Alafair Burke - Dead Connection

They were finally where they needed to be, logged in to Amy Davis’s FirstDate account. Now it was time to find out just who tried to get to know Amy Davis. Anonymously. Safely. Privately.

AT AN INTERNET café in Midtown Manhattan, the man who strangled Amy Davis sipped a cup of coffee and smiled. He smiled because he liked what he saw on the screen of his laptop.

He had been keeping an eye on MoMAgirl’s profile. Until Saturday evening, he had seen the words “active within 24 hours” posted above that pretty picture of hers. Then it morphed to “active within 48 hours.”

Patience , he told himself. Even the stupidest police officer could figure this one out . After all, the unsubtle clue left for them in Amy’s coat pocket had a purpose. Her e-mails would point the police directly to that insipid poseur she met that night at Angel’s Share. He would undoubtedly be of limited intelligence. Even so, sooner or later, he would persuade the cops of his innocence, and they’d start to dig for another suspect.

Now it appeared he had gotten what he was waiting for: another change in the text above MoMAgirl’s picture. “Online now!” the screen declared.

He caught himself smiling, then forced himself to stop. Smiling would bring attention to himself. He didn’t want the attention. Not yet, anyway. Not on him.

He read the words again. Online now . How thrilling. Amy Davis, of course, could not be the computer user who was online as MoMAgirl. He had made sure of that in the alley on Friday night. It had required more of a fight than he anticipated, but he had put her down for good. And now someone had logged into her FirstDate account. The police had made the connection. The game was on.

He was surprised that he didn’t feel at least some guilt. He’d expected some pangs of discomfort. But nothing. In fact, taking out Amy was a piece of delicious karmic balance. More than five years earlier, in a spontaneous act of curiosity, he had Googled the name, wondering what had ever become of Amy Davis. Lo and behold, she was in New York, where he had recently moved himself. It had been a few years since he’d thought about her, but when the moment presented itself, there she was. Still in New York. Still at the museum. Still single and lonely, living in that same apartment. It was as if fate had held her there for him, ready to be used at just the right time.

On further contemplation, he decided there was no reason for him to be surprised at his lack of remorse. The average person didn’t truly care whether other people lived or died; they just convinced themselves they did because they were supposed to. He, however, knew better than to assume any kind of ingrained benevolence. In his entire life, he had known only one truly good human being.

He clicked on the Message Me button. He liked this particular function, which allowed FirstDate users to chat on the screen in real time. Spontaneous, but anonymous.

He stroked the keys lightly with his fingertips, mentally composing the text he wanted to send. He allowed himself to type words in the dialogue box: I know you’re not Amy .

He reread the single sentence, then added another. I know because I strangled the life out of her .

He let his index finger rest – lightly – on the Enter key, exhilarated by the possibility.

Sighing, he deleted the letters, one by one, then closed the messaging box. It wasn’t time. Not yet. He’d had enough personal experience with police to know they had procedures to follow, clues to chase down, and mistakes to make before the fun could begin. Between Amy Davis and Caroline Hunter, they had plenty of work to do. And he had another love-starved woman to stalk.

ELLIE TURNED FIRST to Amy Davis’s work e-mail, reading through all of the messages in her in-box and trash can. The only one related to FirstDate was a solicitation she’d received nearly five weeks earlier, inviting her to enjoy a thirty-day free membership on the service. Amy had left the message in her in-box for a full week before taking FirstDate up on its offer. Ellie shook her head, knowing that if Amy had deleted the message immediately, she would be the one sitting in front of her laptop right now.

Ellie closed Amy’s museum account and moved into her FirstDate account. She clicked through a random sampling of messages.

“She didn’t tell anyone on FirstDate her work e-mail address. She used her first name, and it doesn’t look like she told anyone where she lived.” She opened a few more messages. “Even when things moved beyond e-mails to phone calls, she insisted on calling them. She was being pretty safe.”

“Apparently not safe enough,” McIlroy added dryly.

“Okay, this should be pretty simple.” She directed McIlroy’s attention to the computer screen. “There’s a feature here called Connections. When you click on it, the FirstDate site takes you to a page that keeps track of all the other users Amy had contact with. Then you can click on each one” – she clicked on one of the photographs on the screen – “and it shows when the last contact was with that connection. And, from there, you can click on E-mails to see all the messages to and from that connection. Since she only contacted the online dates through her FirstDate account, we should be able to find all the old messages here. We can compile a list and go from there. What about the first victim? Caroline Hunter?”

“I’ve got a huge stack of notes that her mother had in storage. They just arrived this morning.”

“You called her mother about this already?”

“I told you – it was slightly more than a hunch. If the same man killed both victims, then working the Caroline Hunter case is a legitimate way to solve ours.”

“So what’d you find out?”

“The mom says everyone loved her daughter, she always knew it had to be someone who didn’t know her, that kind of thing. She sent everything, including a list of her profile names and passwords on FirstDate.” He pulled a piece of paper from a file drawer in his desk and placed it in front of Ellie.

“A list ?” Ellie asked, scanning the names that filled the entire page.

“Apparently you can be twenty different kinds of women online, and Caroline was trying all of them out as research for her book. Different personalities, different photos, different people. She had so many profiles, she kept them posted on a bulletin board above her desk for reference.”

“Let’s see if we can even access those accounts now. They’ve probably expired.” Ellie moved through several screens on the Internet. “Okay, see how this works. One of her names was new2ny. If you’re just some FirstDate user out there in cyberspace and try to search for new2ny, you can’t find her. Hunter didn’t renew her subscription because – well, you know why. So, new2ny is a dead profile. She can’t be contacted. But dead on FirstDate isn’t really dead. It just means dead to the outside world. New2ny still has an account that can be logged into with the password.”

She typed in the corresponding password on the list, and Caroline Hunter’s smiling face appeared on the screen. According to the profile, new2ny was a twenty-six-year-old fashion publicist who had moved to the city after graduating from Indiana University. In the photograph posted with the profile, Caroline wore her hair pulled back with a paisley headband, making her appear younger than her actual age.

“It’s in the company’s interest if users can go active and inactive with the same user name,” Ellie speculated. “They think they finally found that special someone, so they take themselves off the market. But then when they’re single again, they can hop right back on, using the same online handle. If you’re unsubscribed-”