Dead Connection Page 3

  “Are you Detective McIlroy?”

  “Does Keith Richards pick coconuts?” McIlroy’s eyes remained on the report he was reading.

  “I think the surgeons might’ve removed that impulse while they were fixing the rest of his brain.”

  “Ah, very nice. A woman who keeps up with her pop culture.” McIlroy rose from his chair and offered a thick hand. “You must be Ellie Hatcher.”

  Ellie shifted her cardboard box for a handshake, and McIlroy quickly relieved her of the parcel, setting it on his desk. In a framed photograph that he pushed aside, Ellie recognized the men on either side of Flann McIlroy as Rudy Giuliani and Bill Bratton.

  “That’s me,” Ellie said, “reporting to duty. Thank you for bringing me over.”

  “You make an excellent first impression. Most of my colleagues don’t get my rhetorical questions.”

  “Aging rock stars, I get. Throw out any allusions to French literature, and we might have some problems.”

  “You must be wondering why you’re here.” McIlroy had a gleam in his eye.

  “I go where I’m told,” Ellie said matter-of-factly.

  “I got permission from the assistant chief to work a single case exclusively.”

  Ellie did her best to conceal her surprise. Lieutenant Jenkins said McIlroy had suck with the brass, but the assistant chief was extremely brassy — he ran the entire Manhattan detective borough.

  “My lieutenant’s not particularly happy about it, so the freedom may not last. He’s already threatened to pull the plug tomorrow if it doesn’t go anywhere, but he’s mindful of the politics. If nothing breaks — the case, you, me — we all turn back to pumpkins. So let’s just say you better not unpack this box quite yet.”

  “Not a problem. Desks are overrated anyway.” Ellie tried to sound like she was taking it all in stride.

  “Unless you’ve got a hearing problem, you probably noticed some comments as you walked in.”

  McIlroy hadn’t bothered to lower his voice. Nearby detectives shifted their eyes back to their work.

  “No hearing problem, sir,” Ellie said.

  “And none of this ‘sir’ stuff. Call me Flann.”

  “And call me Ellie. Or my friends just call me Date Bait.” She threw a look to the younger detective at the next desk, and he laughed aloud and smiled. One down, the rest of the room to go, Ellie thought.

  “Let’s talk while we drive,” Flann said. “I want you to see something.”

  “FRIDAY NIGHT, AROUND three in the morning, two men found a woman’s body in an alley off of Avenue C.” McIlroy flipped down the sun visor on the department-issued Crown Vic as he hung a left onto Third Avenue, followed by another quick left onto Twentieth Street to take them to the far East Side. “The girl’s name was Amy Davis. She lived in the adjacent building. We’ve already determined she was walking home from a date when the bad guy grabbed her. Strangled.”

  He pushed a manila folder across the seat toward Ellie. She opened it and removed an eight-by-ten photograph. Amy Davis lay on a metal slab. A white sheet was pulled up to her shoulders, but the rest of the picture told the story. Her face was scarlet. Dark contusions discolored her neck and throat, her eyes protruded from their sockets, and her swollen tongue peeked out from encrusted lips. Ellie could tell from the many marks between Amy’s jaw and clavicle that the killer had used his hands. She had definitely struggled.

  “How do you know the date didn’t walk her home and do all of this himself?”

  “We called his cell right after we found this in the vic’s coat pocket.” McIlroy handed Ellie two sheets of folded white paper from his own jacket. “That’s a photocopy, obviously.”

  Ellie read the string of e-mail messages from the bottom up, starting with the earliest. The first message was sent a week ago, from CameraMan to MoMAgirl: I saw your profile. We seem to have a lot in common. Maybe between my photography and your love of Warhol, we can take the art-world by storm. Check out my profile and let me know. My name’s Brad.

  MoMAgirl responded two hours later: You don’t look too bad yourself. What kind of stuff do you usually shoot? Amy (aka MoMAgirl)

  The two had e-mailed each other once or twice a day for the next few days, until Brad finally suggested on Friday evening that they meet for a drink that night at eleven o’clock.

  “Eleven o’clock on a Friday night? What a cheese ball,” Ellie muttered under her breath.

  “The cheese factor, as you put it, gets considerably worse,” McIlroy said. “But he’s not our guy. I called his cell at three thirty in the morning, after we found the e-mails. I think I hit redial six times before he finally picked up. By that time, he was in bed at another woman’s apartment. According to the bedmate, our playboy Brad called her around midnight saying he was in the neighborhood.”

  “He could have made that call after the murder to give himself some semblance of an alibi.”

  “Except the girl remembers bar noises in the background, and the waiter at Angel’s Share remembers Brad on his cell phone when he signed for the check. Apparently he was pissed off about the price of the wine Amy was drinking.”

  “Did you check the call records on Brad’s cell phone?”

  McIlroy nodded. “They’re consistent: Two back-to-back calls around midnight. One to a woman in the West Village, which went unanswered. Then another call, which his overnight companion picked up.”

  “And he couldn’t have killed Davis between the phone call and the booty call?”

  “Nope,” Flann said, smiling. “The booty call, as you so aptly described it, took place next to the Flatiron Building. The security camera in the elevator has him arriving ten minutes after the cell phone call.”

  Ellie finished the chain of reasoning. “And it’s impossible to get from the Village to Avenue C, then back up to the Flatiron in even twice that time.”

  “I was impressed he made it to the Flatiron in ten minutes.”

  “When sex awaits,” Ellie said, refolding the sheet of paper and handing it back to McIlroy. “So the victim had a date that night, but it’s got nothing to do with her murder.”

  “Now that I’m not so sure about. Here’s my hunch.”

  Ellie raised an eyebrow. According to her lieutenant, one of McIlroy’s misplaced hunches could tarnish her reputation for years.

  “Don’t worry,” Flann said, catching her expression. “It’s one notch stronger than a hunch — I guarantee. Did you notice how our victim met this courtly gentleman, Brad?”

  “On the Internet. Very Twenty-first Century.” The e-mails had been sent through a company called FirstDate.com. Ellie had recognized the name. From what she could tell, FirstDate was one of the biggest online dating companies around, at least in the New York area. She could hardly ride the subway or pass a bus stop without spotting an ad announcing that true love was waiting for her somewhere out there in cyberspace. If the men on the service were anything like Brad the bed-hopping CameraMan, then Ellie had no remorse about resisting her occasional curiosity.

  “I read that you’ve got an interest in high-tech law enforcement,” Flann said. “I’m hoping that’s going to come in handy.”

  It was Ellie’s first confirmation that McIlroy knew about her fifteen minutes of fame. In retrospect, Ellie regretted giving any interviews. She’d done it for her mother, hoping that a profile piece might bring more attention to her case against the police department back in Wichita. The strategy hadn’t worked. The case was still pending, the police department was still calling her father’s death a suicide, and her mother was still broke.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Ellie cautioned. “I said I was interested in it, not that I was an expert.”

  “Do you remember this murder?”

  McIlroy handed Ellie another folded piece of paper. It was a photocopy of a newspaper article, dated just over a year earlier, about the discovery of another young woman’s body — this one shot to death in NoLita, just north of Little Italy.

&n
bsp; An aspiring psychologist and author who devoted herself to the study of interpersonal relationships died alone early yesterday morning after she was shot in the trendy NoLita neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, a police spokesman said. Caroline Hunter, 29, was killed on the corner of Spring and Elizabeth shortly after 2 a.m. in what police investigators believe was a botched robbery attempt.

  Hunter was pursuing her Ph.D. in social psychology at New York University, where her dissertation examined the role of online relationships in contemporary society. She had justsigned a significant publishing contract to write a book summarizing her findings for a broader audience.

  “Carrie, without a doubt, would have emerged as one of the most significant sociological voices of her generation,” said her editor at Penman Publishing, Joan Landers. “We have all lost the opportunity to learn from her.”

  The gunshots interrupted a telephone conversation Hunter was having with her mother.

  “She often called late because of the time zones,” said Barbara Hunter, of Yakima, Washington. “She’d say good night and let me know all was well. She was in the middle of telling me about a meeting she had with her editor when I heard some kind of scuffle, then two loud bangs.”

  Mrs. Hunter believed her daughter may have been walking home to her East Village apartment from a meeting arranged on an Internet dating Web site as part of her ongoing research. Police say they have confirmed that Hunter’s dinner companion was not involved in the shooting. Witnesses have reported seeing a lone man flee with Hunter’s purse. Police had no comment on current suspects, but said the investigation continues.

  The photograph accompanying the article jogged a memory somewhere in the recesses of Ellie’s mind. Every once in a while, one of the thousands of gorgeous young women in New York City with a professional head shot fell prey to the random violence of the city. Those were the crime stories that the local papers took hold of. Caroline Hunter had been famous for a few days, then relegated to the unsolved murder files.

  Ellie told McIlroy that she had a vague recollection of the story.

  “So did I. And when I caught this case and saw how pretty Amy Davis was, I immediately pictured the tabloid headlines. That got me thinking about the last time the media glommed on to one of these cases. Out of curiosity, I pulled the file. Caroline Hunter. Notice anything?”

  “Kind of hard not to,” Ellie said. “According to this article, Hunter was shot on the way home from a date she’d arranged on the Internet. She was even writing her Ph.D. on online relationships.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Two women, both attractive. Both in downtown Manhattan. Approximately the same age. One strangled, though; the other shot.” Ellie knew, however, that killers could change the way they killed, as long as the method itself was not an important part of what they considered their M.O.

  “What about the timing?”

  She calculated last Friday’s date in her head, then saw what McIlroy was getting at. “Exactly one year apart.”

  “To the day. Now you know why I said it’s more than a hunch.”

  “I believe you said one notch more,” Ellie added.

  “Still, it’s more. And that’s why we’re going to Amy Davis’s apartment. Your charge, Detective Hatcher, is to find me something that says we’re on the right track.”

  4

  AMY DAVIS HAD LIVED IN A PREWAR WALK-UP APARTMENT ON Avenue C. This was the Lower East Side, not to be confused with SoHo, Tribeca, or some other fame-infused bastion of downtown coolness. In Alphabet City, gentrification had hit only building-by-building, block-by-block: The gamut ran from unmarked needle-exchange counters to Glamazon-infested martini bars. Davis’s building fell on the shabby end of the neighborhood’s spectrum.

  McIlroy pressed one of the roughly twenty doorbells lined up at the building’s entrance. A voice blurted through a speaker under the buzzers. “Dígame.”

  “Policía. Estamos aquí con respecto a asesinato.”

  Ellie was able to make out a few of the words. They were the police and were here about something. Her Spanish vocabulary could use an influx of nouns.

  The door was opened by a man in faded jeans, an oversized flannel shirt, and a coarse goatee. “You speak some pretty good español, man, but I’m fine with English.”

  McIlroy took care of a brief introduction. The superintendent’s name was Oswaldo Lopez. His friends all called him Oz, he added, checking out Ellie as he said it. The detectives followed him up the steep, zig-zag staircase that ran through the center of the building.

  “How long have you been the super here?” McIlroy asked between deep breaths, already starting to fall behind.

  “Around eight months.”

  “What can you tell us about Amy Davis?”

  “Pays her rent. Comes and goes. Keeps to herself, at least around the building. Like everyone else. It’s that kind of place.”

  “Any regular company?” Ellie asked.

  “Not that I noticed. But I’m not a doorman in a white-glove high-rise, you know what I’m saying?”

  Ellie knew exactly what he was saying. Oz probably responded to about half of the tenants’ complaints, based on who was most generous or persistent. He did not, however, make friends or keep tabs. It was, as he said, that kind of place.

  “When can we start showing the apartment?” Oz asked.

  “Sometime after we’ve put its current tenant in the ground,” McIlroy said without missing a beat.

  “No disrespect, man. The owner wanted to know.”

  “If Davis paid her rent, he doesn’t have anything to complain about until the end of the month. Now does he?”

  “Like I said, no disrespect.”

  When they reached the fifth of six floors, Oz removed a key ring from his belt and unlocked a door in the back corner of the hallway. Ellie and McIlroy entered, and Oz followed. McIlroy looked annoyed but too out of breath to express it.

  “I think we’ll be fine here, Mr. Lopez,” Ellie said. “We’ll let you know when we’re finished.”

  The super paused, no doubt wanting to get a first-hand view. Murder-related macabre was simply too titillating for even the most complacent people to resist.

  McIlroy thanked her once the door was closed and they were alone. “My doc says I need to add more cardio into my workout routine.”

  “Hey, at least you’ve got a routine.”

  “That’s what he thinks,” McIlroy said, wiping a bead of perspiration from his temple. “I’m surprised you’re not wheezing a little.”

  “I live on the fourth floor of a converted townhouse. I’m used to it.”

  “Nice of you not to mention the fifteen years you’ve got on me and the obvious fact that you’re more fit than I ever was. But I don’t smoke.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Okay,” McIlroy said after a pause. “If you say so.”

  “I say so.” Ellie took her first look around Amy Davis’s apartment. “So give me some hint why I’m here. What am I going to lead you to that you couldn’t find yourself?”

  “We’ll know when you find it.”

  Whatever it was, the search wouldn’t take long. The apartment was an undersized studio, just a few hundred square feet. A double bed and a single nightstand were tucked into one corner. A love seat, tray table, and steamer trunk-cum-TV stand occupied the center of the room. A tiny desk was crammed into a poor excuse for a kitchen. Clothes and shoes were stuffed anywhere they fit.

  The items in Davis’s wardrobe spoke to the double life led by so many city women. The modern business-casual workplace demanded tailored shirts, pencil skirts, and fitted pants — not unlike Ellie’s own charcoal gray V-neck sweater and straight-leg black pants. In her free time, though, while Ellie hung out in sweatshirts and Levi’s, Davis hoarded low-rider jeans, bohemian tops, and funky boots.

  Ellie opened one of the kitchenette’s cabinets. No dishes, no pans, no food — just more clothes and shoes. Only two bowls were in sight, an
d they were on the floor — one filled with water, the other empty, with the word Chowhound printed on the side.

  “What happened to the cat?” Ellie asked.

  “Funny thing about that cat. The first time I came to the apartment, he led me right to the window by the fire escape and started meowing. Like he was telling me something.”

  “So where is he now?” Ellie had never stopped to wonder what happened to animals after their people were killed.

  “In the bunk room at the bureau.”

  “You’re kidding.” No wonder this guy had a reputation as a maverick, Ellie thought.

  “I tried taking him home with me, but my seven-pound Siamese was a little intimidated. Chowhound’s an absolute beast. The guys at the house aren’t too happy about the loads he leaves in his litterbox. The vic’s parents are supposed to pick him up tomorrow.”

  McIlroy took a look around the apartment and shook his head. “I’ll never understand living in a place like this. Some people think the city begins and ends with Manhattan. On Staten Island, this girl could have bought a house and a yard for what she was paying to rent this dump.”

  Ellie smiled to herself as she hit the power button to the laptop on Davis’s desk. McIlroy moved into the bathroom, out of her view.

  “I quit,” Ellie called out to McIlroy as she scrolled through the recently viewed files on Amy Davis’s computer. “Smoking, I mean. I quit. Well, basically. Almost.”