hundred of those trite profiles yesterday. Looking for a partner in crime. Tired of the bar scene. I want a girl who can go from pearls to blue jeans. No drama queens. Gag me. I mean, you’ve got two paragraphs to say something interesting about yourself and what you’re looking for in life, and this is what they come up with?”
“And what should they say?”
“Something original. Something interesting. My god, even just something that doesn’t sound cribbed from a high school yearbook might be nice. But everyone writes the same stupid stuff. That’s what got me thinking about Enoch. In a sea of profiles filled with the same banal platitudes, his stood out almost like a prototype. At first, I just thought it was lame. But then I reread the e-mails between him and Amy, and there seemed to be a disjoint between his profile and the e-mails. As generic as his profile was, his messages were specific. He was one of the few men to ask for her name immediately, which I take is a bit taboo in the online world. He wanted to know where she was from, where she went to school, what was the worst thing she’d ever done – that kind of thing.”
“A bit too curious?”
“Yeah. And intense. When I went back and read his profile again in light of that intensity, it was almost like he was in on the joke, using all of the standard lines. I don’t know. A long shot but-”
“That’s the nature of risk,” Flann said, pulling the car to a stop in front of the precinct. “The long shot’s the only way to the jackpot.”
ELLIE WENT STRAIGHT to Flann’s computer, pulled up her account on FirstDate, and immediately laughed out loud. In response to Flann’s curious look, she explained. “I have eight new messages and ten flirts.”
“You must have slapped together some profile.”
Ellie began clicking on the messages in her in-box. “My alter ego, otherwise known as DB990, already got a response from Mr. Right. Nothing from the other two yet. What’s next? This isn’t the part where you tell me I’m supposed to go on dates until we catch the bad guy, is it?”
“No. Despite the moniker, I never intended to use you as date bait.” He apparently caught the significance of her user name.
“Phew,” she said, wiping her brow. “I thought I’d have to haul out my best Pacino. Hoo-ah!”
“Hey, Sea of Love is still classic Pacino compared to Scent of a Woman. Nice impersonation there, by the way.”
Ellie gave a mock stage bow. “Thank you, thank you. And thank god for the next generation of personal ads. No personal contact necessary. I’ll just do what Amy would’ve done. Get a couple of e-mail exchanges and be receptive to a phone call?”
“Sounds good. In the meantime, I see archives sent down the file on Tatiana Chekova.” He held up a navy blue binder that was waiting for them on his desk. “This should keep us busy awhile.”
INDIVIDUAL DETECTIVES CAN justify different ways of organizing a file. Chronologically to show how the investigation unfolded, piece by piece. By type of evidence – witness statements separate from forensics. But the investigating detectives on Tatiana Chekova’s case used no apparent filing system whatsoever. Initial interviews, follow-ups, crime lab reports, victim info – all of it was commingled. Some sheets of paper hadn’t quite made it through the hole-puncher and were jammed into the notebook’s worn plastic pockets. Random handwritten notes were left unexplained and indecipherable. Ellie had never seen an NYPD murder book, but she took better care of her files on Podunk cases.
According to the initial report, Tatiana Chekova lived in Bensonhurst but was shot outside of Vibrations on the West Side Highway in Manhattan. The report filed by a Detective Ed Becker euphemistically referred to the establishment as a “gentlemen’s club.” Ellie did a double take at the name typed at the bottom of the police report. Something about it seemed familiar. She’d come across it recently in another context but couldn’t place it.
It was two in the morning on April 22 when one of the members of a bachelor’s party ducked to the edge of the parking lot to take a leak during a smoking break and spied bare legs behind a parked car. Assuming the legs belonged to a hooker, passed out after turning a trick, he waved his friends over for a free peep show. Her raincoat had fallen open to reveal a jeweled bra and thong. A closer look revealed a less titillating picture. Most of the woman’s brain matter had spilled to the parking lot concrete.
The bouncer at the door confirmed that the body, outfit, and butterfly-tattooed ass belonged to Tatiana Chekova. She worked part-time as a waitress and, when money fell short, as a reluctant lap dancer on the floor. She’d been employed at Vibrations for six weeks. Sadly, no one at the club claimed to know her well.
Considering she devoted more words to a typical burglary, Ellie thought the report fell woefully short. The detectives supposedly questioned everyone who was still at Vibrations when they arrived, but the report tersely concluded that “there were no witnesses to the shooting.” Details of the interviews were omitted. Even names were missing, except for the manager on duty, the drunken groomsman who found the body, and the lucky husband-to-be.
It was piss-poor police work.
The background information the detectives gathered on Chekova wasn’t any more impressive. They quickly determined she was a Russian immigrant, in New York for almost five years. They ran her record: three prostitution pops her first two years in the country; more recently, a bust for credit card fraud and heroin possession three months before her murder. According to a computer printout, the officer arrested Chekova for the fraud, then found heroin in her bedroom. The case was declined for prosecution. Ellie guessed that the search was bad. Arresting a woman in her apartment usually didn’t require a search of her bedroom.
As she turned to the ballistics reports, Ellie fished out her jar of Nutella and spoon from the cardboard box she’d stashed underneath Flann’s desk. The crime lab reports were considerably more thorough than the detectives’. Two bullets, fired into the back of the victim’s head, close range. A lot of damage.
“What’s that smell?” Flann looked up from his reading. “That’s something you’re eating?”
“Nutella. A little bit nutty, a little bit of chocolate. It’s culinary perfection.”
“Smells like something you’d scoop from the bottom of a pigpen. Not to mention it’s barely ten in the morning.”
Ellie helped herself to another scoop and smiled. “You’ve looked at the murder book on Caroline Hunter, right?”
“Yeah. Not much there. Her purse was stolen, so it looked like a robbery gone bad. No neighborhood witnesses. The trail ran cold – fast.”
He looked up at Ellie, apparently waiting for her to come up with the right question. He’d also seen the crime lab reports on Chekova.
“What about the gunshots?” she asked.
“Two of them. Back of the head.”
“Close range?”
“Ballistics’ best guess was two to three feet.”
Just like Tatiana Chekova. Same gun. Same shots. Same number of bullets. Chekova was killed nine months and ten days before Caroline Hunter. Twenty-one months and ten days before Amy Davis. No reason to suspect a FirstDate connection. No reason to dismiss it either. The original investigators had no cause to look for it. Even if they had, they might not have bothered. A Russian heroin addict, living in Bensonhurst, stripping in Manhattan.
“I was hoping to avoid this,” Flann said, “but I think we need to talk to one of the investigating detectives on the Chekova case.”
“Afraid of a turf battle?”
“There’s no turf to fight over. Barney Tendall is dead – shot, off-duty, when he tried to stop a robbery. Ed Becker took retirement two months later. I guess Becker talked to Tendall on the phone a couple of hours before it all happened and couldn’t get past it – like he was supposed to stop his partner from grabbing a beer.”
Becker. Twice Flann had spoken the name now, and twice it had rung a distant and annoying bell in the back of her mind. She closed her eyes and tried to remember but couldn’t pull the connection forward. She wrote it off as a common name she must’ve run across in the newspaper.
“Becker’s sour on the job?” she asked.
Flann paused before answering. “God no. Ed Becker loved being a cop. He just wasn’t very good at it if you ask me. And we’re about to point that out to him by asking the questions we can’t answer from these notes.”
Ellie sensed a discomfort in McIlroy that went beyond having to ask a retired cop about a cold case. The man was definitely elusive with his thoughts.
“Is there any more to it than that?”
“We worked out of the same precinct a long, long time ago. Let’s just say that when it comes to Ed Becker, I’d prefer that you do most of the talking.”
ED BECKER LIVED IN A MODEST BRICK TUDOR IN SCARSDALE, just north of the Bronx in Westchester. Despite the proximity, Westchester was nothing like the Bronx, and upscale Scarsdale was one of the least Bronxlike of its enclaves.
Ellie had called ahead, and Becker met them at his front door before they knocked. He was a big man – tall, thick, substantial, with a barrel chest. His skin was ruddy, his hair a light gold only just beginning to thin. He greeted them with a friendly smile.
It wasn’t just Ed Becker’s smile that was friendly. It was the hearty way he clasped Flann’s shoulder, the enthusiastic shake he gave to Ellie’s hand, and the boisterous manner in which he waved them into his living room. It was the small things that Ellie noticed, like Becker’s metal sign reading Retirement Parking Only, which hung over an overstuffed reclining chair.
“Nice sign,” Ellie said.
Becker’s smile grew wider. “Yeah. Some of the boys got a little carried away with what you might call the novelty gifts when I left the job. That was about the only one that was appropriate for public display. From the looks of you, you’ve got quite a lot of years left with a shield before you’ll be having a party.”
“Oh, every day’s a party when you’re part of the NYPD.”
Becker chuckled. “I like that. Every day’s a party. I like this one, McIlroy. Keep her around.”
“We plan on it.”
Based on Flann’s comments, Ellie had expected Ed Becker to be an ogre. Now that she’d met the man in person, she wondered whether Flann the infamous loner perhaps had the same suspicious response toward all cops.
“So what brings you up to Westchester?”
Becker directed his question toward Flann, but Ellie answered. “We’re looking into a possible connection between the deaths of two women in Manhattan, Caroline Hunter and Amy Davis. They were killed exactly one year apart, both after dates they had arranged online.”
“That Internet dating is big stuff. My son met someone a couple of years ago. They’re getting married this spring. Oh, speaking of which, Mac, how’s that daughter of yours?”
The friendly question did nothing to change the scowl Flann had worn since stepping into Ed Becker’s home. “She’s good, Ed. Thanks for asking.”
“Anyway, Internet dating. I’ll admit, I’ve been tempted to try it myself. Read all about it, in fact. An old geezer like me, though-”
“You’d be surprised,” Ellie said.
“I’m sure I would. Maybe not in a good way though, you know what I mean? Wake up one morning and your pee burns and your pet bunny’s been boiled. But I suspect you didn’t drive all the way up here to kick-start an old guy’s love life.”
“No sir. It’s about an old case of yours. We just discovered that the gun that killed one of our victims was also used to shoot Tatiana Chekova. You worked that one, right?”
“Chekova, huh?”
“Russian woman, found in the parking lot of a strip club.”
“Right. Vibrations. Some name, huh? We never cleared that one. We got names off the credit cards in the club, but no one jumped out at us. Definitely wasn’t anyone in the bachelor party that found her. Two of those guys were puking their guts out on the West Side Highway.”
Ellie saw the frustration on McIlroy’s face.
“Um, I pulled the file this morning,” she said gently. “It didn’t contain a list of names from the club. Or at least I didn’t see it.”
Becker looked puzzled. “It should have been there. Records ain’t always the best about holding cold cases. Anyway, it didn’t get us anywhere. With her background, we assumed it was a trick gone bad.”
“The M.E. found no signs of sexual activity.”
“I remember. Her coat was open though, and the shots came from behind. Close range, right?”
“Yeah.”
“See, I can remember a thing or two.” He tapped his temple for emphasis. “Barney’s theory – Barney was my partner. He figured the guy might’ve been groping her from behind, started to get going, and then something went wrong. She wasn’t ready yet, or he couldn’t get it – he couldn’t complete the act.”
“Not a crazy theory.”
“Not a crazy theory. But I never quite bought it. The manager said the vic didn’t want to dance. She only did an occasional lap dance when she was desperate for a few extra bucks. And her vice pops were old. My theory was she was trying to get out of the life.”
“By working at a strip club?” That was like going on a diet by taking a job at Baskin-Robbins.
“You know, staying just at the edge of it, but not wanting to pull tricks anymore. She walked to the parking lot with someone, but then decided to go for the money without giving up the quid pro quo. Two bullets, back of the head.”
It was a better theory than Barney Tendall’s. And it described a kind of murder that was nearly impossible to solve.
“That was my theory. Barney had his. Neither of them got us anywhere.”
“Flann told me about your partner. I’m sorry.”
Flann finally broke his silence. “He was a good man, Ed.”
“Great partner too. It was rough for a while there, what happened to Barney. Looking back on it, I was in a fog my last couple of months on the job. I knew if I stuck around, I’d be chained to a desk by the year’s end. The union got me an early retirement package, and I moved out here. After all those years living in the city, watching the crime rate yo-yo, I just couldn’t take it anymore after Barney.”
“I can’t even imagine,” Ellie muttered, knowing her words fell short.
“Aah, what are you gonna do, right? Anyway, we never closed on Chekova. That was one of our last cases together. I tried working it on my own after I was reassigned, but – well, I wasn’t doing anyone much good by then. Maybe that’s why I didn’t get further with it.”
“Can you think of any suspects we should be looking at?”
“No, we never homed in on anyone.”
“We’ve been looking at this Internet dating connection between our two victims. Any chance Chekova was using a service? Did she have a computer?”
Becker shook his head. “Not that I can remember. She was sort of transient. Moved around a lot. Staying with whatever guy was getting her high that week. Not exactly the technological type. I think I’d remember if she’d had a computer. It would have seemed out of place.”
“I hope you’ll understand if we have to look at her again with new eyes. Try to find the connection between her and our victims.”
“It’d be sloppy work not to.”
“Can you remember anything that might help?”
“The file should have all my notes.” This time Becker must have caught Flann’s frustrated expression as well. “You can always call if you need anything specific.”
“Do you remember if she had family? Someone who might know if she was using FirstDate?”
“Now that I can’t remember. But the vic didn’t seem close to anyone, so we were pretty sure it wasn’t a domestic. We worked the club angle. It’s not in the file?”
“No sir.”
Becker shook his head. “I was out of it back then, but I thought I left behind my notebooks all right.”
“I’ll look again,” Ellie offered.
“Yeah, okay.”
“You a full-time retiree now, Ed?” Flann’s tone was cordial enough, but the question struck Ellie as odd.
“Oh yeah,” Becker said. “I’m not one of those second career guys. You never know how much time you got, right?”
“That’s the way to do it,” Flann said.
“Well, like I said, call if I can help. I got a pretty good memory, at least for the stuff that seemed to matter.”
MCILROY WAS QUIET during the ride back to the city.
“You okay, Flann?” Ellie asked.
The question bounced right off of him. “That was a really nice house. Brick. Nice block. Good shape inside. How much you think that goes for in this market?”
“I’m too impoverished to bother browsing the real estate section. Why?”
“Just seems like an awfully nice house for a retired cop without a second income.”
“He did say he got a retirement package. Maybe the union got him something extra because of his partner.”
Flann’s lips remained pursed in a straight line, his blond eyebrows furrowed. He kept his eyes on the traffic, both hands firmly gripping the wheel. By the time they hit the Hudson, Ellie was fed up. She was grateful for a murder assignment, but McIlroy’s tight lips were getting ridiculous. He was her partner, at least temporarily, and she believed that meant something. They should at least get to know each other.
“You never mentioned you had a daughter.”
McIlroy sighed loudly. “No, I didn’t. I’m sure glad lazy old Becker did.”
“I’m sure he was trying to be nice.”
“He was trying to get under my skin.”
“Odd way to get under someone’s skin.”
McIlroy sighed again. “I don’t get to see her much. We were never married, her mother and I. Becker knows all that, and he asks about her anyway.”
“That must be rough.”
“All these single moms out there trying to get a daddy involved in the picture, and this one prefers I walk away. She thinks one way to do that is to make it hard for me to see my kid.”
“What’s her name?”
“Miranda. Oh, you meant my daughter. Stephanie. Stephanie Hart, not McIlroy. She’s thirteen. Thirteen-year-old girls need their fathers, you know?”
Ellie nodded. “I was fourteen when my father was killed. He wasn’t even fifty yet.” If McIlroy was going to open up to her, it was only fair that she did the same.
“I know some of the details already,” Flann said. “I read about you last year.”
“I assumed that had something to do with the special request. It’s not true, most of what they said. I didn’t always know I wanted to be a cop, and my father didn’t start training me when I was five. Quite the opposite in fact. He always pushed my brother in that direction, but me, he humored. If he’d been around when I finally decided to take the leap, he would have tried to stop me.”
“Fathers can be protective that way.”
“You’ve probably figured out by now I’m not the high-tech bill of goods they were selling.”
He nodded. “They wanted to use your story to talk about the next generation of law enforcement, which they’d like to think is all about the high-tech solutions they see on CSI. I’ve learned over the years not to trust the media’s spin. In fact, I’ve learned to use it to mutual advantage.”
Ellie thought about that. Mutual advantage. That’s precisely what she had tried to do with all those interviews and profiles she’d agreed to last year. “Hope I didn’t disappoint.”
“Not at all. Your supposed expertise in modern crime fighting wasn’t the reason I called you.”
Ellie did not interrupt the silence that followed.
“You work homicide as long as I do and have nothing else going for you but the job, it can be hard sometimes to hold it together. To keep waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night – I don’t want to sound morose, but even though I rarely see her, my daughter’s the closest thing I’ve got to someone who cares whether or not I come home each night.”
“Flann-”
He held up a hand and shook his head. “That’s just the way it is. When you described to that reporter how haunted you’ve felt all of these years – even about the suggestion that your father might have left you by his own hand – well, I remembered the story. I needed a damn good cop who’d be open-minded enough to follow this one through. You seemed to fit the ticket.”
“I’m glad you asked for me.”
“And I’m glad you let me tell you why.”
CHARLIE DIXON WATCHED THE DETECTIVES PULL INTO A PARKING spot in front of the Thirteenth Precinct. The female detective waved to McIlroy as he hopped out of the car and walked into the precinct. The woman then climbed behind the wheel and restarted the engine. She took Twenty-first Street west to Park Avenue, then turned left to go south.
Once she cleared the corner, Charlie pulled into traffic. Trailing people in the city was easy. The streets carried too many cars for one to stand out. In any event, his light blue Chevy Impala made for ideal urban camouflage. He’d followed the detectives all the way to Westchester and back without a hitch.
Traffic was heavy, so it was easy to stay a few cars back. He tried to tune out the sounds of trucks, rattling buses, and honking horns as he followed her down Broadway, past City Hall Park. It was time for midday deliveries. Double-parking was high, and so were tensions. His head was starting to throb, and he could swear that the burning in his stomach was back.
Two blocks short of Battery Park, the detective stopped in a loading zone and threw something on the dash, undoubtedly a police parking permit. Charlie allowed himself to get locked in behind a UPS truck in the middle of a delivery. Watching her on foot would be trickier.
Fortunately, she didn’t stray far. She dashed across the intersection at a catty-corner, glancing up at the sign above a Vietnamese restaurant before entering. Charlie wasn’t sure what to do now. For all he knew, she was meeting a girlfriend for lunch. Maybe McIlroy was the one doing the legwork, while he was spinning his wheels watching the girl just because she left the precinct first.
It had been just over twenty-four hours since he learned that the NYPD was asking Stern for the personal information of FirstDate users. Two women were dead, and a Detective McIlroy seemed to be working a serial killer theory. Apparently Mark Stern was convinced that the theory was nonsense. According to Dixon’s source at the company – a nice-enough guy with a nasty penchant for recreational coke – Stern even sounded slightly smug about the coincidence. From the singleminded perspective of a successful entrepreneur, two murder victims tied to his company in a twelve-month period demonstrated just how ubiquitous the service had become among New Yorkers.
Nevertheless, Stern was firmly committed against handing over private information to the police. The promise of anonymity, he emphasized, was FirstDate’s most valuable asset. He circled the wagons and made sure that his employees understood that any inquiries about the matter should go directly to him.
In the end, it was Dixon who helped get the cops off Stern’s back. A few discreet calls revealed McIlroy was known as a loose cannon, a detective who conjured up wild fantasies out of imaginary evidence. His nickname was McIl-Mulder, for Christ’s sake. The higher-ups were letting him run amok on this theory to reward him for getting lucky on an earlier case. Once this indulgence ran its course, his star would fall.
So Dixon had made the call. It was risky. He could have let the NYPD get the information it was looking for. Once they realized it was a dead end, they’d move on. But he had too much at stake with FirstDate. If Stern got nervous – even about some wild theory – he might change his habits while Dixon was still trying to figure them out.
But now apparently McIlroy and his partner had done enough digging to turn up Tatiana. First they had requested the police reports, then they’d driven all the way to Scarsdale to see that sorry excuse for a detective who never even scratched the surface of Tatiana’s murder. Why in the world were they asking about Tatiana? Was it part of the serial killer theory, or had they moved directly into his territory?
Now that Tatiana was on their radar, her death might give them a direction, something to focus their attention on. She wouldn’t fit easily into their serial theory, so they’d have to dig further. Work from the victim outward, that would be the goal. It would be the smart way to investigate. It was also a problem. If McIlroy and his partner were even half decent cops – not like that other one – the trail could lead right back to Dixon.
His stomach was starting to burn again when he saw another woman he recognized walk into the Vietnamese restaurant. He had never seen her in person, but he had her driver’s license photograph on his dining room wall – the wall on which he had mapped out the corporate structure of FirstDate. She was prettier in person.
The pain in his gut was subsiding. She was down at the bottom, both literally on the wall and figuratively in the corporate hierarchy. She was the receptionist. What was her name again? Conroy or something.
He’d already dug into the backgrounds of everyone at the company. The redhead was clean. Dixon also knew a bit about her boss. Mark Stern was a control freak. No way did he let his receptionist know anything about the company. She was there strictly to answer telephones.
If Detective Hatcher was spending her lunch hour on a liaison with her, they were definitely still working their serial killer theory, still trying to get a list of the men who contacted that woman who was strangled this week. They hadn’t begun to connect the dots that actually connected Tatiana Chekova and FirstDate – the dots that drew a line back to Special Agent Charlie Dixon of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A line that had nothing to do with the jurisdiction of the NYPD. A line that hopefully they would never find.
He called the FBI field office to report the good news to his boss, Special Agent in Charge Barry Mayfield.
“Stay on top of it,” Mayfield warned. “You’re sure your source at FirstDate won’t mention your side project?”
“Positive,” he said. Ninety-five percent certain.
“And make sure to get rid of anything that could tie you to that dead girl.”
Dixon hated hearing Tatiana referred to as that dead girl, but he was in no position to correct Mayfield under the circumstances.
ELLIE DIDN’T GET much time with Christine Conboy. The receptionist made it clear she’d talk as long as it took to walk out with her pork noodle bowl and a spring roll, and no longer.
“I want to help you. I do. Nothing scares me more than the idea of someone hunting down single women. But, like I said, no one I know can directly access user information.”
“What about the employees who handle the billing?”
“They only have access to the billing information – how much to charge, and what credit card to charge it to. They’d know people’s real names but wouldn’t be able to match those to the profile names you have. Trust me. I tried.”
“You told them it was for the police?”
“Are you kidding? No way. Stern sent a memo out yesterday saying that police were conducting an inquiry that related to the company – but only indirectly. He was clear about that. He was also clear that all communications from police were to go through him. I know billing can’t help you because I started getting serious with someone online a few months ago, and I got suspicious. I begged my friend in accounting, and she swore she couldn’t help me.”
“I’m not just spying on a new boyfriend, Christine. I’m looking for a killer. Can’t you at least ask around and find someone who can help?”
Christine hushed Ellie with a pat on the forearm, checking again to make sure she didn’t recognize anyone in the restaurant.
“So you can pressure them? You don’t seem to get what I’m saying. We don’t have civil service protection. We don’t have a union. Mark Stern will fire any one of us at the drop of a hat, and the job market’s rough out there. Not that you would know.”
Ellie had made the mistake of momentarily forgetting that she was bullying an innocent person. It wasn’t the bullying that was wrong; it was the forgetting. Ellie was asking Christine to put something important on the line for a cause that was not hers, and she had acted as if it were owed to her.
“Look, Christine. I’m sorry. I appreciate the help. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your meeting me. Did I mention that I appreciate you?” Christine smiled. “I’ll find some other way.”
The woman at the cash register called out a number, and Christine raised her hand. “That’s me. I’m sorry if I’m a little testy. I’m sure my job seems Podunk, but it’s all I’ve got.”
Christine stopped Ellie as she was heading toward the door. “You know, if you want some help from someone who’s not afraid of Stern, there’s one guy you might want to talk to first. Jason Upton. He worked at FirstDate for a long time. He left about a year ago when the company got a little too big for him.”
“You know this guy?”
“Yeah. He was one of the early programmers. Stern’s always saying how fond he was of Jason and what great friends they were, so Jason’s probably not afraid of him either. If there’s a way to pull together the information you need, he might at least know who in the company can do it. He went to Larkin, Baker & Howry to run their I.T. department.” Ellie recognized the name of one of the city’s largest law firms. “He’s nice too. Nicer than Stern. I’m sure you can track him down.”
“I’ll do that. Thank you.”
Ellie watched Christine throw a set of chopsticks and two packets of chili sauce into her lunch bag. She left the restaurant just as snow was beginning to fall.
THREE MONTHS BEFORE TATIANA CHEKOVA WAS MURDERED, A man named Eric Rivero found a charge on his American Express card that he had not made – the purchase of a television from Circuit City. That discovery eventually led to Tatiana’s arrest and to the police report now waiting for Ellie back at the precinct. She gave it a quick read.
Unlike most credit card owners, Rivero had reported the unauthorized charge not only to American Express but also to the police. And he had been smart. He asked Circuit City where the television had been delivered and then filed the police report in the corresponding Brooklyn police precinct. An ambitious rookie patrol officer found the time to follow up and stopped by the address where the television had been delivered.
The first thing the officer saw when Tatiana Chekova opened the door was a fancy new plasma screen in the living room. Tatiana consented to a search of the rest of the apartment, and the officer found heroin in Tatiana’s nightstand drawer. It was a straightforward case, put together with a self-investigating citizen, good police work, and a bit of luck.
When Ellie was finished reading, she turned to Flann. “Tatiana gave a sister as her contact information when she was arrested a couple of years ago. The sister also lives in Bensonhurst, or at least she did back then.”
“Good. Maybe she’ll know if Tatiana was using FirstDate.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Ellie said. “How well did you smooth things over with Stern after I left his office yesterday?”
“He stopped talking about siccing a lawsuit on us, but he’s probably not about to invite me over to meet the missus. Why?”
“Because even in his self-righteous indignation about customer privacy, he did offer to cooperate if we had a narrower request backed by a better reason.”
“And now all we need to know is if Tatiana was a FirstDate customer,” Flann said.
“How much more specific can we be, right? It’s certainly worth a phone call.”
“Nah. I better see him in person. He might check, find out she’s in his system, and then lie about it.”
“He struck you as that evil?”
“He’s the CEO of a corporation that’s about to go public. A few taps on his keyboard might just confirm that some bedbug out there is using his customers for urban hunting.”
“Enough said.” Confirmation of three victims linked to FirstDate, two of them killed by the same gun, would send Mark Stern’s stock values plummeting. “You know what I can’t figure is why the D.A. kicked Tatiana’s case.”
“Bad search?” Flann asked.
“That’s what I assumed, but it looks textbook. She said the TV arrived in the mail, and she just assumed it was a gift. Give me a break.”
“And the drugs?”
“She gave consent to search, then admitted the horse was hers. Looks like a slam dunk.”
Flann shrugged it off. “Maybe the prosecutor didn’t think it was worth the hassle. A gullible jury might’ve bought the story of a television miraculously arriving to a working girl’s doorstep. And the heroin was a first-time drug pop.”
“But enough quantity to trigger a hefty sentence.”
“You know how judges can be about so-called consent searches. Maybe the prosecutor didn’t want to push it.”
“Too bad for Tatiana. If she’d gotten some jail time, she might not have been in the Vibrations parking lot three months later.”
Ellie was interrupted by the chirp of her cell phone. She didn’t recognize the incoming number. “Let me get rid of this. Hello?”
“Hatcher, it’s Ed Becker. I hope you don’t mind me calling your cell. They didn’t have you on the roster at Homicide for some reason, so I played the old retiree card with some friends and got this number.”
“Not a problem, Ed. Thanks again for your time this morning.” Flann threw Ellie a curious look, and Ellie shrugged.
“I’ve been thinking more about the Chekova case, and I’m not feeling good right now about how I handled it. Looking back, I might’ve missed something on that one.”
“I’m sure you did what you could. We’re just taking a fresh look in light of the new killings. You never know what could break it, right?”
“You’re a real nice girl – woman, sorry – but I’m in a better state of mind now compared to back then. I’m pretty sure I did a piss-poor job. But, hey, I’m not calling so you’ll feel sorry for me or anything. I want to help.”
“Help how?”
Flann’s look moved from curiosity to anger. He shook his head quickly at Ellie. On the other end of the line, Becker laughed.
“Don’t worry. I know the last thing you and McIlroy need is me nipping at your heels. I was just thinking about our talk yesterday. I told you we eliminated the bachelor party at the outset. In retrospect, though, I can’t remember whether we really looked at them or not. We just went with our gut-”
“And the fact that they were spilling their guts on the side of the road?”
“Exactly,” Becker said with another laugh. “Not a bad judgment in the beginning, when you’re prioritizing. But when we didn’t have any other leads, we should have gone back and taken a closer look. After what happened with my partner, well, I don’t think I ever did. You might want to check them out after all.”
“All right, we’ll do that. Thanks for the call.”
“No problem. I mean it, if there’s anything I can do, let me know. Hell, I know I can’t be much help anymore, but it’s just eating at me. Promise me you’ll let me know if I missed something-”
“Stop assuming that. It’s just a new set of eyes is all. And of course I’ll call you if we get anywhere.”
Flann threw her another cross look.
“I’ll be here waiting. I’m just sitting up here in Westchester getting old.”
When Ellie flipped her phone shut, an obviously unhappy Flann pressed her for every detail.
“He can find out the results of our investigation when we publicly announce an arrest. We’re not about to partner up with Ed Becker.”
“Nobody’s talking about partnering up.”
“Sharing information, talking about the old days, whatever. I don’t care what he says, but that phone call’s about covering his ass. I’m not getting involved, and, trust me, you shouldn’t either.” Flann stood and started to pull his coat on.
“I don’t get it, Flann. What is it with you and Becker? He’s being a hell of a lot nicer than most retired detectives would be about someone working an old case, and you find something wrong with every step he makes.”
“That’s because with a guy like Ed Becker, nice always comes with a price. Now, I’m going down to FirstDate to see Stern. You coming?”
“No, after yesterday’s fireworks between me and Stern, you should go alone. Besides,” she said, looking at her watch, “we’re supposed to go see that computer guy. Just meet me at his office when you’re done with Stern.” Jason Upton, the former FirstDate programmer, had agreed to meet with her at two o’clock at his office.
Once Flann was gone, Ellie checked her FirstDate account. Eleven new messages, not including flirts. She had a message from Mr. Right. He was the one she thought of as dirty birdy, who’d used such subtle sexual innuendo with Amy Davis. He was nice enough to leave a phone number. She also had a message from Taylor, the one she’d mentally dubbed as stalker-guy. He was interested in meeting for a drink. Still no word from bachelor number three, Enoch.
She pulled up the message from Taylor, hit Reply, and typed, Taylor, How about a phone call first? Give me a number where I can call you?” Twenty seconds later, she received a message from Taylor with a telephone number, complete with the desperate comment that he had plenty of free minutes on his new CellularOne plan. That was the nice thing about stalkers. They were good about returning messages.
Then she found herself reading another message, this one from one of the “keepers” to whom Jess had sent a flirt on her behalf. Hey. It’s pretty funny they call hitting a little button on their Web page flirting . Doesn’t flirting usually involve lingering glances across a crowded room, a gentle graze of the forearm after a subtle joke, deliberately placed lips on a wine glass… Whoops, sorry, got a little carried away there. Wow, is it hot in here? Anyway, thanks for flirting with me. If you get a chance, tell me a little bit about yourself. How’s this for an ice-breaker? My name’s Peter. Hey, don’t laugh. My name really is Peter. Seriously.
The message was enough to make Ellie laugh – twice – so she clicked on Peter’s profile, amazed that she was even remotely curious about a man her brother had selected. She read the brief introduction he’d written about himself. It’s official. I’m a hypocrite. I shake my angry fist at the publishing industry that fails to recognize my manuscripts as the future classics of American fiction, and yet I have no idea what to say about myself in this little box. I have a salaried writing job by day but dream of making it to the walls of Chumley’s. I guess that makes me a writer manqué. I consider my self a non-British, much better-looking version of Nick Hornby, so prepare yourself for endless conversations involving randomly inserted allusions to culturally significant popular icons such as the Clash, the Simpsons, John Waters, so-bad-it’s-good reality TV, and on and on till the break of dawn. Sounds fun, right?
Ellie smiled, then found herself typing a response. Peter, Thanks for the note. About that mental digression of yours, I hope I was good. Manqué? I looked up that fancy SAT word in the dictionary and it sounds a little bit like a wannabe. You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. She paused, knowing that she should say at least something about herself. I’m not a writer but I do like to read. I overheard a woman in a bookstore the other day tell her friend she really loved books, “but not the reading kind.” Besides reading and eaves- dropping on strangers in stores, I like kickboxing and watching my brother’s band play. Wow. That made me sound really butch and boring. Hopefully I’m neither. If I had to pick one, though, I guess I’d go with the former.
Ellie paused again. You need to sign an e-mail, don’t you? She typed DB990, then erased it. Ally. Close enough. She hit send. Your message has been sent to Unpublished. Too late to back out now.
She checked her watch. Jason Upton was expecting her in forty minutes. She’d have to wait to learn more about Peter, but she had just enough time to do a little research into the men who called themselves Taylor and Mr. Right.
ELLIE WAITED FOR JASON UPTON ON A SQUAT, SHINY BLACK leather sofa in the Midtown lobby of the law firm of Larkin, Baker & Howry. She took in a Jasper Johns silkscreen on the wall across from her as she sipped a coffee fetched for her by the receptionist.
“Detective Hatcher? I’m Jason Upton.”
The man who offered his hand did not fit the stereotype of a computer geek or tech-head. He was probably in his midthirties and dressed fashionably in a pair of loose khaki pants and a striped open-collar shirt. His frame was full but fit. His dark hair managed to be simultaneously neat but tousled. His accent was northeastern and uniquely moneyed.
“Thanks for making time for me. My partner should be here shortly, but we can start without him.”
Jason asked the receptionist to bring McIlroy to them when he arrived, and then led the way to a more modest office two floors down.
“Big change in scenery,” she commented.
“Welcome to the fifty-seventh floor, land of word processing, printing, and I.T. No clients means no interior decorators. Just cubicles, copy machines, and lots of computers. I’m lucky to have walls.”
“I think I prefer the art in here,” Ellie said, gesturing to a framed poster from Pulp Fiction as she took a seat in Jason’s sole guest chair. She got straight to the point, first covering the possible link between two murder victims and FirstDate, then moving on to the effort to determine the true identities behind all of the user names. “We started an account ourselves and are trying to get ID’s on a few of the men by contacting them directly, but it would be a lot easier if someone with access to the company’s computers would just hand over the names.”
“The police department has an online dating profile?” he asked, laughing.
“I meant more like a royal we, as in me.”
“Usually I have this spiel I give my female friends before they try the online dating thing, but I assume this is strictly for investigative purposes?”
“All business, I’m afraid.” A thought of Peter the wannabe writer flashed through her mind. “Go ahead and give me the spiel anyway.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t have worked to start the company if I didn’t think it could serve a good purpose. Love’s a beautiful thing, right? Mark and I really believed that the Internet held the potential to transform the way a couple interacts when they first ‘meet,’ so to speak. People open up on e-mail in a more honest way than when they’re face-to-face with someone they’re trying to impress. Then, by the time you see each other in person, there’s already a connection there. A bad outfit, or the beginning of baldness, or a few extra pounds – those physical imperfections that might have been deal killers if you met in a bar – they become something you get past.”
“You make it sound so-” Ellie wanted to say sickening but instead she opted for “pure.”
“Well, those upsides were what we had in mind when we started. But we also knew there could be downsides. We did our best to warn customers up front so they could be smart, but, frankly, not everyone’s so smart.”
“I see a lot of that in my job.”
“So you can imagine what I’m talking about. People handed over their real names and phone numbers to total strangers. They met for first dates at their homes. One guy said he lived in Arizona and needed money to move up to New York to pursue the relationship. Of course, he lived in Hoboken and gave the same story to twenty different women. Really stupid stuff. I left when our customer base was relatively small, but we were already getting a ton of complaints about unwanted e-mails, phone calls, whatever.”
Ellie was reminded of Amy Davis’s problems with Taylor, the man who couldn’t take no for an answer. “That’s why you’ve got that Block function, right?”
“We programmed that in after the first few weeks online. We had that many problems. It’s a quick fix, but only for customers who are smart enough to stay anonymous – no names, phone numbers, any of that.”
“And not everyone’s smart.”
“Exactly. Then of course you’ve got all the same problems you have out there with good old-fashioned dating. One guy I worked with was juggling five different women in any given week. Each of them thought their boyfriend was working so hard he could only see them once a week on date night. Now, in the old-fashioned world, a guy like that would eventually get caught juggling women in his building, or from work, or who were friends of friends – the girls might put the pieces together. And if he did get caught, there’d be the embarrassment factor if he had to keep running into them. But FirstDate introduces people who share absolutely no preexisting links. As a result, there’s no accountability if someone gets caught being a dog.”
“This dog from work – he doesn’t happen to be Mark Stern?”
Jason laughed. “Mark? No, definitely not. Very happily married.”
“So it’s not just a marketing image? I thought maybe he hired someone to pose for that perfect wedding picture on his desk.”
“You’re a very cynical woman, so I’m sorry to disappoint you. He’s actually as happy as he appears to be.”
“Just not fair,” Ellie said dryly.
Knuckles rapped against the office door frame.
“Hi. Flann McIlroy.” Ellie noticed that her partner was carrying a pair of brown sheepskin gloves and a laptop that looked a lot like Amy Davis’s. He laid the gloves on Jason’s desk and shifted the computer into his left hand as he offered Jason the other. “The woman upstairs said it was all right to come down.”
“The more the merrier,” Jason said, making room to roll a stool from the hallway into his small office.
“Did you get what you wanted downtown?” Ellie asked. She was eager to know what Flann had learned from Mark Stern. If Tatiana also had an account, they’d have a stronger argument for getting a court order giving them access to FirstDate’s records, and they wouldn’t even need Jason Upton.
“I got an answer to the question, but it wasn’t the one we wanted.” Flann did his best to make it sound innocuous, but Ellie could tell he was disappointed. So was she. Chekova was killed by the same gun as Caroline Hunter but wasn’t using FirstDate. Maybe they were hurtling down an entirely wrong track.
“I WAS JUST about to ask Jason why he left the company,” Ellie said.
“For all of this,” Jason said, holding his arms out wide. “Money, prestige, power.”
“We have all the same rewards in our job.”
“I left because Mark was more ambitious than I was. I liked the work we were doing, the freedom of self-employment, breaking new ground. I had a trust fund, though, and Mark didn’t. He was a few years older. He was the entrepreneur, the one with the M.B.A. and the big plans. Honestly, I wasn’t willing to do the corporate side of the work. I mean, come on. I was a computer science major, archaeology minor at Tufts. What do I know about business? Maybe if I’d pulled myself up by the bootstraps, I’d be more like him, but what can I say? Dot-com’s were all going bust so I got out. Mark had the cojones to stick with it.”
“You left on good terms?”
“Oh yeah. Mark’s a little uptight, but we always got along real well. He was nice enough to act heartbroken when I left, but he was probably happy to be able to take the company in his own direction. We worked out a nice little deal for both of us. I got to move on to other things. Mark kept his stock and got to live his dream.”
“He strikes us as more than just a little uptight,” Ellie said. “He pretty much threw us out of his office when we asked him to give us some customer names, then threatened to sue us if the story leaked. And he’s apparently got all of his employees too scared to help us behind his back.”
“Like I said, he was always more corporate than I was.”
“Feel like taking your old job back, just for a few days?” Ellie asked.
“Sorry. I hope that’s not your reason for being here.”
“Actually, I was hoping you might at least be able to point us in the right direction. Do you know someone at FirstDate who could pull the information we need?”
Jason shook his head. “I don’t know most of the people there now. The company’s grown, and we always had a lot of turnover. You’ve got to understand. It’s not like there’s this public file in the network at FirstDate that links customer names to their profiles. Very few people have access to that. Otherwise, you get one bad employee, and every married man hooking up online would get blackmailed. Only a few people are likely to have access, but I’ve got to be honest – my guess is they’ll toe the party line if Mark has put his foot down on this one.”
“Which he has,” Ellie made clear. “I don’t suppose you still have some magic password you can use to log on to the system?”
Jason smiled and shook his head. “Sorry. I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that.”
“I figured you probably would have mentioned it by now.”
“I’ve got a question,” Flann interjected. “Any idea how someone could get into a woman’s FirstDate e-mails and print one of them out?” Flann explained how they found a FirstDate message that apparently wasn’t printed by the victim. He placed the laptop he was carrying on Jason’s desk and opened it. “This belonged to one of our victims if you want to take a look.”
“Well, let’s start with the easy stuff. You said you have a list of FirstDate connections, so that means you managed to get into this woman’s account. How’d you do it?”
Ellie explained how she requested a lost password and answered the so-called security questions on the FirstDate site. Jason nodded.
“Okay, so there’s one way right there. You knew enough about the victim to have the password sent directly from the Web site provider. A higher tech way to get a password is by stealing a person’s cookies.”
“English please,” Flann said.
“A cookie is a tiny piece of data sent from a Web server to a Web browser. So when you use a browser like Internet Explorer to go to a Web site like eBay, eBay sends a cookie to your browser, then it’s stored on your computer so that eBay will recognize you the next time you visit the site from that same computer. What people don’t understand is that computers don’t just hang on to the stuff that you intentionally tell them to save. They also hang on to all kinds of data on a temporary basis. Here, take a look at this.”
He had logged Amy Davis onto the law firm’s wireless network and then pulled up the popular search engine site Google. He clicked on the empty text box provided for users to type in their Internet search. A menu of text appeared.
“With just one click on an empty box, we can see all of the different Google searches she ran since the last time she cleared her search history.”
He scrolled down the alphabetical list. American Idol. Black wedge boots. Cat toys. Dwight Schrute.
“That information is all stored in the computer temporarily. Same thing with her Internet browser.” He hit a separate button to display Amy Davis’s history on Internet Explorer, then scrolled down to point out all of the Web sites she’d visited recently.
“You could erase all of this data just by hitting Clear, or by scheduling your computer to do it every day automatically. The same is true with all the cookies that get sent to your computer from Web servers. So what a cookie tracker does is send the victim to a link that’s disguised as a legitimate Web site. But instead of being whatever site it purports to be, the link lets the bad guy steal the cookies off the victim’s computer.”
“And cookies are worth having?” Ellie asked.
“Sure, if they contain anything of value to the person who steals them – things like passwords, user names, sites visited, old searches. A good hacker can steal all kinds of information through cookies. Or cookies could be used to create a profile of a person, by monitoring their activities across a number of different Web sites. It’s like someone stalking while you surf.”
“Can you tell if anyone did that to Amy Davis’s laptop?”
“No, but a computer like this is a hacker’s best friend. Her privacy levels are low. She hadn’t updated the security on her system for more than a year. It also looks like she was using an unprotected home wireless network to connect to the Internet.”
“And what does that mean?” McIlroy asked.
“Half the people in Manhattan do it,” Ellie explained, “including me. Wireless home networks are designed for houses, which means that in a city apartment, you can mooch off your neighbor’s connection and not have to pay for your own.”
“It also means there’s about fifty different ways someone could have known what Web sites she was going to,” Jason explained. “They also could have gotten into any files she downloaded from the net, including that message.”
“And with all that clicking around you’re doing there, you can’t tell us which of those methods was most likely?” McIlroy asked.
“Nope. But what most people fail to realize is that the biggest risk of losing privacy online isn’t from the technological potential of the Internet. It’s carelessness.”
“What do you mean?” Ellie asked.
“Like one way for a black hat to get a white hat’s account password is to know them well enough to figure it out. People use birth dates, their kids’ names – amateur stuff. You pulled off a more sophisticated version when you answered all her security questions that backed up her password. Or they can hack it. Super computer nerd stuff. But the black hat could just persuade the white hat to turn it over. A phone call. There’s been a problem with our records,” he said, holding an imaginary telephone to his ear. “It’s possible that someone else has recently changed your password. We need you to verify your account information.”
“So the idea is to scare the person with a threat that doesn’t really exist, so they suddenly trust this stranger on the phone,” Ellie said.
“Precisely. Now imagine doing it not with a phone call, but with an e-mail sent to thousands of potential victims at one time. That’s what they call phishing.”
“I bet the fraud unit sees cases like that all the time,” Flann added. “Why go for an e-mail password when you can say you’re American Express and need to verify the customer’s account number? It’s a very simple con.”
“Exactly,” Jason said. “But the technology provides the incentive. The black hats can hit thousands of potential marks with a single e-mail. The stolen credit card numbers can be used to wire money to a Western Union, where it’s picked up using a fake ID.”
Ellie knew that the profitability of identity theft had created a vast market for the sale and purchase of personal information. “So the same simple tricks people use for identity theft could’ve been used by our guy to access a victim’s FirstDate account,” Ellie said.
“Yep. Or, like I said, it could be super low tech if her password was obvious.” Jason shut down Amy Davis’s computer and handed it to Flann. “At first I thought you meant someone was using FirstDate to find women, like a big search engine. But if he was actually snooping through her account – I’m not a psychologist, but isn’t that, you know, sort of obsessive?”
“That’s what we thought,” Ellie said. “Not just killing, but stalking first.”
“If that’s the case, he probably did a lot more than read a few of her e-mails. Do you have any idea how much you can learn about a person without ever leaving your office? Even here,” Jason said, “the attorneys ask me to do research on opposing parties all the time. I can pull up a person’s divorce records, income levels, real estate transactions, an entire life picture. Pretty helpful stuff when you’re trying to figure out how deep a person’s pockets are or where they’re hiding money. And it’s all publicly available, thanks to data-mining companies that aggregate information from the public domain and pop it up on the Internet for all to see. Now imagine if someone with competent hacking skills decided to break the rules.”
DOWN IN THE MARBLE lobby, men and women in thousand-dollar suits bustled through at fast clips to make the elevator, Starbucks cups in hand. Corporate types were always in a hurry, Ellie thought, but they always seemed to have time to stand in line for a five-dollar cup of coffee. Once they made it through the crowd, Ellie asked Flann about his visit to Mark Stern.
“He was actually cooperative. I told him how we connected Tatiana Chekova to Caroline Hunter through ballistics. He immediately saw why we’d want to know if she was a customer. I watched over his shoulder while he checked, and, unfortunately, Tatiana’s name was nowhere in the system. He double-checked by calling accounting to see if anyone named Chekova had ever been billed by them. Nothing. He looked pretty relieved.”
“So where does that leave us?” Ellie asked. If Stern was relieved, it meant he was even more convinced that FirstDate was unrelated to the murders. She was having some real doubts about their theory as well.
“Same place we were before. We keep working all the angles and hope something breaks.”
“On that note, I’ve got real names for both Taylor and Mr. Right.”
“How’d you manage that?”
“They both sent me phone numbers.”
“Jesus, it really is easier for women, isn’t it?”
Ellie removed a small notepad from her handbag. “I ran the numbers through the reverse directory, and voilà. Mr. Right’s real name is Rick Newton.” He was the one Ellie thought of as dirty birdy, so fond of double entendre. “He’s got a drunk and disorderly three years ago at a bar in Tribeca. I took the liberty of calling him. I told him it was about some found property. He’s coming into the station this afternoon.”
“And Taylor?”
“Taylor Gottman. Two different women have obtained restraining orders against him in the last five years.”
“Ding ding ding,” Flann said, touching the tip of his nose.
“No arrests, but he’s definitely interesting. Him, I think we need to surprise.”
Flann stole a glance at his watch. “No time like the present.”
“Sounds good.”
On the way out of the building, Ellie pulled on her gloves and looped her scarf around her face.
“Doggone it,” Flann said, patting the pockets of his coat. “I left my gloves upstairs.” He headed in the direction of the elevators. “I’ll be right back. Can you do me a favor? I don’t want to waste the rest of the day trying to find this guy Taylor. Call his cell, make up some story, and figure out where he is?”
“I’m supposed to do all that while you go fetch your gloves? Maybe I’ll get myself a manicure while I’m at it.”
“See the confidence I have in you,” Flann said, his ruddy face beaming. “Oh, and, no pressure, but my lieutenant called. He wants a briefing this afternoon so we’d better nail down something soon.”
Right, Ellie thought, flipping open her phone. No pressure.
“MAY I PLEASE speak with Mr. Gottman?” Ellie had dialed the number Taylor Gottman had e-mailed to the woman he knew as DB990.
“This is him.”
Ellie fingered Jason Upton’s Larkin, Baker & Howry business card. “This is Larkin Baker calling from CellularOne. Can you please verify your home address and telephone number for identification purposes?”
“What is this about?”
“There’s been some recent activity on your cellular account that we need to confirm for security purposes. Can you please verify the address and home telephone number on the account?”
Taylor rattled off a Brooklyn street address and a 718 area code number.
“And can I get a work number for you while I have you on the line?”
He recited a 212 number that she added to her notes.
“Okay. And in the event we’re disconnected, is the work number where I can reach you now? Great.” She circled Gottman’s office number. “I’m calling because we recently received a request to add cellular telephone insurance to this account. Was that request made by you?”
“No, it wasn’t,” Taylor said, sounding alarmed. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“All right. There’s no need for concern. That’s why we make these phone calls, to make sure there’s no fraudulent activity on the account.”
“Fraud? Someone’s using my phone?”
“No, sir. Everything’s fine. The insurance covers the replacement of your telephone in the event that it is lost or stolen. Unfortunately, some people have been adding insurance to accounts, then making claims in our branch stores for very expensive telephones. Now we call customers to ensure that the insurance and any claims are authentic. Since we caught it up front, there’s nothing to worry about.”
“Okay. I guess I should be grateful you guys are on top of it.”
“We try our best,” Ellie said, hitting the end button on her phone. A quick call to the precinct for a reverse phone directory search of Taylor Gottman’s work number yielded a Midtown address. She was clicking her phone shut as Flann emerged from the elevator with his gloves on.
“We ready to roll?” he asked optimistically.
“Taylor Gottman’s office is six blocks from here.”
SMO MEDIA OCCUPIED FOUR FLOORS OF A MIDSIZE OFFICE tower at Forty-ninth and Lexington. The marketing firm’s receptionist was a young lithe brunette with full lips and flawless skin – undoubtedly an aspiring model when she wasn’t wearing that headset. She was squinting at Ellie and Flann, polite but clearly confused.
“I’m sorry, who is it you’re looking for?” A well-polished fingernail ran again down the pages of names on the desk in front of her.
“Taylor Gottman,” Flann said.
“Do you know what department he’s in?”
The man’s FirstDate profile described his job as “marketing/advertising/other” and his annual income as more than one hundred thousand dollars. “We’re pretty sure he’s one of the marketing or advertising executives,” Ellie said.
The receptionist’s big green eyes roamed the phone list again as she shook her head bewilderedly. “No. I’m sorry. I don’t see him here. You’re sure he works here? SMO? You know, there are a bunch of other marketing groups in this building.”
Damnit. Had Taylor been tipped off by Ellie’s phone call? No way, Ellie thought. No way did he pull a phone number of another marketing company out of his ass like that.
Ellie pulled a small notebook from her jacket pocket and looked at the notes she had taken from Taylor’s profile. “He’s five eleven. Brown hair, brown eyes.” She tried to recall the online photograph. “Sort of short hair. Thin face.”
The receptionist shrugged her shoulders, and Ellie realized her description was no better than the junk she usually got from eyewitnesses.
“Do you have Internet access on that?” Ellie asked, gesturing to the flat-screen computer panel in front of the receptionist.
“Of course,” the receptionist jiggled the mouse on her desk and the Web site for Entertainment Weekly appeared on her screen.
“May I?” Ellie asked, already stepping behind the desk. She logged on to the FirstDate Web site, clicked on her connections, and pointed to a photograph of Taylor. “Does this man look familiar?”
“Um, I’m not sure.” The model moved her face closer to the screen and looked again. “Oh my god. Is that…the mail room guy?”
“What mail room guy?”
“Some creepy guy who works in the mail room. I don’t know his name. He stares at me when he’s up here. A couple of times he noticed me catch him at it. He apologized, but then told me how pretty I was.”
“That sounds like our guy. Do you know where we can find him?”
She gave them directions to the mail room two floors down and pointed the way to the stairs.
“The mail room, huh?” Flann said on the way down. “Last I heard, that wasn’t a six-figure job.”
Ellie feigned shock and fanned herself like a southern belle. “Oh my lawd. Call the papers. A man lied about his income.”
They found their way to a large room in the back corner, where a bulky man sat at the front counter, placing labels on a series of envelopes.
“Can I help you?”
Ellie scanned the office and saw a man resembling Taylor sorting manila interoffice envelopes into folders hanging from a file cart. She shifted her jacket, revealing the NYPD badge clipped at her waist.
“We’re looking for Taylor Gottman. Is that him?” She nodded her head toward the back of the room, and the big man’s gaze followed hers.
“Yeah. What’d he do?”
Ellie noticed the response. Is everything all right? Did something happen? That’s what she was used to from employers, coworkers, neighbors – people who knew the suspect. But not with Taylor Gottman. What’d he do?
“Absolutely nothing,” she said confidently. “We’re just here about some unauthorized activity reported on his cellular account. We’ll need him to file a report.”
“Yo, Taylor. Cops for you.” Taylor and his four coworkers all turned in response to the man’s big voice. “Something about your cell phone.”
Taylor Gottman was tall and thin with short brown hair, full lips, and pale, smooth skin. As he made his way over, Ellie noticed he had an effeminate walk.
“Someone from the company just called me twenty minutes ago. I didn’t even call the police.”
“Is there somewhere we can talk privately?” Flann asked.
Taylor looked uncertainly at the beefy guy with the big voice, who in turn looked at the watch on his thick wrist.
“Go ahead and take your fifteen,” the man said.
Taylor led the way to a break room down the hallway. A frumpy woman sat at the only table in the small room, eating a Butterfinger and reading a paperback romance novel. “Excuse me,” Ellie said. The woman’s eyes didn’t leave her book. “Ma’am? Hello? Excuse me.”
Finally, at least a visual acknowledgment of their presence. “We’re police. We need to take a crime report from this gentleman. I hate to interrupt you, but could you give us some privacy?”
The woman pushed some yellow Butterfinger crust into her mouth as she considered the request. “My break’s over anyway,” she acquiesced, glancing at the clock. She read a moment more, then tucked a bookmark neatly into the novel.
When she was gone, Taylor had an observation to make. “You look familiar,” he said to Ellie. “And your voice too. This isn’t about that cell phone insurance, is it?”
“Do you know a woman named Amy Davis?”
Taylor repeated the name to himself a couple of times, as if trying to jog his memory. “It sounds familiar. Can you tell me who she is?”
Was. Who Amy was. “I think you might know her from FirstDate?”
“That’s right,” Taylor said, snapping his fingers. “What’s her online name again?”
“MoMAgirl. She works at the Museum of Modern Art.”
“Right, right.” He nodded his head like it was all coming back to him now. “We went out on a date. Must have been – I don’t know – a few weeks ago?”
“A date?” Ellie asked skeptically. “From what we can tell from your e-mails, it was one cup of coffee. And it didn’t go very well.”
“Well, I considered it a date.”
“And you also considered it to be a pretty successful one. But Amy didn’t agree, did she? Amy wasn’t interested in having another – well, what you call a date.”
“I don’t remember why it didn’t go further.” Taylor brushed imaginary crumbs from his dark green pants. “I would’ve said it was mutual. Whatever. We didn’t see each other again. What does it matter anyway?”
“It matters,” Flann said, “because MoMAgirl is dead.” He laid a picture of Amy’s face, resting against the cold metal slab at the coroner’s office, on the table in front of Taylor. “She was killed Friday night.”
Apparently Taylor wasn’t one for reading newspapers. He didn’t take his eyes from the gruesome photograph, but the color left his skin and for a second, Ellie thought he was going to be sick. He finally looked away, shaking his head adamantly. “No. No. You can’t possibly – That’s ridiculous. I didn’t even know her.”
“You wanted to though. We’ve seen the e-mails, Taylor.” Ellie leaned forward, moving herself closer. “We need to understand what happened.”
“Nothing.” Taylor used his hands to push his chair back from the table subtly, giving himself space from Ellie. “We went out one time.”
“You have a problem letting go.”
“That’s not true.”
“Of course it’s true. But-”
“It is not.”
“What do you want me to say in response to that, Taylor? Is so? We can go back and forth like that all day if you’d like. But ultimately, I’m going to win. Why? Because in addition to all those e-mails you sent to Amy Davis – so many that she had to block you from her in-box – we also know about the restraining orders. Two of them. From two different women. Even the receptionist – that pretty girl upstairs – says you stare at her all the time.”
“You make me sound like some kind of…vulture.”
“No.” Ellie’s voice was firm. “I said you had a problem letting go. I didn’t judge. That woman upstairs? From what she told us, you complimented her. Told her how nice she looks. Did I say there was anything wrong with that? I mean she obviously tries to look good. It’s not your fault she’s offended when someone notices. I’m just saying you can be – tenacious. That doesn’t mean you hurt Amy. That’s what we’re here to understand.”
“You talked to Monique?”
Ellie said nothing.
“The girl at the front desk. Her name’s Monique.” He appeared to struggle to find the right words. “She’s – she’s nothing. All looks. Nice skin, pretty hair. She smells good. But there’s no substance.”
“What about Amy?” Flann asked. “She was different, wasn’t she?”
Taylor nodded slowly. For the first time since he’d seen the picture, he looked genuinely sad. “So completely different. She was smart and funny and confident. Did you know she graduated in the top ten percent of her class at Colby? Then she had a fellowship in Washington, D.C., with the National Endowment for the Arts. She sat on the board of a nonprofit here in New York that took poor kids to Broadway shows. She knew a ton about art. She was good to her friends.”
It was an odd way of describing the dead. More like the rundown of a résumé than a personal account of the woman. And they had already determined that Amy didn’t have many friends in the city – just girlfriends from college who’d moved on to motherly lives in the suburbs.
“You know. She was the kind of girl who organized her five-year college reunion. And she’d been a bridesmaid a few times. You could see by the way her friends smiled around her that she had a real impact on them.”
It all clicked for Ellie as she listened to Taylor reminisce. “How do you know these things about her?”
“What?”
“How do you know she did all of these things, Taylor? And when did you see her with her friends if you only went out once for coffee, just the two of you?”
He was silent, staring at the table in front of him.
“You researched her. You snuck around and learned those things about her on your own. She never told you any of it. She didn’t even know you. How’d you do it? Follow her? Talk to her friends?” Ellie knew the answer but wanted to hear it from Taylor.
He was shaking his head. “It wasn’t like that. Not at all. All I did was Google her.”
“And you didn’t think that invaded her privacy?”
His brow furrowed and he looked up at Ellie. “Googling someone? You mean to tell me that you wouldn’t pop in the name of a new boyfriend on the Internet? Everyone does it.”
“How did you even know her last name?”
Silence again. Ellie stared at him until he answered. “I didn’t. But I knew she went to Colby and worked at MoMA. That was enough. Google’s amazing.”
“You did all this work to learn about a woman who didn’t want to know you. And now she’s dead, Taylor.”
“I didn’t do it. When was it? You said Friday night. What time?”
Ellie looked to Flann. “Around midnight.”
Taylor’s knee jiggled under the table.
“Let me guess,” Ellie said. “Sitting alone at home watching TV.”
“In my bed, sleeping. Alone.”
“On a Friday night?” Flann asked.
“Yeah.” He seemed to realize it sounded pathetic. “Look, I’m not perfect. I’m – how’d you say it – I don’t like letting go. But I was totally over Amy. I promise. I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t see me again, but – well, there’s someone else now.”
“A girlfriend?”
More knee jiggling. “You know, someone else I’m paying more attention to.”
Ellie realized what he was telling them. His obsession – his myopic focus on one particular woman who didn’t return his affections – was homed in on a new target.
“Who is she?”
“From FirstDate. I can log on to my account if you want. You can see all the messages.”
They followed Taylor back to the mail room and asked the behemoth of a supervisor for some privacy at his computer terminal. “We need to get some information off his cell phone account,” Ellie explained.
Taylor logged on to the FirstDate Web site and pulled up a list of messages he had sent. Forty-five in the last five days alone, most of them to a woman calling herself Dragonfly. Nothing to Amy Davis for eleven days. Taylor appeared to have moved on.
One message to Taylor’s current project was transmitted just after eleven the night Amy was murdered. It mentioned a mock interview that Ellie recognized from that night’s episode of The Daily Show. If Taylor had been watching television at his apartment in Prospect Heights, it would have been possible for him to get into Manhattan to kill Amy an hour later, but not likely.
Flann gave Ellie a look that said he felt it too. Taylor Gottman was a creep, but he wasn’t their creep.
“What’s her real name?” Ellie asked. “This new woman, Dragonfly. The one you’re e-mailing with.”
“Janet.”
“Janet What?”
“Janet Bobbitt.”
“All right. You’re not going to e-mail her anymore.”
“What?” Taylor quickly lowered his voice to a whisper, avoiding the attention of his coworkers in the mail room. “But you were here about Amy-”
“And we’re going to leave you alone about her.” His worried face was immediately washed in relief. “And in exchange you’re not going to e-mail Janet. And you’re going to stop using FirstDate. As soon as we leave, you’re terminating your account. And I’m going to go back to the precinct and make sure you’ve done it.”
Taylor no longer looked relieved but he wasn’t fighting them either.
“I shouldn’t even help you.”
“You haven’t,” Ellie said firmly.
“But I can. You have to promise not to get mad at me.” Taylor was whispering again.
“Get mad at you? What do you think this is, Taylor? Kindergarten?”
“You know what I mean. You can’t yell at me, or arrest me or something.”
“What did you do? We can’t promise not to arrest you if we don’t know what we’re talking about.”
“Nothing illegal. It’s nothing. It’s just – well, I – I followed Amy a few times.”
Ellie sighed and shook her head. “Depending on what we’re talking about, that’s stalking. It’s the same thing that got you those restraining orders.”
“Fine. Arrest me then. I’m trying to help you. For Amy. I followed her and – well, I saw someone else. I saw another man. Twice. First I saw him looking at us when we met for coffee. He was outside. I felt sort of proud, like another man was noticing me with a woman as beautiful as Amy. But then I saw him again, standing under the fire escape at her building.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. About two weeks ago, not long after our date. I even tried to e-mail Amy about it, but she had blocked me. Look – I can show you.”
He turned to the computer and pulled up a message sent to MoMAgirl eleven days earlier. Amy, I know you’re not interested in seeing me, and I know this will sound really weird. I was in your neighborhood visiting a friend and noticed a man in the alley by your building. DON’T FREAK OUT. I only know you live there because I happened to see you walk in once. Anyway, I think I saw the same guy watching us at the coffee shop. I know it sounds crazy, but please be careful. I promise not to contact you again.
It was indeed the last message he’d sent her, and it had been bounced back to him with a notification that he’d been blocked from the user’s FirstDate account.
A man beneath Amy’s fire escape, in the same alley where her body was found. “What did the guy look like? The one you saw in the alley.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. Tall, I guess. Not big, though. He was all bundled up in the cold. I think I’d recognize him if I saw him again.”
Ellie tried having Taylor look at Amy’s connections on FirstDate in the hope of jogging a memory loose, but it was no use.
“I should have done more,” Taylor said. “I could have called her or something.”
Ellie took a final look at Taylor Gottman, slumped at his boss’s computer, staring at the messages supposedly sent by a successful advertising executive.
“It wouldn’t have made a difference, Taylor. She wouldn’t have believed you.”
SPECIAL AGENT CHARLIE DIXON STARED OUT AT THE HUDSON River, but saw something else altogether. He saw the smiling face of Tatiana Chekova framed by long, loose, honey brown curls, blown by the winds that rushed over the Hudson River on an unseasonably warm spring afternoon almost two years ago.
Charlie had called in sick that day so he and Tatiana could take a sightseeing cruise. The champagne-pouring, sailor-hat-wearing tour guide was corny, but they both knew this was the closest they could come anytime soon to fulfilling Tatiana’s dream of a real luxury cruise. He thought of the glee on her face – the utter carefree abandon – as they waited among the tourists to board at Pier Eighty-three. The way she pushed her cheek into his hand when he reached for her. The one time he had touched her in public. That’s what Charlie remembered now as he stared at the water.
They had met two months earlier when Charlie drove to the precinct in Brooklyn to debrief a Russian female who had just been arrested for heroin possession and credit card fraud. His friend and supervisor Barry Mayfield liked to say that Charlie “got played” by Tatiana. It was easier for Mayfield to think of it that way – to think of Charlie as the victim instead of Tatiana. In Mayfield’s view, Tatiana had immediately spotted an easy mark.
Charlie used his federal authority to cut her loose from the state felony charges she was facing. But instead of giving cooperation, she gave Charlie fake stories and false promises that led to nothing except the violation of a number of Justice Department guidelines – enough to lose Charlie his job and his pension, if not his freedom. In Mayfield’s view, Tatiana was probably killed by some other gullible horn dog who was sucker enough to fall for her shit. As Mayfield saw it, Charlie was luckier for it, as long as no one ever found out about him and Tatiana.
Charlie understood why Mayfield liked that version of the story, but he also knew it wasn’t true. He remembered the way Tatiana cried during that first interview. He’d seen a lot of suspects – male and female – try to cry their way out of it, but these tears were real. She was in over her head, and she had no idea how to get out.
Russian heroin importers were among the most sadistic, ruthless, and organized criminals Dixon had ever encountered. They also expected loyalty among cohorts, meting out heinous reprisals against those who disappointed. Dixon had flipped a member of the Russian mob three years ago. Six hours after the plea deal was struck, the informant’s wife and three children disappeared from the family’s home. Three days later, eight hack-sawed thumbs arrived in a care package mailed to the informant at his federal holding facility. The bodies were never found, and Dixon’s informant backed out of the cooperation agreement and served his full sentence. Tatiana didn’t want to go upstate but she wasn’t about to double-cross the men who fed her drug habit.
She was in the worst position suspects could find themselves in. She was a stripper-slash-occasional hooker who wanted a television she couldn’t afford. An eager-beaver cop’s search for the flat-screen led to her pop with enough horse to trigger eight years under the state’s Rockefeller sentencing laws. She was just dangerous enough, to men who were just bad enough, that she just might find herself killed. But she didn’t have an established record of cooperation, and she couldn’t corroborate anything she had to say. She was of marginal worth as an informant and was not even close to being the kind of deep player who could earn witness protection as a quid pro quo.
But Charlie got her out of the local charges anyway. He didn’t have it in him to do anything else. Not this time. She was too vulnerable, too needy. She seemed too good, and it had been a long time since he’d used his position to help anyone. So he helped Tatiana. He listened to her. And to reconcile the help he had given her with his obligations as an FBI agent, he had even acted on the limited information she did provide. He set up a controlled buy with a dealer she gave up. He popped another guy walking out of a motel with nearly a hundred stolen credit card numbers.
But, on paper, he didn’t document one word about Tatiana – not the information she gave him, and not the consideration he’d shown her at the Brooklyn precinct. If he did, it would be obvious she got too good a deal for the information she gave. There’d be an inquiry. His motives would be questioned. And someone might figure out that he had fallen in love.
Everything might have been fine if Charlie had ignored the most intriguing piece of information Tatiana provided. This one time, she said, I heard some guys talking about some arrangement they had with a company called FirstDate. Charlie pressed her for more. What guys? What kind of arrangement? Nothing. He should have let it drop. But even with that vague description, he had a theory: Organized criminals had to have a means of washing the proceeds of their criminal enterprises, and it was often legitimate businesspeople who did the laundering.
He couldn’t extract cooperation from the members of the criminal ring themselves, but he figured a man like Mark Stern would make a deal the minute the possibility of federal criminal charges was mentioned. So, nearly three months after he first met Tatiana, with absolutely no evidence to back him up, Dixon went to Mark Stern and told him he was a target. He claimed he had an informant who could document the use of his company, FirstDate, to hide financial transactions for Russian drug dealers.
But, to his surprise, Stern feigned ignorance, and then threw Charlie out of his office. Three nights later, Tatiana was shot in the Vibrations parking lot.
Looking back on it, almost two years after her death, he realized that Tatiana knew more than she told him. Her elusive mention of “some guys” with “some arrangement” was intentionally unhelpful. Tatiana wouldn’t have hidden anything from him, though, unless she were truly terrified. What crushed Charlie the most was the possibility that she was even trying to protect him. She had loved him too, after all. And they both knew that the men she was talking about made the crooks Charlie usually dealt with look like Boy Scouts.
So because Charlie had not let the FirstDate matter go when it would have made a difference to Tatiana, he had vowed never to let it go. He was still trying to figure out how Stern knew his information came from Tatiana. He was also still trying to find a connection between Stern and the men whom Tatiana was wrapped up with. In short, he was still looking for a way to bring Stern down.
Stern had all the signs of a man up to no good. According to his tax returns, he was drawing only a modest salary – modest for a CEO, at least – and had no other documented income. Meanwhile, he and his strictly volunteer-work wife managed to cover the mortgage on their twenty-four-hundred-square-foot apartment, complete with keys to Gramercy Park. They blew thirty grand on a weeklong stay last winter at a five-star resort on Paradise Island. They had a private driver. They were not living on Mark Stern’s salary. A hundred times Charlie had been tempted to turn what he had over to the tax division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. After all, Al Capone had been taken down for tax evasion. But then Charlie would have to explain how he knew so much about Mark Stern. And Stern would remember his meeting with Charlie two years ago. And Charlie would have to identify his informant. And then Charlie’s career would be over. He might even be prosecuted himself.
So Charlie kept waiting and watching, thinking someday Stern would slip up. Charlie would catch him with the wrong person. Figure out who else was involved. He’d make it look like one of them had been cooperating with the FBI all along. It was an old lawman’s trick – find out what you need to know first, then find yourself an informant to take the credit.
He’d used laws intended for terror investigations to get access to Mark Stern’s financial information. He kept up an undocumented informant relationship with a marketing assistant at FirstDate – on federal parole for a little coke habit. He could lose everything but had gotten absolutely nowhere. Up until this week, the only dirt he’d uncovered was that Mark Stern lived above his explainable means. Then, yesterday, out of the blue, his informant called to report that Stern had sent out an office-wide memo about a police inquiry related to the company. And now two NYPD detectives were threatening his mission by asking their own questions about FirstDate.
Charlie reached into his pocket for the one piece of evidence that remained of his relationship with Tatiana – a single photograph of them together, purchased for five dollars that day on the sightseeing cruise. Her smile was radiant. She was clean of the drugs. She was happy. His own face was at peace in a way he hadn’t felt since. He would remember that day on the boat with her – and the love he felt for her then – forever.
He took one last long look and tore the picture in half. Then he continued tearing, watching its unrecognizable pieces fall to the river below.
“CAN I JUST SAY YOU WERE A LOT HOTTER AS DB990?”
“Thanks. I’ll make a mental note. Now about the alibi-”
“How much detail do you need from me, Detective?”
The tone of the question was intended to be seductive. Unfortunately for Ellie, the questioner – Rick Newton, aka “Mr. Right” – was anything but. His jeans were a size too tight, and his disheveled hair was an inch too long. He gazed at Ellie in the interrogation room over rose-tinted sunglasses the size of salad plates. His attempt to be hip was more David Cassidy than George Clooney.
“Not nearly as much as you’ve got in mind,” Ellie responded. “Just a name and phone number would be fine.”
She pushed a notepad across the table in his direction, and he flipped his cell phone open to retrieve the requested information.
“I forgot the last name, but I’m sure she’ll be…forthcoming.” Newton grinned at Ellie as the final word dripped from his lips.
“It’s that kind of schtick that landed you here in the first place.”
“It’s also what landed me with Reeva. Hey, what does a Chinese Elvis impersonator say?”
“Why do I have a feeling you’re going to tell me anyway?”
“Reeva Ras Vegas.”
“That’s not even how the accent – oh, forget it.”
Newton was still singing when Ellie left the room to call poor Reeva. Her last name turned out to be Stanton. She also turned out to be mortified.
“I knew it. I just fucking knew it. I knew that sleeping with that sleaze-meister motherfucker was going to come back to haunt me.”
Ellie stifled a laugh. “I hate to do this to you, but could you give me a rough timeline?”
“Jesus, I’m so tempted to tell you I never met the guy. Too late, huh?”
Now Ellie snickered aloud. “Afraid so. That whole lying to the police thing can ruin a perfectly good day.”
“Oh, yeah. That. Well, don’t share it with the world, but I only met him that one night. At Uptown Lounge, at the bar.”
Ellie knew the place. It was an Upper East Side restaurant, particularly popular with good-looking single people.
“What time was that?”
“I got there pretty late, around eleven thirty. He was already there.”
“He, meaning Rick Newton?”
“I’m trying to repress it, but yes. Anyway, I just went through a horrible breakup, so I went out with my girlfriends. I’m following some silly book that says you’re supposed to go sixty days without talking to the asshole you’re trying to get over, and you’re supposed to stay busy while you go cold turkey. The same book probably says somewhere not to sleep with the first loser who comes sniffing your way, but, chalk it up to four ginger martinis and a broken heart, right?”
“So, as far as a timeline goes-”
“How long was it before my inner slut took him home? A couple of hours. We left around two. He tried to stick around in the morning, but I woke up early and told him I had to go to yoga. That was probably around nine on Saturday. Then I stayed hungover in bed for another six hours. I was hoping never to hear about it again.”
“Hopefully this will be the end of it. Can I get a name of one of your girlfriends? Just to corroborate?”
Reeva sighed loudly and gave Ellie a name and number. “She is going to give me so much shit.”
FLANN WAVED ELLIE over to his desk when she was finished with her call. “What did you get from Mr. Right?”
“A nasty case of the crabs if he had his way. In a development that proves that there’s someone out there for everyone – at least for an evening – Rick Newton somehow managed to get lucky Friday night.” Ellie shook her head in bewilderment. “He looks good to go.”
“So get a load of this. My friend from the D.A.’s office called.”
“Jeffrey P. Yong the poker player?”
“That would be the man. He worked his way up the ladder to figure out why he was told to back off the FirstDate subpoena. It wasn’t Stern after all. It was a call from the FBI field office.”
It took a moment for the information to sink in. “Why would the feds care about FirstDate?”
McIlroy raised his eyebrows. “Interesting question, isn’t it? Go ahead and wrap up things with your guy. Maybe you can call the feds while my lieutenant chews me out.”
“And what exactly did you do to make you chew-out-able?”
“With Lieutenant Dan Eckels, simply being Flann McIlroy is generally enough.” They shared a glance toward the man inside the glass office occupying one side of the detectives’ room. Ellie could see from the way that Lieutenant Eckels’s salt-and-pepper hairline barely cleared the back of his chair that he was short. Big, though. Wide. She remembered Flann telling her that his lieutenant wasn’t happy about the assistant chief’s decision to run with this investigation.
“Shouldn’t both of us go?” Ellie asked.
“You really don’t need to go to a Lieutenant Eckels chew-out session to feel like you’ve been there. Just imagine the mean, gruff boss in any cop movie you’ve ever seen. He’ll lean on me, remind me for the sixty-third time we don’t have the resources to run off on fantasy missions. He’ll scold me when I tell him we don’t have anything solid yet. And then he’ll set some arbitrary deadline by which we have to catch our man or he’ll shut us down. Got the general picture?”
“You sure you don’t want a second body to share the wrath?”
“Nah, he’s waiting for me. Besides, if all else fails, I can use the fact that the feds are interested to buy us a little more time. Eckels might hate me, but I’m a pal compared to the fibbies. Call the FBI office and see what you can find. Unless of course you need a little more private time with Rick Newton.” Flann threw her a cheeky wink before heading to the gallows.
ELLIE DID CALL the FBI, but the conversation was short. When she told Special Agent in Charge Barry Mayfield why she was calling, she could practically hear the thud as she hit the brick wall.
“I’m sorry, Detective. Tell me again why you think our office has any involvement with this company you’re talking about?”
Ellie couldn’t let on that she knew the FBI impeded their efforts to get a subpoena for FirstDate’s records. She didn’t want to burn Jeff Yong.
“The way you let word get around, I didn’t know it was a secret.”
“I know what cases my agents are working, and this one doesn’t ring a bell.”
“We’re working a murder case. Three of them actually. Tatiana Chekova. Caroline Hunter. Amy Davis. There’s a connection to an online dating company called FirstDate. The CEO is Mark Stern.”
“I understood that the first time you said it, Detective. None of it sounds like a federal concern. Unless of course you’re asking for the FBI’s assistance with a suspected serial killer. In that case, I’ll certainly call in Quantico. You’ll have national experts there within twenty-four hours.”
“We’ve got our case under control. In the spirit of cooperation, I was trying to see if we had some overlap. The company’s about to go public. Maybe you’ve got some kind of white collar investigation on it? Fraud in the initial public stock offering, perhaps?”
“Like I told you, Detective. I know the caseload out of this office.”
“Maybe it’s not an official case? Perhaps you’ve got an agent who’s friends with Stern? Asking a few questions for him about our investigation? We’d sure appreciate knowing something like that.”
“I don’t keep tabs on my agents’ friendships unless there’s a reason to worry about them. Now if you’ve got some specifics, something one of my agents did that’s inappropriate-”
“I didn’t say any such thing.”
“I didn’t think so. Thank you for calling, Detective. Good luck with that investigation. It sounds like a real barn burner.”
A young civilian aide lingered beside Flann’s desk with a manila envelope. “A messenger dropped this off for Detective McIlroy.”
“I’ll take it.” The mailing label on the envelope indicated it came from the law firm of Larkin, Baker & Howry. Ellie slid a letter opener across the top and removed a half-inch-thick stack of papers. On the first sheet was a Post-it note: Detective, The works, as you requested. Should all be self-explanatory. Jason Upton
Ellie flipped through the documents. Financial information. Public records. Property archives. All relating to Ed Becker.
She scanned the first printout. It showed a real estate transaction almost a year and a half earlier. The title of a house in Scarsdale had transferred from James Gunther to Edward Becker. The next page documented the simultaneous closing on a house in Staten Island, sold by Ed Becker for slightly less than what he paid for his new home in Scarsdale.
Ellie bit her lower lip as she realized what McIlroy had done. Forgotten gloves? Right. He had snuck upstairs to ask Jason the wunderkind to do a background check on Becker.
Ellie was still seething when McIlroy emerged from the lieutenant’s office. He failed to notice.
“Something better break for us soon,” he reported. “I played the fibbie card, but Eckels is talking about pulling the plug if we don’t start tying some pieces together. At this rate, we may not get a decent lead until our guy kills another victim.”
“You almost sound like you’re looking forward to it.” Ellie regretted the comment at once, knowing it was a passive-aggressive way of dealing with what actually angered her.
“Jesus, Hatcher. I was only kidding. I forget you haven’t thickened your skin yet. Any luck with the G-men?”
“No. They denied all knowledge of the subject. Are you going to do the same about this?” She dropped the stack of paper on McIlroy’s desk. He flipped through the pages, nodding as he read.
“You did a background check on another cop?” A couple of nearby heads turned, and Ellie lowered her voice. “I may be junior to you, but what the hell are you thinking? Show some loyalty.”
“You’re right, you are junior to me, so don’t talk to me like I’m I.A. I don’t have any loyalty to cops like Becker. You saw that house up there, in that highbrow neighborhood. When Upton said he could dig up information that the law keeps us from getting-”
“Well, I hope you’re happy. There’s nothing there. That house cost the same as he was paying back at his old place on the job. Oh, excuse me, the house itself cost slightly more, but if you check out his mortgage payments, he’s actually paying a little less per month now thanks to interest rates.”
“His mortgage payments are in here?”
“You did ask for the works, after all. What did you expect? An offshore account? A secret warehouse filled with piles of cash?”
Flann’s face fell. “I don’t know. A higher purchase price on that house, for one – something too spendy for a cop’s pension.”
“Well, you’re not going to find it there. Or anything else for that matter.”
“I guess some guys are just lucky.”
“Yeah, I’m sure Becker will feel real lucky knowing we checked up on him.”
“He’s not going to know, Ellie.”
“That wasn’t my point.”
“Look, I’m sorry that I’ve offended you. Becker’s not the most wholesome cop in my book, and the luxury digs set off my spidey senses. I didn’t see the harm in having someone check it out. I should have told you before I went back to Upton’s office.”
“You mean before you snuck back to his office?”
“Yes, before I snuck, like the snake in the grass that I am, back to his office. I should have told you the truth. Now does that tiny hint of a smile on your face mean we’re gonna be okay? You’re going to forgive the snake?”
“Yeah, we’re fine, Flann. As long as you promise not to do a background check on me.” Ellie wasn’t about to let on that she was harboring doubts about her new partner.
“I think I can live with that.”
“So, moving on to other subjects, I was thinking about trying to track down Tatiana’s sister tonight. Maybe check out the club she worked at too. You in?”
Flann checked his watch. “Sorry. I should have realized. I mean I shouldn’t have made other plans.”
“That’s okay. We hadn’t talked about it.” Ellie had just assumed that, like herself, Flann worked past the clock, regardless of the O.T.
“It’s just that – well, after our talk yesterday, I called Miranda, Stephanie’s mom. My daughter’s mother. Anyway, I’m going over there tonight. Stephanie and I are having dinner. I’m eating dinner with my daughter.”
“Flann. That’s wonderful.” Ellie couldn’t figure this guy out. One minute he seemed like a self-promoting turncoat, and the next he was a teddy bear.
“All right. Enough of that. You’re going to be cooing cute noises at me soon if you don’t stop looking at me like that.”
“Just gives me faith in the world. That’s all.”
“Get some rest tonight,” Flann said, pulling on his coat. “We’ll take another crack at it tomorrow.”
Ellie assured him she was going straight home too, but in the back of her mind, she couldn’t shake Flann’s passing remark: We may not get a decent lead until our guy kills another victim. She was not going to wait around for that to happen.
ELLIE’S FATHER ALWAYS believed that the key to finding a killer was to identify his motive. Find the motive, he used to say, and the motive will lead you to the man. Jerry Hatcher had been convinced that the College Hill Strangler was motivated by masochistic sexual voyeurism. That conviction had guided his thirteen-year search for men who got off watching women in pain.
Ellie reread all of her notes on the case, wondering about motive. None of the women were raped, but the absence of sexual contact didn’t preclude the possibility of a sexual motive. On the other hand, maybe she was overlooking an entirely different possibility. She found herself fixed on the words she’d transcribed politely while Amy Davis’s parents retrieved Chowhound. High school boy. Changed grade. Restraining order. Call Suzanne Mouton to verify. A New Iberia telephone number.
Changed grade. Ellie remembered that at some point in her own education, handwritten report cards were replaced by computer printouts. She assumed the same modernization had occurred in New Iberia by the time Amy Davis and Suzanne Mouton were in high school. What if Amy’s parents had given her their best clue at the very beginning? Ellie dialed Suzanne Mouton’s number.
“Hello?”
“I’m calling for Suzanne Mouton.” She tried pronouncing it the way Evelyn Davis had.
“This is Suzanne.”
Ellie explained who she was and why she was calling. “We’re working a lot of the leads we have locally, but we want to be thorough. Can’t risk missing a thing, you know? Anyway, Mrs. Davis mentioned a problem Amy had with a guy when you all were younger, before she left for college. I was hoping you could fill me in on the details.”
“You mean Edmond?”
“I don’t know the boy’s name. Apparently Mr. Davis had to get a restraining order against him?”
“Yeah, that was Edmond Bertrand,” Suzanne explained. “Just about the scariest boy a group of us girls could have imagined back then. Of course, that was before we realized how much worse people could be.”
“What exactly was the problem with Edmond?”
“A lot of what I know about the beginning is kind of secondhand. Amy and I really weren’t all that close around then. I suspect she and her friends thought I was a bore. Whatever happened, though, I do remember how obsessed Edmond got over her.”
“So they were high school sweethearts or something?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. It was a short-lived thing. He was sort of an outcast – the kind of weird kid who only has one friend, you know? Kind of sad. Amy – well, I don’t feel right saying something bad about her. It was so long ago and now she’s gone.”
“Her mom said something about him changing a grade for her?” Ellie prompted.
“Well, that was what I heard. She used him, to be frank. Everyone at school knew something wasn’t quite right with him. He wasn’t slow enough to be in the special classes with the short school bus, but, still, something was off. He lived in one of those group homes or something. But everyone knew how bad Amy wanted to get into one of those elite colleges she was always talking about, and he started bragging about how he knew how to change grades. Amy saw a way to take care of that C in Mr. Gribble’s bio class.”
“I don’t suppose you know whether it involved hacking into the school computers, did it?”
“Well, that’s what Edmond said he did.”
Ellie felt the beginnings of an adrenaline high. Whoever they were looking for had better-than-average computer skills.
“To tell you the truth,” Suzanne went on, “the rest of us figured it was all talk. But the next thing you know, the rumor is Amy’s letting him cop a feel behind the school fence.”
“I gather it didn’t last?”
“Only until she got her college acceptance letters. She blew him off, then started complaining around town that he wouldn’t leave her alone. At first we all felt sort of sorry for him, like she kind of brought it on herself, but then he crossed this line. It was like he was trying to possess her somehow – like if she wasn’t going to be with him, then he wasn’t going to let her move on.”
“And this continued even when she left for Colby?”
“Um, yeah, I think so. They pressed charges at one point. I think he got, like, thirty days in jail. I’m sorry. I know you’re trying to be thorough, but what does any of this have to do with what happened in New York?”
“Probably nothing,” Ellie said, trying to keep her voice even, but knowing in her gut she could be on the right track. In a boy who was already unstable, seduction followed by rejection and a jail sentence could be a motive to kill, even years later. The question was whether Edmond Bertrand was unstable enough to take out a few extra people to cover his trail. “We’re just trying to make sure. There have been cases where people carry grudges for decades then reappear out of nowhere.”
“I don’t think this is one of those cases. Evelyn and Hampton didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?” Ellie asked.
“Edmond Bertrand is dead. He overdosed on heroin. I was probably a junior in college by then. I heard about it at LSU.”
Ellie looked at all the notes she’d just taken and ran a giant, frustrated scribble across them all. “No, I didn’t realize. They mentioned that things got worse after Bertrand’s arrest but-”
“They got weird is what they got. Amy always wondered if he would’ve been using drugs at all if it weren’t for her. We tried telling her it wasn’t her fault. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He’s been dead for ten years.”
“I didn’t realize. I’m sorry to waste your time,” Ellie said.
“I’m sorry if you wasted yours. You don’t know who did this to her, do you?”
Ellie wished she could offer another answer to the question but could think of only one honest response. “Not yet.”
HE LEFT WORK A LITTLE EARLY. HE WANTED TO SEE MEGAN WHEN she emerged from her building. He wondered if watching her – getting to know the life he would eventually take from her – would be as enjoyable as it had been with Amy Davis. Amy had been special. He had taken his time setting up every last detail. It had paid off too. The plan played out without a hitch.
With Megan, everything was different. He had nothing against her personally. Not yet. At least not consciously. But following her, tracking her, secretly becoming a part of her life – it could still be fun. He was surprised at how eager he was to experience his own reaction.
He sat at the front counter of the Starbucks on Forty-sixth, sipping an Oregon chai tea, monitoring the two revolving doors of the office building across the street now ridiculously named the Avenue of the Americas. He had seen seven pictures of Megan by now. The most recent involved little more than a sheer white negligee. Still, this would be his first look at her in person – in the flesh, so to speak. He wasn’t certain he would recognize her.
But precisely six minutes and ninety-eight departing employees later, there she was. She pushed her way awkwardly through the door, carrying an overstuffed canvas book tote and a Macy’s shopping bag. So much for her claim of being low maintenance, the rare woman who despised shopping.
That was not the only penchant for consumption she had lied about. The photographs she sent, even the racy one, had all been conveniently cropped beneath her ample chest. There had been one full-length shot, but two rug rats – a niece and nephew, she claimed – obscured her lower body. Watching her plod away from her building, he smiled slightly. Sure enough, she was a chubster. The only “athletic” frame she could legitimately avow belonged in a sumo ring. So predictable. So typical. Such a manipulative little liar.
Over the years he had learned that everyone lied – not just to others, but to themselves. They convinced themselves that they were good and motivated by decency. They assuaged their own guilt by conjuring excuses for their self-interested actions. Megan, no doubt, persuaded herself that all of her self-indulgences were justified. He could just picture her fat face saying, “I deserve it,” as she shoveled in another piece of chocolate cheesecake.
That’s how it was with the average person. They were dishonest and stupid, each trait feeding the other. Only a stupid person could believe the lies most people tell themselves. Only a blissfully ignorant person could be so stupid. He, on the other hand, was different. He was honest – at least with himself – and was definitely not stupid.
Megan had a not unpleasant face, with round, pink cheeks and cheerful hazel eyes – at least she described them as hazel on FirstDate – and framed by bouncy brown curls. She reminded him of a Campbell’s soup kid. Or maybe one of those annoying Cabbage Patch dolls the spoiled girls collected when he was a kid.
His heart rate picked up slightly as he walked outside and adopted a pace about half a block behind her. This would be the fun part. Spying online was one thing, but he had learned with Amy that he enjoyed the live version even more.
Early on, he decided that the next victim would have to be a woman who contacted him. That way, the initial step was actually hers. He was just playing along. He had two other rules as well. Somewhere in the communications, he’d tip her off. He would give her a reason to be cautious. And third, if she ever told him to leave her alone, he would. It was that simple. He was empowering her to leave herself out of his game, if that’s what she chose.
As he followed her down the stairway to the 7 train, he wondered why he had settled on Megan. It was true that she’d been assertive enough to e-mail him, satisfying his initial criterion. In her first e-mail, she suggested they had a lot in common because she also enjoyed reading The Da Vinci Code. But his in-box had no shortage of annoying e-mails from other women, each convinced they had found their soul mate in the most generic profile he had been able to create.
What was it about Megan that had piqued his curiosity? He had plenty of time to figure that out as he got to know more about her – from a distance.
ELLIE FOUND JESS sprawled across her couch at the apartment. He wore a wide-collared, checked shirt and a pair of weathered blue jeans. Were it not for the change of clothing and the can of aerosol cheese he was emptying directly into his mouth, she would have wondered whether he’d moved at all the entire day.
She draped her down coat on a hook inside the doorway, kicked off her fleece-lined suede boots, and grabbed a bottle of Rolling Rock from the fridge. Nudging Jess’s legs, she sat next to him and took a long pull from the bottle.
“New Yorkers are a bunch of wusses,” she declared, blowing her bangs from her forehead as she stripped down further, pulling off her bulky cable-knit cardigan.
Jess used the remote control to mute a show about motorcycles. “That’s not a claim one hears too often.”
“It’s the snow. A couple tiny flakes of wimpy pansy snow, and everyone goes ballistic. The drivers can’t drive. The pedestrians keep on with their stupid habit of waiting in the street for the light to change. Then they’re outraged when some dumbass who can’t drive starts to slide right into them through the slush. I must’ve seen three near misses just coming from the subway. And don’t get me started about the crowds on the train-”
“I hate to break it to you, El, but you sound like a true New Yorker. ‘Yo, don’t gemme started.’”
“Except I don’t talk like that. And I know how to drive in snow. And walk in it. And dress in it, for Christ’s sake. You know how many women I saw on the train wearing pointy high-heeled shoes? Three days of a Kansas winter, and these people would grow some sense.”
“In more ways than one.”
Ellie tipped the bottle at him, then finished it off. “Damn. Two weeks without a cigarette and I’m still craving it. You want something?” she asked, heading to the refrigerator. He passed on the offer, and Ellie settled back onto the couch with another beer and her laptop. She told Jess that they’d cleared Taylor and Mr. Right. “Still no word from Enoch,” she said.
“What kind of name is Enoch?” Jess asked. “Sounds like some celebrity kid name, like Apple or Blanket.”
Ellie flipped open her laptop and Googled “Enoch.” She clicked on an encyclopedia entry in Wikipedia.
“Turns out to have at least one thing in common with Apple. It says here the name is biblical.” She scrolled down the screen. “The name comes up in two contexts. One was a son of Cain, as in Cain and Abel. And one was the son of someone named Jared.”
“We sure learned a lot in those Confirmation classes, didn’t we?”
The Hatchers had attended mass at Blessed Sacrament most Sundays, and Jess and Ellie had been raised to say prayers every night. But other than the well-known stories of Adam and Eve, Mary, Job, and Noah, their knowledge of the Bible was limited.
She clicked on a few other links that popped up from the search. “I guess one of them is the basis of something called the Book of Enoch, which isn’t actually part of the Bible. Who the hell knows? Maybe it was the name of the guy’s first dog.”
Ellie switched the computer to standby mode and lowered it to the floor.
“I need a favor, Jess.”
“Can’t say I recall you ever speaking that particular sentence.”
“I mean it. It’s not much of an imposition. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’ll find some enjoyment in it.”
“So what’s the hitch?”
“Don’t make me regret asking. I need you to go with me somewhere.” She added, “It’s for the case I’m working.”
Jess paused, obviously fighting the urge to go another round with her about her involvement in the case. “I can’t say anything to change your mind on this, can I?”
“Nope.”
Jess shrugged his shoulders. “Well in that case, don’t sweat it. I was being a dick last night anyway. So where are we headed?”
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, they stood in the Vibrations parking lot.
“Classy!” Jess yelled above the sound of traffic on the West Side Highway. He gestured to a life-size purple neon sign of an arched-back naked silhouette.
“I don’t know. She’s got a little gut, don’t you think?”
“I never thought I’d be going to a titty bar with my baby sister. It’s so wrong, on so many levels.”
“I’m sure you won’t be looking at any of the dirty stuff.”
“Of course not. I’m absolutely repulsed by the mere notion of it. The objectification of these women – it’s reprehensible, is what it is. I’m just doing my civic duty at the request of a police officer in need.”
Ellie figured she’d have better luck at a club like Vibrations if she had a man with her. Since Flann had personal obligations, Jess would have to do.
Vibrations earned its name in more than one way. The kinetic bass thump of heavy metal music rumbled through the floor of the building, while women in pasties and G-strings gyrated against poles, the floor, and, to the apparent delight of one drooling man at a front table, each other. The crowd was a bizarre mix of men sitting solo, staring longingly at the dancers, and groups of rowdier men who tried to appear more amused than titillated. Interspersed throughout were a few young women, no doubt fulfilling all kinds of fantasies for their accompanying boyfriends.
The bouncer apparently assumed that Ellie and Jess were a similarly adventurous couple, throwing Jess a look that said, You scored, dude. His look turned guarded when Ellie asked for Seth Verona, the manager who was on duty the night Tatiana Chekova was shot.
“Who’s asking?”
“The New York Police Department.” Ellie flashed her shield.
“He’s a little busy right now. We don’t have no problems here.”
She took a look around the vast club. “You mean to tell me that the pasties and G-strings always stay on in those back rooms? I won’t find a guy copping an extra feel during a private lap dance? Something like that would cause you big problems with your liquor license.”
“Yeah, all right. Hey, Crystal. Crystal. Get your skinny ass over here.” A tall woman with long, dark auburn curls and full red lips came their way. She wore four-inch plastic heels, a nine-inch leather miniskirt, and a purple halter top that barely covered her enormous breasts. “Take these guys back to Seth. Make sure you knock first.”
“I’m sure Crystal’s her real name,” Jess said to Ellie as he eagerly took his place behind the towering woman.
Following a knock and a quick conversation through the cracked door, Crystal delivered them to a plain-looking man sitting at his desk surrounded by ordinary off-white walls adorned with metal-framed Monet prints. Seth Verona, with his striped, collared shirt and horn-rimmed glasses, could have been anyone working anywhere. He invited them to take seats, like a travel agent about to book a trip for the happy couple.
“We’re following up on an old case. Tatiana Chekova.” Ellie handed him a photograph to refresh his memory, but he shooed it away with a wave of a hand.
“I remember. Not every day we have an employee shot in the parking lot.”
“What do you remember about her?”
“Dark blond hair. Pretty. Kind of a sweet girl, really. A lot less screwed up than most of them around here. She only worked for me a couple of months.”
“She wasn’t a dancer?”
“Not here she wasn’t. Maybe before, at another club. I got the impression she was trying to pull her shit together. Only wanted to wait tables, even though the money’s a pittance compared to the other girls. She was broke, I know that. I gave her some small advances here and there.”
“You make a habit of handing out money before the girls have earned it?”
“I wouldn’t be in business long if I did. Like I said, Tatiana was different. She was like a lost little puppy finally starting to make her way. And when I did front her some cash, she always caught up.”
“Did she have any friends? Family?”
“Now that I don’t know about. The way girls go in and out of this place, I try not to get too personal. You know what I mean?”
“What about a boyfriend? A customer who might have shown a little more than the usual interest?”
“Guys like that, they get taken in by the dancers – some girl who gives them a little extra knee time in the back rooms. The waitresses are just eye candy. There was this one guy, though. Not our usual type. Real straightlaced. Like an accountant. He’d come in by himself, but didn’t come off as lonely, you know? And he never sat near the stage. Always toward the back. I only saw him in here a few times, but every time I did, he was talking to Tatiana. Come to think of it, I don’t recall seeing him since what happened.”
Taylor Gottman had described the man lurking near Amy Davis’s apartment as tall and dark-haired. Ellie wondered if it was the same man who came to mingle with Tatiana. “Do you remember anything else about him? Age? Height? Hair color?”
“Nah. Could be you for all I know,” Seth said, gesturing to Jess. “Okay, maybe not you. You, I can tell, aren’t straightlaced. But I can’t give you any details. I only remember the guy because I told the cops about it back then, the night she was killed.”
Another piece of information that failed to make it into Becker’s reports.
“What about that night? Do you remember anything unusual?”
He chuckled. “Unusual? Every night at this place is unusual. But, no, nothing stood out about that night. Just like I told the cops then, Tatiana seemed fine. Worked her shift, served her drinks, and left. Next thing I know, a couple of guys come running in, yelling for 911.”
“These are the members of the bachelor party?”
“One of the bachelor parties, yeah. That sounds right.”
“What about them? Did you notice any of them paying special attention to Tatiana? Or acting strangely afterward?”
“Are you kidding? Those guys? Totally harmless. Now, you tell me a girl gets grabbed a little, maybe roughed up – I’ve learned by now a lot of guys you’d never suspect, they’ve got it in them. But a gun? No way were these guys packing.”
Becker and his partner had had the same instincts.
“I’m about to see Tatiana’s sister, Zoya. Her married name’s Rostov. She lives in Bensonhurst. You don’t happen to know anything about her, huh?”
He shook his head. “Like I said, I don’t get personal. But send her my way if she’s looking for work. If I had more girls as good looking and reliable as Tatiana-”
Ellie thanked Seth for his time, and then Jess spoke up for the first time.
“Hey, I don’t suppose you’re hiring any guys, are you? Bar work, no dancing,” he said with a smile. “No drugs, no convictions.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
Jess wasn’t kidding. He made Ellie wait while he filled out an application.
ELLIE RODE THE SUBWAY TO BENSONHURST ALONE. NOT literally – as she shared a seven o’clock train with the crowds of nannies, housekeepers, and other workers finally making their way home from Manhattan – but she was unaccompanied.
She had tried to persuade Jess to come along, but he had two reasons for passing, each of which he insisted was sufficient justification. He, unlike Ellie, had a personal life. He was supposed to have a drink with a woman he met at his last gig. He used the opportunity to remind Ellie that she should get around to meeting someone too. Ellie found his second reason equally frustrating. Whenever he had a Manhattan crash pad, he didn’t “do the bridge and tunnel thing.” So even though that crash pad was Ellie’s, she was going solo to Bensonhurst.
There was a time when Bensonhurst was strictly Italian, famous – infamous some would say – for its mafia settlements. Ellie was in junior high when a crowd of local boys beat sixteen-year-old Yusef Hawkins to death for being a black boy looking to buy a used car in the wrong neighborhood. As hard as they’d tried to resist the inevitable ethnic changes, this was no longer the same Bensonhurst. Italians moved to the suburbs of Staten Island and Nassau County, leaving African Americans behind and making way for a melting pot of new immigrants from Eastern Europe and Asia.
She passed a Chinese dollar store, a Russian deli, and a Turkish fast food stand as she made her way to Zoya Rostov’s address. Nearing the narrow brick walk-up, she spotted a familiar face heading toward her under a street lamp. The face spread into a smile, and Ed Becker offered a firm handshake.
“Detective Hatcher. I wonder which of us is more surprised. You got O.T. approved on a cold case?”
Ellie was pretty sure she topped Becker on the surprise meter. “I’m doing a little background work in my spare time. What are you doing here, Ed?”
“I guess you could say I’m doing the same. I’ve been wracking my brain and shook out a recollection that Chekova had a sister. I thought I remembered where she lived, so I figured I’d check it out.”
Ellie recalled McIlroy’s concerns about precisely this situation. “We didn’t mean to call you out of retirement.”
Becker laughed. “No chance of that. Let’s just say I didn’t feel particularly helpful the other day. I thought I’d check the mailboxes to see if she still lives here, then give you a call. I wasn’t going to talk to her. I mean, what would I say, right? I screwed up your sister’s case when I was half drunk and half crazy, and now I thought I’d solve it without a shield? Turned out to be a waste of time. It took me half an hour of driving in circles before I found the building. There’s a mess of Russian names on the mailboxes. I thought I’d recognize the sister’s-”
“It’s Rostov. And she’s in 4F.”
Becker nodded as if he should have remembered, then pulled a set of keys from his pocket. Ellie watched as he headed toward a blue Buick Regal parked two doors down. She’d allowed Flann’s comments about Becker to get to her, and now she’d made the man feel small. She took another look at Zoya Rostov’s apartment building.
“You feel like coming up? It might help break the ice if she sees a familiar face.”
As Ed Becker returned his keys to his coat, Ellie thought she saw a look of purpose that hadn’t been there before.
THE WAIL OF an unhappy baby grew louder as they climbed the hallway steps of the narrow apartment building. Immediately outside the door to Zoya Rostov’s apartment, they also heard the delighted squeals of another child inside, joined by a man’s voice, yelling something in Russian, when they knocked on the door.
“Yes. Who is it?” a woman asked.
“Police,” Ellie replied. “I hate to bother you, ma’am, but it’s about your sister. It’s about Tatiana.”
The woman who opened the door was striking. She had full, peach-tinted lips and eyes the size of quarters, which peered out at Ellie and Ed through wisps of short brown hair. She gently jiggled the crying baby she held against her hip.
“I’m sorry. Who are you?” With a delicate Russian accent, she appeared to direct the question to Ellie. Ed jumped in to answer.
“You might remember me from when I worked your sister’s case back then. I’m retired now, but this is Detective Ellie Hatcher. She’d like to talk to you about some recent developments.”
The man’s voice rang out, again in Russian, and Zoya answered. “It is police, Vitya.”
“The police?”
“The man from before. And a woman is with him.”
Zoya opened the door wider. A handsome man, who looked to be in his early forties, with short blond hair, sat on the floor amid a fantasy farmland of miniature people and animals. Next to him, a white-haired toddler laughed, completely unaware of his father’s surprised expression as he marched a plastic cow up his resting leg.
“Ask them in. Yes, come in.” He said something quietly in Russian to his son and patted him on the bottom, and the boy ran off happily to another room, clutching his cow to his chest. “I am Zoya’s husband, Vitali. Vitali Rostov. Has something happened?”
“A woman named Caroline Hunter was killed a little over a year ago with the same weapon that was used in your sister’s murder. Earlier this week, another woman was killed. She wasn’t shot, but there are reasons to think her murder might have been connected to Caroline Hunter’s. I’m trying to see how Tatiana’s case might be connected.”
Ellie focused her attention on Zoya, but the woman showed no response. Though the baby had quieted, she continued to stroke her thin hair and deliver soothing little kisses to her forehead.
“The woman this week,” Vitali asked, “is that the museum worker that was in the paper?”
“Yes. Her name was Amy Davis. Does that name sound familiar?”
“Not to me.”
“Or Caroline Hunter?”
The man shook his head, and Ellie looked again at Zoya. It took the woman a moment to realize the room was waiting for her. She shook her head. “No. I did not know my sister’s friends. Tatiana led her own life, separate from ours.”
“Do you know if she was dating someone? A boyfriend, maybe, or even something more casual?”
Vitali let out an exasperated laugh, and Zoya threw him a disapproving glance. “I am sorry, Zoya, but your sister – let’s just say that for Tatiana it was always, as you say, casual. She had her fair share of male companionship, but nothing we wanted to know about.”
“What he means to say, Detective, is that my sister, when she was alive, was a prostitute. She was a drug addict and she was a prostitute. She did one to serve the other, and so it was.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Ellie offered. “I’m sure it’s hard to be reminded of all this again. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t important.”
Zoya bowed her head slightly. Ellie remembered in the earliest years of the College Hill Strangler investigation how her father dreaded having to re-question the victims’ families. He said he felt like he was literally tearing off the scabs that had finally started to heal over the wounds of the people left behind to mourn. As time passed, her father stopped talking to the families altogether, unless they contacted him. Nothing he turned up ever seemed important enough to justify picking at those old sores again. But the ballistics match to the Hunter case showed a connection of some kind to Tatiana. Ellie just had to find it.
“The connection between the two other women has to do with a computerized dating company. Do you know if she used a service like that? It’s called FirstDate.”
The Rostovs both shook their heads silently.
“Did she own a computer? Or have access to one?”
“Tatiana could barely afford to feed herself,” Vitali said. “We gave her money here and there, but not enough for a computer. Even if she had that kind of money, that is not what she would have used it for.”
Ellie asked a few more questions about possible connections to Caroline Hunter’s graduate school, the Museum of Modern Art, and the neighborhoods the women traveled in, but the questions only served to show how different Tatiana’s life had been from the others’. The point wasn’t lost on the Rostovs.
“These women,” Vitali said. “They do not sound anything like Zoya’s sister. Obviously, you are the police. But guns get lost, you know. Guns get stolen and sold. Maybe Tatiana has nothing to do with any of this, in which case there is nothing we can do to help you.”
The unspoken message was clear. In which case, you did not need to come here and remind my wife what happened to her sister. Ellie offered her business card, apologized again for the disturbance, and thanked them for their time.
“If it makes any difference, Mrs. Rostov, from what I’ve been able to gather so far, it sounds like your sister was working hard to get her life together. She was reliable at her job, and she was getting away from those activities you referred to before. That’s what I’ve heard anyway.”
Zoya’s big eyes pooled and for just a moment she looked serene as if she were remembering some earlier time with her sister. Then the pools gave way to tears, and she tucked her face into her baby’s neck.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She continued to apologize as she carried the child to the back of the apartment.
Ellie didn’t know what to say once she and Ed were alone with Vitali. “She’ll be fine,” he said, waving off the concerned look on Ellie’s face. “She will cry, and then she will go back to how she was this morning. Do not worry.”
Ellie asked him once again to call if they thought of anything new, or if she could help them in any way. “I don’t think that will happen, Detective. It was a long time ago now, and Zoya has accepted that we will probably never know who did this to Tatiana. But, yes, we will keep the number.”
Ellie paused in the hallway after the door closed behind them. Seconds later, she heard the Rostovs speaking in Russian. Even in another language, she could tell the conversation was tense. Urgent. Angry.
“What do you think that’s about?” Ellie whispered.
“Whatever they were probably fighting about before we showed up,” he said, leading the way down the staircase. “So what do you think?”
“I’m not sure what I was hoping for. A connection to FirstDate, I guess. I don’t know – maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree. Like he said, guns change hands. A trick gone bad could have shot Tatiana then sold the gun. Or he panicked and dumped it along the West Side Highway, and someone else picked it up and used it later on Hunter. I feel like I’m swimming in goop on this one.”
“That’s the technical evidentiary term for it, all right. Goop.”
“What’d you think of them?” she asked, gesturing up toward the Rostovs’ apartment. “Were they like that before? Right after it happened?”
“Like what?”
“They seemed – I don’t know – distant, or something. Cold? Disinterested? I mean, they didn’t ask anything about the other women, who they were, what they might have to do with Tatiana. They didn’t seem to care one way or another whether we ever solved the case.”
Becker seemed to take it in stride. “You see it all the time in murder cases. By the time you deliver the news, their family’s written them off as dead a long time ago.”
“But the sister. She was obviously upset. She just didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with me.”
“Don’t knock yourself over it. Some people, their emotions take them places they don’t want to go. Who knows? Maybe she’ll think more about what you said, about Tatiana getting better and everything. Maybe she’ll start caring again and you’ll hear from her.”
“Maybe.”
“Hey, where you going next? Let me give you a lift.”
“Just to the subway would be great.”
“You kidding me? You’re gonna ride the train with the rest of the citizens when you can get door-to-door service? What kind of a lady are you?”
Ellie hesitated, reluctant to impose.
“You’ll be doing me a favor. I can tell myself I was helpful, go back to the peaceful life of a retiree, and forget all about this case.”
Ellie laughed. “All right. But only since I’m helping you out. I’m going back to Manhattan. Thirty-eighth and Park.”
“Your carriage awaits, madam.”
ONCE BECKER HAD wound his way through the narrow side streets onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he got the conversation rolling. “So does McIlroy still do that thing where he answers you with a rhetorical question?”
“Does Tara Reid drink beer?”
Becker smiled even though she suspected he’d never heard of Tara Reid. “That’s a damn annoying habit. The man can’t just give you a simple ‘yes,’ you know what I mean? So other than that, how’s Flann doing?”
Ellie heard the discomfort in her own voice when she said he was fine.
“I’ve always had the impression that McIlroy’s not a big fan of mine,” Becker said. “He might have mentioned something to you about it?”
“No details, but I picked up on some tension.”
“Sure you did. You’re a detective, right? It’s not like you couldn’t tell when you guys were up at my house.”
“So, is there some story involving the two of you that I don’t know about?”
“Aah, it’s water under the bridge. I’m not the type to try to taint you on a new partner. He’s a good enough guy. Smart as a whip, that’s for sure.”
“And yet?”
“We’re two different kinds of cops. That’s all. Back in the day, it was Mac who was odd man out. But who knows. Maybe now, it’s guys like me who are the dying breed.”
“Come on. You’re not that much older than Flann. What? Five years?” She was being generous. Her guess was that Flann was in his midforties at best, and Ed was pushing sixty.
“Hell of a lot more than that, but I’m not talking age in years. It’s a way of thinking about the job. The thin blue line. When I was a beat cop, that really meant something. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter what your beef was with another cop. You were all brothers, held together by the job, by a code of loyalty. Flann’s a whole ’nother breed.”
“You make it sound like I can’t trust him.” She thought about Flann sneaking up to see Jason Upton without her and that ridiculous background check he ran on a fellow officer. She thought about the bond her father had felt among his friends at the Wichita Police Department, the commitment that made the city’s treatment of his death so much harder for her to understand.
“I shouldn’t have started running my old mouth. It’s nothing like that. He’s a good guy. He just sees the world different, that’s all. His loyalty to the job is about doing the job itself. He follows all the rules, dots all the i’s, crosses off the t’s. It’s not about the brotherhood. See what an old man I sound like? His way’s the way of the future. And he won’t have any problems with a smart one like you. You probably even went to college, didn’t you?”
“John Jay.”
“How about that. A graduate degree even?”
“No, just a bachelor’s. I started toward a master’s in forensic psychology – even thought of going the FBI route for a while.”
“You didn’t want to be a G-man? Or I guess you’d be a G-woman, huh?”
“Whatever. No, I just was too eager to get into the real world. Studying crime out of books in a classroom never seemed to work for me. I figured the best thing I could do for my instincts was to get out on the street as soon as I could.”
Then, for reasons she didn’t understand, she told Ed about Jerry Hatcher, his role in the College Hill Strangler case, and her unresolved questions about his death. And when she was finally finished, he told her he was sorry her family had to go through that. It was the only response she needed.
“I bet your old man would be proud of you, Hatcher. You’re just a kid and already made detective. Working homicides, even.”
“Well, not really.” She told him about Flann’s special request for her assistance, and he let out a whistle.
“Who knew Flann had that kind of muscle with the honchos. Ever wonder why he asked for you?”
She recalled the partial explanation Flann gave her on the ride back from Becker’s home, but she kept it to herself.
“And he knows about that whole thing with your father. All the attention you got from the news?”
“I think so.”
Becker didn’t speak until they emerged from the Midtown Tunnel. “Flann McIlroy never was one to shy away from the media.”
IT TURNED OUT THAT BIG-BONED MEGAN QUINN WASN’T AS popular with the boys on FirstDate as Amy Davis had been. If Megan never left the house, he couldn’t kill her outside late at night. So he made adjustments.
Getting into the building didn’t prove to be much of a challenge. Megan lived in an enormous generic rental building on the far, far east side of the Upper East Side, in the yuppy slum of Yorkville. Unlike the white-gloved doormen in the ritzier apartments near the park, the staff at these places were strictly for show and a false sense of security. He showed up shortly after seven thirty. Evening rush hour. He pulled the hood of his jacket over his head.
“Delivery for 32M. It comes with a song, so I have to see her in person.” He made sure to hold the flowers in front of his face. The doorman was on the phone with one resident and handing a package to another.
“Yeah, okay. Go on up.”
He rode the crowded elevator with his face turned from the camera in the upper corner. He pushed the button for the thirty-second floor with his knuckle. A woman stepped off with him. He waited until she entered her apartment, then knocked on the door of 32M.
IT HAD ONLY been two nights since Jess began his latest sojourn on her sofa, but Ellie was struck by the silence and emptiness in her apartment. She flipped on the television just for the sound of it, and then settled onto the couch with her laptop and logged onto FirstDate.
More new messages and even more flirts. She had a lame two-sentence profile, but a decent if grainy picture. Maybe she’d unwittingly tapped into precisely what men valued. She scanned the list of messages. Only one user name caught her eye, and it had nothing to do with the case. Unpublished, the writer manqué whom she’d e-mailed earlier. She clicked on the message.
Ally, You sound fun. I’d like to know more about you, but I don’t like e-mail. (I know. Stupid way to try to meet someone if you don’t like e-mail.) This may sound forward, but do you want to go for a drink tonight? I promise you can take one look at me and walk out if you like. I won’t take it personally. In fact, I’ve gotten used to it. Peter. He left a phone number.
Ellie started to delete the message, then stopped herself. Jess was out. She was alone. Her brain needed a break from the case. If she stayed here, she’d only surf the Web and feel like a loser. She clicked on the photograph posted with Unpublished’s profile. Peter had dark brown tousled hair and intense green eyes, and he posed with a panting golden retriever. A caption beneath the picture read, “Sorry, but this isn’t my dog.”
She made a deal with herself, thought it through one more time, and then picked up the phone and dialed.
“Peter?”
“Last time I checked.”
“Hey, it’s Ally. Um, from FirstDate. I got your e-mail. Is it too late to take you up on that drink offer?”
“No, perfect timing. I’m just leaving work. Where do you want to go?”
“How about I come to you?” She didn’t need someone like Taylor Gottman cruising her neighborhood later, trying to track her down.
“There’s a place by me called Delta Grill.” He gave her an address, but Ellie told him she knew the place. “You don’t mind coming to Hell’s Kitchen?”
“Nope. I love it over there,” Ellie said.
“Very good. That scares a lot of people off.”
“I think that’s why you’re supposed to call it Clinton.” The neighborhood used to be Manhattan’s ghetto for the roughneck lower middle class, but like the rest of the borough, had experienced what the real estate brokers called a “transition.” Along with a slew of new high-class residents who couldn’t quite swing their dream pad on the other side of Lincoln Center, the neighborhood had also inherited a new, safer-sounding name.
“We renters call it Hell’s Kitchen. How long do you need to get here?”
Ellie considered that day’s choice of work clothes – a red turtleneck sweater, gray pencil skirt, and knee-high black leather boots – and decided she was good to go. “Is half an hour too soon?”
“Perfect. I’ll be the guy in the purple velvet jacket with a vicious case of acne.”
“Okay. I’ll be in my motorcycle leathers. If you still can’t spot me, I’m wearing the pink chain today that drapes from my nose to my ear.”
“You like Hell’s Kitchen. You can leave for a drink on a second’s notice. And you’re not afraid to call a man out when he’s being stupid. You got it going on, Ally.”
MEGAN QUINN WAS alone in her apartment when the doorman buzzed. Ten, nine, eight, seven…She scissored her legs in the air and mimicked the breathing patterns of the lithe instructor on the Pilates DVD. Six, five, four, three…The phone buzzed again. Two, one.
She took a deep breath and folded her knees into her abdomen. Then she hit the pause button on the remote control, wiped a bead of sweat from her temple, and pushed herself up from the blue mat unrolled on the living room floor. She ran to the intercom. “Hello?”
“Delivery.”
“I didn’t order anything, Lewis.”
“He said 32M.”
“N, Lewis. He probably said N, as in Not M. As in Never for Megan, always for the neighbor.” The guys across the hallway ordered in dinner every night, usually from multiple establishments. And half of those nights, the doormen called to tell her about it by mistake.
“Not food this time. Flowers.”
“Well, it’s definitely not for me then.”
“Sorry.”
“Not a problem.”
Megan hung up the phone and looked in the mirror that hung beside it on the wall. She pressed her round cheeks with her palms, squishing the fat around her lips and nose. She tried to pinpoint when this had happened, and how long it would take to lose. She had been thin once. She had been confident. She sucked in her cheeks and held up the skin of her wrinkled forehead and for a moment looked like the girl who had waved from the homecoming float in Colorado while her date sang a comedic version of “Mandy,” substituting in “Oh, Megan.” Now she was so ashamed of how she looked that she was actually afraid of meeting any man who could possibly be the one. He might reject her as too heavy, and then she would have missed her chance.
She looked away from the mirror, reminding herself that her days of feeling bad about herself were numbered. She had joined Weight Watchers. She was doing Pilates. She looked and felt better every day. She even forced herself to go shopping during her lunch break to buy some transition clothes now that her fat ones were too loose. Baby steps. Three months from now, she’d reach her goal weight and treat herself to an entirely new wardrobe.
As she settled back down onto her exercise mat, there was a knock on the door. “Who is it?” she yelled.
“Delivery.”
The delivery men didn’t speak English any better than Lewis, she thought as she climbed back up to her feet. She squinted against the peephole and saw a bouquet of flowers blocking the profile of a brown-haired delivery man.
“They’re not for me. 32F, maybe.” That’s where the long-haired skank with the chihuahua, pierced tongue, and all the boyfriends lived.
“Megan, they’re for you. It’s me. Greg. From FirstDate. I told you that if you wouldn’t go out with me, I’d show up at your door one day with flowers.”
It wasn’t actually the man at the door who had written that promise to Megan, but a very nice man named Greg London, who had been exchanging e-mails with Megan for a good solid week now on FirstDate. Lots of chemistry. Plenty of witty banter. Greg was one of the few men interested in meeting Megan in person, but Megan was mortified at the thought of meeting a trim stranger who described his perfect match as slender. Megan had been putting him off, racing to shed a few more pounds before the big introduction.
And now Greg had made good on his promise to surprise her one day with flowers. She did a panicked check in the mirror, then decided that sweat became her. She looked happy and healthy, and, screw it, she was finally going to meet Greg.
“How on earth did you find me?”
THE MAN STANDING outside 32M pictured the round face pressed against the peephole. Flowers and brown hair. That’s all she’d see. How on earth did you find me? He heard locks turning in the door, and then Megan smiled and welcomed him and his cheap bouquet of flowers inside.
Megan did not live long enough to learn the answer to her eager question. Just as she closed the door and locked it behind her, the man who called himself Enoch realized that Megan looked a lot like one of his foster mothers. He was still thinking about the absurdity of that when he grabbed her.