The College Hill Strangler was back. The anonymous mailing was his way of announcing that to the police. While the city was comforted by false theories of his death or incapacitation, he still lived among them, killing. Over the next eleven months, he would dole out six more envelopes of surprises — letters, drawings, even poems. His desire to gloat finally led to his own capture when an alert teenager jotted down the license plate number of a car peeling rubber as it sped away from the neighborhood mail drop.
“They’re trotting out the same old story,” Roberta said. “He was meticulous about his mementos and his diaries. They found evidence linking him to the eight named victims, and that’s all.”
“That’s bullshit,” Ellie said, quickly apologizing to her mother for the language. It would be just like Summer to gloat to the police about all his other killings, except for the one cop who almost caught him.
“Maybe you could help if you came down here,” Roberta offered. “I have a hard enough time on my own without all of this going on.”
“Mom, I told you I’d come down once there was a reason to. I’ll take as much time off as I have to. If we get access to the evidence, I’ll go through it myself, piece by piece. Or if they’d just let me talk to him—”
“You know I don’t like that idea.”
Ellie recognized that she fell directly in the center of William Summer’s preference zone. Right age. Clean-cut. Warm personality. She was convinced that if she had him in the box, he would be unable to resist the temptation to torture her the only way he could — mentally. He would try to torture her by describing what he had done to her father.
“Let’s not fight about this, Mom. I promise you: When the time comes, I’ll fly to Wichita, and we’ll figure out where to go from there — together.”
There was a brief silence on the line, then Roberta asked about Jess. “I haven’t heard from him lately.”
“He’s great. He dropped by here earlier. He wanted to talk to you, but his band had a big gig tonight.”
“Good for them. I keep telling the folks around here about Dog Park, but so far no one’s heard of them. You know how it takes forever for anything big to make it to Kansas.”
Ellie told her mother she loved her before she said good night. She made a point of telling her mother she missed her. Roberta said she loved and missed Ellie too, then hung up sounding as lonely and helpless as she always did at the end of their calls.
THE WHISKEY WAS still working on Ellie’s brain an hour later, along with images of her mother, Amy Davis’s damaged neck, and the empty look in her parents’ eyes as Flann helplessly handed them their daughter’s cat. Her mind’s eye leaped back to a memory of her father, sitting alone at the garage sale desk in the basement, surrounded by crime photos, rereading old police reports he had memorized eight times over. Hanging at the center of his gruesome montage was the smiling face of an impish-looking blond woman named Janice Beale.
Detective Jerry Hatcher had been most shaken by that one. By the time Beale was killed, two weeks before Christmas, 1984, the College Hill Strangler had already killed five people. Five people. Three days. Six years. Ellie’s father could never shake the guilt that perhaps Beale’s death could have been prevented. If they had put the pieces together, if they had warned the public, maybe she would have been spared. That was the thought Ellie’s father could never elude.
Like Amy Davis, Janice Beale was single, young, lived alone — a death by strangling. Ellie shook the comparison from her head. She was not going to let this happen. She was not in her father’s shoes. Amy Davis had been dead for less than a week. This was not a cold case. If she and Flann worked hard enough, it never would be.
With sleep futile, she climbed out of her bed and reread all of the e-mails Amy had exchanged on FirstDate. She picked the three men who were most interesting. Nothing dangerous. Nothing threatening. Just a hunch about these three. Then she signed up for FirstDate, calling herself “DB990.” DB for Date Bait, followed by her badge number. She wrote a profile along the lines of others on the site and uploaded a dark, grainy photograph that Jess had snapped of her with his cell phone one night at the Blue Note. She sent “flirts” to the three men she had selected. Clicking on another user’s flirt command didn’t require her to say anything. It just meant she was interested. And she was.
When she was finished online, she called the precinct and asked a clerk in the records department to run Christine Conboy, the redheaded receptionist at FirstDate. Conboy had a few old driving offenses on Long Island and a current phone number in Queens. Ellie checked the clock and saw it was past eleven, but she dialed the number anyway. A friendly voice said hello.
“Christine? This is Detective Ellie Hatcher. We met this morning?”
“Um, yeah?”
“I was hoping you could help me with something. I have a—”
“I’m not supposed to talk to you. The company says that any communications from law enforcement are supposed to go to the CEO.”
“The company says? You mean Mark Stern announced this today after we left?” Ellie took the silence on the other end of the line as confirmation. “Just hear me out, okay? Your boss will never know.”
“Can I trust you on that?”
“Did I seem to be buddies with Mr. Stern?”
That got a laugh in response. “I have to say, he didn’t seem to be real fond of you.”
“Well, don’t tell him, but the feeling’s mutual. You, on the other hand, seemed to actually care that we’re trying to catch someone who killed two women.”
“Of course I care. I just have no idea how I can possibly help you.”
“I have a list of profile names — people who were in touch with our two victims. I just need to know who they are. If we had that, we could start trying to put some pieces together.”
“I’m the receptionist. I don’t know how to get that information. Trust me, I wish I could. I’m not just an employee, I’m a customer.” Ellie got the reference to the old hair club ads, but the attempt at humor was awkward. “Really. We don’t have access to personal information.”
“But someone must. It’s stored in your database somewhere. It just needs to be turned over.”
There was a long pause. “I can’t help. I’m sorry.”
“Can I at least talk to you in person?” Saying no is always harder in person.
“If Stern sees me talking to you, I’ll lose my job. He’s a total control freak.”
“He won’t see us. I can come to your house. I can meet you on your break. Your lunch hour?”
“One o’clock. There’s a noodle place on Rector and Broadway. Much too lowbrow for the boss.”
Ellie took down the intersection and thanked Christine profusely. Then she climbed back into bed and shut her eyes. She left the bedroom door open so she could hear Jess come home. Once he did, she fell into a deep slumber.
11
IN THE MORNING, ELLIE FOUND JESS LOUNGING ON THE SOFA, her laptop open on his chest.
“You seem bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning,” she said. “One might even say you appear fully employable, and it’s only eight a.m.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m still up from last night. I figured I’d take advantage of your computer before catching some z’s.” He eyed her with obvious amusement, apparently waiting for some response.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing. I’m just glad to see you getting out into the world, El.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Welcome to FirstDate? Sorry, but I noticed the subject line in your in-box.”
“Get out of my e-mail!”
“Um, hello? Who’s got their computer set up to open e-mail automatically when you log in? I couldn’t help it. Besides, I think it’s cool. It’s about time you started getting laid again. You’ve got to be the only attractive woman in Manhattan who’s not getting her freak on.”
“I’m sure having you on my
couch will be very conducive to that. And, I hate to break it to you, but my participation on FirstDate is part of that case I mentioned.” She told him about Flann McIlroy and his theory about FirstDate. She could sense Jess wanted to say something about the wisdom of her assignment, but he kept his thoughts to himself.
“Well, I hope he’s kissing luck’s butt for handing him the only cop in New York who works cases off the clock. The last cop I’d want on my ass is Ellie Mae Hatcher.”
“I am the cop on your ass.” When Ellie first joined the department, she and Jess struck a deal meant to balance the obvious differences, and potential conflicts, in their lifestyles. Ellie made sure Jess knew the difference between keeping bad company and becoming a criminal accomplice. Jess made sure he never crossed that line. Tolerating his intermittent presence on her sofa was one way Ellie helped him to keep his end of the deal.
“Maybe there’ll be an added benefit to this FirstDate research. Maybe you’ll actually find someone decent while you’re at it.”
“I told you. It’s only for the case.”
“Um, maybe not anymore. I sort of flirted with a few guys who looked good for you.”
“You did what?”
“The e-mail from FirstDate had all your account info, and I got curious. The next thing I knew, I was sending flirts to people. I finally had to stop because it was feeling a little gay. But, trust me, I picked way better guys than the ones you flirted with.”
“Jess. I picked those men because they seemed like people who might be homicidal maniacs, not because I thought they were dreamy.”
“Sorry. My bad.”
When Jess continued to insist that there might be a personal upside to Ellie’s research, she finally fessed up that her curiosity was piqued. She showed him the profile for Chef4U, the thirty-eight-year-old Upper East Sider she first noticed in Caroline Hunter’s FirstDate account. He had sandy blond, wavy hair and smiling eyes.
Jess took one quick look. “What a cornballer.” He read dramatically from the screen: “Brainy women are sexy. It’s what’s on the inside that counts.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Because if he has to say it out loud, he doesn’t mean it. Trust me. I’m a guy, I know how we operate. It’s just a line to lure in women who don’t think they’re pretty enough to do better than him. He cooks Julia Child recipes? In Manhattan? I bet you fifty bucks he doesn’t even own a frying pan.”
“As if you’ve got fifty bucks.”
Still, Ellie reread the profile and saw it in an entirely different light. In every other part of her life, she trusted her instincts. She never hesitated about moving to New York. She never second-guessed her decision to bypass her school plans to study criminal justice at John Jay. On the job, she read suspects, witnesses, and supposed victims better than officers with decades more experience.
But when it came to men, Ellie was as naive as she’d been in the ninth grade when she accepted her first car date with the high school quarterback Gil Morton. He opened the passenger door of his pickup and asked her what she felt like doing. Whatever. He suggested ordering pizza and renting Lethal Weapon. Fifteen minutes later, she found herself on his sofa, with no pizza and no movie, beneath one hundred and eighty pounds of sloppy kisses and groping. She walked to Quik-Trip and called Jess for a ride before things passed the tipping point, but she had never quite absorbed the lesson.
Ellie was a woman who expected men to value the same things she did. She expected men to want not just a lover but a friend, a challenge, and an equal. The problem, Jess always told her, wasn’t in her expectations. Plenty of men out there met them. The problem was that Ellie, despite all her intuitive strengths, had absolutely no ability to distinguish the poseurs from the real thing.
“Here, give me that,” Jess insisted, reaching for the laptop. “I’ll find you a worthy suitor.” Jess began clicking away, and Ellie found herself involuntarily intrigued. These men were total strangers. She could develop relationships with them without ever telling them what she did for a living. They might get to know her without the hindrance of the immediate “female cop” stereotypes. Online, she could be a completely different person.
Jess grabbed a pen and a crumpled paper napkin from the coffee table and scribbled down the names of what he called “the keepers,” men with good jobs, at least one creative comment in their self-descriptions, and absolutely no disqualifying bullshit. Ellie snatched the running list from him and began crossing names from it.
“What are you doing, El? Those are perfectly good prospects.”
“I’m scratching out the ones who fail my litmus tests,” Ellie replied. “Let me ask you something, Jess. You’re thirty-five years old. If you were to fill out one of these surveys, what would you put down as the age range for your ideal mate?”
“For me? Um, I guess twenty…-four to thirty-five.”
Ellie made a noise of disgust and swatted her brother across the shoulder. “Even you? My own flesh and blood? You are a thirty-five-year-old man with a birthday in four months, and you’re telling me that you wouldn’t even consider going out with a woman who turned thirty-six yesterday?”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t consider it. Obviously if I met a woman and I liked her, and she turned out to be a little older, I wouldn’t care. But if you ask me who I picture in the abstract, then yeah, I guess I picture someone my age or younger.”
Ellie rolled her eyes. “Well, at least you include your own age. My litmus test — the men I’m crossing off — are the ones who cap their age range below their own age. Half the men on here, no matter how old they are, say their perfect woman is somewhere between her midtwenties and exactly one year younger than he is.” She continued crossing off names, clearly disgusted. “I mean, what is it about the midtwenties?”
Jess’s eyes glazed over as he hung his tongue from his mouth in mock bliss. Ellie pretended to shoot a roundhouse kick in his direction.
“All right, Gloria Steinem. But I bet you a million bucks that the women on there are just as superficial. They’re just screening for different qualities. Money, power, prestige. It’s market forces, little sis.”
“On that very romantic — and totally depressing — note, I think you’ve convinced me that my online surfing should remain strictly professional.”
The telephone rang and Jess beat her to the handset.
“You’ve reached the marvelous Ellie Hatcher…. Oh, you’re just the man I’d like to talk to. I hope you know how lucky you are to be working with my sister.”
Ellie smacked him on the arm and grabbed the phone. “Sorry, Flann. My brother got out of the butterfly net.”
“I just got a call from ballistics. They got a cold hit. The gun that killed Caroline Hunter a year ago was used to shoot another woman nine months earlier. Our guy’s been at it longer than we thought. There’s a third victim.”
AN HOUR LATER, Charlie Dixon hung up his telephone. He was angry. He did not like bad news. Only eighteen hours earlier, the FirstDate situation appeared to be under control. NYPD’s investigation had nothing to do with him. They were chasing down some stupid theory cooked up by a detective known as a wing nut. He had gotten worked up over nothing.
Now this.
He picked up his telephone again, punched in a familiar number, and asked for his boss. He tried to calm his nerves while he listened to the Muzak.
“Mayfield.”
“I’m sorry to bother you, sir, but there’s been a development.”
“I heard. Snow by six.” Dixon’s boss had a dry way about him, even in the face of stressful developments. That trait might explain where he sat in the hierarchy. Barry Mayfield oozed confidence, able to control any situation and the people involved in it without ever changing the serious but restrained tone of his voice.
Dixon, in contrast, honestly did not have the best personality for this job. Two years ago, during a particularly unpredictable turn of events, he ripped himself an ulcer that felt as if h
is intestines were marinating in Tabasco. Now Dixon was thinking about that ulcer again, convinced he was starting to feel the familiar hot inside of his gut.
“It’s about FirstDate.”
“I had an inkling. Those detectives again?”
“Afraid so.”
“Did they find a way to a court order? I told you before it wasn’t worth worrying about. The chances of this leading back to you—”
“It’s something else.” The something was worse than a fishing expedition at FirstDate. “I got a call from my PD source. Flann McIlroy just requested the file on the Tatiana Chekova murder.”
“Now, that is a problem.”
PART TWO
DATE BAIT
12
ENTERING THE EIGHTH FLOOR OF ONE POLICE PLAZA, ELLIE WAS as excited as a four-year-old on Christmas morning. She was anxious to catch a first-hand look at the department’s fancy new Real Time Crime Center. It might not wear a plush red suit or sport a jolly white beard, but the center was the high-tech feather in the department’s crime-fighting cap, a vast computerized clearinghouse to link information gathered throughout the city’s many precincts. The idea was to place a wealth of databases — parole records, prior complaints, 911 calls, tattoos and aliases, criminal histories — at the fingertips of detectives, in one centralized location.
Ellie thought the location looked just as it should, like the hub of an intergalactic star chamber. She marveled at the various maps blinking from at least twenty different flat-screen televisions hanging from a single wall.
“That’s the data wall.”
Ellie turned from the screens to find a smiling woman about her own age, with shiny, straight blond hair held back from her face by a barrette.
“I’m Naomi Skura. I’ve got your partner over there.” She gestured down an aisle of cubicles, where Ellie saw Flann peering out at her.
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