Dead Connection

by Alafair Burke

  “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 livelih
ood 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.”

  31

  IN THE NARROW, WHITE-TILE HALLWAY THAT LED TO ZOYA Rostov’s apartment, Ellie recognized the familiar baby’s cry and toddlerlike squeals of happiness she’d heard on her first visit to Tatiana’s sister. She wondered if perhaps children were born with fixed temperaments, one sibling content and playful while the other fussed stoically. But when Zoya opened the apartment door and Ellie glimpsed the young faces of the baby and the boy, she realized how inchoate their identities were; their current emotional states fleeting — just momentary phases in a child’s development of days, weeks, and years. These two little lives had so much more to experience before anyone could guess what their future adult selves might become.

  Zoya invited Ellie in, then locked the door behind her, securing the chain in place.

  “Your husband isn’t here?” Ellie asked.

  “Vitya is working.”

  “What does your husband do for a living?”

  “He is a security guard at a storage warehouse. He usually is on night shift, but lately he has overtime to work.”

  “Staying home with both of the kids all those hours has to be hard,” Ellie offered.

  “I never see my children as work. Other people’s children — that was work. In Russia, I was a schoolteacher. The children, they were good, nice children. But every day, I thought, how much work it is to take care of all of these children in one little room. Keeping them from hurting themselves, getting them to behave — that was all work, let alone trying to teach them anything. Now that I have my own? I cannot imagine anyone else thinking of them as work.”

  “Did you ever think of being a teacher here in the United States?”

  Zoya nodded. “Of course. At first. But I found nothing. Not even teaching Russian. Too many licenses and requirements. I looked for other work. Some girls, they learn how to style hair or become house servants. I was offered a job at a massage parlor, but I could see from one visit what went on there. I made the mistake of telling Tatiana about it. And now here we are.”

  “What do you mean by that? Here we are.”

  “I got lucky. I marry a good man, a good father. I have children and am happy. Tatiana, she worked at massages and never got lucky like I was. Now she is dead. She never even got to meet her little niece. Her name is Tanya,” she said, jiggling the calmed baby toward Ellie. “It is like a nickname of Tatiana in Russian.”

  “That’s really nice, both the name and the sentiment.”

  “Vitya, he fought me on it. He made jokes that he did not want our daughter to turn out like Tatiana. But I told him this is what I wanted, and that was the end of it.”

  Ellie noted the sound of pride in Zoya’s voice and decided it was well deserved as she pictured this tiny waif of a woman standing up on behalf of her sister’s good name.

  “You probably figured out by now that I came back to talk to you about Tatiana.”

  Zoya nodded.

  “Did you know that she was an informant for the FBI?” Zoya’s eyes widened, and Ellie pulled out the booking photograph of Lev Grosha that she’d received from Charlie Dixon. “Do you recognize this man? His name is Lev Grosha. He’s in prison based in part on information that Tatiana gave to the FBI.”

  Zoya held the picture and stared at it blankly.

  “I take it you had no idea how serious her legal problems had gotten.”

  “This man is in prison because of Tatiana?”

  “That’s my understanding. We just heard about it ourselves.” Ellie pulled her phone from her waist, flipped it open, and showed Zoya the picture she’d taken of Charlie Dixon. “This was the FBI agent she was working with.”

  Ellie could not read Zoya’s silence, but it seemed more troubled than surprised.


  “This man,” she said, jutting her chin toward Ellie’s phone, “he is an agent for the police?”

  “Well, not for the police, but for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They’re—”

  “Yes, I know what is the FBI. I just say police. But he works for FBI?”

  Ellie nodded, and Zoya worked her lips nervously between her teeth. Her eyes moved between the grainy digital photo of Dixon and the booking photo of Lev Grosha.

  “Have you seen the FBI agent before? With your sister?”

  “Yes, I think so. She came here, not long before — she came and asked for some money, just a little bit, like always. I have to ask Vitya, you know. But we give her some money, and then she leaves. Vitya and I, we go out a few minutes later to take Anton to the park, back when we had just the one child. A car passed us and Tatiana was inside. Vitya, you know, he was bothered, like she had come asking for money but was running off with some strange man anyway. He made a big fuss over it is why I remember. This man on your phone, I think he was the man who was driving.”

  “I can imagine what your husband must have thought when he saw her in a new car with a man who was probably wearing a suit and tie. But he wasn’t a client. She was providing information to law enforcement.” Ellie kept her suspicions about the nature of Charlie’s relationship with Tatiana to herself.

  “Did your partner know that?”

  “Excuse me? My partner?”

  “The man you came here with before. Mr. Becker, right? Did he know my sister was working with the FBI?”

  “No. He’s retired now. He couldn’t have known she was an informant for the FBI. They’re totally separate from the city police. What about the man in the other photograph? Do you recognize him? Lev Grosha?”

  Zoya shook her head but still looked rattled.

  “Can you think of how your sister might have known Lev Grosha? She told the agent that he was part of a larger criminal conspiracy. Grosha was arrested for credit card fraud, but there was also heroin dealing involved, maybe money laundering.”