Dead Connection (23 page)

Given the illegal investigation tactics he’d used to keep an eye on Stern, Dixon was relieved when Hatcher didn’t press the question of how he’d formed his “impression.”

“Sure,” she promised. “And, hey, thanks for calling me. And for the sweets.”

Dixon rose from the table and pulled his coat on. He left the café satisfied with the way he’d controlled the message. He’d given the NYPD the information they needed, and his hands were clean. Hatcher seemed like a decent cop. Maybe she could carry the burden now, and he could finally put all of this behind him.

ELLIE WATCHED CHARLIE Dixon walk to a blue Impala down the street, then she pulled her cell phone from her waist, flipped it open, and pressed the camera button. Charlie Dixon popped up on the small screen, in color, his coffee cup held just below his chin. It wasn’t a bad photograph.

She left Lamarca with a small box of tiramisu wrapped in string, a surprise for Flann. Unfortunately, a very different kind of surprise awaited her. Just outside the precinct entrance, a mere eighty feet away, stood Peter Morse. She could not believe her luck. Millions of people had reckless evenings of casual sex with strangers. She did it one time — only once — and the guy wound up literally at her doorstep.

She ducked down a metal staircase leading to a basement laundry shop and stifled a scream when a rat scurried across her foot. She watched as Peter pulled open one of the precinct’s glass double doors. How long was she willing to stand here in the cold, with this stench, to avoid him? Until she saw him leave, she decided — no matter how long it took.

Her cell phone jingled at her waist. She flipped it open and recognized Flann’s number.

“Hello?” She whispered as if Peter could hear her from inside the walls of the precinct across the street.

“Are you almost done with the elusive G-man?”

“Yeah, I’m done. I’m just, um, yeah, I’m on my way back. What’s up?”

“Just get back here.”

“It might be a sec—”

“If this is about the apparently prescient reporter named Peter Morse, he’s standing right here and warned me you’d try to avoid him. Get back here please. The sooner you talk to him, the sooner he’ll leave.”

30

PETER MORSE FOLLOWED ELLIE’S SHEEPISH ENTRANCE WITH A
pleased expression. Flann shot her eye daggers.

“I brought tiramisu,” she said, offering Flann the dainty bakery package. She offered Peter her hand, playing it cool. “Hi. I’m Ellie Hatcher. But it sounds like you already know that.”

“I know now.” Ellie couldn’t tell if he was angry, amused, or both. “I hope you don’t mind, but I told your partner that I really needed to talk to the two of you together.”

“I tried pushing him off on the Public Information Office,” Flann said, “but he insisted you’d want to hear this. The two of you know each other?”

“Oh yeah, we go way back,” Peter said. “Good times. Good times. So anyhoo, I got a phone call this morning from your killer.”

Ellie and Flann exchanged skeptical looks. Reporters contacted cops to suck up information, not to dole it out.

“It was probably just a prank,” Flann said. “Routine on high-profile cases.”

“That’s what I assumed too. It was at least a clever crank. He told me to go to the public library to find a letter he left there for me. Sound familiar?”

“That’s how William Summer delivered the first of the College Hill Strangler letters,” Ellie explained to Flann. “He hid a letter inside a book at the library, then gave a tip to a reporter.”

“I guess I play the role of the reporter.” Peter handed them a piece of paper sealed inside a plastic bag. “I watch
CSI
.”

Dear Mr. Morse, Congratulations. You found this letter. Now here is your reward
. The letter continued with a detailed description of the killings, down to the shrill mews of Amy Davis’s cat while he strangled her and the tapestry pattern on the sofa where he found the pillow used to smother Megan Quinn.
They were sinners and fornicators and temptresses, but that is not why I killed them. The police are covering up the real reason. They were liars, using deception to trigger lust in honest men. They used FirstDate, then took their Last Breath. “And behold! He cometh to execute judgement upon all, and to destroy the ungodly, and to convict all flesh of all the works which they have ungodly committed.” Three down and many more to go. Enoch
.

“You probably recognize that last line about how many more,” Peter said, looking at Ellie.

Of course she recognized the reference. In 1982, the College Hill Strangler wrote a letter to police asking how many people he had to murder before he would get some media attention. In his postscript, he wrote, “five down and many more to go.”

“He’s fucking with me,” Ellie said. “He saw the news coverage mentioning my connection to William Summer, and now he’s intentionally fucking with me.”

“I’m sorry.” Peter Morse sounded like he actually meant it.

“You can’t run the story,” Flann said.

“What?” Peter exclaimed. “That’s not your call to make. I only came here to give you evidence and to see if you have any comment.”

“He’s escalating,” Flann explained. “It’s all about his ego. He wants notoriety. If you give it to him, it’ll only up the ante. He’ll kill again to prove that he can live up to the reputation.”

“That’s not enough to justify holding the story. If publication presented an imminent threat—”

“Don’t hold the story,” Ellie said. “Get it out there as soon as you can.”

“Ellie, this is not your decision.”

“I’m sorry if I’m being insubordinate, Flann, but I will not be part of hiding this from the public. I grew up in a town where every couple of years a woman would be tied up in her home and slowly tortured to death. The police knew about it and kept us in the dark. Then they said he was gone, when they should have known he wasn’t. Some of his victims might have lived if they’d known to be more careful. Peter’s right. You’re just speculating about what Enoch will do. He might be more likely to kill again if he
doesn’t
get the press he wants. The only thing we know for sure is that women might be more careful if they know what they’re dealing with. He should go with the story.”

“He signed the letter Enoch,” Peter said. “Is that a name that means something to you?”

It was clear the train was leaving the station. Flann had no way of stopping Peter from running the story — he of all people was not going to report Ellie to the department for cooperating with the press — but that wasn’t going to stop him from salvaging some secrecy. “Any way we can persuade you to at least hold back the name?” he asked.

“I already know it’s from the Book of Enoch. The reference librarian tracked down the quote in the letter for me.”

“Off the record for a second?” Ellie asked.

“Sure.”

Ellie told him about the FirstDate user who called himself Enoch. “His profile is still online. It’s a real long shot, but we’ve got it monitored so we can locate him in the event that he logs back on to his account.”

“Okay. That’s good enough reason for me. The name won’t go in. Neither will the quote.”

“Really?” Ellie tilted her head.

“Even reporters can be reasonable, Detective. I need to do more work on the Book of Enoch angle in any event. Just one more question, back on the record. What do you want me to say about you? About the fact that he’s apparently trying to push some buttons in your background?”

“I think that letter gives you enough for a day’s newsprint. You can say we believe that one man has used FirstDate to kill at least three women and that we believe the letter is authentic.” She chose her words carefully when she described
at least three
victims. The letter detailed the Hunter, Davis, and Quinn murders, but didn’t mention Tatiana Chekova, and Peter apparently didn’t know about her. She wanted to be truthful, but no more forthcoming than necessary to protect the public. Flann nodded his approval. “We have no further comment about any other details.”

“Yeah, okay. I’ve got enough to run with for now. You’ll give me a break in the future, I hope. For holding back the Enoch thing?”

“No problem,” Flann said, already turning his attention back to his desk.

Ellie offered to walk Peter out. She finally spoke once they reached the sidewalk. “You probably hate me. I’m so sorry—”

“I don’t hate you. I’m intrigued. And, with tremendous guilt given the circumstances, I’m actually happy to have an excuse to break my promise never to call you again.”

“I’m not the kind of person who lies, who tells stories—”

“Hey, if you want to make it up to me, promise me you’ll stop apologizing. It’s not like I regret anything that happened. And if you really, really want to make it up to me, rethink that whole never-seeing-each-other-again agreement. We’ve both got a ton of work to do — yours more important than mine, obviously — but if you get a chance, even just for a drink, call me tonight.” He scribbled a number down on a business card and handed it to her. “Hopefully I’ll talk to you soon.”

ON THE WAY back to the detectives’ room, Ellie checked her reflection in the glass door to make sure it didn’t reveal the few seconds of giddiness she allowed herself. Nope, plain old normal Ellie, even though Peter Morse knew who she was and what she did for a living. He didn’t hate her. He wanted to see her again. He agreed to hold back the name, without even a fight.

Flann wasted no time getting back to the task at hand. “I sent the original of the letter down to the crime lab, but it’ll be a while before we hear anything.”

“They won’t find anything anyway.” Enoch hadn’t left prints behind on anything yet. “I think I’ve got a better lead from our friendly neighborhood FBI agent.”

Flann ate tiramisu, nodding occasionally as she walked him through her chat with Charlie Dixon.

“So Chekova was killed for flipping for the FBI, but then the same gun used on her is used to kill our first victim? That doesn’t add up.”

“It does if Enoch is somehow tied to whatever criminal enterprise Tatiana had knowledge of.”

“So we’re looking for Russian heroin dealers, or, more interestingly, we’re looking at Mark Stern. You think Stern’s got it in him?”

“Anyone can be evil. But I don’t think it’s Stern. I remember the momentary look of panic on his face when we first told him that someone was using his company to pluck off young single women. He wasn’t panicked because he was our guy; he was freaking out because that piece of information, made public, would ruin his company. If he wanted to go on a killing spree, why drag his livelihood down with it?”

“So that leaves somebody connected to whoever wanted to silence Tatiana. Maybe he kills her to shut her up, gets off on it, and then continues to use FirstDate to find more victims and to develop his Enoch persona?” Flann immediately saw the flaw in his own theory. “But if he’s on a learning curve and using FirstDate to play, how do we explain him luring Amy Davis onto the site?”

“I know,” Ellie said. “None of it adds up. But we’ve got to track down this Tatiana angle. We don’t have any other leads.”

“The doorman at Megan Quinn’s building said the man who delivered the flowers didn’t have an accent of any kind, so my guess is he’s not a Russian.”

“And Peter Morse said the guy who called him had a southern accent. Maybe the Latino doorman couldn’t tell the difference between a southern accent and a plain old generic white boy? We’re looking for a man with a southern accent, connections to Russian criminals, and a fixation on an obscure religious text? Piece of cake.”

Ellie reached across Flann’s desk for the bakery box and caught a glance at Caroline Hunter’s open notebook. Flann had marked a single page with a neon orange Post-it note.

“What’s this?” she asked, turning the notebook toward her.

“See for yourself.” In the margin next to the orange sticky was a handwritten notation:
MC Becker
.

Ellie recognized the scrawl. When she’d first read the police reports on Tatiana Chekova’s murder, she knew she’d recently come across the name Becker. What she hadn’t realized at the time was that she’d seen the name among the miscellaneous doodles of Caroline Hunter’s research notes.

“It’s my old buddy from Scarsdale,” Flann said.

Ellie wasn’t surprised that Flann would jump to conclusions when it came to Ed Becker. “You don’t know that, Flann.”

“He’s been in front of us the entire time. He caught Tatiana’s murder. Now his name’s in Caroline Hunter’s notebook. And accents are easy to fake.”

“It’s a common last name.” Ellie took another look at the note. “And the way it’s written there, it might even say McBecker. It’s hard to tell.”

“Looks more like MC Becker to me. According to Dixon, Tatiana said the men she knew had NYPD cops on the take, and I know first-hand that Becker’s got that kind of thing in his background. MC could’ve been shorthand for a meeting place.”

“Or maybe it’s his son’s initials? Becker said his son met his fiancée online. Or it may be totally unrelated. I could call him. Ask him about it.”

“He’ll say it’s a coincidence, and then what? No, we’ve got to look into Becker without him knowing.”

Ellie hated the idea that the man who wrote that letter, the man who killed these women, could have given her a ride home. She didn’t want to believe that her instincts could be so wrong. But no matter how she shaped the ideas in her mind, she couldn’t shake Flann’s reasoning. Flann might be jumping to conclusions, but the possibility had to be pursued, especially when she considered Charlie Dixon’s other troubling comment. “Dixon said that Becker was slacking on Tatiana’s murder case from the very beginning, before his partner was killed. Apparently they were working their other cases just fine.”

“That doesn’t jibe with what Becker told us.”

“I know, and it does a lot to explain that train wreck of a murder notebook he left behind. It bothers me.”

“One of us needs to look at Becker’s old files for comparison. See if he really did bury Tatiana’s case.”

“I’ll do it,” Ellie offered.

Flann shook his head. “You won’t know what to look for. This is your first homicide case.”

“Fine. You do it. But promise me you’ll run anything by me before you whisk off and arrest him or something, okay?”

“Aye, aye.”

“I’ll go out to Brooklyn to talk to Tatiana’s sister again. See if she knows anything about the deal with the FBI. If there’s time on the way back, I might stop by MDC to see Lev Grosha.”

On the way out of the precinct, Ellie used her telephone to send the digital photograph of Charlie Dixon to Jess’s e-mail account. She followed up with a text message: “See if anyone at Vibrations knows him. Start with the manager. C U 2nite.”