“Do you remember if she had family? Someone who might know if she was using FirstDate?”
“Now that I can’t remember. But the vic didn’t seem close to anyone, so we were pretty sure it wasn’t a domestic. We worked the club angle. It’s not in the file?”
“No sir.”
Becker shook his head. “I was out of it back then, but I thought I left behind my notebooks all right.”
“I’ll look again,” Ellie offered.
“Yeah, okay.”
“You a full-time retiree now, Ed?” Flann’s tone was cordial enough, but the question struck Ellie as odd.
“Oh yeah,” Becker said. “I’m not one of those second career guys. You never know how much time you got, right?”
“That’s the way to do it,” Flann said.
“Well, like I said, call if I can help. I got a pretty good memory, at least for the stuff that seemed to matter.”
MCILROY WAS QUIET during the ride back to the city.
“You okay, Flann?” Ellie asked.
The question bounced right off of him. “That was a really nice house. Brick. Nice block. Good shape inside. How much you think that goes for in this market?”
“I’m too impoverished to bother browsing the real estate section. Why?”
“Just seems like an awfully nice house for a retired cop without a second income.”
“He did say he got a retirement package. Maybe the union got him something extra because of his partner.”
Flann’s lips remained pursed in a straight line, his blond eyebrows furrowed. He kept his eyes on the traffic, both hands firmly gripping the wheel. By the time they hit the Hudson, Ellie was fed up. She was grateful for a murder assignment, but McIlroy’s tight lips were getting ridiculous. He was her partner, at least temporarily, and she believed that meant something. They should at least get to know each other.
“You never mentioned you had a daughter.”
McIlroy sighed loudly. “No, I didn’t. I’m sure glad lazy old Becker did.”
“I’m sure he was trying to be nice.”
“He was trying to get under my skin.”
“Odd way to get under someone’s skin.”
McIlroy sighed again. “I don’t get to see her much. We were never married, her mother and I. Becker knows all that, and he asks about her anyway.”
“That must be rough.”
“All these single moms out there trying to get a daddy involved in the picture, and this one prefers I walk away. She thinks one way to do that is to make it hard for me to see my kid.”
“What’s her name?”
“Miranda. Oh, you meant my daughter. Stephanie. Stephanie Hart, not McIlroy. She’s thirteen. Thirteen-year-old girls need their fathers, you know?”
Ellie nodded. “I was fourteen when my father was killed. He wasn’t even fifty yet.” If McIlroy was going to open up to her, it was only fair that she did the same.
“I know some of the details already,” Flann said. “I read about you last year.”
“I assumed that had something to do with the special request. It’s not true, most of what they said. I didn’t always know I wanted to be a cop, and my father didn’t start training me when I was five. Quite the opposite in fact. He always pushed my brother in that direction, but me, he humored. If he’d been around when I finally decided to take the leap, he would have tried to stop me.”
“Fathers can be protective that way.”
“You’ve probably figured out by now I’m not the high-tech bill of goods they were selling.”
He nodded. “They wanted to use your story to talk about the next generation of law enforcement, which they’d like to think is all about the high-tech solutions they see on CSI. I’ve learned over the years not to trust the media’s spin. In fact, I’ve learned to use it to mutual advantage.”
Ellie thought about that. Mutual advantage. That’s precisely what she had tried to do with all those interviews and profiles she’d agreed to last year. “Hope I didn’t disappoint.”
“Not at all. Your supposed expertise in modern crime fighting wasn’t the reason I called you.”
Ellie did not interrupt the silence that followed.
“You work homicide as long as I do and have nothing else going for you but the job, it can be hard sometimes to hold it together. To keep waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night – I don’t want to sound morose, but even though I rarely see her, my daughter’s the closest thing I’ve got to someone who cares whether or not I come home each night.”
“Flann-”
He held up a hand and shook his head. “That’s just the way it is. When you described to that reporter how haunted you’ve felt all of these years – even about the suggestion that your father might have left you by his own hand – well, I remembered the story. I needed a damn good cop who’d be open-minded enough to follow this one through. You seemed to fit the ticket.”
“I’m glad you asked for me.”
“And I’m glad you let me tell you why.”
14
CHARLIE DIXON WATCHED THE DETECTIVES PULL INTO A PARKING spot in front of the Thirteenth Precinct. The female detective waved to McIlroy as he hopped out of the car and walked into the precinct. The woman then climbed behind the wheel and restarted the engine. She took Twenty-first Street west to Park Avenue, then turned left to go south.
Once she cleared the corner, Charlie pulled into traffic. Trailing people in the city was easy. The streets carried too many cars for one to stand out. In any event, his light blue Chevy Impala made for ideal urban camouflage. He’d followed the detectives all the way to Westchester and back without a hitch.
Traffic was heavy, so it was easy to stay a few cars back. He tried to tune out the sounds of trucks, rattling buses, and honking horns as he followed her down Broadway, past City Hall Park. It was time for midday deliveries. Double-parking was high, and so were tensions. His head was starting to throb, and he could swear that the burning in his stomach was back.
Two blocks short of Battery Park, the detective stopped in a loading zone and threw something on the dash, undoubtedly a police parking permit. Charlie allowed himself to get locked in behind a UPS truck in the middle of a delivery. Watching her on foot would be trickier.
Fortunately, she didn’t stray far. She dashed across the intersection at a catty-corner, glancing up at the sign above a Vietnamese restaurant before entering. Charlie wasn’t sure what to do now. For all he knew, she was meeting a girlfriend for lunch. Maybe McIlroy was the one doing the legwork, while he was spinning his wheels watching the girl just because she left the precinct first.
It had been just over twenty-four hours since he learned that the NYPD was asking Stern for the personal information of FirstDate users. Two women were dead, and a Detective McIlroy seemed to be working a serial killer theory. Apparently Mark Stern was convinced that the theory was nonsense. According to Dixon’s source at the company – a nice-enough guy with a nasty penchant for recreational coke – Stern even sounded slightly smug about the coincidence. From the singleminded perspective of a successful entrepreneur, two murder victims tied to his company in a twelve-month period demonstrated just how ubiquitous the service had become among New Yorkers.
Nevertheless, Stern was firmly committed against handing over private information to the police. The promise of anonymity, he emphasized, was FirstDate’s most valuable asset. He circled the wagons and made sure that his employees understood that any inquiries about the matter should go directly to him.
In the end, it was Dixon who helped get the cops off Stern’s back. A few discreet calls revealed McIlroy was known as a loose cannon, a detective who conjured up wild fantasies out of imaginary evidence. His nickname was McIl-Mulder, for Christ’s sake. The higher-ups were letting him run amok on this theory to reward him for getting lucky on an earlier case. Once this indulgence ran its course, his star would fall.