Dead Connection (4 page)

The photograph accompanying the article jogged a memory somewhere in the recesses of Ellie’s mind. Every once in a while, one of the thousands of gorgeous young women in New York City with a professional head shot fell prey to the random violence of the city. Those were the crime stories that the local papers took hold of. Caroline Hunter had been famous for a few days, then relegated to the unsolved murder files.

Ellie told McIlroy that she had a vague recollection of the story.

“So did I. And when I caught this case and saw how pretty Amy Davis was, I immediately pictured the tabloid headlines. That got me thinking about the last time the media glommed on to one of these cases. Out of curiosity, I pulled the file. Caroline Hunter. Notice anything?”

“Kind of hard not to,” Ellie said. “According to this article, Hunter was shot on the way home from a date she’d arranged on the Internet. She was even writing her Ph.D. on online relationships.”

“Anything else?”

“Two women, both attractive. Both in downtown Manhattan. Approximately the same age. One strangled, though; the other shot.” Ellie knew, however, that killers could change the way they killed, as long as the method itself was not an important part of what they considered their M.O.

“What about the timing?”

She calculated last Friday’s date in her head, then saw what McIlroy was getting at. “Exactly one year apart.”

“To the day. Now you know why I said it’s more than a hunch.”

“I believe you said one notch more,” Ellie added.

“Still, it’s more. And that’s why we’re going to Amy Davis’s apartment. Your charge, Detective Hatcher, is to find me something that says we’re on the right track.”

4

AMY DAVIS HAD LIVED IN A PREWAR WALK-UP APARTMENT ON
Avenue C. This was the Lower East Side, not to be confused with SoHo, Tribeca, or some other fame-infused bastion of downtown coolness. In Alphabet City, gentrification had hit only building-by-building, block-by-block: The gamut ran from unmarked needle-exchange counters to Glamazon-infested martini bars. Davis’s building fell on the shabby end of the neighborhood’s spectrum.

McIlroy pressed one of the roughly twenty doorbells lined up at the building’s entrance. A voice blurted through a speaker under the buzzers. “Dígame.”

“Policía. Estamos aquí con respecto a asesinato.”

Ellie was able to make out a few of the words. They were the police and were here about
something
. Her Spanish vocabulary could use an influx of nouns.

The door was opened by a man in faded jeans, an oversized flannel shirt, and a coarse goatee. “You speak some pretty good español, man, but I’m fine with English.”

McIlroy took care of a brief introduction. The superintendent’s name was Oswaldo Lopez. His friends all called him Oz, he added, checking out Ellie as he said it. The detectives followed him up the steep, zig-zag staircase that ran through the center of the building.

“How long have you been the super here?” McIlroy asked between deep breaths, already starting to fall behind.

“Around eight months.”

“What can you tell us about Amy Davis?”

“Pays her rent. Comes and goes. Keeps to herself, at least around the building. Like everyone else. It’s that kind of place.”

“Any regular company?” Ellie asked.

“Not that I noticed. But I’m not a doorman in a white-glove high-rise, you know what I’m saying?”

Ellie knew exactly what he was saying. Oz probably responded to about half of the tenants’ complaints, based on who was most generous or persistent. He did not, however, make friends or keep tabs. It was, as he said,
that kind of place
.

“When can we start showing the apartment?” Oz asked.

“Sometime after we’ve put its current tenant in the ground,” McIlroy said without missing a beat.

“No disrespect, man. The owner wanted to know.”

“If Davis paid her rent, he doesn’t have anything to complain about until the end of the month. Now does he?”

“Like I said, no disrespect.”

When they reached the fifth of six floors, Oz removed a key ring from his belt and unlocked a door in the back corner of the hallway. Ellie and McIlroy entered, and Oz followed. McIlroy looked annoyed but too out of breath to express it.

“I think we’ll be fine here, Mr. Lopez,” Ellie said. “We’ll let you know when we’re finished.”

The super paused, no doubt wanting to get a first-hand view. Murder-related macabre was simply too titillating for even the most complacent people to resist.

McIlroy thanked her once the door was closed and they were alone. “My doc says I need to add more cardio into my workout routine.”

“Hey, at least you’ve got a routine.”

“That’s what he thinks,” McIlroy said, wiping a bead of perspiration from his temple. “I’m surprised you’re not wheezing a little.”

“I live on the fourth floor of a converted townhouse. I’m used to it.”

“Nice of you not to mention the fifteen years you’ve got on me and the obvious fact that you’re more fit than I ever was. But I don’t smoke.”

“Neither do I.”

“Okay,” McIlroy said after a pause. “If you say so.”

“I say so.” Ellie took her first look around Amy Davis’s apartment. “So give me some hint why I’m here. What am I going to lead you to that you couldn’t find yourself?”

“We’ll know when you find it.”

Whatever it was, the search wouldn’t take long. The apartment was an undersized studio, just a few hundred square feet. A double bed and a single nightstand were tucked into one corner. A love seat, tray table, and steamer trunk-cum-TV stand occupied the center of the room. A tiny desk was crammed into a poor excuse for a kitchen. Clothes and shoes were stuffed anywhere they fit.

The items in Davis’s wardrobe spoke to the double life led by so many city women. The modern business-casual workplace demanded tailored shirts, pencil skirts, and fitted pants — not unlike Ellie’s own charcoal gray V-neck sweater and straight-leg black pants. In her free time, though, while Ellie hung out in sweatshirts and Levi’s, Davis hoarded low-rider jeans, bohemian tops, and funky boots.

Ellie opened one of the kitchenette’s cabinets. No dishes, no pans, no food — just more clothes and shoes. Only two bowls were in sight, and they were on the floor — one filled with water, the other empty, with the word
Chowhound
printed on the side.

“What happened to the cat?” Ellie asked.

“Funny thing about that cat. The first time I came to the apartment, he led me right to the window by the fire escape and started meowing. Like he was telling me something.”

“So where is he now?” Ellie had never stopped to wonder what happened to animals after their people were killed.

“In the bunk room at the bureau.”

“You’re kidding.” No wonder this guy had a reputation as a maverick, Ellie thought.

“I tried taking him home with me, but my seven-pound Siamese was a little intimidated. Chowhound’s an absolute beast. The guys at the house aren’t too happy about the loads he leaves in his litterbox. The vic’s parents are supposed to pick him up tomorrow.”

McIlroy took a look around the apartment and shook his head. “I’ll never understand living in a place like this. Some people think the city begins and ends with Manhattan. On Staten Island, this girl could have bought a house and a yard for what she was paying to rent this dump.”

Ellie smiled to herself as she hit the power button to the laptop on Davis’s desk. McIlroy moved into the bathroom, out of her view.

“I quit,” Ellie called out to McIlroy as she scrolled through the recently viewed files on Amy Davis’s computer. “Smoking, I mean. I quit. Well, basically. Almost.”

“You don’t have to explain.”

Ellie heard rustling and guessed McIlroy had moved on to the medicine cabinet. “I know. But then I couldn’t ask what tipped you off.”

McIlroy chuckled. “You had a lighter in that box of junk you hauled into the division this morning. Plus you had that way of fiddling with your pen in the car, like you were jonesing for a smoke.”

“I’ll have to watch that,” she said, making a mental note. “We should take this laptop in to get a better look at the files.”

Ellie quickly rifled through the nightstand, the desk, and the kitchen cabinets doubling as dresser drawers. She inspected the printer on top of the desk, then walked to the bathroom. It wasn’t big enough for two people.

“Do you mind if I see the e-mails again? The ones between Brad and Amy.”

McIlroy handed her the printout.

“Was the original in black and white like these pages, or in color?”

“Color.”

“You’re sure?”

“Does Donald Trump need a haircut? Yeah, I’m sure.”

Ellie flipped open the top of the printer, removed each of the four cartridges of ink inside, and confirmed that three of them were bone dry.

“Those e-mails in her coat weren’t printed from here,” she said. “This is an ink-jet color printer, but she’s out of colored ink. With just a black cartridge, this is essentially a black-and-white printer.”

McIlroy took another look at the printout. Each message bore a time and date. “She said right in that last message that she was home from work.”

“I noticed that too. But that e-mail wasn’t printed here.” She held up a sheet of paper that was left resting on top of the printer. It was a receipt for a pair of shoes Amy had ordered off the Internet the day before she was killed. “See? No color.”

“So you think she lied? Maybe she was at a boyfriend’s place?”

“I don’t think so. There’s a glass of water and an open book on the nightstand. She’s got hair and makeup stuff scattered all over the bathroom. No. She’s definitely been sleeping at home, and there’s no signs of a man around. The e-mail wasn’t printed out from here because
she
didn’t print it out. Think about it: Why would she need to? She clearly knew where the bar was — she said it was one of her favorite places.”

McIlroy looked excited. “No one can read a thirty-year-old woman like another thirty-year-old woman. Okay, so now tell me what you think it means if Amy Davis wasn’t the one who printed out the e-mail.”

“Well, it might mean there’s some perfectly innocuous explanation.”

“Or?” He obviously wanted to hear her say it.

“Or it might mean that someone else printed out the e-mail and deliberately planted it in her coat pocket so the police wouldn’t miss the fact that Amy had been using FirstDate.”

“And what would that mean?”

“That someone wants us to know he’s out there.”

It meant that, just possibly, Flann McIl-Mulder had much more than a crazy hunch.

5

ANONYMITY. THE PROMISE OF AN UNREVEALED IDENTITY.
Anonymity is appealing. Anonymity provides a shield, and a shield provides safety. Ellie Hatcher and Flann McIlroy were learning, however, that a shield could also be used as a sword.

FirstDate was not like an old-fashioned dating service. There were no background checks and no interviews to determine shared interests and values. The company purported to know nothing about its individual members, let alone who was best suited for whom. In fact, FirstDate’s refusal to suggest potential matches was precisely what attracted the lovelorn, at least those who believed that chemistry and love were too irrational and unpredictable to be crassly calculated by a computer.

FirstDate left the hunt for these elusive objects to the hunters but made the possibility of a successful end to the hunt seem plausible. It did so by providing a virtual meat market with no geographic or temporal limits. With FirstDate, you could hook up with your next love from your desk, with none of the messiness (or potential lawsuits) inherent in dating a coworker. With FirstDate, you could meet someone on a Saturday morning while you surfed the net in your pajamas in front of the television.

But what really attracted customers to FirstDate was the anonymity provided by cyberspace. FirstDate users went by pseudonyms. No addresses, no phone numbers. Not even e-mail addresses. Members contacted each other — at least initially — directly through the FirstDate site, using the FirstDate mailboxes and messaging systems, rather than personal e-mail accounts. The entire system was set up so that careful members could “meet” and get to know any other FirstDate member without ever disclosing their identities.

Anonymity. Safety. Privacy. It all sounded good. Unless, of course, a killer used the anonymity to ensure safety and privacy from the police.

To find the men who contacted Amy Davis through FirstDate, Ellie and Flann needed access to her account. That simple task was proving to be frustratingly difficult.

The many pages on the FirstDate Web site listed only one telephone number, and that was for members of the media. Everyone else was supposed to make contact via e-mail. Ellie called the number, and a public relations representative eventually put her through to a customer service representative. Much to Ellie’s surprise, even after she identified herself and explained the nature of her inquiry, the FirstDate employee informed her that she would need a court order before the company would release any personal information regarding Amy Davis.

“The poor woman is dead,” Ellie protested. “I think if she were here, she’d be more concerned about the police finding the man who killed her than about her privacy.”

There had been an uncomfortable silence, followed by the comment, “We at FirstDate assume that our customers value privacy above all else. We will, however, comply with any lawfully issued court orders.”

Anonymity. Safety. Privacy.

After their efforts with FirstDate petered out, they tried the department’s computer technicians, but were told the staff was too backed up to look at Amy’s laptop. Apparently McIlroy’s suck with the honchos didn’t trickle down to the crime analysts.

“Aah, why bother? Corporations and crooks take all of the techies worth having anyway.” He and Ellie sat side by side at his desk, staring at Davis’s laptop screen. McIlroy picked up the phone. “I know an A.D.A. who will help us get a court order. We’ll force FirstDate to open Davis’s account.”

Ellie waved him off. “That’ll take forever. Let me try a few things.”

She pulled up the log-on page at FirstDate. She typed “MoMAgirl” in the user name box, offered a few random letters for the password box, then hit enter. The computer responded with an error message informing her that the user name and password did not match.

“No shit,” McIlroy said. “You really think you’re going to stumble upon it?”

“Nope.” Ellie clicked on the hypertext beneath the error message:
Forgot your password
?

Ellie smiled when the next screen appeared. The screen contained three prompts: the e-mail address the member had used to register, the member’s date of birth, and the name of the member’s pet. “For a company that values privacy, they sure haven’t done much to protect it.”

She had seen a few e-mails printed out on Amy’s desk at her apartment. They had all listed an e-mail address in her name at the Museum of Modern Art. She typed that address into the first box on the screen, followed by Amy’s date of birth, followed by “Chowhound.” That was a good cat name. Good and memorable.

She hit enter, mentally crossing her fingers. Then she received another message.
Sorry but the information you provided does not match our records
.

McIlroy reached again for the phone. “I’m going to make that call to the D.A.’s office now. Good thing I didn’t bring you onto the case for your computer skills.”

“Don’t you dare,” Ellie said, holding up her hand. “And here I thought you were starting to have some faith in me.”

She pulled up the member profile for MoMAgirl. The photograph of Amy Davis was flattering, but with enough shadows to maintain some mystery. Her dark hair was windblown, and she wore sunglasses. She was smiling, seemingly happy to be wherever she was when the picture was taken.

In the box of basic information, next to her photograph, and above a lengthier statement Amy had written about herself, MoMAgirl listed her height (5’3”), hair and eye color (brown and blue, respectively), body type (athletic), ethnicity (white), and age (29).

“Got it,” Ellie said, clicking back to the password reminder page. “Amy wasn’t twenty-nine, but she wanted FirstDate to think she was.”

Ellie typed in the requested information again, this time shaving two years off Amy’s birth year. When she hit the enter key, a message popped up informing her that her FirstDate password had been sent to the member’s e-mail address.

“Call MoMA, please? Ask them how employees check their e-mail from home. And make sure you get her log-in information.”

A few minutes later, McIlroy had the information they needed to access Amy’s work account. Ellie logged in and found eighty-two messages waiting. The most recent was from FirstDate, reminding Amy that her password for the profile MoMAgirl was “Colby.”

“Hot diggity,” Flann said, rubbing his palms together.

They were finally where they needed to be, logged in to Amy Davis’s FirstDate account. Now it was time to find out just who tried to get to know Amy Davis. Anonymously. Safely. Privately.

AT AN INTERNET café in Midtown Manhattan, the man who strangled Amy Davis sipped a cup of coffee and smiled. He smiled because he liked what he saw on the screen of his laptop.

He had been keeping an eye on MoMAgirl’s profile. Until Saturday evening, he had seen the words “active within 24 hours” posted above that pretty picture of hers. Then it morphed to “active within 48 hours.”

Patience
, he told himself.
Even the stupidest police officer could figure this one out
. After all, the unsubtle clue left for them in Amy’s coat pocket had a purpose. Her e-mails would point the police directly to that insipid poseur she met that night at Angel’s Share. He would undoubtedly be of limited intelligence. Even so, sooner or later, he would persuade the cops of his innocence, and they’d start to dig for another suspect.

Now it appeared he had gotten what he was waiting for: another change in the text above MoMAgirl’s picture. “Online now!” the screen declared.

He caught himself smiling, then forced himself to stop. Smiling would bring attention to himself. He didn’t want the attention. Not yet, anyway. Not on him.

He read the words again.
Online now
. How thrilling. Amy Davis, of course, could not be the computer user who was online as MoMAgirl. He had made sure of that in the alley on Friday night. It had required more of a fight than he anticipated, but he had put her down for good. And now someone had logged into her FirstDate account. The police had made the connection. The game was on.

He was surprised that he didn’t feel at least some guilt. He’d expected some pangs of discomfort. But nothing. In fact, taking out Amy was a piece of delicious karmic balance. More than five years earlier, in a spontaneous act of curiosity, he had Googled the name, wondering what had ever become of Amy Davis. Lo and behold, she was in New York, where he had recently moved himself. It had been a few years since he’d thought about her, but when the moment presented itself, there she was. Still in New York. Still at the museum. Still single and lonely, living in that same apartment. It was as if fate had held her there for him, ready to be used at just the right time.

On further contemplation, he decided there was no reason for him to be surprised at his lack of remorse. The average person didn’t truly care whether other people lived or died; they just convinced themselves they did because they were supposed to. He, however, knew better than to assume any kind of ingrained benevolence. In his entire life, he had known only one truly good human being.

He clicked on the Message Me button. He liked this particular function, which allowed FirstDate users to chat on the screen in real time. Spontaneous, but anonymous.

He stroked the keys lightly with his fingertips, mentally composing the text he wanted to send. He allowed himself to type words in the dialogue box:
I know you’re not Amy
.

He reread the single sentence, then added another.
I know because I strangled the life out of her
.

He let his index finger rest — lightly — on the Enter key, exhilarated by the possibility.

Sighing, he deleted the letters, one by one, then closed the messaging box. It wasn’t time. Not yet. He’d had enough personal experience with police to know they had procedures to follow, clues to chase down, and mistakes to make before the fun could begin. Between Amy Davis and Caroline Hunter, they had plenty of work to do. And he had another love-starved woman to stalk.

ELLIE TURNED FIRST to Amy Davis’s work e-mail, reading through all of the messages in her in-box and trash can. The only one related to FirstDate was a solicitation she’d received nearly five weeks earlier, inviting her to enjoy a thirty-day free membership on the service. Amy had left the message in her in-box for a full week before taking FirstDate up on its offer. Ellie shook her head, knowing that if Amy had deleted the message immediately, she would be the one sitting in front of her laptop right now.

Ellie closed Amy’s museum account and moved into her FirstDate account. She clicked through a random sampling of messages.

“She didn’t tell anyone on FirstDate her work e-mail address. She used her first name, and it doesn’t look like she told anyone where she lived.” She opened a few more messages. “Even when things moved beyond e-mails to phone calls, she insisted on calling them. She was being pretty safe.”

“Apparently not safe enough,” McIlroy added dryly.

“Okay, this should be pretty simple.” She directed McIlroy’s attention to the computer screen. “There’s a feature here called Connections. When you click on it, the FirstDate site takes you to a page that keeps track of all the other users Amy had contact with. Then you can click on each one” — she clicked on one of the photographs on the screen — “and it shows when the last contact was with that connection. And, from there, you can click on E-mails to see all the messages to and from that connection. Since she only contacted the online dates through her FirstDate account, we should be able to find all the old messages here. We can compile a list and go from there. What about the first victim? Caroline Hunter?”

“I’ve got a huge stack of notes that her mother had in storage. They just arrived this morning.”

“You called her mother about this already?”

“I told you — it was slightly more than a hunch. If the same man killed both victims, then working the Caroline Hunter case is a legitimate way to solve ours.”

“So what’d you find out?”

“The mom says everyone loved her daughter, she always knew it had to be someone who didn’t know her, that kind of thing. She sent everything, including a list of her profile names and passwords on FirstDate.” He pulled a piece of paper from a file drawer in his desk and placed it in front of Ellie.

“A
list
?” Ellie asked, scanning the names that filled the entire page.

“Apparently you can be twenty different kinds of women online, and Caroline was trying all of them out as research for her book. Different personalities, different photos, different people. She had so many profiles, she kept them posted on a bulletin board above her desk for reference.”

“Let’s see if we can even access those accounts now. They’ve probably expired.” Ellie moved through several screens on the Internet. “Okay, see how this works. One of her names was new2ny. If you’re just some FirstDate user out there in cyberspace and try to search for new2ny, you can’t find her. Hunter didn’t renew her subscription because — well, you know why. So, new2ny is a dead profile. She can’t be contacted. But dead on FirstDate isn’t really dead. It just means dead to the outside world. New2ny still has an account that can be logged into with the password.”

She typed in the corresponding password on the list, and Caroline Hunter’s smiling face appeared on the screen. According to the profile, new2ny was a twenty-six-year-old fashion publicist who had moved to the city after graduating from Indiana University. In the photograph posted with the profile, Caroline wore her hair pulled back with a paisley headband, making her appear younger than her actual age.

“It’s in the company’s interest if users can go active and inactive with the same user name,” Ellie speculated. “They think they finally found that special someone, so they take themselves off the market. But then when they’re single again, they can hop right back on, using the same online handle. If you’re unsubscribed—”

“Meaning, if you’re not paying.”

“Right. If you’re not paying, you can still log in to your account, but you can’t contact anyone.”