Dead at First Sight

30 Tuesday 2 October

Matthew Sorokin sat in his uniform in the tiny office he had been allocated in the single-storey building occupied by the Sheriff’s Department of the Hernando County Police. He sneezed, feeling another cold coming on. The air con was freezing his nuts off, the one thing he did not like about Florida. Outside it was often hot and humid as hell while inside it was an icebox. He seemed to be permanently either sweating or shivering, and sometimes, like now, both.

He was leafing through the album of crime scene photographs of another cold case he had been allocated. Back in 1998, Dara Lamont, a beautiful socialite, lay in the hallway of a mansion on a gated estate in nearby Naples, most of her head blasted away by a shotgun. It had initially looked to the cops like a burglary gone wrong, but that had soon changed.

Her husband, Arron, then thirty-four, had been in the process of filing for divorce, and having uncovered a string of his infidelities, his wife was after him for every penny she could get. His real estate company had taken a nosedive after a large, unwise investment, and from being worth millions, was struggling to survive. On the night Dara had died, Arron had a cast-iron alibi. He was 1,283 miles away in New York, having dinner with his then mistress, now his wife, who had stood by her story, and he had the restaurant receipt as further evidence.

But Sorokin had discovered something significant. AT&T never destroyed their phone records. Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone in 1879, established the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885. It had a monopoly on the US telephone service until 1982. As a matter of policy, they kept all phone records for twenty years and then archived them. But when Homeland Security was established in the aftermath of 9/11, a request was made to all US phone providers to retain call records indefinitely.

Sorokin had managed to obtain the complete call log from Arron Lamont’s mobile phone from 1998. The calls put him in Florida, at the family home, at the exact time of his wife’s murder. The Sheriff’s task now, in order not to be shot down by a defence brief, was to try to establish that the husband had the phone in his possession at that exact time. That was a tough one. A real challenge.

Sorokin was grateful for it. For taking his mind off the nightmare of the past week.

The waking nightmare that had become his new normality. His life.

His phone rang.

‘Deputy Sheriff Sorokin,’ he answered.

‘Very grand. Does Deputy Sheriff Sorokin have time to talk to an old buddy?’

‘Gerry!’ he said.

‘How you doing?’

‘I’d like to say great, Gerry! I’d like to say it’s good to hear from you, but right now, if I saw you, I’d happily plug you.’

‘Hey, whoahhh! Wind back, pal!’

‘Gerry, there isn’t any winding back.’

‘Buddy, what’s the problem?’

‘That dating agency you put me on to?’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘It just cost me a packet, OK? Ninety thousand bucks.’

‘Holy shit. That’s why I was calling you, to see how it was going. Say you’re joking?’

‘I’m not joking.’

‘I was calling to warn you. I’ve got another pal I put on to online dating — a guy in England, he got stiffed for an insane amount of money. I met Karen, my wife, online. Thought I’d do you guys a favour. But it seems it’s been hijacked by total shitbags since. Ninety thousand bucks? What do you mean, ninety thousand bucks?’

‘I mean, Gerry, ninety thousand bucks.’

‘How in God’s name did you part with that kind of dough?’

‘Probably the same way your pal in England got suckered. I thought she was for real — her name was Evelyne Desota. A babe. We got on so well, and I felt — you know — I really cared for her and trusted her. She had a whole load of issues, with a nightmare of a husband and family — so I thought. I don’t know what to believe any more — I don’t think I believe any of it. I was just spun a load of total baloney.’

‘Pretty convincing baloney,’ Gerry said.

‘I’ve lost all my fun money. Every extra dime I worked for is gone.’

‘Any chance you can recover any of it?’

‘You sitting near a window, Gerry?’

‘Near a window? Sure, right by a window.’

‘Can you see the sky?’

‘Uh-huh. Got a clear view.’

‘See any pigs flying past?’