Dead Connection

a message from Mr. Right. He was the one she thought of as dirty birdy, who’d used such subtle sexual innuendo with Amy Davis. He was nice enough to leave a phone number. She also had a message from Taylor, the one she’d mentally dubbed as stalker-guy. He was interested in meeting for a drink. Still no word from bachelor number three, Enoch.

She pulled up the message from Taylor, hit Reply, and typed, Taylor, How about a phone call first? Give me a number where I can call you?” Twenty seconds later, she received a message from Taylor with a telephone number, complete with the desperate comment that he had plenty of free minutes on his new CellularOne plan. That was the nice thing about stalkers. They were good about returning messages.

Then she found herself reading another message, this one from one of the “keepers” to whom Jess had sent a flirt on her behalf. Hey. It’s pretty funny they call hitting a little button on their Web page flirting . Doesn’t flirting usually involve lingering glances across a crowded room, a gentle graze of the forearm after a subtle joke, deliberately placed lips on a wine glass… Whoops, sorry, got a little carried away there. Wow, is it hot in here? Anyway, thanks for flirting with me. If you get a chance, tell me a little bit about yourself. How’s this for an ice-breaker? My name’s Peter. Hey, don’t laugh. My name really is Peter. Seriously.

The message was enough to make Ellie laugh – twice – so she clicked on Peter’s profile, amazed that she was even remotely curious about a man her brother had selected. She read the brief introduction he’d written about himself. It’s official. I’m a hypocrite. I shake my angry fist at the publishing industry that fails to recognize my manuscripts as the future classics of American fiction, and yet I have no idea what to say about myself in this little box. I have a salaried writing job by day but dream of making it to the walls of Chumley’s. I guess that makes me a writer manque. I consider my self a non-British, much better-looking version of Nick Hornby, so prepare yourself for endless conversations involving randomly inserted allusions to culturally significant popular icons such as the Clash, the Simpsons, John Waters, so-bad-it’s-good reality TV, and on and on till the break of dawn. Sounds fun, right?

Ellie smiled, then found herself typing a response. Peter, Thanks for the note. About that mental digression of yours, I hope I was good. Manque? I looked up that fancy SAT word in the dictionary and it sounds a little bit like a wannabe. You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. She paused, knowing that she should say at least something about herself. I’m not a writer but I do like to read. I overheard a woman in a bookstore the other day tell her friend she really loved books, “but not the reading kind.” Besides reading and eaves- dropping on strangers in stores, I like kickboxing and watching my brother’s band play. Wow. That made me sound really butch and boring. Hopefully I’m neither. If I had to pick one, though, I guess I’d go with the former.

Ellie paused again. You need to sign an e-mail, don’t you? She typed DB990, then erased it. Ally. Close enough. She hit send. Your message has been sent to Unpublished. Too late to back out now.

She checked her watch. Jason Upton was expecting her in forty minutes. She’d have to wait to learn more about Peter, but she had just enough time to do a little research into the men who called themselves Taylor and Mr. Right.

16

ELLIE WAITED FOR JASON UPTON ON A SQUAT, SHINY BLACK leather sofa in the Midtown lobby of the law firm of Larkin, Baker & Howry. She took in a Jasper Johns silkscreen on the wall across from her as she sipped a coffee fetched for her by the receptionist.

“Detective Hatcher? I’m Jason Upton.”

The man who offered his hand did not fit the stereotype of a computer geek or tech-head. He was probably in his midthirties and dressed fashionably in a pair of loose khaki pants and a striped open-collar shirt. His frame was full but fit. His dark hair managed to be simultaneously neat but tousled. His accent was northeastern and uniquely moneyed.

“Thanks for making time for me. My partner should be here shortly, but we can start without him.”

Jason asked the receptionist to bring McIlroy to them when he arrived, and then led the way to a more modest office two floors down.

“Big change in scenery,” she commented.

“Welcome to the fifty-seventh floor, land of word processing, printing, and I.T. No clients means no interior decorators. Just cubicles, copy machines, and lots of computers. I’m lucky to have walls.”

“I think I prefer the art in here,” Ellie said, gesturing to a framed poster from Pulp Fiction as she took a seat in Jason’s sole guest chair. She got straight to the point, first covering the possible link between two murder victims and FirstDate, then moving on to the effort to determine the true identities behind all of the user names. “We started an account ourselves and are trying to get ID’s on a few of the men by contacting them directly, but it would be a lot easier if someone with access to the company’s computers would just hand over the names.”

“The police department has an online dating profile?” he asked, laughing.

“I meant more like a royal we, as in me.”

“Usually I have this spiel I give my female friends before they try the online dating thing, but I assume this is strictly for investigative purposes?”

“All business, I’m afraid.” A thought of Peter the wannabe writer flashed through her mind. “Go ahead and give me the spiel anyway.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t have worked to start the company if I didn’t think it could serve a good purpose. Love’s a beautiful thing, right? Mark and I really believed that the Internet held the potential to transform the way a couple interacts when they first ‘meet,’ so to speak. People open up on e-mail in a more honest way than when they’re face-to-face with someone they’re trying to impress. Then, by the time you see each other in person, there’s already a connection there. A bad outfit, or the beginning of baldness, or a few extra pounds – those physical imperfections that might have been deal killers if you met in a bar – they become something you get past.”

“You make it sound so-” Ellie wanted to say sickening but instead she opted for “pure.”

“Well, those upsides were what we had in mind when we started. But we also knew there could be downsides. We did our best to warn customers up front so they could be smart, but, frankly, not everyone’s so smart.”

“I see a lot of that in my job.”

“So you can imagine what I’m talking about. People handed over their real names and phone numbers to total strangers. They met for first dates at their homes. One guy said he lived in Arizona and needed money to move up to New York to pursue the relationship. Of course, he lived in Hoboken and gave the same story to twenty different women. Really stupid stuff. I left when our customer base was relatively small, but we were already getting a ton of complaints about unwanted e-mails, phone calls, whatever.”

Ellie was reminded of Amy Davis’s problems with Taylor, the man who couldn’t take no for an answer. “That’s why you’ve got that Block function, right?”

“We programmed that in after the first few weeks online. We had that many problems. It’s a quick fix, but only for customers who are smart enough to stay anonymous – no names, phone numbers, any of that.”

“And not everyone’s smart.”

“Exactly. Then of course you’ve got all the same problems you have out there with good old-fashioned dating. One guy I worked with was juggling five different women in any given week. Each of them thought their boyfriend was working so hard he could only see them once a week on date night. Now, in the old-fashioned world, a guy like that would eventually get caught juggling women in his building, or from work, or who were friends of friends – the girls might put the pieces together. And if he did get caught, there’d be the embarrassment factor if he had to keep running into them. But FirstDate introduces people who share absolutely no preexisting links. As a result, there’s no