Dead Connection

by Alafair Burke

  “Where are you going?” Ellie asked.

  “Work.”

  “Where are you playing tonight?”

  “I’m not. Or at least it’s not that kind of playing. I got that job at Vibrations.” Jess delivered the news with a grin.

  “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “You’re the one who’s always after me to get a real job. This has the kind of hours I can deal with. Decent pay too. The views aren’t bad either. I’ll be pulling my first full shift tonight.”

  “Oh, shit, it’s late. I forgot to call Mom again.”

  “I figured,” Jess said. “Don’t worry — I called her. I knew you had your hands full and would worry about it later. And, no, I didn’t mention anything about your case. I told her you had a date.”

  “Why, Jess Hatcher. You called our mother. And you did it all on your own.” For me, she thought. Ellie was surprised at how touched she was.

  “Hey, I gotta run. My dream job awaits. Oh, and Ellie, bolt the door behind me. Don’t open it. Don’t talk to strangers. Keep the blinds drawn. Gun near the bed. Polo mallet as a backup.”

  She threw a pillow his way. “Because I have so many mallets at the ready. I’ll be fine, you. Get out of here.”

  He continued mumbling safety advice as the door closed behind him. An hour later, Ellie was still surfing the net, reading about the Book of Enoch, when her eyes began to close involuntarily. She took a last look at Enoch’s FirstDate profile. Active within 48 hours! the screen announced. He hadn’t logged on today. Mark Stern had promised they’d be paged the minute Enoch accessed his account, but Ellie knew that he was too smart to log on again — at least, not as Enoch.

  She could not resist the temptation to sneak a peak at Peter Morse’s profile while she was at it. Active within 48 hours! He hadn’t signed on today either. She wondered if that meant anything about the night they’d spent together. She looked at Peter’s picture, wondering if some other woman out there would snatch him off FirstDate. Some other woman who didn’t follow her self-imposed rules was going to end up with the man who could have been her next boyfriend.

  She exited the FirstDate Web site and went to Barnes and Noble’s site, which promised twenty-four-hour delivery in Manhattan. She had a copy of The Book of Enoch, translated by R. H. Charles, sent to her attention at the police precinct.

  AN HOUR LATER, the man who called himself Enoch was sitting at his special laptop, composing a letter. He could tell from the media coverage what the police were trying to do, but he was going to kick it up a notch. That’s what that fat, hairy TV chef liked to say. One of the ladies down the street — the one who always harped on him about smoking in the alley — used to have his cooking show on at all hours. Kick it up a notch. Bam! He’d kicked it up scads of notches when he’d bammed the old bag’s spoiled cat in the alley with his boots. Car accident, my ass.

  He reread the words on his screen. This was the perfect way to rattle that blond detective’s cage. He’d been tempted a few times to respond to that ridiculous little flirt she’d sent his way. He’d even thought about making her the last victim instead of Megan. But this letter was better. For now.

  He was careful to save the letter to his hard drive before pressing the print command on his keyboard. Then he pulled on a pair of latex gloves, removed the piece of paper from the printer, and folded it into an envelope. He used some water from the tap to moisten the seal with his knuckle, and found a phone number for the New York Daily Post.

  28

  “YOU’RE NOT REALLY GOING TO READ THAT ENTIRE THING, ARE you?”

  Ellie was sucking on a spoonful of Nutella, using her free hand to hold open the paperback edition of The Book of Enoch, which Flann eyed suspiciously.

  “Nonsense goes surprisingly quickly,” Ellie said. “I’m just trying to get a feel for what we’re dealing with.”

  “And do you have a full-blown criminal profile ready for us to distribute to the fine citizens of New York City?”

  She shot him a mock glare. “My inclination is that he’s not actually a religious zealot. He’s been too clever, too meticulous, and too techsavvy to be some homeless schizo inspired by the Book of Enoch.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Okay, so then why does he use the name Enoch? Because he’s a game player. He wants a cat-and-mouse chase with us. He waits a full calendar year between Hunter and Davis, to create a pattern. He even puts a copy of Davis’s FirstDate e-mail in her coat pocket, to give us another hint. By the time he kills Megan, all subtlety is gone. He places the FirstDate note right on top of her body, but then never signs on again. He knew that once we found Megan, we’d know that Enoch had contacted both her and Davis. He knew signing on under that account would be too risky. But the user name itself is another layer in the game. He had to have picked it intentionally.”

  “I was skeptical at first, but you’re on to something. The name’s peculiar, but you noticed him in the first place because the profile itself was so generic.”

  “Right. Absolutely vanilla. No personality. But instead of the standard lame handles — Looking for Love, Sleepless in SoHo — he picks an oddball name like Enoch. And using Rick Hamline’s credit card to pay for the FirstDate account?” Ellie flashed the book cover toward Flann. “This is the established, accepted translation. It’s been around nearly a century. Notice the name of the translator.”

  “R. H. Charles. You think that was intentional?”

  “It’s enough to make me wonder. And that’s exactly what this guy wants us to do — to sit around wondering what makes him tick. He’s screwing with us.”

  “So aren’t you falling for it by reading that ridiculous book?”

  “Do you have any other suggestions? He won’t log in as Enoch again, so we’ll never get a hit from the computer tracking. The mailbox rented to open Hamline’s credit card account was a dead end. And we got nowhere with the Internet cafés.”

  Flann and Ellie had spent the entire morning interviewing the employees at the various locations Enoch used to access FirstDate. Each of the employees regularly noticed customers logged on to FirstDate, but that kind of computer activity was so commonplace, they didn’t bother to note who the people were, let alone remember them. So, until they came up with a better plan, Ellie was reading The Book of Enoch, and Flann was reviewing all of Caroline Hunter’s notes again looking for a link to Enoch.

  “My current theory is that there’s something ‘cute’ about the book from his perspective. The most famous part of the book is the legend of the Watchers, who came from the highest level of angels. But when they descended to Earth — supposedly for the purpose of watching over the mortals — they lusted for human women and ended up mating with them. Enoch tried to intercede with God, but to no avail. God sent the Great Flood to punish the Watchers — to force them to witness the slaughter of their offspring with mortals.”

  “Yeah, I see what you mean about ‘cute.’”

  “Like I said, from his perspective. Something clever. One possibility is that he’s trying to say something about the process of judgment, or the risks of lust. He’s the fallen angel lusting for these women on FirstDate.”

  “And how does knowing that help us?”

  “It doesn’t. The other possibility, though, is that he sent us to the Book of Enoch not just as a clever reference to his motivations but because that’s where we’re really going to find the game. Another section of the book has Enoch learning all of these mysteries embedded in astronomy and the calendar, then he has these dream visions that supposedly prophesied some of the most significant events in the Bible. Some people believe it’s all a puzzle — that you can align the calendar to Enoch’s lunar calendar and track significant dates in Christ’s life.”

  “So maybe the year-long gap between Hunter and Davis is an allusion to that?”

  “I thought you said I was crazy to read this book.”

  “You forget you’re talking to McIl-Mulder. I don’t think anything
’s crazy.”

  “I keep going back to something my father always said: Find the motive, and the motive will lead you to the man.”

  “Not a bad maxim.”

  “The problem I’m having is making the leap from motive to the man. On my dad’s case, he thought the motive was sexual, so he spent a lot of time in the red light district and responding to calls of peeping toms. And on your psychiatrist case last year—”

  “The key was figuring out that the killer was obsessed with the number eight.”

  “And from there you went to the homeless shelters to find the neighborhood crazies. But if our guy thinks he’s following a pattern that’s related to the Book of Enoch, I have no idea how that leads us to the man. There’s talk in here about twelve winds, the four quarters of the world, seven rivers, the moon, the sun — there’s no way to know how someone might twist that around to pick the date of the next murder, or the next victim, or whatever it is he might be using the book for.”

  “So stop trying to predict what the killer’s going to do next. You forget that on the number eight case, I did the most obvious thing. Once you think you know what makes the killer tick, you use that information to resolve the clues you already have — the clues on the crimes he already committed.”

  “So if the Book of Enoch is a clue about his motives, then he must have a copy of the book. I ordered mine off the Internet. I wonder where he bought his.”

  “Now that sounds like something you can work with.”

  PETER MORSE SLURPED his coffee — it was a little too hot — while he admired the morning’s Daily Post. Side-by-side photographs of Amy Davis and Megan Quinn graced the front page. Davis had shoulder-length brown wavy hair, pale skin, and dark lips. Megan had shorter, curlier hair. She was chubby but cute, with freckles and bright eyes. He had had to persist with the families in that unctuous way he always found uncomfortable but had come up with great pictures of both women by deadline. He took another look at the banner headline running across the top of the page: Two Beauties Slain: More to Come?

  Peter had reported some bombshell stories before, but this one had the potential to be legendary. Murdered girls came and went from the front pages of newspapers, but another serial killer at work in New York City? Jimmy Breslin had worked the Son of Sam case, and he was a journalistic god. Granted, his iconic status came from something other than receiving that renowned letter from Berkowitz, but still, you couldn’t talk about Breslin without mention of the summer of 1977.

  That’s because the story about Son of Sam was about more than just Berkowitz or the lives he claimed. It was a story about an era. It was a story about an entire city — a great city — made vulnerable by one man, a man who could be any of us and could choose any of us as his next victims.

  Peter opened the paper to the article he wrote yesterday afternoon when he first got the tip that the two murders were related. This one had potential. This one would have legs. Flann McIlroy called in the tip himself. That was unusual. It meant he wanted the story out there, which could only mean that he didn’t have any leads. If he had a suspect — a landlord, a mutual boyfriend, the bartender who closed a watering hole shared by the two women — the cops would be worried about scaring a suspect off. But McIlroy also must have had a feeling in his gut about this one. And from what Peter knew about the detective, that was saying something.

  He flipped through the pages of notes he had put together for tomorrow’s article. Hopefully it would be the next entry in a long and meaningful series, the beginning of what would ultimately become a book. He sorted his material into two piles.

  One pile related to Detective Ellie Hatcher. The Daily Post had run a story about her in a sidebar a year ago, presenting the local angle to the College Hill Strangler case. She might make a good front-page story for tomorrow — assuming that another victim didn’t turn up in the meantime. Haunted by the death of her father, raised under the fearful influences of a killer and the hunting instincts of his pursuer, not too dissimilar in her demographics from the victims themselves. Peter could picture the story and he liked what he saw.

  The other pile related to the murder of a woman named Caroline Hunter. She was about the same age as the other victims. Her murder also remained unsolved. He’d written a couple of stories about her case last year, before the city’s attention — and his — moved on to other things. The date of her murder was precisely one year earlier than Amy Davis’s.

  He had a strategic decision to make about whether to focus on one story or both. If the public’s interest stayed hot, it was better to dole out a new angle each morning — keep the papers moving from the stands. But if the police were going to announce an arrest tomorrow night, he was better off shooting his wad at once, before the focus turned to a suspect.

  He stuck with the feeling in his gut and decided to use just one story for now and save the other for the following day. The Caroline Hunter angle was risky. His speculation could be totally off-base, and there was no guarantee he could come up with sufficient corroboration by deadline. On the other hand, with risks came rewards. He might be the only reporter to make the connection, while the TV news had already tapped into Ellie Hatcher’s backstory.

  Maybe he’d let photogenics break the tie. His editor always said that pictures sold papers. He studied the head shot of Caroline Hunter that had run the morning after her murder. Even prettier than Davis and Quinn, she’d be awfully hard to compete with, especially by some cop. He pulled up Google on his computer and ran a search for images under the name Ellie Hatcher.

  The screen changed to a display of twelve thumbnail photographs, most of them of the same award-winning quilt apparently designed by a woman named Ellie Hatcher. Toward the bottom of the screen was a small photograph of a blond woman in a white blouse and dark jacket. The text beneath it read Family of College Hill Strangler Detective Cries Cover-Up, followed by a link to People magazine’s Web site. He double clicked on the link.

  He’d followed the College Hill Strangler story at the time, but not closely enough to remember the accompanying photograph two years later. Gazing at him from the screen with big blue eyes, full pink lips, and a heart-shaped face was the woman he’d been thinking about every twelve minutes for the last twenty-seven hours: Ally, last name unknown, whom he promised never to contact again.

  “Who’s the hottie?” Peter looked up to find the smiling face and dark eyes of Justine Navarro, the intern from NYU with a pierced tongue and an uncomfortably revealing wardrobe. Today’s ensemble was the usual hip-hugger pants and a clingy off-white sweater with a plunging neckline.

  “Believe it or not, she’s apparently an NYPD detective.”

  “I wouldn’t kick her out of bed.”

  Peter had no idea whether Justine was a lesbian, bisexual, or simply the free-spoken product of a generation that had no qualms about checking out members of the same sex. He knew better than to spend too much time thinking about it. She had good taste though. He hadn’t kicked Ellie Hatcher out of bed either, even if her presence there came with the horrible condition that it was a one-night deal. Man, he could not stop thinking about this woman.

  “Hey, I’m sending a call back in about sixty seconds,” Justine said. “You better pick it up.”

  One of the interns’ jobs was to answer the general public’s crime beat calls. The reporters had lobbied for the change, fed up with constant and absolutely unnewsworthy bitching about abandoned cars, noisy dance clubs, street-level drug dealing, and the occasional illegal exotic pet. Granted, sometimes an apartment-reared lion made good copy, but the interns were perfectly capable of passing along a worthy tip.

  “I always take my calls,” Peter said.

  “No you don’t. You say you do, but I catch you cheating all the time.”

  Peter was only in his midthirties, but increasingly he found himself thinking that youth was a pain in the ass. “Well, it never seems to matter, does it?”

  “On this one, it might. The guy say
s he’s got something on that serial killer case. An exclusive tip only for you.”

  Peter didn’t bother to get his hopes up. This call would be just one of many he and other reporters around the city would receive from various whack jobs. He kept his eyes on Ellie Hatcher, wondering if she was getting the same kind of phone calls. “So transfer him already.”

  “I tried. I pretended to look for your number while I tried getting your attention. He said he’d call back in exactly ninety seconds and expected to be transferred immediately.” She rushed back to her desk, yelling, “We’ve got about five seconds left.”

  This could be interesting. Peter watched the digital clock tick away on the LED readout of his phone. He kept an eye on Justine, who was at her desk now, with one hand on the phone. Five, four, three, two, one. A millisecond of a phone ringing, then Justine’s voice. “Daily Post…. Right away.”

  She gave Peter an urgent look and pushed a few buttons on her phone, then Peter’s phone rang.

  “Peter Morse.”

  “Did that young thing with the pretty voice tell you why I was calling?” The voice had a southern accent. Not a twang, but something southern. Raised in the northeast, Peter couldn’t place it any more particularly.

  “She said it was about this week’s murders.”

  “That’s right. Amy and Megan.” The names oozed like warm caramel. “There’s more you need to know about what got them killed. Something the police are hiding. You got a pen? Write this down. 455 Fifth Avenue. Third floor.” He read off a series of numbers followed by letters.

  “Is that some kind of code?”

  “You mean to tell me that an accomplished journalist like yourself is unfamiliar with the Dewey Decimal system? I promise, it’ll make good reading.”

  “Wait. Who are you? How can I get a hold of you?”

  Peter heard a click in his ear, then hung up as well. He rolled out his keyboard drawer and Googled the address the man had recited. The mid-Manhattan public library. He reached for the pile of notes on Ellie Hatcher and flipped to a summary of the College Hill Strangler case that he’d printed from a Web site called Crime Library. He found what he was looking for on the third page: