Dead Connection by Alafair Burke

I was sending flirts to people. I finally had to stop because it was feeling a little gay. But, trust me, I picked way better guys than the ones you flirted with.”
    “Jess. I picked those men because they seemed like people who might be homicidal maniacs, not because I thought they were dreamy.”
    “Sorry. My bad.”
    When Jess continued to insist that there might be a personal upside to Ellie’s research, she finally fessed up that her curiosity was piqued. She showed him the profile for Chef4U, the thirty-eight-year-old Upper East Sider she first noticed in Caroline Hunter’s FirstDate account. He had sandy blond, wavy hair and smiling eyes.
    Jess took one quick look. “What a cornballer.” He read dramatically from the screen: “ Brainy women are sexy. It’s what’s on the inside that counts .”
    “What’s wrong with that?”
    “Because if he has to say it out loud, he doesn’t mean it. Trust me. I’m a guy, I know how we operate. It’s just a line to lure in women who don’t think they’re pretty enough to do better than him. He cooks Julia Child recipes? In Manhattan? I bet you fifty bucks he doesn’t even own a frying pan.”
    “As if you’ve got fifty bucks.”
    Still, Ellie reread the profile and saw it in an entirely different light. In every other part of her life, she trusted her instincts. She never hesitated about moving to New York. She never second-guessed her decision to bypass her school plans to study criminal justice at John Jay. On the job, she read suspects, witnesses, and supposed victims better than officers with decades more experience.
    But when it came to men, Ellie was as naive as she’d been in the ninth grade when she accepted her first car date with the high school quarterback Gil Morton. He opened the passenger door of his pickup and asked her what she felt like doing. Whatever . He suggested ordering pizza and renting Lethal Weapon . Fifteen minutes later, she found herself on his sofa, with no pizza and no movie, beneath one hundred and eighty pounds of sloppy kisses and groping. She walked to Quik-Trip and called Jess for a ride before things passed the tipping point, but she had never quite absorbed the lesson.
    Ellie was a woman who expected men to value the same things she did. She expected men to want not just a lover but a friend, a challenge, and an equal. The problem, Jess always told her, wasn’t in her expectations. Plenty of men out there met them. The problem was that Ellie, despite all her intuitive strengths, had absolutely no ability to distinguish the poseurs from the real thing.
    “Here, give me that,” Jess insisted, reaching for the laptop. “I’ll find you a worthy suitor.” Jess began clicking away, and Ellie found herself involuntarily intrigued. These men were total strangers. She could develop relationships with them without ever telling them what she did for a living. They might get to know her without the hindrance of the immediate “female cop” stereotypes. Online, she could be a completely different person.
    Jess grabbed a pen and a crumpled paper napkin from the coffee table and scribbled down the names of what he called “the keepers,” men with good jobs, at least one creative comment in their self-descriptions, and absolutely no disqualifying bullshit. Ellie snatched the running list from him and began crossing names from it.
    “What are you doing, El? Those are perfectly good prospects.”
    “I’m scratching out the ones who fail my litmus tests,” Ellie replied. “Let me ask you something, Jess. You’re thirty-five years old. If you were to fill out one of these surveys, what would you put down as the age range for your ideal mate?”
    “For me? Um, I guess twenty…-four to thirty-five.”
    Ellie made a noise of disgust and swatted her brother across the shoulder. “Even you? My own flesh and blood? You are a thirty-five-year-old man with a birthday in four months, and you’re telling me that you wouldn’t even