Dead Connection

by Alafair Burke

  “We’ve got a fuller morning than we thought,” he announced. “My guy’s willing to help us out, but first we’ve got to do a drop by at FirstDate.”

  “Did you tell him we already tried?”

  “Yeah, but he wants us to go through the drill in person. Tell them we really mean it about the court order. I called the corporate filings office and finally tracked down an address near Battery Park. Maybe they’ll cave when they see our smiling faces.” He removed his coat from the back of his chair and pulled it on. “I’m heading home. I suggest you do the same.”

  Ellie assured him she’d be close behind, but for three additional hours, she remained glued to the computer screen, reading every last message in every last one of Caroline Hunter’s accounts.

  Not a single name overlapped. No one person had contacted both Caroline Hunter and Amy Davis, at least not using the same profile name. Maybe her lieutenant had good reason for his concerns. Maybe McIlroy was seeing shadows. Two women dead, both among thousands of other women on FirstDate. Maybe there was no connection between their murders.

  She found herself fiddling with the pen she held between her index and middle fingers. She’d been telling herself that quitting was easy — a self-imposed contract to go cold turkey, the only way to go — but all that energy in her right hand made it clear she was still craving a smoke.

  She was about to shut down the computer when she took a closer look at the e-mail message on the screen. It was sent to Caroline Hunter, posing as a thirty-two-year-old pediatric resident who went by the handle BrooklynHeidi, by Chef4U, who — according to his profile — was a thirty-eight-year-old who lived on the Upper East Side and would love nothing more than to cook a Julia Child recipe for his perfect date. Ellie took in Chef4U’s photograph, thinking that it would be nice to go home to a man with moppish blond hair, bright blue eyes, and a pot of beef bourguignon. For now, though, all she had to go home to was an empty apartment.

  She picked up the thick binder of notes that Caroline Hunter’s mother had sent to Flann and began reading. Interspersed among summaries of dates, quotations from various e-mails, and draft chapter outlines, Ellie found random notes jotted in the margins — Caroline’s miscellaneous reminders to herself about hair appointments, phone calls, and grocery lists.

  From what Ellie could piece together, the book was shaping up to be less about the men Caroline met online than about her own self-discovery. By creating different personalities on the Internet, she experienced a kind of independence she’d never felt before. At the same time, these desperate, fleeting encounters with men who shared no common social connection made her feel profoundly alone in the world.

  Having read Caroline’s scribbled words, Ellie somehow felt lonelier as well. Caroline Hunter was smart, reflective, and had something original and provocative to say. She should still be alive. Ellie closed the notebook and finally resolved to go home.

  6

  THAT EVENING, IN A WOOD-FRAMED RANCH HOUSE IN WICHITA, Kansas, Roberta Hatcher was doing exactly what she did every night. She was watching her shows on a console television set and pouring herself a vodka on the rocks from the bottle of Smirnoff that rested on the tray table next to her reclining chair.

  When she married Jerry Hatcher thirty-five years ago, she never expected to be a widow. No one ever thinks about those possibilities when they are young. Even if she had considered the fact that one of them would have to go first, and the statistical likelihood that it would be Jerry, she certainly never would have anticipated that she’d be left a widow so early, with a daughter just starting high school and a son who barely managed to finish.

  It had been more than fifteen years since her husband died. That’s how she always worded it: Jerry had simply died. The newspapers and the police department said Jerry shot himself. That was the official account, so of course that’s what they said.

  Ellie, however, always made sure that her father was the object of the sentence, not the subject. At first, Ellie insisted on saying that her father “was murdered.” Over time, though, even Ellie tired of the reaction those words triggered — looks of sympathy for a fatherless girl of questionable mental health. Over time, Ellie adopted a tamer version of her father’s death. He “was killed,” she usually said.

  Last year, when the national news briefly cared about the long-delayed capture of the College Hill Strangler, Ellie had hauled out the M-word again. I truly believe my father was murdered by William Summer. She repeated that same sentence to whatever reporters would listen. She willingly played the role she’d come to despise at the age of fourteen — the haunted fatherless child. She even spun the story of a young female cop following in her father’s footsteps, as if he had encouraged her in that direction. As if it weren’t his son that traditional, conventional Jerry had always pushed to be a cop. As if Jerry had even noticed his little daughter desperately offering her own theories about the killer named for his preferred stalking territory in the otherwise quiet College Hill neighborhood south of WSU.

  Ellie didn’t care whether the papers got her story right. She only cared about one truth. Ellie swallowed her pride, played the game, and did everything she could to get the news, the city, the police department — anyone — to take another look at Jerry’s death.

  At the time, she insisted that she was doing all of this for herself. According to Ellie, she needed to see that son of a bitch William Summer — the man finally connected to the College Hill Strangler pseudonym — take full account for his victims, including Detective Jerry Hatcher. She needed to see her father vindicated.

  But Roberta knew there was more to it. Her daughter rarely did anything for herself, and this campaign to declare her father’s death another College Hill murder was no different. Ellie was doing it for her family. That is what Ellie had done for nearly as long as Roberta could remember — taken care of her and Jess.

  Ellie knew that, more than ever, Roberta could use that money from Jerry’s life insurance and pension, long ago denied to her. Suicides, Roberta had been informed, were not in the line of duty. And death by suicide was what they called it.

  Her husband was found in the driver’s seat of his car, pulled to the side of a country road north of Wichita. A single bullet was discharged from his service revolver, into the roof of his mouth, through his brain and skull, and lodged into the roof of his Mercury Sable. Gunpowder residue was found on Jerry’s hands, in a pattern consistent with a self-inflicted gun wound, she was told. He left no note, she pointed out repeatedly. That wasn’t uncommon, the department’s shrink explained. Jerry had, after all, been raised Catholic.

  Jerry had also been depressed, the department emphasized. And obsessed. And disenchanted. On these points, Roberta could not argue. Her husband had certainly changed from the man she knew twenty years before his death. She, Jerry, their marriage, and their family had all begun to change on February 2, 1978, when he was called out to what became one of the city’s most notorious crime scenes.

  The dead were a single mother and her two children. All three of the victims were bound, blindfolded, and strangled. Semen on a rag found near the twelve-year-old daughter’s body suggested that the killer got to the young girl last and —

  Roberta tried to block out the details of the scene as she took another sip of vodka. Unfortunately, the images — and those from the murders that would come later — were far too ingrained in her memory. She could only imagine how they affected her daughter. Little Ellie, sneaking all the time into that damn basement to be a part of her father’s hobby. Roberta should have insisted on a padlock.

  In theory, Jerry should have stopped working the case when the Wichita Police Department disbanded the College Hill Strangler task force a few years after his last known kill. When the trademark communications and murders appeared to stop, everyone assumed the man was either dead or in prison.

  But not Roberta’s husband. The files, the photographs, a killer’s self-aggrandizing letters to police and the media
— the College Hill Strangler investigation itself — continued to decorate tabletops, nightstands, and every surface of her basement walls for another decade. After Jerry’s death, the department seized it all. All that Roberta and her children were left with were the memories — of Jerry, and of the case he could never put behind him.

  After all these hours of all these nights over all these years, she honestly didn’t know what to believe about the facts surrounding her husband’s death. But she knew that, regardless of who pulled the trigger on Jerry’s gun, William Summer was responsible for what happened to her and her family.

  The repeat she was watching of a sitcom about nothing ended, and the network moved on to a drama about police officers who solved crimes by analyzing physical evidence. Roberta changed the channel with a click of the remote control, then took another sip of vodka.

  She glanced at the digital clock that sat on the top of the television. Nine o’clock. Pretty soon Ellie would be calling to check in on her. Just as she always did.

  THAT SAME NIGHT, in New Iberia, Louisiana, another mother was thinking of her daughter. Evelyn Davis sat on a small settee in her art studio, next to her daughter’s best friend, Suzanne Mouton.

  On further reflection, Evelyn thought, perhaps Suzanne was no longer Amy’s best friend. In fact, Suzanne may never have been Amy’s best friend at all. Suzanne had been part of Amy’s group in high school. That much she was sure of. She remembered how the other members of the group always loved to call this particular girlfriend by her full name. Suzanne — pronounced the Acadian way, Susahn — Mouton. It did have a very nice sound to it. But Suzanne Mouton had always just been one of the crowd, not one of the two or three girls who took shifts being inseparable from Amy.

  The reasons Evelyn was close to Suzanne now, nearly fifteen years later, had more to do with the fact that Suzanne had been the only one of Amy’s friends to stay in Louisiana. And when Suzanne’s own mother died when she was a junior at LSU, Evelyn Davis had stepped in to help her get through it.

  Amy’s trips home had already begun dwindling back in college. At the time Evelyn assumed that her daughter was just too busy with her classes at Colby to fly all the way down from Maine. But then Amy’s visits became briefer, even during breaks.

  Evelyn couldn’t say she was surprised that she and her only child had grown apart. Amy had always been her father’s daughter. Like her father, she would have preferred to live in Houston. Or in San Francisco or New York for that matter. Anywhere but what she called “da buy-you.” She worked hard to avoid picking up a regional accent, sure it would hamper her once she finally escaped the land of sugar cane and gators.

  And her hatred of Louisiana had always translated into resentment toward her mother. Amy knew that Evelyn was the one who insisted that the family stay in the only state she had ever known. It had been a condition when she married Hampton. Evelyn had insisted, ironically, because her own mother needed her.

  Something had begun to change in Amy, however, just in the last few years. Possibly it was because she was finally living in a city of her choosing. Or perhaps it was the job at the museum, which Amy loved so much. Evelyn, after all, was the parent who had encouraged her interest in art. Or maybe it was simply the process of growing up and realizing that every story, every person, and every marriage has two sides.

  But now all that was moot. Evelyn had to pack a bag, fly to New York, and return her daughter’s body to the town she always hated.

  “Thank you so much, Suzanne, for being here.” The tissue that Evelyn held was shredded to pieces.

  “Of course I’m here.” Suzanne handed Evelyn a new tissue and tossed the other in a wastebasket. “Are you sure you don’t want me to fly to New York with you? I could make J.D. watch the kids for a few days.”

  “I’ll be fine. Hampton’s flying up there from Dallas.”

  Suzanne was silent, but her expression said enough. She felt sorry for Evelyn — not just because of what happened to Amy up north, but because Amy’s father couldn’t cut short the deal he was brokering in Dallas to mourn with his wife. Evelyn had learned not to complain. She, after all, was the one who insisted that he keep his law firm’s Lafayette office as home base. Travel was part of his life. He knew it was hard, he explained — for both of them — but it just didn’t make sense for him to spend a day traveling home, just to leave again for New York. They’d meet tomorrow at LaGuardia instead.

  “If I tell you what I need to bring, Suzanne, can you pack a bag for me?” Evelyn asked. “I just can’t bring myself to leave this room. I shouldn’t have changed it. She should have had her bedroom. Her things should still be here. An artist’s studio — what vanity.”

  Suzanne did her best to console her, but they both knew there was nothing one can say to a mother who has to bury her child. Her only child. Her baby, strangled in an alley and left beside a Dumpster like garbage.

  “How could this have happened?” Evelyn was sobbing now into her tissue. “She was always so careful. Ever since she left for college, she was always so very, very careful. She was in her thirties, and still—”

  Suzanne made soothing noises and patted Evelyn gently on the back as she cried. People overused the word ironic, but Amy Davis becoming a murder victim was indeed ironic. A statistic. Another woman killed while walking alone at night in an area where others would say that single women ought not walk alone. It was ironic because Amy had always been, as her mother said, so very, very careful. She was so careful about letting men get to know her that she was still walking alone at night.

  “All these years, Suzanne, she could never trust anyone. Maybe if that awful business had never happened. Maybe she wouldn’t have been in the city. Or at least she wouldn’t have been alone.”

  Evelyn knew that Suzanne, of all people, remembered the incident to which she referred. Amy had learned her lesson. She had to be careful. Careful with men. Careful with trust. Careful with the unpredictability of human emotions. These were valuable lessons, but Amy had learned them too young, and she had probably overlearned them. Plenty of women were unmarried after thirty, but Amy had never even had a serious relationship. She was too careful, too untrusting, too unwilling to be vulnerable.

  Evelyn’s crying had subsided and her breathing was more regular now. She stood, straightened her sweater set, and began to gather the things she would need for her trip. “I will pack my own bag, but I do need one very huge favor. Can you make room in your home for a cat? He’s a Persian. I did my best to lobby Hamp, but he’s allergic.”

  7

  FIRSTDATE’S CORPORATE OFFICES WERE HOUSED ON THE EIGHTEENTH floor of a midsize tower on Rector and Greenwich streets in the city’s financial district. A red-haired receptionist stood guard behind a sleek black desk that rested between the elevator and a set of double glass doors. Through the glass, Ellie spotted a dozen or so workers clicking away on keyboards in cookie-cutter cubicles on the floor, with a few private offices scattered along the perimeter.

  The redhead wasn’t much of a guard. She hunched in her high-backed chair, twirling a lock of wavy hair with her fingers, speaking animatedly into her cell phone. A couple of light taps of Ellie’s nails against the receptionist’s desktop triggered nothing but a nod. A flash of her detective’s shield finally caught the woman’s attention.

  “I’ll call you right back.” The redhead flipped the phone shut, straightened her posture, and asked how she could help. McIlroy asked to speak with someone who might be able to assist them with some profile names that had come up in an investigation.

  “I’m sorry. We have a firm policy against disclosing information about our users.”

  Apparently all FirstDate employees received the same training.

  “We were hoping to talk to someone about that,” McIlroy said. “We certainly understand the reasons for your policy, but this is a little unusual. Our case is a double homicide. Two women are dead, and they were both active on FirstDate. I’m sure you can see the urgency.�
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  The receptionist’s eyes widened at the mention of a double homicide, a description that wasn’t precisely accurate since the two victims were killed an entire calendar year apart. But people mislead for a reason. Ellie watched the woman’s fingers move toward a directory of telephone extensions that was taped next to the telephone.

  “I’m really not sure how I can help you—”

  “We just need to talk to someone who might be in the position to look up a few names for us,” Ellie interrupted. She and McIlroy had agreed in advance that Ellie would play the bad cop if necessary to get to the company CEO, Mark Stern.

  “There’s only one person I can think of who might have the authority—”

  “Why don’t you go ahead and call that person?” McIlroy asked.

  “He has a very busy schedule. Can you, like, call later to schedule an appointment?”

  Ellie stepped in. “If we have to get a court order and FirstDate ends up on the front page of the New York Daily Post as a stalking ground for serial killers, I suspect Mr. Stern will want to know who turned us away when we tried to make a quiet courtesy call. Is this the name I should give him when he asks?” She held up the nameplate that rested on the desk.

  As it turned out, looks really couldn’t kill. Once Ellie and the receptionist came to that mutual realization, a set of manicured pink nails tapped a four-digit extension into a phone, and, after a terse conversation, Ellie and McIlroy were escorted to a corner office.

  “Mr. Stern, these are the detectives who wanted to speak with you.”

  The chief executive officer of FirstDate lived up to one’s expectations of a man who made his living selling the romantic fantasy of realistic love. He was probably approaching forty and wore a platinum wedding band, a conservative navy blue suit, and a not-so-conservative lime green tie. His hair was on the long side for an executive, with the right amount of gray at the temples. Message: I was young once myself but found the right girl, fell in love, and remained loyal and happy. The silver-framed photograph of his beautiful wife in her beautiful wedding dress, placed prominently on his desk, wasn’t exactly subtle, but selling love, after all, was how Mark Stern made his money.