Dead Connection

by Alafair Burke

  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?”

&nb
sp; “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.”

  18

  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.