Dead Connection

by Alafair Burke

  She had tried to persuade Jess to come along, but he had two reasons for passing, each of which he insisted was sufficient justification. He, unlike Ellie, had a personal life. He was supposed to have a drink with a woman he met at his last gig. He used the opportunity to remind Ellie that she should get around to meeting someone too. Ellie found his second reason equally frustrating. Whenever he had a Manhattan crash pad, he didn’t “do the bridge and tunnel thing.” So even though that crash pad was Ellie’s, she was going solo to Bensonhurst.

  There was a time when Bensonhurst was strictly Italian, famous — infamous some would say — for its mafia settlements. Ellie was in junior high when a crowd of local boys beat sixteen-year-old Yusef Hawkins to death for being a black boy looking to buy a used car in the wrong neighborhood. As hard as they’d tried to resist the inevitable ethnic changes, this was no longer the same Bensonhurst. Italians moved to the suburbs of Staten Island and Nassau County, leaving African Americans behind and making way for a melting pot of new immigrants from Eastern Europe and Asia.

  She passed a Chinese dollar store, a Russian deli, and a Turkish fast food stand as she made her way to Zoya Rostov’s address. Nearing the narrow brick walk-up, she spotted a familiar face heading toward her under a street lamp. The face spread into a smile, and Ed Becker offered a firm handshake.

  “Detective Hatcher. I wonder which of us is more surprised. You got O.T. approved on a cold case?”

  Ellie was pretty sure she topped Becker on the surprise meter. “I’m doing a little background work in my spare time. What are you doing here, Ed?”

  “I guess you could say I’m doing the same. I’ve been wracking my brain and shook out a recollection that Chekova had a sister. I thought I remembered where she lived, so I figured I’d check it out.”

  Ellie recalled McIlroy’s concerns about precisely this situation. “We didn’t mean to call you out of retirement.”

  Becker laughed. “No chance of that. Let’s just say I didn’t feel particularly helpful the other day. I thought I’d check the mailboxes to see if she still lives here, then give you a call. I wasn’t going to talk to her. I mean, what would I say, right? I screwed up your sister’s case when I was half drunk and half crazy, and now I thought I’d solve it without a shield? Turned out to be a waste of time. It took me half an hour of driving in circles before I found the building. There’s a mess of Russian names on the mailboxes. I thought I’d recognize the sister’s—”

  “It’s Rostov. And she’s in 4F.”

  Becker nodded as if he should have remembered, then pulled a set of keys from his pocket. Ellie watched as he headed toward a blue Buick Regal parked two doors down. She’d allowed Flann’s comments about Becker to get to her, and now she’d made the man feel small. She took another look at Zoya Rostov’s apartment building.

  “You feel like coming up? It might help break the ice if she sees a familiar face.”

  As Ed Becker returned his keys to his coat, Ellie thought she saw a look of purpose that hadn’t been there before.

  THE WAIL OF an unhappy baby grew louder as they climbed the hallway steps of the narrow apartment building. Immediately outside the door to Zoya Rostov’s apartment, they also heard the delighted squeals of another child inside, joined by a man’s voice, yelling something in Russian, when they knocked on the door.

  “Yes. Who is it?” a woman asked.

  “Police,” Ellie replied. “I hate to bother you, ma’am, but it’s about your sister. It’s about Tatiana.”

  The woman who opened the door was striking. She had full, peach-tinted lips and eyes the size of quarters, which peered out at Ellie and Ed through wisps of short brown hair. She gently jiggled the crying baby she held against her hip.

  “I’m sorry. Who are you?” With a delicate Russian accent, she appeared to direct the question to Ellie. Ed jumped in to answer.

  “You might remember me from when I worked your sister’s case back then. I’m retired now, but this is Detective Ellie Hatcher. She’d like to talk to you about some recent developments.”

  The man’s voice rang out, again in Russian, and Zoya answered. “It is police, Vitya.”

  “The police?”

  “The man from before. And a woman is with him.”

  Zoya opened the door wider. A handsome man, who looked to be in his early forties, with short blond hair, sat on the floor amid a fantasy farmland of miniature people and animals. Next to him, a white-haired toddler laughed, completely unaware of his father’s surprised expression as he marched a plastic cow up his resting leg.

  “Ask them in. Yes, come in.” He said something quietly in Russian to his son and patted him on the bottom, and the boy ran off happily to another room, clutching his cow to his chest. “I am Zoya’s husband, Vitali. Vitali Rostov. Has something happened?”

  “A woman named Caroline Hunter was killed a little over a year ago with the same weapon that was used in your sister’s murder. Earlier this week, another woman was killed. She wasn’t shot, but there are reasons to think her murder might have been connected to Caroline Hunter’s. I’m trying to see how Tatiana’s case might be connected.”

  Ellie focused her attention on Zoya, but the woman showed no response. Though the baby had quieted, she continued to stroke her thin hair and deliver soothing little kisses to her forehead.

  “The woman this week,” Vitali asked, “is that the museum worker that was in the paper?”

  “Yes. Her name was Amy Davis. Does that name sound familiar?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Or Caroline Hunter?”

  The man shook his head, and Ellie looked again at Zoya. It took the woman a moment to realize the room was waiting for her. She shook her head. “No. I did not know my sister’s friends. Tatiana led her own life, separate from ours.”

  “Do you know if she was dating someone? A boyfriend, maybe, or even something more casual?”

  Vitali let out an exasperated laugh, and Zoya threw him a disapproving glance. “I am sorry, Zoya, but your sister — let’s just say that for Tatiana it was always, as you say, casual. She had her fair share of male companionship, but nothing we wanted to know about.”

  “What he means to say, Detective, is that my sister, when she was alive, was a prostitute. She was a drug addict and she was a prostitute. She did one to serve the other, and so it was.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” Ellie offered. “I’m sure it’s hard to be reminded of all this again. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t important.”

  Zoya bowed her head slightly. Ellie remembered in the earliest years of the College Hill Strangler investigation how her father dreaded having to re-question the victims’ families. He said he felt like he was literally tearing off the scabs that had finally started to heal over the wounds of the people left behind to mourn. As time passed, her father stopped talking to the families altogether, unless they contacted him. Nothing he turned up ever seemed important enough to justify picking at those old sores again. But the ballistics match to the Hunter case showed a connection of some kind to Tatiana. Ellie just had to find it.

  “The connection between the two other women has to do with a computerized dating company. Do you know if she used a service like that? It’s called FirstDate.”

  The Rostovs both shook their heads silently.

  “Did she own a computer? Or have access to one?”

  “Tatiana could barely afford to feed herself,” Vitali said. “We gave her money here and there, but not enough for a computer. Even if she had that kind of money, that is not what she would have used it for.”

  Ellie asked a few more questions about possible connections to Caroline Hunter’s graduate school, the Museum of Modern Art, and the neighborhoods the women traveled in, but the questions only served to show how different Tatiana’s life had been from the others’. The point wasn’t lost on the Rostovs.

  “These women,” Vitali said. “They do not sound anything like Zoya’s sister. Obviously, you are
the police. But guns get lost, you know. Guns get stolen and sold. Maybe Tatiana has nothing to do with any of this, in which case there is nothing we can do to help you.”

  The unspoken message was clear. In which case, you did not need to come here and remind my wife what happened to her sister. Ellie offered her business card, apologized again for the disturbance, and thanked them for their time.

  “If it makes any difference, Mrs. Rostov, from what I’ve been able to gather so far, it sounds like your sister was working hard to get her life together. She was reliable at her job, and she was getting away from those activities you referred to before. That’s what I’ve heard anyway.”

  Zoya’s big eyes pooled and for just a moment she looked serene as if she were remembering some earlier time with her sister. Then the pools gave way to tears, and she tucked her face into her baby’s neck.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She continued to apologize as she carried the child to the back of the apartment.

  Ellie didn’t know what to say once she and Ed were alone with Vitali. “She’ll be fine,” he said, waving off the concerned look on Ellie’s face. “She will cry, and then she will go back to how she was this morning. Do not worry.”

  Ellie asked him once again to call if they thought of anything new, or if she could help them in any way. “I don’t think that will happen, Detective. It was a long time ago now, and Zoya has accepted that we will probably never know who did this to Tatiana. But, yes, we will keep the number.”

  Ellie paused in the hallway after the door closed behind them. Seconds later, she heard the Rostovs speaking in Russian. Even in another language, she could tell the conversation was tense. Urgent. Angry.

  “What do you think that’s about?” Ellie whispered.

  “Whatever they were probably fighting about before we showed up,” he said, leading the way down the staircase. “So what do you think?”

  “I’m not sure what I was hoping for. A connection to FirstDate, I guess. I don’t know — maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree. Like he said, guns change hands. A trick gone bad could have shot Tatiana then sold the gun. Or he panicked and dumped it along the West Side Highway, and someone else picked it up and used it later on Hunter. I feel like I’m swimming in goop on this one.”

  “That’s the technical evidentiary term for it, all right. Goop.”

  “What’d you think of them?” she asked, gesturing up toward the Rostovs’ apartment. “Were they like that before? Right after it happened?”

  “Like what?”

  “They seemed — I don’t know — distant, or something. Cold? Disinterested? I mean, they didn’t ask anything about the other women, who they were, what they might have to do with Tatiana. They didn’t seem to care one way or another whether we ever solved the case.”

  Becker seemed to take it in stride. “You see it all the time in murder cases. By the time you deliver the news, their family’s written them off as dead a long time ago.”

  “But the sister. She was obviously upset. She just didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with me.”

  “Don’t knock yourself over it. Some people, their emotions take them places they don’t want to go. Who knows? Maybe she’ll think more about what you said, about Tatiana getting better and everything. Maybe she’ll start caring again and you’ll hear from her.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Hey, where you going next? Let me give you a lift.”

  “Just to the subway would be great.”

  “You kidding me? You’re gonna ride the train with the rest of the citizens when you can get door-to-door service? What kind of a lady are you?”

  Ellie hesitated, reluctant to impose.

  “You’ll be doing me a favor. I can tell myself I was helpful, go back to the peaceful life of a retiree, and forget all about this case.”

  Ellie laughed. “All right. But only since I’m helping you out. I’m going back to Manhattan. Thirty-eighth and Park.”

  “Your carriage awaits, madam.”

  ONCE BECKER HAD wound his way through the narrow side streets onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he got the conversation rolling. “So does McIlroy still do that thing where he answers you with a rhetorical question?”

  “Does Tara Reid drink beer?”

  Becker smiled even though she suspected he’d never heard of Tara Reid. “That’s a damn annoying habit. The man can’t just give you a simple ‘yes,’ you know what I mean? So other than that, how’s Flann doing?”

  Ellie heard the discomfort in her own voice when she said he was fine.

  “I’ve always had the impression that McIlroy’s not a big fan of mine,” Becker said. “He might have mentioned something to you about it?”

  “No details, but I picked up on some tension.”

  “Sure you did. You’re a detective, right? It’s not like you couldn’t tell when you guys were up at my house.”

  “So, is there some story involving the two of you that I don’t know about?”

  “Aah, it’s water under the bridge. I’m not the type to try to taint you on a new partner. He’s a good enough guy. Smart as a whip, that’s for sure.”

  “And yet?”

  “We’re two different kinds of cops. That’s all. Back in the day, it was Mac who was odd man out. But who knows. Maybe now, it’s guys like me who are the dying breed.”

  “Come on. You’re not that much older than Flann. What? Five years?” She was being generous. Her guess was that Flann was in his midforties at best, and Ed was pushing sixty.

  “Hell of a lot more than that, but I’m not talking age in years. It’s a way of thinking about the job. The thin blue line. When I was a beat cop, that really meant something. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter what your beef was with another cop. You were all brothers, held together by the job, by a code of loyalty. Flann’s a whole ’nother breed.”

  “You make it sound like I can’t trust him.” She thought about Flann sneaking up to see Jason Upton without her and that ridiculous background check he ran on a fellow officer. She thought about the bond her father had felt among his friends at the Wichita Police Department, the commitment that made the city’s treatment of his death so much harder for her to understand.

  “I shouldn’t have started running my old mouth. It’s nothing like that. He’s a good guy. He just sees the world different, that’s all. His loyalty to the job is about doing the job itself. He follows all the rules, dots all the i’s, crosses off the t’s. It’s not about the brotherhood. See what an old man I sound like? His way’s the way of the future. And he won’t have any problems with a smart one like you. You probably even went to college, didn’t you?”

  “John Jay.”

  “How about that. A graduate degree even?”

  “No, just a bachelor’s. I started toward a master’s in forensic psychology — even thought of going the FBI route for a while.”

  “You didn’t want to be a G-man? Or I guess you’d be a G-woman, huh?”

  “Whatever. No, I just was too eager to get into the real world. Studying crime out of books in a classroom never seemed to work for me. I figured the best thing I could do for my instincts was to get out on the street as soon as I could.”

  Then, for reasons she didn’t understand, she told Ed about Jerry Hatcher, his role in the College Hill Strangler case, and her unresolved questions about his death. And when she was finally finished, he told her he was sorry her family had to go through that. It was the only response she needed.

  “I bet your old man would be proud of you, Hatcher. You’re just a kid and already made detective. Working homicides, even.”

  “Well, not really.” She told him about Flann’s special request for her assistance, and he let out a whistle.

  “Who knew Flann had that kind of muscle with the honchos. Ever wonder why he asked for you?”

  She recalled the partial explanation Flann gave her on the ride back from Becker’s home, but she kept it to herself.
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br />   “And he knows about that whole thing with your father. All the attention you got from the news?”

  “I think so.”

  Becker didn’t speak until they emerged from the Midtown Tunnel. “Flann McIlroy never was one to shy away from the media.”

  22

  IT TURNED OUT THAT BIG-BONED MEGAN QUINN WASN’T AS popular with the boys on FirstDate as Amy Davis had been. If Megan never left the house, he couldn’t kill her outside late at night. So he made adjustments.

  Getting into the building didn’t prove to be much of a challenge. Megan lived in an enormous generic rental building on the far, far east side of the Upper East Side, in the yuppy slum of Yorkville. Unlike the white-gloved doormen in the ritzier apartments near the park, the staff at these places were strictly for show and a false sense of security. He showed up shortly after seven thirty. Evening rush hour. He pulled the hood of his jacket over his head.

  “Delivery for 32M. It comes with a song, so I have to see her in person.” He made sure to hold the flowers in front of his face. The doorman was on the phone with one resident and handing a package to another.

  “Yeah, okay. Go on up.”

  He rode the crowded elevator with his face turned from the camera in the upper corner. He pushed the button for the thirty-second floor with his knuckle. A woman stepped off with him. He waited until she entered her apartment, then knocked on the door of 32M.

  IT HAD ONLY been two nights since Jess began his latest sojourn on her sofa, but Ellie was struck by the silence and emptiness in her apartment. She flipped on the television just for the sound of it, and then settled onto the couch with her laptop and logged onto FirstDate.

  More new messages and even more flirts. She had a lame two-sentence profile, but a decent if grainy picture. Maybe she’d unwittingly tapped into precisely what men valued. She scanned the list of messages. Only one user name caught her eye, and it had nothing to do with the case. Unpublished, the writer manqué whom she’d e-mailed earlier. She clicked on the message.