Dead Connection

by Alafair Burke

  “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 nee
ded 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.”

  14

  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.

  15

  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.