Dead Connection Read online

  Charlie didn’t miss a beat. “No. He’s a crook, but he’s not that kind of wrong. You know, one way to find out would be to take the case, Barry.” Charlie leaned in to make the argument he’d been rehearsing at his desk. “A case like this would be good for the bureau — show we’ve still got room for our meat and potatoes even with all the terrorism investigations.”

  “Except that ain’t exactly true now, is it? You know as well as I do where the priorities are these days. And I’ve thought about it. It’s better this way. It’s like a Chinese wall between them and us. If anyone finds out about you and that girl, no one can say the relationship tainted the investigation — not if we’re not the ones conducting it.”

  “You assume they can solve it.”

  “The NYPD’s good at these cases. They’ll find the guy, and they’ll do it without us.”

  “But maybe we’d have a better chance, knowing what we know.”

  “And therein lies the rub,” Mayfield said. “I thought about this awhile, and it always comes back to the fact that we know something they don’t. And that’s why one of us needs to change that situation.”

  “You want to tell them?”

  “Actually, I thought it was more fair to have you do it.”

  “Tell them what?”

  “You really don’t see an opportunity when it’s handed to you, do you, Charlie?” He smiled at his old friend when he said it, but it still pissed Charlie off. “You go to them, you talk to them, you find out what the fuck’s going on. And then you tell them anything you know that might be relevant. Is the fact that you were nailing that dead girl going to be relevant?”

  “No.” It was all Charlie could bring himself to say at that moment. He’d been in love with that dead girl. He hadn’t made love to another woman since.

  “All right then. That’s what I meant by an opportunity. You get to control the message. But you better make sure the message gets across.”

  As Charlie turned to leave the office, he heard Mayfield call out behind him, “You’re welcome, man.”

  Screw you, man, Charlie thought. He knew damn well why Barry Mayfield was sending him to the NYPD alone. If the shit hit the fan, he’d deny all knowledge. Charlie would be a rogue agent with a hard-on for that dead girl.

  RICHARD HAMLINE’S law firm occupied nine floors of One Liberty Plaza in the financial district. The receptionist insisted that Mr. Hamline was unavailable. He was overseeing a major closing.

  Through a long wall of glass windows adjacent to the lobby, Ellie spotted a thin, dark-haired, blue-eyed man at the head of a large, rectangular conference table lined with men in suits, with a few women scattered in between. Ellie recognized the speaker from Hamline’s driver’s license.

  Yes, the receptionist confirmed, that is Mr. Hamline. And, no, they could not interrupt.

  The arrest warrant signed by Judge Bernie Jacob shortened the rest of the conversation considerably. Ignoring the receptionist’s protestations, Ellie and Flann breezed into the conference room. Hamline held a laser pointer in one hand, and a binder of notes in the other. He gestured with the laser to a series of numerical figures projected onto a screen behind him, while the rest of the table followed along from matching notebooks. Taking a closer look at the man, the doubt in Ellie’s stomach burrowed further. The photograph posted on FirstDate was definitely not his.

  “Wrong room, guys.” Hamline was momentarily startled by the open door and two strangers, but then turned his attention back to the screen. “Now if you look at the aggregate values of the two stock classes on page seventeen—”

  “New York police, Mr. Hamline.” Ellie held up the shield she’d hung from her neck to keep her hands free. She felt the comfort of the 9-mm Glock against her hip. Better safe than sorry. Muscle memory kicked in as she visualized the twist-then-up motion that would unholster the pistol from the leather. “Something’s come up, sir. We need to talk to you in the lobby.”

  A look of concern flickered across Hamline’s face, but then he smiled at his table of listeners. “I appreciate the good service, officers, but we’re putting a deal together here.” A few members of his audience laughed, appreciating an inside joke that two civil service employees would never understand.

  “It’s urgent, sir. Please don’t make me ask you again,” Ellie said.

  “Now wait a second, officer—”

  “Hands,” Flann cried out, responding to Hamline’s quick movement as he dropped his notes to the table. “Keep your hands where they were.”

  Flann had his gun in his right hand now, but kept it pointed at the floor. Several of the people in the room huddled closer to the table, as if that subtle movement could shield them from whatever confrontation was about to take place. A couple of others gasped. Someone said something about calling building security. No one stood up.

  Hamline hunched his shoulders, palms toward them. “Okay, um, okay. There’s apparently some misunderstanding. I’m, I’ll — what did you say? The lobby, right? Okay, I’m coming out.” He edged his way around the table, keeping his hands by his face. “Um, I’ll be back as soon as I can. Tim, go ahead and cover the stock values.”

  Flann placed his left hand on Hamline’s back and guided him toward the door. “The rest of you all might want to plan on finishing your work without him,” Ellie said politely, closing the door behind her.

  “Richard Hamline, we have a warrant for your arrest.”

  Flann continued with Miranda warnings while Hamline insisted this was all a colossal misunderstanding. By the time he’d been marched through the lobby to the elevator bank, Hamline realized this wasn’t going to get taken care of on his home turf.

  “Libby,” he barked back to the receptionist, “call Michele Campbell. Call her now.”

  Ellie left the building knowing in her gut that she and Flann had just arrested an innocent man.

  THE MOST SEASONED criminal lawyer at Hamline’s firm was not happy to find her colleague in an interrogation room at the Thirteenth Precinct speaking with two homicide detectives.

  “What is going on in here? I’m sure you’re not questioning my client, because, unless I’m mistaken, a witness to his arrest heard his express request for counsel. That is, after all, how I came to be here — eventually. Sorry, Rick. Detectives, Michele Campbell.”

  Michele Campbell wasn’t like any of the criminal defense attorneys Ellie had ever encountered. Her dark shiny hair fell perfectly into a broom-straight bob. A black suit fit impeccably over a hot pink sweater and what appeared to be a terrific set of legs. Her reprimand of their interrogation was firm but surprisingly friendly. She made a damn good first impression. Unfortunately, her client, despite his profession, had made the same rookie mistake all defendants made.

  “Sorry, counselor. Your client invoked his rights, then promptly initiated contact with us.”

  Campbell threw a frustrated look at her client for verification.

  “Chele, they arrested me for murder. Some serial killer or something. On an Internet dating site.”

  “You started talking to them?”

  “The silence was killing me. All I asked was what they were arresting me for. Then they said murder. You weren’t here. I wanted to know what the fuck was going on.”

  Campbell exhaled loudly. “I guess corporate lawyers read the stock page during crim pro. Sorry to ruin your fun, Detectives, but this stops now. You tell me what’s going on, and he doesn’t say another word until I okay it.”

  “Two women have been murdered in one week,” Flann explained. “Evidence left near the bodies linked both to an Internet dating site. Your client is the one and only person, out of tens of thousands of users, who managed to have recent contact with both victims. As you can imagine, we’re looking for an explanation.”

  “It’s not me,” Hamline interjected. “I told you. It’s not even my picture.”

  Campbell shushed her client.

  “What evidence do you have that it’s his account?”
r />   “The account is in his name,” Flann said. “It lists all of the correct identifying information, including his precise height and date of birth. And he paid for the account a month ago using his own credit card. If he’s not our guy, he should be willing to clear up the misunderstanding. We were just starting to cover the details before you got here.”

  “Give us a second?”

  Through a one-way mirror, they watched the two attorneys huddled close at the table. Campbell placed her arm around Hamline’s shoulder and gave him a squeeze, then she turned and pulled the blinds closed.

  “Think he’s our guy?” Flann asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Too normal?”

  “No such thing as too normal. I just don’t think our guy would have made it this easy.”

  Michele Campbell knocked on the window of the interrogation room, and they reentered.

  “Although I never thought I’d let a client talk to law enforcement, I think the quicker we can get this cleared up, the better for all of us. What do we need to tell you for Rick to go home?”

  “Tell us about this Internet profile.” Ellie laid a printout of the profile’s home page on the table in front of Hamline.

  “I don’t know anything about it. I’ve never seen it, and that’s obviously not my picture.”

  “Have you ever used FirstDate?”

  “No. I know what it is — their ads are everywhere. But I got divorced about a year ago, and I’ve been happily seeing someone ever since.”

  “Can we get a name?” Ellie looked at Michele Campbell as she asked the question.

  “Dating a colleague would be against the internal policies of my client’s law firm,” Campbell said. “Our law firm. Let’s just say that should you need to talk to his girlfriend, I can definitely tell you anything you need to know.”

  “The credit card that was used to open the account was an American Express.” Ellie read the numbers off quickly from her notes. “Is that yours?”

  “I don’t know. I’d have to check. Are you going to shoot me if I reach for my wallet?” His tone was bitter, but Campbell lightened the mood with a quiet laugh.

  “No bullets. We promise,” Ellie assured him.

  Hamline opened a thin black leather billfold, removed a platinum card, and slid it across the table. “That’s my only Am Ex.”

  “Not according to the credit card company.”

  “Well, check and see when it was opened, because that card in your hand is the only Am Ex that I ever applied for.”

  According to FirstDate’s records, the Enoch profile was created not quite a month earlier. Ellie had a feeling they were going to find out that the credit card in question hadn’t been around much longer.

  “Do you have any idea how someone could’ve gotten the information they’d need to open both a FirstDate account and a credit card in your name? Or why they’d pick you? They’d need your name, height, hair color. For a credit card, they’d need your Social Security number.”

  Hamline shook his head. “Who the fuck knows.” Michele placed her arm around the back of his chair, and he appeared to calm down. “I don’t know. This is one of those identity theft things, isn’t it? I can’t frickin’ believe this. The only thing I can think of is that I got my wallet stolen two years ago — right after Christmas. People weren’t as cautious then. Like an idiot, I had my Social Security card in there. As time passed, I assumed whoever stole it grabbed the cash and tossed the rest. I guess not.”

  It was total speculation, and unhelpful in any event. Grab and runs were impossible to solve two days after the fact, let alone two years.

  “Let me ask my question again,” Campbell said, again firmly but in a friendly way. “What do we need to tell you for Rick to go home?”

  Usually a defense attorney’s attempt to steer the direction of a conversation in the interrogation room would have provoked threats of high sentences, cherry-popping cell mates, and death row. But under these circumstances, Ellie shared Campbell’s desire to clear Hamline as quickly as possible.

  She looked at her watch. It had been more than an hour since Mark Stern had called in the employee from Jersey City to track Enoch’s computer usage by location.

  “You bill your hours at the law firm, right?” Ellie asked.

  “Unfortunately,” Hamline said.

  Ellie knew from her ex-boyfriend that corporate lawyers were obligated to keep detailed records to account for their professional time in six-minute increments. At five hundred bucks an hour, clients tended to complain about rounding up. Ellie had a feeling that a comparison of Hamline’s billing records against Enoch’s log-ons would exonerate him.

  “Give us a second, and we’ll see if we can’t clear this up.”

  ELLIE REACHED the credit card company while Flann called Mark Stern to ask for a report of Enoch’s log-ons to FirstDate. The card had been opened only a month earlier. Whoever opened the account used Hamline’s home address as his residence, but asked that the credit card and all bills be sent to a post office box at a Mailboxes Etc. No doubt they’d find out that the box had been rented with Hamline’s stolen ID.

  “Were there any charges on the account other than to FirstDate?” Ellie asked the woman at the other end of the line. By tracking down purchases, they might locate the purchaser.

  “No, ma’am. Just the two charges to FirstDate, each for thirty dollars.”

  “I’m sorry. You said there are two charges?” Thirty dollars covered a one-month membership, and Enoch had not yet been a member for a full month.

  “That’s right.” She provided two dates to Ellie. One corresponded with the day Enoch enrolled with FirstDate. The other payment was made three days later. Ellie thanked the woman for her time and flipped her phone shut.

  She found Flann at his desk, reviewing a fax from Mark Stern. It was the computer-locating information for Enoch.

  “Thanks to this,” Flann said, “we’ve got a timeline of Enoch’s online activities, matched with physical locations. We need to cut this Hamline guy loose. Almost all of Enoch’s connections to FirstDate were made from three different cybercafés throughout Manhattan: one downtown, one in Murray Hill, and one in Midtown. The one exception was when he logged on last night from a café on City Island.” Ellie recognized the name of the town, a seaport community off the western edge of the Long Island Sound. “I’m still waiting on the billing records, but that firecracker in there already vouches that Hamline was taking a dinner break downtown last night, not frolicking on City Island.”

  Ellie told Flann what she’d learned from American Express. “If Enoch made two payments to FirstDate in the last month, he must have another profile, using another name to contact who knows how many other women. We need to call Stern.”

  “Good. You do that while I wrap up Hamline’s alibi.”

  TO ELLIE’S SURPRISE, Stern sounded downright gleeful to hear from her. “Did you get the I.P. data I sent?” Mark Stern, citizen extraordinaire, fighting crime wherever it was found.

  “Yes, thank you. It’s proving very helpful. Look, I’m calling because we need one more thing. It turns out Richard Hamline’s credit card paid for two different memberships this month. Can you check on that?”

  “No problem.” She heard fingers tapping on a keyboard. “Huh. That’s odd.”

  “What?”

  “The other membership. Wow, that’s really weird.”

  “What’s weird?”

  “The charge was for Amy Davis. Richard Hamline paid for Amy Davis’s membership.”

  Ellie paused, trying to process the information Stern was giving her. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. I’m looking at it right here.”

  “But Amy had a free membership.”

  Stern laughed. “Sorry. Free membership’s an oxymoron at FirstDate.”

  “But I saw the offer on her computer. It was a thirty-day trial membership.”

  “Not for FirstDate, it wasn’t. The marketing types have
proposed it, and I’ve held firm. If people think they can subscribe for free, they’ll stop paying me.”

  Ellie was certain of what she’d seen in Amy’s e-mail account. She described it in detail to Stern, who didn’t seem to be surprised.

  “It’s fishing,” he said.

  “Fishing for what?”

  “No, phishing. With a ph. It’s a doctored e-mail, so it looks like it came from a legitimate company. It probably contained a link to a Web site that looks like FirstDate’s site, and then asks the recipient of the e-mail for information about themselves. I can tell you one thing, though — if it offered a free account, it didn’t come from us.”

  Ellie thanked Stern for his time and hung up in a daze. Flann was walking toward her, a piece of paper in his hand.

  “Hope you don’t mind, but I went ahead and sprang Hamline. His billing records all checked out. The guy’s barely got time to take a leak, let alone hang out in cybercafés all day long. You okay?” Before Ellie had a chance to answer, he offered her the paper in his hand. “This fax came for you. An old police report on an Edmond Bertrand?”

  According to the Boston Police Department, Edmond Bertrand, date of birth, October 16, 1974, had been arrested for forgery six years earlier. Cited and released. No booking photo and no fingerprints. He had been arrested after trying to use a stolen credit card number to pay for a suit at Brooks Brothers.

  Ellie needed to call Suzanne Mouton again.

  27

  “I’M SORRY TO BOTHER YOU AT HOME, DETECTIVE ROBI—” ELLIE stumbled over a seemingly unpronounceable Cajun last name.

  “Just call me Dave.”

  “Sorry. Your neighbor Suzanne Mouton gave me your number. I believe she might have told you that I was interested in Edmond Bertrand?”

  “I was just fixing to give you a ring.”

  “Do you know the details of his drug overdose? He had some problems years ago with a homicide victim we’ve got up here.”