“So that leaves somebody connected to whoever wanted to silence Tatiana. Maybe he kills her to shut her up, gets off on it, and then continues to use FirstDate to find more victims and to develop his Enoch persona?” Flann immediately saw the flaw in his own theory. “But if he’s on a learning curve and using FirstDate to play, how do we explain him luring Amy Davis onto the site?”
“I know,” Ellie said. “None of it adds up. But we’ve got to track down this Tatiana angle. We don’t have any other leads.”
“The doorman at Megan Quinn’s building said the man who delivered the flowers didn’t have an accent of any kind, so my guess is he’s not a Russian.”
“And Peter Morse said the guy who called him had a southern accent. Maybe the Latino doorman couldn’t tell the difference between a southern accent and a plain old generic white boy? We’re looking for a man with a southern accent, connections to Russian criminals, and a fixation on an obscure religious text? Piece of cake.”
Ellie reached across Flann’s desk for the bakery box and caught a glance at Caroline Hunter’s open notebook. Flann had marked a single page with a neon orange Post-it note.
“What’s this?” she asked, turning the notebook toward her.
“See for yourself.” In the margin next to the orange sticky was a handwritten notation: MC Becker.
Ellie recognized the scrawl. When she’d first read the police reports on Tatiana Chekova’s murder, she knew she’d recently come across the name Becker. What she hadn’t realized at the time was that she’d seen the name among the miscellaneous doodles of Caroline Hunter’s research notes.
“It’s my old buddy from Scarsdale,” Flann said.
Ellie wasn’t surprised that Flann would jump to conclusions when it came to Ed Becker. “You don’t know that, Flann.”
“He’s been in front of us the entire time. He caught Tatiana’s murder. Now his name’s in Caroline Hunter’s notebook. And accents are easy to fake.”
“It’s a common last name.” Ellie took another look at the note. “And the way it’s written there, it might even say McBecker. It’s hard to tell.”
“Looks more like MC Becker to me. According to Dixon, Tatiana said the men she knew had NYPD cops on the take, and I know first-hand that Becker’s got that kind of thing in his background. MC could’ve been shorthand for a meeting place.”
“Or maybe it’s his son’s initials? Becker said his son met his fiancée online. Or it may be totally unrelated. I could call him. Ask him about it.”
“He’ll say it’s a coincidence, and then what? No, we’ve got to look into Becker without him knowing.”
Ellie hated the idea that the man who wrote that letter, the man who killed these women, could have given her a ride home. She didn’t want to believe that her instincts could be so wrong. But no matter how she shaped the ideas in her mind, she couldn’t shake Flann’s reasoning. Flann might be jumping to conclusions, but the possibility had to be pursued, especially when she considered Charlie Dixon’s other troubling comment. “Dixon said that Becker was slacking on Tatiana’s murder case from the very beginning, before his partner was killed. Apparently they were working their other cases just fine.”
“That doesn’t jibe with what Becker told us.”
“I know, and it does a lot to explain that train wreck of a murder notebook he left behind. It bothers me.”
“One of us needs to look at Becker’s old files for comparison. See if he really did bury Tatiana’s case.”
“I’ll do it,” Ellie offered.
Flann shook his head. “You won’t know what to look for. This is your first homicide case.”
“Fine. You do it. But promise me you’ll run anything by me before you whisk off and arrest him or something, okay?”
“Aye, aye.”
“I’ll go out to Brooklyn to talk to Tatiana’s sister again. See if she knows anything about the deal with the FBI. If there’s time on the way back, I might stop by MDC to see Lev Grosha.”
On the way out of the precinct, Ellie used her telephone to send the digital photograph of Charlie Dixon to Jess’s e-mail account. She followed up with a text message: “See if anyone at Vibrations knows him. Start with the manager. C U 2nite.”
31
IN THE NARROW, WHITE-TILE HALLWAY THAT LED TO ZOYA Rostov’s apartment, Ellie recognized the familiar baby’s cry and toddlerlike squeals of happiness she’d heard on her first visit to Tatiana’s sister. She wondered if perhaps children were born with fixed temperaments, one sibling content and playful while the other fussed stoically. But when Zoya opened the apartment door and Ellie glimpsed the young faces of the baby and the boy, she realized how inchoate their identities were; their current emotional states fleeting – just momentary phases in a child’s development of days, weeks, and years. These two little lives had so much more to experience before anyone could guess what their future adult selves might become.
Zoya invited Ellie in, then locked the door behind her, securing the chain in place.
“Your husband isn’t here?” Ellie asked.
“Vitya is working.”
“What does your husband do for a living?”
“He is a security guard at a storage warehouse. He usually is on night shift, but lately he has overtime to work.”
“Staying home with both of the kids all those hours has to be hard,” Ellie offered.
“I never see my children as work. Other people’s children – that was work. In Russia, I was a schoolteacher. The children, they were good, nice children. But every day, I thought, how much work it is to take care of all of these children in one little room. Keeping them from hurting themselves, getting them to behave – that was all work, let alone trying to teach them anything. Now that I have my own? I cannot imagine anyone else thinking of them as work.”
“Did you ever think of being a teacher here in the United States?”
Zoya nodded. “Of course. At first. But I found nothing. Not even teaching Russian. Too many licenses and requirements. I looked for other work. Some girls, they learn how to style hair or become house servants. I was offered a job at a massage parlor, but I could see from one visit what went on there. I made the mistake of telling Tatiana about it. And now here we are.”
“What do you mean by that? Here we are.”
“I got lucky. I marry a good man, a good father. I have children and am happy. Tatiana, she worked at massages and never got lucky like I was. Now she is dead. She never even got to meet her little niece. Her name is Tanya,” she said, jiggling the calmed baby toward Ellie. “It is like a nickname of Tatiana in Russian.”
“That’s really nice, both the name and the sentiment.”
“Vitya, he fought me on it. He made jokes that he did not want our daughter to turn out like Tatiana. But I told him this is what I wanted, and that was the end of it.”
Ellie noted the sound of pride in Zoya’s voice and decided it was well deserved as she pictured this tiny waif of a woman standing up on behalf of her sister’s good name.
“You probably figured out by now that I came back to talk to you about Tatiana.”
Zoya nodded.
“Did you know that she was an informant for the FBI?” Zoya’s eyes widened, and Ellie pulled out the booking photograph of Lev Grosha that she’d received from Charlie Dixon. “Do you recognize this man? His name is Lev Grosha. He’s in prison based in part on information that Tatiana gave to the FBI.”
Zoya held the picture and stared at it blankly.
“I take it you had no idea how serious her legal problems had gotten.”
“This man is in prison because of Tatiana?”