Alafair Burke - Dead Connection

“Hey you.” The familiar voice came from an adjacent gurney. Peter Morse looked at her through puffy, blackened eyes. A gash ran along his right cheekbone. A paramedic had wiped blood away, leaving behind a deep pink smear on Peter’s pale skin.

“Hey yourself.”

“I heard the shots from the bathroom. And then the sound of your voice stopped. I thought I’d lost you.”

“A nice girl never goes to a man’s house without her Kevlar.” After a quick phone call to Charlie Dixon from the cab, she’d asked the driver to make a pit stop at her apartment on the way to Peter’s for the vest she kept at home.

“Good girl.”

“Hey, Peter?”

“Yeah?”

“So what exactly did you tell the intern at the paper about me?”

Peter closed his eyes as he drifted off, but he was smiling. As far as post-blackout first memories went, Ellie considered this a good one.

ONE WEEK LATER, Ellie stood next to Charlie Dixon outside a conference room in the federal building, thinking how much easier this all would be if Vitali Rostov had carried a larger gun. The power of a gun made a difference, even at close distances. Vitali Rostov took two shots from Dixon’s semiautomatic and was pronounced dead on arrival. Jason Upton, however, survived the shot from Rostov’s compact Derringer – which is why Ellie stood in the hallway of the federal building wishing Rostov had used a bigger gun.

Ellie knew her thoughts were morally wrong at some level, but she couldn’t control them. She wished Upton had died that day in Peter’s apartment. She wanted Upton to pay the ultimate price, and inconvenient details were more easily swept away when the interested parties were dead. The NYPD didn’t worry about details when it declared Ed Becker solely responsible for the four FirstDate murders. The Wichita police didn’t worry about details when it labeled her father’s death a suicide. But Jason Upton would not be punished until a prosecutor, judge, jury, and defense lawyer pored over the messy details created by his secrets and his lies.

In the week since the shootings, Ellie had left the job of collecting those details to Charlie Dixon. Then they had met the previous night to lock down the official version that Dixon would file in his reports and eventually repeat to a federal grand jury. And now that official version was about to get its first preview in a joint meeting called by FBI Special Agent in Charge Barry Mayfield and NYPD Lieutenant Dan Eckels.

“You sure about this?” Dixon asked one last time. A man she’d known for less than two weeks was trusting his career to her.

Ellie smiled. “Does Britney Spears like Cheetos?”

Mayfield and Eckels were already seated on one side of the long table in the conference room, and Dixon and Ellie joined them on the other. Ellie sat patiently while Dixon explained how nearly two years earlier a federal defendant informed him that an associate named Vitya – last name supposedly unknown – was engaged in a criminal conspiracy that related somehow to a company called FirstDate.

“What was this informant’s name?” Eckels asked.

“Alexander Federov.”

“And where can we find Mr. Federov today?”

“You can’t,” Dixon said. “He was killed in prison.”

“Go on,” Mayfield encouraged.

“All I had was a guy’s first name and a company name. It wasn’t enough to pursue formally, and Federov made it clear he wasn’t about to flip. Since then, however, I’ve remained curious about the tip and informally kept an eye on FirstDate.”

“What do you mean you ‘informally kept an eye’ on it?” Eckels asked. Ellie noticed that Barry Mayfield was leaving the questioning to Lieutenant Eckels. She hoped it was a sign of the friendship Charlie Dixon claimed he had with his boss.

“Just that. I read up on the company and its CEO, Mark Stern. Newspaper articles and advertisements would catch my eye. I was hoping to find some kind of connection to a person named Vitya. Nothing ever came of it. Then two Mondays ago, I heard from a source that Detectives McIlroy and Hatcher had arrived at Mark Stern’s office asking for records as part of a criminal investigation.”

“And who was your source?” Eckels asked.

“Again, nothing formal. A marketing assistant at FirstDate was on parole for a minor drug violation and was willing to stay in touch.”

“Please, Lieutenant,” Mayfield interjected. “If you’d let my agent tell the story, we’d get through this faster. You’ll have time for questions afterward.”

The rest of the official story unfolded without interruption. At Dixon’s request, Detectives McIlroy and Hatcher briefed him about their investigation into a series of murders connected to FirstDate. When they identified a woman named Tatiana Chekova as a potential victim based on ballistics evidence, Dixon was intrigued because the man who originally tipped him off about FirstDate had also been Russian. Then things took off when Dixon learned that Tatiana Chekova had a brother-in-law named Vitali Rostov. Vitya, Dixon explained, was a familiar Russian nickname for Vitali.

Dixon explained how he began following Vitali Rostov to the extent that his other investigations allowed. He saw Rostov meet at an Internet café with a man he recognized from his early surveillance of FirstDate as Jason Upton, a former programmer with the company.

“And where was this café?” Eckels asked.

Mayfield threw Eckels a look of warning, but Dixon answered without hesitation. He gave a Midtown address – one of the three Manhattan Internet cafés that Upton had used for his Enoch activities on FirstDate.

“Anyway, I recognized Upton from my early research into FirstDate, when he was still at the company. At that point, I realized that Upton had to have been the point person for whatever was going on between Rostov and the company. That’s when I went to Mark Stern for assistance.”

Ellie knew that Stern would have already backed up this part of the official story. She had rehearsed the information with Stern before leaving his office that day for Peter Morse’s apartment. True to his word, he’d been willing to be flexible.

“Stern then informed me of the conflict between him and Mr. Upton. He also realized that Upton could have potentially given himself access to customers’ credit card records. At that point, I continued to follow Vitya Rostov in the hope of witnessing an actual exchange of cash for information. That is how I wound up at Peter Morse’s apartment a week ago. I saw Rostov enter the building. Then when Detective Hatcher arrived shortly thereafter, I knew I had to intervene.”

“How did you get access to the apartment?” Eckels asked. “The lock was controlled by a combination.”

“We got lucky,” Dixon said. “When Hatcher went in, the door didn’t close completely. I just pushed it open.”

Ellie continued to listen as Dixon summarized all of the admissions that Upton made while Rostov had held her at gunpoint. From this point in the story, the official version hewed pretty closely to the truth.

Just as Ellie knew it was wrong to wish for Jason Upton’s death, she knew that at some level it was wrong to lie and to have encouraged Dixon and Stern to do the same. But they had no choice if they wanted to see Upton punished. A skeptic might take issue with some of the details in the official version that Dixon offered, but Ellie knew that in the end the powers-that-be would accept any credible lie as truth. They didn’t want to see Upton walk either. And as long as that was the case, Ellie wasn’t going to lose sleep over it.

Ellie tuned back in just as Dixon laid a brown mailing envelope with a New Iberia postmark on the conference table. The package was going to help Dixon tie all the pieces together. It had been delivered by the U.S. Postal Service around the same time Ellie’s Kevlar vest was saving her life. Ellie found it in her mailbox when she came home from the hospital. Enclosed were several yellowed photographs of boys and girls of various ages, each picture accompanied by a Post-it note of the shaky writings of an aged hand. On one of the photographs, Helen Benoit had written, The third boy on the left, Jasper, liked computers. He had a mean streak too . Even in his early teens, Jasper looked a lot like Jason Upton.