today.”
They’d already brought in Seth Verona, the manager of Vibrations, to look at booking photos and FirstDate profiles, but the clean-cut man who used to visit Tatiana wasn’t among them. They could find no other common connections between Tatiana, Caroline, and Amy. This was supposedly a brainstorming session, but Ellie held her pen against a blank pad of paper. She looked at her watch – eleven o’clock in the morning.
“You using a patch or something?” Flann asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“To quit smoking. You’re not fiddling with your pen today.”
Ellie assured Flann it was a matter of pure willpower, but she knew what was different about today. She had already noticed the newfound steadiness in her hands. She also noticed that she hadn’t craved a cigarette once since her date with Peter. Maybe Jess had been right that she’d been craving something else all this time.
“Nah, it’s something,” Flann pestered. “You’ve got a funny look on your face. Are you sneaking candy bars or something? Maybe an extra little spoonful out of that nasty jar of junk you keep in that box of yours?”
Ellie felt her face begin to flush but was saved by the ring of Flann’s cell.
“McIlroy… You heard correctly. The company’s called FirstDate… Yes, my partner is very pretty.” Flann threw a look to Ellie and smiled. “What’s up, Antoine?…Eighty-sixth and First? All right, we’ll be right there.”
Flann flipped his phone shut. “Grab your coat. We’ve got another body.”
THEY PULLED IN FRONT of the high-rise Yorkville apartment building twenty minutes later. As they made their way to the entrance, Ellie spotted a NY1 van screech to a halt at the curb. She nudged Flann when a man holding a camera climbed from the back.
“How can they know already?”
“A big building like this? Someone tells someone else, and before you know it, they call their friend at the news station. Word spreads. We’ll have a mob up here before long. Quiet time is over. This is about to hit the big leagues.”
Ellie thought she detected a note of excitement in his voice. They waited to speak with the doorman, who was busy helping a well-dressed tenant push a box onto the elevator on the opposite side of the lobby. They could have easily walked right in without notice, but waited anyway.
Ellie used the time to check out three small, black-and-white screens that rested beneath the check-in desk. On the middle screen, she recognized the well-dressed tenant and his package. When the doorman returned, Ellie asked if the security cameras were attached to a recorder, or only used for monitoring.
“We record,” he said. “I don’t know how long but-”
Ellie knew that most apartment buildings, if they sprung at all for recording, only retained a limited duration of footage – twenty-four hours max. “We need whatever you’ve got from the elevator that goes to the thirty-second floor. As soon as you can do it.”
He assured them he’d grab the tape ASAP, then promptly left the lobby unattended and unsecured.
THE BODY in apartment 32M belonged to Megan Quinn. An hour after she should have been at work, writing copy for
It was a printout of an e-mail, sent through FirstDate, to the account of Megan May, from the account of GregUK.
Antoine Williams, the homicide detective from Manhattan North who originally caught the call-out, had heard rumors that Flann was working a case full time that was somehow related to Internet dating. Flann had long ago learned to stop asking how his name and his cases came to be discussed among other detectives. He was grateful Antoine made the connection so quickly.
“I suppose we should call Greg. Nail down his story,” Ellie said. Flann nodded, but they both suspected what they’d find. GregUK would be a decent guy who had nothing to do with any of this, other than unwittingly providing a killer access to a woman he had really hoped to meet.
Flann beelined to a good-looking black man with a short Afro and a groomed goatee, who stood over Megan Quinn’s body. “Antoine Williams, this is Ellie Hatcher. Hatcher, Williams. What have we got?”
Megan wore a gray Lycra tank top and black yoga pants. Tiny red splotches marked her eyes, cheeks, and neck. Bleeding beneath the skin had led to petechial hemorrhaging.
“We’re still waiting on the M.E., but looks like asphyxiation. No bruising or ligature marks on her neck though, so I think we’re talking smothering. We pulled a pillow off the couch with her lipstick and mascara on it. Creepy shit. Looked like a death mask. No doubt we’ll find saliva on it with her DNA.”
“What kind of pillow?” Ellie asked.
“Like the matching one over there.” He pointed to a moss green throw cushion on the upholstered tapestry couch.
Ellie took a closer look at the body. “No scratches. No cuts. No bruises. Only the petechiae. He just covered her face with a pillow and smothered her.”
“I’m sorry,” Williams said, not sounding sorry at all. “I thought that’s what I just said.”
“No, I know that’s what you said. It just strikes me as odd. This is victim number four, but he’s changing his M.O. with each murder. The first woman, Tatiana-”
Williams interrupted, holding his hands up in a capital T. “Mac, I can see you found yourself a suitable partner. If this is about to be a whole big picture kind of conversation, I may as well get on out of your all’s way. All I been doing so far is checking on the crime scene. We good here?”
Flann assured him they were and thanked Williams once again for connecting them so quickly to the case.
Ellie didn’t bother with good-byes. “So Tatiana. She’s an outlier from the other three simply because of the demographics. Shot in the parking lot of Vibrations with a.380 semiautomatic. Two bullets to the back of the head. Caroline Hunter’s a higher-class victim, but same method of killing. Two shots, back of the head, same gun.”
“So far, so good,” Flann said.
“Right. But exactly one year after Caroline, we’ve got Amy Davis. You could say it’s a similar victim profile to Hunter, plus you’ve got the FirstDate connection, but look at the method of killing. No gun. Instead, we had those horrible black bruises all across her neck and face. He strangled her with his bare hands. He crushed her larynx. He literally squeezed the life out of her.”
“So maybe he ditched the gun as a precaution, then decided to try something new when he got the urge to kill.”
Ellie shook off the suggestion. “Uh-uh. This guy plans. He chooses his victim. He stalks. We know he stalks. He gets into their e-mail accounts. And Taylor Gottman says he saw a man watching Amy. He’s not an impulse killer. If shooting is what he likes to do, then he’d get another gun. If we stopped with Amy Davis, I would have said he was seeking a more personal connection with death as he escalated. At first it was enough to pull a trigger and walk away quick, knowing he was powerful, knowing he was the one who ended a life. But then with Davis, he gets closer. He draws it out. It’s more physical. More intimate. He wants to savor the moment and literally feel it pass through his body.”
“But now we’ve got poor Megan here.”
“Exactly. You see my point. He’s past the doorman. He’s in the apartment. He has access. Why so impersonal? Why hide her face beneath a pillow? Why not watch her choke – see her pain? It’s like he’s regressing. He’s taking a step backward, getting more distance after Amy’s murder.”
“Maybe. But this is the first time he’s gone inside a victim’s home, into a big apartment complex. Maybe he was worried about the noise. The pillow covers her mouth. It keeps her from yelling.”
Ellie squinted, trying to picture it, then shook her head. “He’s too meticulous. He watches, he stalks. If it was important for him to touch her, to feel her in his hands, to look into her eyes while she died – he would have figured out a way. But for some reason, with Megan, it didn’t matter.”
Flann didn’t seem to share her concern. “The kill’s quicker this time too. We had exactly a year between Hunter and Davis. Now, not even a week. Maybe he got such a high from Davis, when he did get a hands-on feel for it, that
