completely unaware of his father’s surprised expression as he marched a plastic cow up his resting leg.
“Ask them in. Yes, come in.” He said something quietly in Russian to his son and patted him on the bottom, and the boy ran off happily to another room, clutching his cow to his chest. “I am Zoya’s husband, Vitali. Vitali Rostov. Has something happened?”
“A woman named Caroline Hunter was killed a little over a year ago with the same weapon that was used in your sister’s murder. Earlier this week, another woman was killed. She wasn’t shot, but there are reasons to think her murder might have been connected to Caroline Hunter’s. I’m trying to see how Tatiana’s case might be connected.”
Ellie focused her attention on Zoya, but the woman showed no response. Though the baby had quieted, she continued to stroke her thin hair and deliver soothing little kisses to her forehead.
“The woman this week,” Vitali asked, “is that the museum worker that was in the paper?”
“Yes. Her name was Amy Davis. Does that name sound familiar?”
“Not to me.”
“Or Caroline Hunter?”
The man shook his head, and Ellie looked again at Zoya. It took the woman a moment to realize the room was waiting for her. She shook her head. “No. I did not know my sister’s friends. Tatiana led her own life, separate from ours.”
“Do you know if she was dating someone? A boyfriend, maybe, or even something more casual?”
Vitali let out an exasperated laugh, and Zoya threw him a disapproving glance. “I am sorry, Zoya, but your sister – let’s just say that for Tatiana it was always, as you say, casual. She had her fair share of male companionship, but nothing we wanted to know about.”
“What he means to say, Detective, is that my sister, when she was alive, was a prostitute. She was a drug addict and she was a prostitute. She did one to serve the other, and so it was.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Ellie offered. “I’m sure it’s hard to be reminded of all this again. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t important.”
Zoya bowed her head slightly. Ellie remembered in the earliest years of the College Hill Strangler investigation how her father dreaded having to re-question the victims’ families. He said he felt like he was literally tearing off the scabs that had finally started to heal over the wounds of the people left behind to mourn. As time passed, her father stopped talking to the families altogether, unless they contacted him. Nothing he turned up ever seemed important enough to justify picking at those old sores again. But the ballistics match to the Hunter case showed a connection of some kind to Tatiana. Ellie just had to find it.
“The connection between the two other women has to do with a computerized dating company. Do you know if she used a service like that? It’s called FirstDate.”
The Rostovs both shook their heads silently.
“Did she own a computer? Or have access to one?”
“Tatiana could barely afford to feed herself,” Vitali said. “We gave her money here and there, but not enough for a computer. Even if she had that kind of money, that is not what she would have used it for.”
Ellie asked a few more questions about possible connections to Caroline Hunter’s graduate school, the Museum of Modern Art, and the neighborhoods the women traveled in, but the questions only served to show how different Tatiana’s life had been from the others’. The point wasn’t lost on the Rostovs.
“These women,” Vitali said. “They do not sound anything like Zoya’s sister. Obviously, you are the police. But guns get lost, you know. Guns get stolen and sold. Maybe Tatiana has nothing to do with any of this, in which case there is nothing we can do to help you.”
The unspoken message was clear.
“If it makes any difference, Mrs. Rostov, from what I’ve been able to gather so far, it sounds like your sister was working hard to get her life together. She was reliable at her job, and she was getting away from those activities you referred to before. That’s what I’ve heard anyway.”
Zoya’s big eyes pooled and for just a moment she looked serene as if she were remembering some earlier time with her sister. Then the pools gave way to tears, and she tucked her face into her baby’s neck.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She continued to apologize as she carried the child to the back of the apartment.
Ellie didn’t know what to say once she and Ed were alone with Vitali. “She’ll be fine,” he said, waving off the concerned look on Ellie’s face. “She will cry, and then she will go back to how she was this morning. Do not worry.”
Ellie asked him once again to call if they thought of anything new, or if she could help them in any way. “I don’t think that will happen, Detective. It was a long time ago now, and Zoya has accepted that we will probably never know who did this to Tatiana. But, yes, we will keep the number.”
Ellie paused in the hallway after the door closed behind them. Seconds later, she heard the Rostovs speaking in Russian. Even in another language, she could tell the conversation was tense. Urgent. Angry.
“What do you think that’s about?” Ellie whispered.
“Whatever they were probably fighting about before we showed up,” he said, leading the way down the staircase. “So what do you think?”
“I’m not sure what I was hoping for. A connection to FirstDate, I guess. I don’t know – maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree. Like he said, guns change hands. A trick gone bad could have shot Tatiana then sold the gun. Or he panicked and dumped it along the West Side Highway, and someone else picked it up and used it later on Hunter. I feel like I’m swimming in goop on this one.”
“That’s the technical evidentiary term for it, all right. Goop.”
“What’d you think of them?” she asked, gesturing up toward the Rostovs’ apartment. “Were they like that before? Right after it happened?”
“Like what?”
“They seemed – I don’t know – distant, or something. Cold? Disinterested? I mean, they didn’t ask anything about the other women, who they were, what they might have to do with Tatiana. They didn’t seem to care one way or another whether we ever solved the case.”
Becker seemed to take it in stride. “You see it all the time in murder cases. By the time you deliver the news, their family’s written them off as dead a long time ago.”
“But the sister. She was obviously upset. She just didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with me.”
“Don’t knock yourself over it. Some people, their emotions take them places they don’t want to go. Who knows? Maybe she’ll think more about what you said, about Tatiana getting better and everything. Maybe she’ll start caring again and you’ll hear from her.”
“Maybe.”
“Hey, where you going next? Let me give you a lift.”
“Just to the subway would be great.”
“You kidding me? You’re gonna ride the train with the rest of the citizens when you can get door-to-door service? What kind of a lady are you?”
Ellie hesitated, reluctant to impose.
“You’ll be doing me a favor. I can tell myself I was helpful, go back to the peaceful life of a retiree, and forget all about this case.”
Ellie laughed. “All right. But only since I’m helping you out. I’m going back to Manhattan. Thirty-eighth and Park.”
“Your carriage awaits, madam.”
ONCE BECKER HAD wound his way through the narrow side streets onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he got the conversation rolling. “So does McIlroy still do that thing where he answers you with a rhetorical question?”
“Does Tara Reid drink beer?”
Becker smiled even though she suspected he’d never heard of Tara Reid. “That’s a damn annoying habit. The man can’t just give you a simple ‘yes,’ you know what I mean? So other than that, how’s Flann doing?”
Ellie heard the discomfort in her own voice when she said he was fine.
