Dead Connection

by Alafair Burke

  “I know the story of Cain and Abel.” Rostov spoke quietly, eyeing his friend Upton. “I know it because you told it to me, Jason. You said you felt like Abel, slain by your own brother.”

  “So you knew how much Jason hated Mark Stern. Jason did all this — he jeopardized everything, including you — just to get back at Stern. You think killing me and Peter is going to make this go away? It’s too late, at least for you, Vitya. You haven’t spoken to Zoya?”

  “Why are you talking about Zoya?”

  “I saw her again today. She tried to protect you, but I know you saw Tatiana with that FBI agent. Tatiana wasn’t just an informant, Vitya. That agent was in love with her. He’s not going to drop this. And he knows where Becker got his boat. He’s probably talking to Luke Steiner right now to find out how his boat wound up in Becker’s name shortly after Caroline Hunter’s murder.”

  Rostov threw Upton a nervous look that confirmed Ellie’s suspicion that the previous owner of Becker’s boat was somehow connected to Rostov’s network.

  “The FBI is getting an arrest warrant for you. You’re going down, and killing me won’t change any of that.”

  Ellie could see the veins in Upton’s neck as he screamed at Rostov to put her down. Only Ellie was alert enough to see the knob turn on the apartment’s front door. She gauged the distance to the Glock.

  “Zoya will take the kids. You’ll never see them again.” She raised her voice, hoping to cover any sounds of the door she willed to open. “She’ll probably tell them you’re dead rather than take them to see their father in prison. That’s all on Jason. Everything the FBI has points to you, not him. If you’re going to take me out, you at least should send him with me.”

  Ellie could feel the momentum changing. She was the aggressor now. In her mind’s eye, she saw Rostov turning the gun on Upton. She pictured the bullet firing into Upton’s body. She imagined herself diving for her weapon in the time it would take Rostov to fire another round. She visualized Peter’s front door opening. And as she pictured it all, she kept on talking.

  The problem was, Rostov’s first shot wasn’t intended for Upton. It was meant for Ellie.

  The force of the bullet felt like a battering ram against Ellie’s torso. She fell to the floor, landing hard against bare wood. Rostov got off a fast second shot, nailing Jason Upton squarely in the left cheek. Upton pressed both hands against the wound and swayed backward. Then like a pendulum, he swung forward again, collapsing onto the dining room table.

  Just as Upton crashed headfirst into his mug of tea, Charlie Dixon pushed his way through the apartment door.

  “Drop it, drop it. Drop your weapons. FBI.”

  Rostov swung away from Ellie to face Dixon. Dixon reacted immediately. Pop. Pop. Two quick blasts from Dixon’s semiautomatic. Rostov stumbled backward and tumbled to the floor, coming to rest beside Ellie.

  Dixon ran toward Ellie and kicked the Derringer from Rostov’s reach. Ellie strained to lift her head. As Dixon pressed two fingers to her carotid artery, she asked him for one more thing. “Make sure the guy in the bathroom’s all right.” Then she closed her eyes and everything turned black.

  39

  ELLIE WAS KNEELING BESIDE FLANN MCILROY, PRESSING HER coat against his belly, while she waited for an ambulance that might save him. She heard the high-pitched squeals of a siren in the distance and pushed harder against Flann’s abdomen but could still see the blood spreading beneath her parka. Her mouth was dry, her tongue was swollen, and she smelled the antiseptic odors of Jess’s hospital room. She imagined her father’s body slumped over his steering wheel. Pictured the damage done by the bullet fired into his mouth. Greeted by an intense beam of bright white light in front of her, she tried walking toward it. When her legs wouldn’t move, she tried to run, but got no closer. She was paralyzed.

  Her eyes shot open. Four round lights were mounted in metal on a vibrating wall in front of her. Then she realized that the bulbs were above her. She was horizontal, and the room was shaking. She was in an ambulance.

  “You fainted,” an EMT explained. “Your vest caught the bullet, but you’re going to have a nasty bruise on your gut for about a week.”

  “Hey you.” The familiar voice came from an adjacent gurney. Peter Morse looked at her through puffy, blackened eyes. A gash ran along his right cheekbone. A paramedic had wiped blood away, leaving behind a deep pink smear on Peter’s pale skin.

  “Hey yourself.”

  “I heard the shots from the bathroom. And then the sound of your voice stopped. I thought I’d lost you.”

  “A nice girl never goes to a man’s house without her Kevlar.” After a quick phone call to Charlie Dixon from the cab, she’d asked the driver to make a pit stop at her apartment on the way to Peter’s for the vest she kept at home.

  “Good girl.”

  “Hey, Peter?”

  “Yeah?”

  “So what exactly did you tell the intern at the paper about me?”

  Peter closed his eyes as he drifted off, but he was smiling. As far as post-blackout first memories went, Ellie considered this a good one.

  ONE WEEK LATER, Ellie stood next to Charlie Dixon outside a conference room in the federal building, thinking how much easier this all would be if Vitali Rostov had carried a larger gun. The power of a gun made a difference, even at close distances. Vitali Rostov took two shots from Dixon’s semiautomatic and was pronounced dead on arrival. Jason Upton, however, survived the shot from Rostov’s compact Derringer — which is why Ellie stood in the hallway of the federal building wishing Rostov had used a bigger gun.

  Ellie knew her thoughts were morally wrong at some level, but she couldn’t control them. She wished Upton had died that day in Peter’s apartment. She wanted Upton to pay the ultimate price, and inconvenient details were more easily swept away when the interested parties were dead. The NYPD didn’t worry about details when it declared Ed Becker solely responsible for the four FirstDate murders. The Wichita police didn’t worry about details when it labeled her father’s death a suicide. But Jason Upton would not be punished until a prosecutor, judge, jury, and defense lawyer pored over the messy details created by his secrets and his lies.

  In the week since the shootings, Ellie had left the job of collecting those details to Charlie Dixon. Then they had met the previous night to lock down the official version that Dixon would file in his reports and eventually repeat to a federal grand jury. And now that official version was about to get its first preview in a joint meeting called by FBI Special Agent in Charge Barry Mayfield and NYPD Lieutenant Dan Eckels.

  “You sure about this?” Dixon asked one last time. A man she’d known for less than two weeks was trusting his career to her.

  Ellie smiled. “Does Britney Spears like Cheetos?”

  Mayfield and Eckels were already seated on one side of the long table in the conference room, and Dixon and Ellie joined them on the other. Ellie sat patiently while Dixon explained how nearly two years earlier a federal defendant informed him that an associate named Vitya — last name supposedly unknown — was engaged in a criminal conspiracy that related somehow to a company called FirstDate.

  “What was this informant’s name?” Eckels asked.

  “Alexander Federov.”

  “And where can we find Mr. Federov today?”

  “You can’t,” Dixon said. “He was killed in prison.”

  “Go on,” Mayfield encouraged.

  “All I had was a guy’s first name and a company name. It wasn’t enough to pursue formally, and Federov made it clear he wasn’t about to flip. Since then, however, I’ve remained curious about the tip and informally kept an eye on FirstDate.”

  “What do you mean you ‘informally kept an eye’ on it?” Eckels asked. Ellie noticed that Barry Mayfield was leaving the questioning to Lieutenant Eckels. She hoped it was a sign of the friendship Charlie Dixon claimed he had with his boss.

  “Just that. I read up on the company and its CEO, Mark Stern. Newspap
er articles and advertisements would catch my eye. I was hoping to find some kind of connection to a person named Vitya. Nothing ever came of it. Then two Mondays ago, I heard from a source that Detectives McIlroy and Hatcher had arrived at Mark Stern’s office asking for records as part of a criminal investigation.”

  “And who was your source?” Eckels asked.

  “Again, nothing formal. A marketing assistant at FirstDate was on parole for a minor drug violation and was willing to stay in touch.”

  “Please, Lieutenant,” Mayfield interjected. “If you’d let my agent tell the story, we’d get through this faster. You’ll have time for questions afterward.”

  The rest of the official story unfolded without interruption. At Dixon’s request, Detectives McIlroy and Hatcher briefed him about their investigation into a series of murders connected to FirstDate. When they identified a woman named Tatiana Chekova as a potential victim based on ballistics evidence, Dixon was intrigued because the man who originally tipped him off about FirstDate had also been Russian. Then things took off when Dixon learned that Tatiana Chekova had a brother-in-law named Vitali Rostov. Vitya, Dixon explained, was a familiar Russian nickname for Vitali.

  Dixon explained how he began following Vitali Rostov to the extent that his other investigations allowed. He saw Rostov meet at an Internet café with a man he recognized from his early surveillance of FirstDate as Jason Upton, a former programmer with the company.

  “And where was this café?” Eckels asked.

  Mayfield threw Eckels a look of warning, but Dixon answered without hesitation. He gave a Midtown address — one of the three Manhattan Internet cafés that Upton had used for his Enoch activities on FirstDate.

  “Anyway, I recognized Upton from my early research into FirstDate, when he was still at the company. At that point, I realized that Upton had to have been the point person for whatever was going on between Rostov and the company. That’s when I went to Mark Stern for assistance.”

  Ellie knew that Stern would have already backed up this part of the official story. She had rehearsed the information with Stern before leaving his office that day for Peter Morse’s apartment. True to his word, he’d been willing to be flexible.

  “Stern then informed me of the conflict between him and Mr. Upton. He also realized that Upton could have potentially given himself access to customers’ credit card records. At that point, I continued to follow Vitya Rostov in the hope of witnessing an actual exchange of cash for information. That is how I wound up at Peter Morse’s apartment a week ago. I saw Rostov enter the building. Then when Detective Hatcher arrived shortly thereafter, I knew I had to intervene.”

  “How did you get access to the apartment?” Eckels asked. “The lock was controlled by a combination.”

  “We got lucky,” Dixon said. “When Hatcher went in, the door didn’t close completely. I just pushed it open.”

  Ellie continued to listen as Dixon summarized all of the admissions that Upton made while Rostov had held her at gunpoint. From this point in the story, the official version hewed pretty closely to the truth.

  Just as Ellie knew it was wrong to wish for Jason Upton’s death, she knew that at some level it was wrong to lie and to have encouraged Dixon and Stern to do the same. But they had no choice if they wanted to see Upton punished. A skeptic might take issue with some of the details in the official version that Dixon offered, but Ellie knew that in the end the powers-that-be would accept any credible lie as truth. They didn’t want to see Upton walk either. And as long as that was the case, Ellie wasn’t going to lose sleep over it.

  Ellie tuned back in just as Dixon laid a brown mailing envelope with a New Iberia postmark on the conference table. The package was going to help Dixon tie all the pieces together. It had been delivered by the U.S. Postal Service around the same time Ellie’s Kevlar vest was saving her life. Ellie found it in her mailbox when she came home from the hospital. Enclosed were several yellowed photographs of boys and girls of various ages, each picture accompanied by a Post-it note of the shaky writings of an aged hand. On one of the photographs, Helen Benoit had written, The third boy on the left, Jasper, liked computers. He had a mean streak too. Even in his early teens, Jasper looked a lot like Jason Upton.

  Also enclosed in the envelope were copies of all of Helen Benoit’s foster parent contracts with the Louisiana Department of Social Services. At the same time she’d cared for Edmond Bertrand, she’d also taken in Jasper Dupre, date of birth 10-16-74. Jason Upton had the same birth date. As did the Edmond Bertrand arrested in Boston six years ago.

  Jason Upton had lied about his education, wealth, motives — even his name. Charlie Dixon was still tracking down all of the various aliases that Jasper Dupre had used since he left Louisiana.

  By the time Dixon was done telling the official version of the story, and Ellie was finished corroborating the details, it sounded like it took both of their separate investigations to come to the full truth. Ellie, of course, knew the real truth. She was not troubled, though, that the official version made Dixon sound more resourceful than he was, and she slightly less. Dixon needed the credit more. He was staying on the job.

  ELLIE RETURNED to her apartment to find her suitcase open on the bed, just as she’d left it. Without bothering to remove her coat or boots, she began folding the last few pieces of clothing that remained in a pile on top of her dresser. Jess eyed her from the bedroom doorway as she placed the items in the suitcase.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Jess asked.

  “Yeah, I’m sure. This is what I need right now.”

  Two days earlier, she’d gotten the call from the lawyer in Kansas. Now that the dust had settled on William Summer’s conviction and sentence, the Wichita police were finally prepared to permit the family of deceased detective Jerry Hatcher to have a supervised look at the evidence. Ellie had booked an early-afternoon flight. She was even trying to arrange a private visit with Summer at the El Dorado Correctional Facility while she was down there.

  “And what are you going to do about Clark Kent?”

  Ellie took it as a sign of approval that Jess had come up with a nickname for Peter. “Lots of phone calls. He says if I’m away more than three weeks, he’s flying down there himself. He’s already got a story proposal in the works so the paper will pay for it.”

  “What about when you get back? Don’t you need to tell the department what you’re doing?”

  “I’ll get right on that — just as soon as you know what you’ll be doing for work in a month.”

  Ellie was still on paid leave, but Lieutenant Jenkins was already inquiring as to when she might return to her old post at Midtown North. In the last two weeks, she had trusted too many of the wrong people, been suspicious of the others, and had orchestrated an apocryphal, illegal cover story because she came to believe it was the only way to obtain justice. She had watched her partner get shot, and then held him as he died. She knew better than to make a decision prematurely, but she no longer pictured herself as a police officer. At least not yet.

  “And you’re sure it’s okay I stay here while you’re gone?” Jess asked.

  “Please. You know you’d stay here anyway.”

  “A vacant apartment in Manhattan is a terrible thing to waste.”

  Jess helped Ellie zip the suitcase and then carried it to the front door. Ellie looked at her watch.

  “I better go.”

  “Ellie, wait. You’ve thought through this decision, right? About going home? I mean, what if it turns out — you know, what if we’ve been fooling ourselves about Dad?”

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding. “But we need an answer. Mom needs to finally move on after all these years. And I’ll be there to get her through it. I’m ready to do that.”

  She heard her voice breaking, so she said good-bye to Jess one last time before she hugged him and carried her suitcase to the street. She waved down the next available cab and helped the driver load her oversized bag into the trunk. As
the taxi made its way to the Midtown Tunnel, she took in the streets of Manhattan, as she had when she first arrived in the city, knowing she would miss them and that everything would be different when she returned.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A former deputy district attorney, ALAFAIR BURKE now teaches criminal law at Hofstra Law School and lives in New York City. She is the daughter of the acclaimed crime writer James Lee Burke. Her three novels in the Samantha Kincaid series, Judgment Calls, Missing Justice, and Close Case are available in paperback from St. Martin’s Press.