Taylor nodded slowly. For the first time since he’d seen the picture, he looked genuinely sad. “So completely different. She was smart and funny and confident. Did you know she graduated in the top ten percent of her class at Colby? Then she had a fellowship in Washington, D.C., with the National Endowment for the Arts. She sat on the board of a nonprofit here in New York that took poor kids to Broadway shows. She knew a ton about art. She was good to her friends.”
It was an odd way of describing the dead. More like the rundown of a résumé than a personal account of the woman. And they had already determined that Amy didn’t have many friends in the city – just girlfriends from college who’d moved on to motherly lives in the suburbs.
“You know. She was the kind of girl who organized her five-year college reunion. And she’d been a bridesmaid a few times. You could see by the way her friends smiled around her that she had a real impact on them.”
It all clicked for Ellie as she listened to Taylor reminisce. “How do you know these things about her?”
“What?”
“How do you know she did all of these things, Taylor? And when did you see her with her friends if you only went out once for coffee, just the two of you?”
He was silent, staring at the table in front of him.
“You researched her. You snuck around and learned those things about her on your own. She never told you any of it. She didn’t even know you. How’d you do it? Follow her? Talk to her friends?” Ellie knew the answer but wanted to hear it from Taylor.
He was shaking his head. “It wasn’t like that. Not at all. All I did was Google her.”
“And you didn’t think that invaded her privacy?”
His brow furrowed and he looked up at Ellie. “Googling someone? You mean to tell me that you wouldn’t pop in the name of a new boyfriend on the Internet? Everyone does it.”
“How did you even know her last name?”
Silence again. Ellie stared at him until he answered. “I didn’t. But I knew she went to Colby and worked at MoMA. That was enough. Google’s amazing.”
“You did all this work to learn about a woman who didn’t want to know you. And now she’s dead, Taylor.”
“I didn’t do it. When was it? You said Friday night. What time?”
Ellie looked to Flann. “Around midnight.”
Taylor’s knee jiggled under the table.
“Let me guess,” Ellie said. “Sitting alone at home watching TV.”
“In my bed, sleeping. Alone.”
“On a Friday night?” Flann asked.
“Yeah.” He seemed to realize it sounded pathetic. “Look, I’m not perfect. I’m – how’d you say it – I don’t like letting go. But I was totally over Amy. I promise. I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t see me again, but – well, there’s someone else now.”
“A girlfriend?”
More knee jiggling. “You know, someone else I’m paying more attention to.”
Ellie realized what he was telling them. His obsession – his myopic focus on one particular woman who didn’t return his affections – was homed in on a new target.
“Who is she?”
“From FirstDate. I can log on to my account if you want. You can see all the messages.”
They followed Taylor back to the mail room and asked the behemoth of a supervisor for some privacy at his computer terminal. “We need to get some information off his cell phone account,” Ellie explained.
Taylor logged on to the FirstDate Web site and pulled up a list of messages he had sent. Forty-five in the last five days alone, most of them to a woman calling herself Dragonfly. Nothing to Amy Davis for eleven days. Taylor appeared to have moved on.
One message to Taylor’s current project was transmitted just after eleven the night Amy was murdered. It mentioned a mock interview that Ellie recognized from that night’s episode of The Daily Show. If Taylor had been watching television at his apartment in Prospect Heights, it would have been possible for him to get into Manhattan to kill Amy an hour later, but not likely.
Flann gave Ellie a look that said he felt it too. Taylor Gottman was a creep, but he wasn’t their creep.
“What’s her real name?” Ellie asked. “This new woman, Dragonfly. The one you’re e-mailing with.”
“Janet.”
“Janet What?”
“Janet Bobbitt.”
“All right. You’re not going to e-mail her anymore.”
“What?” Taylor quickly lowered his voice to a whisper, avoiding the attention of his coworkers in the mail room. “But you were here about Amy-”
“And we’re going to leave you alone about her.” His worried face was immediately washed in relief. “And in exchange you’re not going to e-mail Janet. And you’re going to stop using FirstDate. As soon as we leave, you’re terminating your account. And I’m going to go back to the precinct and make sure you’ve done it.”
Taylor no longer looked relieved but he wasn’t fighting them either.
“I shouldn’t even help you.”
“You haven’t,” Ellie said firmly.
“But I can. You have to promise not to get mad at me.” Taylor was whispering again.
“Get mad at you? What do you think this is, Taylor? Kindergarten?”
“You know what I mean. You can’t yell at me, or arrest me or something.”
“What did you do? We can’t promise not to arrest you if we don’t know what we’re talking about.”
“Nothing illegal. It’s nothing. It’s just – well, I – I followed Amy a few times.”
Ellie sighed and shook her head. “Depending on what we’re talking about, that’s stalking. It’s the same thing that got you those restraining orders.”
“Fine. Arrest me then. I’m trying to help you. For Amy. I followed her and – well, I saw someone else. I saw another man. Twice. First I saw him looking at us when we met for coffee. He was outside. I felt sort of proud, like another man was noticing me with a woman as beautiful as Amy. But then I saw him again, standing under the fire escape at her building.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. About two weeks ago, not long after our date. I even tried to e-mail Amy about it, but she had blocked me. Look – I can show you.”
He turned to the computer and pulled up a message sent to MoMAgirl eleven days earlier. Amy, I know you’re not interested in seeing me, and I know this will sound really weird. I was in your neighborhood visiting a friend and noticed a man in the alley by your building. DON’T FREAK OUT. I only know you live there because I happened to see you walk in once. Anyway, I think I saw the same guy watching us at the coffee shop. I know it sounds crazy, but please be careful. I promise not to contact you again.
It was indeed the last message he’d sent her, and it had been bounced back to him with a notification that he’d been blocked from the user’s FirstDate account.
A man beneath Amy’s fire escape, in the same alley where her body was found. “What did the guy look like? The one you saw in the alley.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. Tall, I guess. Not big, though. He was all bundled up in the cold. I think I’d recognize him if I saw him again.”
Ellie tried having Taylor look at Amy’s connections on FirstDate in the hope of jogging a memory loose, but it was no use.
“I should have done more,” Taylor said. “I could have called her or something.”
Ellie took a final look at Taylor Gottman, slumped at his boss’s computer, staring at the messages supposedly sent by a successful advertising executive.
“It wouldn’t have made a difference, Taylor. She wouldn’t have believed you.”
18
SPECIAL AGENT CHARLIE DIXON STARED OUT AT THE HUDSON River, but saw something else altogether. He saw the smiling face of Tatiana Chekova framed by long, loose, honey brown curls, blown by the winds that rushed over the Hudson River on an unseasonably warm spring afternoon almost two years ago.