Ellie smiled, then found herself typing a response. Peter, Thanks for the note. About that mental digression of yours, I hope I was good. Manqué? 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 Your message has been sent to Unpublished.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 accountability if someone gets caught being a dog.”
“This dog from work – he doesn’t happen to be Mark Stern?”
Jason laughed. “Mark? No, definitely not. Very happily married.”
“So it’s not just a marketing image? I thought maybe he hired someone to pose for that perfect wedding picture on his desk.”
“You’re a very cynical woman, so I’m sorry to disappoint you. He’s actually as happy as he appears to be.”
“Just not fair,” Ellie said dryly.
Knuckles rapped against the office door frame.
“Hi. Flann McIlroy.” Ellie noticed that her partner was carrying a pair of brown sheepskin gloves and a laptop that looked a lot like Amy Davis’s. He laid the gloves on Jason’s desk and shifted the computer into his left hand as he offered Jason the other. “The woman upstairs said it was all right to come down.”
“The more the merrier,” Jason said, making room to roll a stool from the hallway into his small office.
“Did you get what you wanted downtown?” Ellie asked. She was eager to know what Flann had learned from Mark Stern. If Tatiana also had an account, they’d have a stronger argument for getting a court order giving them access to FirstDate’s records, and they wouldn’t even need Jason Upton.
“I got an answer to the question, but it wasn’t the one we wanted.” Flann did his best to make it sound innocuous, but Ellie could tell he was disappointed. So was she. Chekova was killed by the same gun as Caroline Hunter but wasn’t using FirstDate. Maybe they were hurtling down an entirely wrong track.
“I WAS JUST about to ask Jason why he left the company,” Ellie said.
“For all of this,” Jason said, holding his arms out wide. “Money, prestige, power.”