Dead Connection by Alafair Burke Read Free Book Online

benevolence. In his entire life, he had known only one truly good human being.
    He clicked on the Message Me button. He liked this particular function, which allowed FirstDate users to chat on the screen in real time. Spontaneous, but anonymous.
    He stroked the keys lightly with his fingertips, mentally composing the text he wanted to send. He allowed himself to type words in the dialogue box: I know you’re not Amy .
    He reread the single sentence, then added another. I know because I strangled the life out of her .
    He let his index finger rest — lightly — on the Enter key, exhilarated by the possibility.
    Sighing, he deleted the letters, one by one, then closed the messaging box. It wasn’t time. Not yet. He’d had enough personal experience with police to know they had procedures to follow, clues to chase down, and mistakes to make before the fun could begin. Between Amy Davis and Caroline Hunter, they had plenty of work to do. And he had another love-starved woman to stalk.

    ELLIE TURNED FIRST to Amy Davis’s work e-mail, reading through all of the messages in her in-box and trash can. The only one related to FirstDate was a solicitation she’d received nearly five weeks earlier, inviting her to enjoy a thirty-day free membership on the service. Amy had left the message in her in-box for a full week before taking FirstDate up on its offer. Ellie shook her head, knowing that if Amy had deleted the message immediately, she would be the one sitting in front of her laptop right now.
    Ellie closed Amy’s museum account and moved into her FirstDate account. She clicked through a random sampling of messages.
    “She didn’t tell anyone on FirstDate her work e-mail address. She used her first name, and it doesn’t look like she told anyone where she lived.” She opened a few more messages. “Even when things moved beyond e-mails to phone calls, she insisted on calling them. She was being pretty safe.”
    “Apparently not safe enough,” McIlroy added dryly.
    “Okay, this should be pretty simple.” She directed McIlroy’s attention to the computer screen. “There’s a feature here called Connections. When you click on it, the FirstDate site takes you to a page that keeps track of all the other users Amy had contact with. Then you can click on each one” — she clicked on one of the photographs on the screen — “and it shows when the last contact was with that connection. And, from there, you can click on E-mails to see all the messages to and from that connection. Since she only contacted the online dates through her FirstDate account, we should be able to find all the old messages here. We can compile a list and go from there. What about the first victim? Caroline Hunter?”
    “I’ve got a huge stack of notes that her mother had in storage. They just arrived this morning.”
    “You called her mother about this already?”
    “I told you — it was slightly more than a hunch. If the same man killed both victims, then working the Caroline Hunter case is a legitimate way to solve ours.”
    “So what’d you find out?”
    “The mom says everyone loved her daughter, she always knew it had to be someone who didn’t know her, that kind of thing. She sent everything, including a list of her profile names and passwords on FirstDate.” He pulled a piece of paper from a file drawer in his desk and placed it in front of Ellie.
    “A list ?” Ellie asked, scanning the names that filled the entire page.
    “Apparently you can be twenty different kinds of women online, and Caroline was trying all of them out as research for her book. Different personalities, different photos, different people. She had so many profiles, she kept them posted on a bulletin board above her desk for reference.”
    “Let’s see if we can even access those accounts now. They’ve probably expired.” Ellie moved through several screens on the Internet. “Okay, see how this works. One of her names was new2ny. If you’re just some