Dead Connection (12 page)

“Exactly,” Jason said. “But the technology provides the incentive. The black hats can hit thousands of potential marks with a single e-mail. The stolen credit card numbers can be used to wire money to a Western Union, where it’s picked up using a fake ID.”

Ellie knew that the profitability of identity theft had created a vast market for the sale and purchase of personal information. “So the same simple tricks people use for identity theft could’ve been used by our guy to access a victim’s FirstDate account,” Ellie said.

“Yep. Or, like I said, it could be super low tech if her password was obvious.” Jason shut down Amy Davis’s computer and handed it to Flann. “At first I thought you meant someone was using FirstDate to find women, like a big search engine. But if he was actually snooping through her account — I’m not a psychologist, but isn’t that, you know, sort of obsessive?”

“That’s what we thought,” Ellie said. “Not just killing, but stalking first.”

“If that’s the case, he probably did a lot more than read a few of her e-mails. Do you have any idea how much you can learn about a person without ever leaving your office? Even here,” Jason said, “the attorneys ask me to do research on opposing parties all the time. I can pull up a person’s divorce records, income levels, real estate transactions, an entire life picture. Pretty helpful stuff when you’re trying to figure out how deep a person’s pockets are or where they’re hiding money. And it’s all publicly available, thanks to data-mining companies that aggregate information from the public domain and pop it up on the Internet for all to see. Now imagine if someone with competent hacking skills decided to break the rules.”

DOWN IN THE MARBLE lobby, men and women in thousand-dollar suits bustled through at fast clips to make the elevator, Starbucks cups in hand. Corporate types were always in a hurry, Ellie thought, but they always seemed to have time to stand in line for a five-dollar cup of coffee. Once they made it through the crowd, Ellie asked Flann about his visit to Mark Stern.

“He was actually cooperative. I told him how we connected Tatiana Chekova to Caroline Hunter through ballistics. He immediately saw why we’d want to know if she was a customer. I watched over his shoulder while he checked, and, unfortunately, Tatiana’s name was nowhere in the system. He double-checked by calling accounting to see if anyone named Chekova had ever been billed by them. Nothing. He looked pretty relieved.”

“So where does that leave us?” Ellie asked. If Stern was relieved, it meant he was even more convinced that FirstDate was unrelated to the murders. She was having some real doubts about their theory as well.

“Same place we were before. We keep working all the angles and hope something breaks.”

“On that note, I’ve got real names for both Taylor and Mr. Right.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“They both sent me phone numbers.”

“Jesus, it really is easier for women, isn’t it?”

Ellie removed a small notepad from her handbag. “I ran the numbers through the reverse directory, and voilà. Mr. Right’s real name is Rick Newton.” He was the one Ellie thought of as dirty birdy, so fond of double entendre. “He’s got a drunk and disorderly three years ago at a bar in Tribeca. I took the liberty of calling him. I told him it was about some found property. He’s coming into the station this afternoon.”

“And Taylor?”

“Taylor Gottman. Two different women have obtained restraining orders against him in the last five years.”

“Ding ding ding,” Flann said, touching the tip of his nose.

“No arrests, but he’s definitely interesting. Him, I think we need to surprise.”

Flann stole a glance at his watch. “No time like the present.”

“Sounds good.”

On the way out of the building, Ellie pulled on her gloves and looped her scarf around her face.

“Doggone it,” Flann said, patting the pockets of his coat. “I left my gloves upstairs.” He headed in the direction of the elevators. “I’ll be right back. Can you do me a favor? I don’t want to waste the rest of the day trying to find this guy Taylor. Call his cell, make up some story, and figure out where he is?”

“I’m supposed to do all that while you go fetch your gloves? Maybe I’ll get myself a manicure while I’m at it.”

“See the confidence I have in you,” Flann said, his ruddy face beaming. “Oh, and, no pressure, but my lieutenant called. He wants a briefing this afternoon so we’d better nail down something soon.”

Right, Ellie thought, flipping open her phone. No pressure.

“MAY I PLEASE speak with Mr. Gottman?” Ellie had dialed the number Taylor Gottman had e-mailed to the woman he knew as DB990.

“This is him.”

Ellie fingered Jason Upton’s Larkin, Baker & Howry business card. “This is Larkin Baker calling from CellularOne. Can you please verify your home address and telephone number for identification purposes?”

“What is this about?”

“There’s been some recent activity on your cellular account that we need to confirm for security purposes. Can you please verify the address and home telephone number on the account?”

Taylor rattled off a Brooklyn street address and a 718 area code number.

“And can I get a work number for you while I have you on the line?”

He recited a 212 number that she added to her notes.

“Okay. And in the event we’re disconnected, is the work number where I can reach you now? Great.” She circled Gottman’s office number. “I’m calling because we recently received a request to add cellular telephone insurance to this account. Was that request made by you?”

“No, it wasn’t,” Taylor said, sounding alarmed. “I don’t even know what that is.”

“All right. There’s no need for concern. That’s why we make these phone calls, to make sure there’s no fraudulent activity on the account.”

“Fraud? Someone’s using my phone?”

“No, sir. Everything’s fine. The insurance covers the replacement of your telephone in the event that it is lost or stolen. Unfortunately, some people have been adding insurance to accounts, then making claims in our branch stores for very expensive telephones. Now we call customers to ensure that the insurance and any claims are authentic. Since we caught it up front, there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Okay. I guess I should be grateful you guys are on top of it.”

“We try our best,” Ellie said, hitting the end button on her phone. A quick call to the precinct for a reverse phone directory search of Taylor Gottman’s work number yielded a Midtown address. She was clicking her phone shut as Flann emerged from the elevator with his gloves on.

“We ready to roll?” he asked optimistically.

“Taylor Gottman’s office is six blocks from here.”

17

SMO MEDIA OCCUPIED FOUR FLOORS OF A MIDSIZE OFFICE
tower at Forty-ninth and Lexington. The marketing firm’s receptionist was a young lithe brunette with full lips and flawless skin — undoubtedly an aspiring model when she wasn’t wearing that headset. She was squinting at Ellie and Flann, polite but clearly confused.

“I’m sorry, who is it you’re looking for?” A well-polished fingernail ran again down the pages of names on the desk in front of her.

“Taylor Gottman,” Flann said.

“Do you know what department he’s in?”

The man’s FirstDate profile described his job as “marketing/advertising/other” and his annual income as more than one hundred thousand dollars. “We’re pretty sure he’s one of the marketing or advertising executives,” Ellie said.

The receptionist’s big green eyes roamed the phone list again as she shook her head bewilderedly. “No. I’m sorry. I don’t see him here. You’re sure he works here? SMO? You know, there are a bunch of other marketing groups in this building.”

Damnit. Had Taylor been tipped off by Ellie’s phone call? No way, Ellie thought. No way did he pull a phone number of another marketing company out of his ass like that.

Ellie pulled a small notebook from her jacket pocket and looked at the notes she had taken from Taylor’s profile. “He’s five eleven. Brown hair, brown eyes.” She tried to recall the online photograph. “Sort of short hair. Thin face.”

The receptionist shrugged her shoulders, and Ellie realized her description was no better than the junk she usually got from eyewitnesses.

“Do you have Internet access on that?” Ellie asked, gesturing to the flat-screen computer panel in front of the receptionist.

“Of course,” the receptionist jiggled the mouse on her desk and the Web site for
Entertainment Weekly
appeared on her screen.

“May I?” Ellie asked, already stepping behind the desk. She logged on to the FirstDate Web site, clicked on her connections, and pointed to a photograph of Taylor. “Does this man look familiar?”

“Um, I’m not sure.” The model moved her face closer to the screen and looked again. “Oh my god. Is that…
the mail room guy
?”

“What mail room guy?”

“Some creepy guy who works in the mail room. I don’t know his name. He stares at me when he’s up here. A couple of times he noticed me catch him at it. He apologized, but then told me how pretty I was.”

“That sounds like our guy. Do you know where we can find him?”

She gave them directions to the mail room two floors down and pointed the way to the stairs.

“The mail room, huh?” Flann said on the way down. “Last I heard, that wasn’t a six-figure job.”

Ellie feigned shock and fanned herself like a southern belle. “Oh my lawd. Call the papers. A man lied about his income.”

They found their way to a large room in the back corner, where a bulky man sat at the front counter, placing labels on a series of envelopes.

“Can I help you?”

Ellie scanned the office and saw a man resembling Taylor sorting manila interoffice envelopes into folders hanging from a file cart. She shifted her jacket, revealing the NYPD badge clipped at her waist.

“We’re looking for Taylor Gottman. Is that him?” She nodded her head toward the back of the room, and the big man’s gaze followed hers.

“Yeah. What’d he do?”

Ellie noticed the response.
Is everything all right? Did something happen
? That’s what she was used to from employers, coworkers, neighbors — people who knew the suspect. But not with Taylor Gottman.
What’d he do
?

“Absolutely nothing,” she said confidently. “We’re just here about some unauthorized activity reported on his cellular account. We’ll need him to file a report.”

“Yo, Taylor. Cops for you.” Taylor and his four coworkers all turned in response to the man’s big voice. “Something about your cell phone.”

Taylor Gottman was tall and thin with short brown hair, full lips, and pale, smooth skin. As he made his way over, Ellie noticed he had an effeminate walk.

“Someone from the company just called me twenty minutes ago. I didn’t even call the police.”

“Is there somewhere we can talk privately?” Flann asked.

Taylor looked uncertainly at the beefy guy with the big voice, who in turn looked at the watch on his thick wrist.

“Go ahead and take your fifteen,” the man said.

Taylor led the way to a break room down the hallway. A frumpy woman sat at the only table in the small room, eating a Butterfinger and reading a paperback romance novel. “Excuse me,” Ellie said. The woman’s eyes didn’t leave her book. “Ma’am? Hello? Excuse me.”

Finally, at least a visual acknowledgment of their presence. “We’re police. We need to take a crime report from this gentleman. I hate to interrupt you, but could you give us some privacy?”

The woman pushed some yellow Butterfinger crust into her mouth as she considered the request. “My break’s over anyway,” she acquiesced, glancing at the clock. She read a moment more, then tucked a bookmark neatly into the novel.

When she was gone, Taylor had an observation to make. “You look familiar,” he said to Ellie. “And your voice too. This isn’t about that cell phone insurance, is it?”

“Do you know a woman named Amy Davis?”

Taylor repeated the name to himself a couple of times, as if trying to jog his memory. “It sounds familiar. Can you tell me who she is?”

Was. Who Amy was
. “I think you might know her from FirstDate?”

“That’s right,” Taylor said, snapping his fingers. “What’s her online name again?”

“MoMAgirl. She works at the Museum of Modern Art.”

“Right, right.” He nodded his head like it was all coming back to him now. “We went out on a date. Must have been — I don’t know — a few weeks ago?”

“A date?” Ellie asked skeptically. “From what we can tell from your e-mails, it was one cup of coffee. And it didn’t go very well.”

“Well, I considered it a date.”

“And you also considered it to be a pretty successful one. But Amy didn’t agree, did she? Amy wasn’t interested in having another — well, what you call a date.”

“I don’t remember why it didn’t go further.” Taylor brushed imaginary crumbs from his dark green pants. “I would’ve said it was mutual. Whatever. We didn’t see each other again. What does it matter anyway?”

“It matters,” Flann said, “because MoMAgirl is dead.” He laid a picture of Amy’s face, resting against the cold metal slab at the coroner’s office, on the table in front of Taylor. “She was killed Friday night.”

Apparently Taylor wasn’t one for reading newspapers. He didn’t take his eyes from the gruesome photograph, but the color left his skin and for a second, Ellie thought he was going to be sick. He finally looked away, shaking his head adamantly. “No. No. You can’t possibly — That’s ridiculous. I didn’t even know her.”

“You wanted to though. We’ve seen the e-mails, Taylor.” Ellie leaned forward, moving herself closer. “We need to understand what happened.”

“Nothing.” Taylor used his hands to push his chair back from the table subtly, giving himself space from Ellie. “We went out one time.”

“You have a problem letting go.”

“That’s not true.”

“Of course it’s true. But—”

“It is not.”

“What do you want me to say in response to that, Taylor?
Is so
? We can go back and forth like that all day if you’d like. But ultimately, I’m going to win. Why? Because in addition to all those e-mails you sent to Amy Davis — so many that she had to
block
you from her in-box — we also know about the restraining orders. Two of them. From two different women. Even the receptionist — that pretty girl upstairs — says you stare at her all the time.”

“You make me sound like some kind of…vulture.”

“No.” Ellie’s voice was firm. “I said you had a problem letting go. I didn’t judge. That woman upstairs? From what she told us, you complimented her. Told her how nice she looks. Did I say there was anything wrong with that? I mean she obviously tries to look good. It’s not your fault she’s offended when someone notices. I’m just saying you can be — tenacious. That doesn’t mean you hurt Amy. That’s what we’re here to understand.”

“You talked to Monique?”

Ellie said nothing.

“The girl at the front desk. Her name’s Monique.” He appeared to struggle to find the right words. “She’s — she’s nothing. All looks. Nice skin, pretty hair. She smells good. But there’s no substance.”

“What about Amy?” Flann asked. “She was different, wasn’t she?”

Taylor nodded slowly. For the first time since he’d seen the picture, he looked genuinely sad. “So completely different. She was smart and funny and confident. Did you know she graduated in the top ten percent of her class at Colby? Then she had a fellowship in Washington, D.C., with the National Endowment for the Arts. She sat on the board of a nonprofit here in New York that took poor kids to Broadway shows. She knew a ton about art. She was good to her friends.”

It was an odd way of describing the dead. More like the rundown of a résumé than a personal account of the woman. And they had already determined that Amy didn’t have many friends in the city — just girlfriends from college who’d moved on to motherly lives in the suburbs.

“You know. She was the kind of girl who organized her five-year college reunion. And she’d been a bridesmaid a few times. You could see by the way her friends smiled around her that she had a real impact on them.”

It all clicked for Ellie as she listened to Taylor reminisce. “How do you know these things about her?”

“What?”

“How do you know she did all of these things, Taylor? And when did you see her with her friends if you only went out once for coffee, just the two of you?”

He was silent, staring at the table in front of him.

“You researched her. You snuck around and learned those things about her on your own. She never told you any of it. She didn’t even know you. How’d you do it? Follow her? Talk to her friends?” Ellie knew the answer but wanted to hear it from Taylor.

He was shaking his head. “It wasn’t like that. Not at all. All I did was Google her.”

“And you didn’t think that invaded her privacy?”

His brow furrowed and he looked up at Ellie. “Googling someone? You mean to tell me that you wouldn’t pop in the name of a new boyfriend on the Internet? Everyone does it.”

“How did you even know her last name?”

Silence again. Ellie stared at him until he answered. “I didn’t. But I knew she went to Colby and worked at MoMA. That was enough. Google’s amazing.”

“You did all this work to learn about a woman who didn’t want to know you. And now she’s dead, Taylor.”

“I didn’t do it. When was it? You said Friday night. What time?”

Ellie looked to Flann. “Around midnight.”

Taylor’s knee jiggled under the table.

“Let me guess,” Ellie said. “Sitting alone at home watching TV.”

“In my bed, sleeping. Alone.”

“On a Friday night?” Flann asked.

“Yeah.” He seemed to realize it sounded pathetic. “Look, I’m not perfect. I’m — how’d you say it — I don’t like letting go. But I was totally over Amy. I promise. I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t see me again, but — well, there’s someone else now.”

“A girlfriend?”

More knee jiggling. “You know, someone else I’m paying more attention to.”

Ellie realized what he was telling them. His obsession — his myopic focus on one particular woman who didn’t return his affections — was homed in on a new target.

“Who is she?”

“From FirstDate. I can log on to my account if you want. You can see all the messages.”

They followed Taylor back to the mail room and asked the behemoth of a supervisor for some privacy at his computer terminal. “We need to get some information off his cell phone account,” Ellie explained.

Taylor logged on to the FirstDate Web site and pulled up a list of messages he had sent. Forty-five in the last five days alone, most of them to a woman calling herself Dragonfly. Nothing to Amy Davis for eleven days. Taylor appeared to have moved on.

One message to Taylor’s current project was transmitted just after eleven the night Amy was murdered. It mentioned a mock interview that Ellie recognized from that night’s episode of
The Daily Show
. If Taylor had been watching television at his apartment in Prospect Heights, it would have been possible for him to get into Manhattan to kill Amy an hour later, but not likely.

Flann gave Ellie a look that said he felt it too. Taylor Gottman was a creep, but he wasn’t their creep.

“What’s her real name?” Ellie asked. “This new woman, Dragonfly. The one you’re e-mailing with.”

“Janet.”

“Janet What?”

“Janet Bobbitt.”

“All right. You’re not going to e-mail her anymore.”

“What?” Taylor quickly lowered his voice to a whisper, avoiding the attention of his coworkers in the mail room. “But you were here about Amy—”

“And we’re going to leave you alone about her.” His worried face was immediately washed in relief. “And in exchange you’re not going to e-mail Janet. And you’re going to stop using FirstDate. As soon as we leave, you’re terminating your account. And I’m going to go back to the precinct and make sure you’ve done it.”

Taylor no longer looked relieved but he wasn’t fighting them either.

“I shouldn’t even help you.”

“You haven’t,” Ellie said firmly.

“But I can. You have to promise not to get mad at me.” Taylor was whispering again.

“Get
mad at you
? What do you think this is, Taylor? Kindergarten?”

“You know what I mean. You can’t yell at me, or arrest me or something.”

“What did you do? We can’t promise not to arrest you if we don’t know what we’re talking about.”

“Nothing illegal. It’s nothing. It’s just — well, I — I followed Amy a few times.”

Ellie sighed and shook her head. “Depending on what we’re talking about, that’s stalking. It’s the same thing that got you those restraining orders.”

“Fine. Arrest me then. I’m trying to help you. For Amy. I followed her and — well, I saw someone else. I saw another man. Twice. First I saw him looking at us when we met for coffee. He was outside. I felt sort of proud, like another man was noticing me with a woman as beautiful as Amy. But then I saw him again, standing under the fire escape at her building.”