Alafair Burke - Dead Connection

Yong sighed and placed one hand on top of his shiny black hair. “That was before the note on my chair.”

“I was wondering when you’d get back to that.”

“The note was from my unit supervisor, and the message apparently came down from above – I can’t authorize a subpoena until you have a suspect.”

Flann threw him a skeptical look. “You’re kidding me, right? Did you miss the part where I explained that the reason we need a subpoena is to help us identify a suspect?”

Yong shook his head. The smile was gone now. “I know. It’s bullshit. It sucks. It ain’t right. But having me as your poker partner’s not doing you any good on this one. I’m just a cog in the machine – a tiny, powerless cog who knows what a note left on my chair during trial means. I’m sorry, man. If I’d had time, I would have called to save you the trip.”

“How would that kind of message hit your supervisor so fast?”

“I don’t know, but you’ve pissed off someone with some serious suck.”

“Your office has taken off bigger fish than the president of some fledgling Internet company.”

Yong looked just as stymied as McIlroy. “I thought the same thing. I did a quick Google search to see if Stern was a real player, but I turned up five other guys named Mark Stern before I hit anything on him. I only had so much time to snoop – given this.” He gestured to the courtroom. “If it’s any consolation, when my trial’s out, I can sniff around and see where the strings were pulled in my office.”

“And then what?”

“And then you’ll know.”

“We need those names. We need to know who contacted our vics before they died. That’s what we need.”

“Then you need to find someone above you to go to someone above me, or you need to find another way to get a suspect.”

“And what if I’m convinced that the only way to get a suspect is to know what FirstDate knows?”

“I guess you’d have to find another way to get that information. Maybe an insider to do it for you, without the government’s hands on it. But I’m not the one who said that.”

The judge reclaimed his seat at the bench, and Flann lowered his voice to a whisper.

“What happens if I call a contact in the press? Let the story leak – the possible connection between the two women, and a company that won’t help the city’s finest catch a killer.”

“I doubt any reporter would run it with what you’ve got – even for you. And if they did, Mark Stern would probably sue the paper, along with the police department and the two of you. I’d strongly recommend against it,” Yong deadpanned. The judge cleared his throat and threw them an impatient look. “Sorry, guys. Gotta go.”

Following Flann out of the courtoom, Ellie was so dejected at leaving without a subpoena that she barely noticed the man sitting in the back row. She assumed he was there for Yong’s case – a friend or relative of the defendant.

She was wrong.

Charlie Dixon was there to make sure of two things. First, that Jeffrey Yong had gotten the message. And second, that the message made its way to the city detectives asking questions about FirstDate. Dixon couldn’t make out the entire conversation, but he noticed that the detectives left the courtroom empty-handed. He was pleased, at least for the moment.

THEY WERE GREETED AT THE PRECINCT BY A CIVILIAN AIDE,probably just out of high school, holding a plastic cup of soda the size of a bucket.

“There’s a couple people waiting here to see Detective McIlroy. I think they’re your victim’s parents. Something about a cat?” He gestured to an attractive couple sitting quietly on a bench down the hall.

Hampton Davis was tall and tan, with every black hair combed neatly in place. His wife, Evelyn, was petite with a light brown, chin-length bob. They both wore suits – his navy, hers powder blue.

McIlroy handled the introductions. “Mr. and Mrs. Davis, I’m Flann McIlroy. We spoke on the phone this weekend. This is Detective Hatcher. She’s also working on your daughter’s case.”

McIlroy led Ellie and the couple to an interview room adjacent to the homicide bureau. The four of them waited in awkward silence to see who would speak first. When Flann finally offered his condolences, Ellie could tell that although he’d no doubt spoken some variant of the same words many times before, he was still uncomfortable with them. He appeared more at ease once he began laying out his theory that Amy’s murder may have been related to her use of an Internet dating site.

“There must be some mistake,” Hampton said. “Our daughter would never use a service like that. She was extremely cautious with men she didn’t know.”

“Amy was being cautious,” Ellie vouched. “The service she used is anonymous, and she was very careful not to give out her last name or address.”

Hampton shook his head. “If you found her listed with one of those companies, then someone else put her there. I’ve read stories about that. Some crazy person gets obsessed and wreaks havoc on a person’s life by posting all kinds of nonsense on the Internet.”

“Amy’s had problems like that before,” Evelyn interrupted. A northeasterner would have described the woman’s accent as southern, but having been raised in Kansas, Ellie knew that not all southern accents were identical. This woman’s cadence was new to Ellie – southern, but not in a way she’d heard before, almost with a touch of Brooklyn thrown in like a hint of cayenne pepper.

“Back in high school, a boy in town wouldn’t leave her alone. It went on for months. Don’t get me wrong. Amy brought a little of it on herself. I guess this boy changed some grades for her. She was under a lot of pressure. She really wanted to go out of state for college, somewhere nice. Somewhere away from home.”

Hampton placed a hand gently on her forearm. “Evelyn, the detectives don’t need to hear this right now.”

Evelyn gave her husband a firm look. “What I’m telling the detectives is that Amy learned an early lesson. This boy I’m talking about kept calling her and writing her letters, even after she left for Colby. Then when she came home for Christmas break, he showed up at the mall where she was shopping. You can call her friend Suzanne Mouton to verify. She’ll tell you. The whole experience was just awful.”

Ellie realized that Evelyn’s story was going nowhere, but took down the number anyway because she understood why this was important to Amy’s mother. Evelyn wanted to talk about her daughter in a personal way. She wanted to tell the detectives about a time when she knew what her daughter’s fears were, when she was familiar even with the bad things her daughter did as a consequence. To feel close again, Evelyn had to go back to Amy’s high school years, when Amy had apparently permitted a troubled boy to alter her transcript so she could escape the bayou.

When his wife finished, Hampton Davis cleared his throat. “You’ll have to forgive us if we seem to dwell on the past,” he said, looking at Evelyn. “But the experience my wife’s talking about was a horrible one. I ultimately had to go to court for a restraining order. The boy was actually arrested after the incident at the mall, and then – well, let’s just say things got worse from there. Amy blamed herself for years.”

“Our point,” Evelyn insisted, “is that our daughter would not have agreed to go on dates with strangers.”

“I’m very sorry,” McIlroy said, “but we’ve confirmed that Amy did sign herself up for an account with this service. In fact, she had a date that very night with a man she’d met online.”

“Well, then, that’s the man you should be looking at,” Hampton insisted.