Angel's Tip

CHAPTER 11

THE DISTANCE BETWEEN the Thirteenth Precinct and the Meatpacking District was almost exactly two miles, but culturally, the neighborhoods were a globe apart. The short drive from the east twenty-something blocks of Manhattan to the far west teens unveiled a dramatic transformation from the sterile and generic high rises of Stuyvesant Town to what was currently the city’s hottest neighborhood.

The key to the Meatpacking District’s current popularity rested in its unique blend of glamor and grit. All of the upscale requirements were here-high-end boutiques, trendy clubs with signature cocktails, expensive restaurants with tiny portions piled into aesthetically pleasing towers. But they existed in loftlike, pared-down spaces that still had the feel-if not the actual structure-of rehabbed warehouses. The streets outside were narrow, many still cobblestone, adding to the sense of an old neighborhood uncovered, dusted off, and polished by its latest visitor.

And, of course, there was the name. Not SoHo. Not Tribeca. Not NoLIta. Nothing cutesy, crisp, or clean. This was the Meatpacking District, and, lest you forget it, the distinctly bloody odor emanating from the remaining butchers and beef wholesalers was there to remind you: this was a neighborhood with substance, history, and dirt beneath its blue-collar fingernails. Just ask the Appletini-sipping supermodel taking a load off her Manolo Blahniks on the stool next to yours.

Ellie had called Pulse from the car on their way to the west side. There had been no answer at the club where Chelsea was last seen-just a recording over techno music with the club’s location and hours-but Rogan figured it was worth a pop-in before trying to track down a manager through business licenses and other paperwork.

The entrance to the club was underwhelming, at least before sundown. No velvet rope. No bass thumping onto the street outside. No well-dressed revelers lined up in front, eager to be selected for admission. No stone-faced body builders clothed in black to pass judgment on who was worthy and who must remain waiting. Just a set of double wooden doors-tall, heavy, and closed, like the sealed entrance to a fortress.

A frosted glass banner ran along the top of the threshold, the word Pulse etched discreetly across it. The trendiest establishments always had the least conspicuous signage. Some bars had no signs at all. One hot spot around the corner from here didn’t even have a name. If you were cool enough to be welcome, you’d know it was there, and you’d know where it was.

As Ellie pulled open the heavy wooden door on the right, the first thing that struck her about the darkened club was its temperature. In the second week of March, it shouldn’t have been colder inside the building than out. “Geez. They’re taking the whole meatpacking concept a bit literally,” she said.

“Don’t you get out, Hatcher?”

“Not to places like this.” Ellie wondered again about her partner’s off-duty lifestyle. She scanned the lofty space. The club was dark and windowless, but had enough accent lights here and there to provide a general sense of the place. Clean. White. Really white. Swaths of crisp cotton hung from the twenty-foot ceilings to the floor. Ellie’s usual haunts were decorated by dartboards, jukeboxes, and dusty black-and-white photographs of pregentrified New York.

“A few hours from now, bodies will be crammed into this place like a full pack of cigarettes. And trust me, no one will be complaining that it’s cold.”

“Hey, numbnuts.” A tall, muscular man wearing a fitted black T-shirt and dark blue jeans appeared behind the glass bar. “We’re closed.” His announcement delivered, he continued on with his business of unpacking bottles of Grey Goose vodka from a cardboard box.

Ellie looked at her partner with amusement. “Which of the numbnuts gets to break the news?”

Rogan flashed a bright white smile, pulled his shield from his waist, and held it beside his face. “You say you’re closed, but your door out front’s unlocked. Who’s the numbnut?”

The man behind the bar emptied his hands of the two bottles he was holding and brushed his palms off on his jeans pockets. “Sorry ’bout that. You guys look more like customers than cops.”

He stepped around the counter and met them halfway, next to an elevated runway extending across the dance floor. A trim of hot pink neon light ran along the runway edge.

“I’m expecting a couple deliveries,” he said, nodding toward the entrance. “But I’m the only one here right now.”

“Not a problem if you’re the person who can help us out,” Rogan said. “And who exactly are you?”

“Oh, sorry.” Two apologies already. That was good. Rogan was establishing his authority over a guy who was used to lording over the minions who felt blessed to enter this sanctuary. “Scott Bell. I’m the assistant club manager. Is there some kind of problem? We’ve been keeping our occupancy down since the last time you guys were out.”

“We’re not here about fire codes. We’re here because of her.” Rogan removed a sheet of paper from his suit pocket and unfolded it. It was the photograph of Chelsea and her friends that had been taken with Jordan’s iPhone the previous night at the restaurant before dinner. Ellie had cropped it down to a close-up of Chelsea. They were more likely to find people who recognized her using that picture than one taken today.

Bell the bartender took a two-second glance at the printout. “I don’t know what to tell you. We’ve got hundreds of girls just like her coming through here every night.”

“Well, this particular girl was here last night,” Rogan said. “Late.”

“So were a lot of people.”

“Yeah, but my guess is, most of them got home safe and sound and are sleeping it off as we speak.”

“What’s the problem? She OD’d, and you want to blame it on my club? I don’t know how many times I’ve told you guys that we do everything we can to keep that shit out of here.”

“You really think two detectives are going to show up in the middle of the day about some drugs going in and out of a Manhattan nightclub? Why don’t we go down to Christopher Street and bust some of the flip-flop boys for having wide stances while we’re at it?”

“Hey, whatever floats your boat.”

“Take another look, Scott,” Rogan said. As he tapped the paper in front of the bar manager another time, Ellie found herself looking at it as well. Now that the picture was cropped to focus only on Chelsea, something about it was bothering her. She scanned the photograph from top to bottom, left to right, but couldn’t place her finger on the problem.

“She was here last night. She was hanging in one of the VIP rooms.” Bell locked resentful eyes with Rogan until the detective dropped the bombshell. “And she was found strangled a couple hours later.”

Bell’s eyes dropped immediately to the printout. “Oh, fuck.”

“There we go. That’s the most authentic response you’ve given us since we got here. By tomorrow morning, the name of this club is going to be in every newspaper, next to a picture just like this one, while everyone who scans the headline is going to wonder whether this is a safe place to be. So if I were you, I’d drop the attitude and start asking how you can help us.”

Bell swallowed. “I-I-” He ran the fingertips of both hands through his dark brown hair. “Fuck. I don’t know what I can do to help. I don’t remember her.”

“You’re sure?” she asked.

He shook his head. “If you’re saying she was here, then she was here. But when you spend enough time in clubs, everyone looks the same.”

Ellie had of course never met Chelsea Hart, but she found herself replaying flashes of the conversations she’d had that morning with Chelsea’s friends. Chelsea would never leave us in limbo like this. She was always the one who’d meet other people for us to hang out with. Chelsea’s going to freak if she misses the deadline for her Othello paper; she wants to be an English major. Someone has to remember seeing her-she’s a really good dancer. It seemed profoundly sad that Chelsea had spent her last couple of hours in a place where no one was special, where everyone looked the same.

“Her friends said she was in a VIP room,” Ellie said. “Who were the VIPs?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Hey, now, I thought we were done with the attitude,” Rogan said.

“Sorry. It’s just, I mean, we call them VIP rooms, and sometimes we get some actual celebs in here, but usually because they’re C-list and we’re paying them. Most nights, it’s just some dumb group of nobodies who called with enough notice and slapped down a fat enough deposit for prepaid liquor to create a guest list.”

“See, you’re more helpful than you think,” Ellie said. “We’ll take a look at those guest lists.”

Bell’s face momentarily brightened before it fell again. “Shit. They’ll be gone by now.” He made his way over to a stainless steel podium near the entrance and fished out a clipboard from a built-in shelf. He skimmed through the top few pages, then flipped to the back. “This one’s for tonight. We got rid of last night’s already.”

“It’s not in a computer?” Ellie asked.

“All in pencil. Too many last-minute changes to run back and forth to the office.”

“Garbage?”

“Gone,” Bell said, shaking his head. “We’ve got to get the place clean right after closing so it doesn’t stink like all the spilled booze.”

“We’ll take credit card numbers instead,” Ellie said. “Easy enough for us to get names from there.”

“What credit card numbers?”

“You said people have to leave a deposit for the VIP rooms? I assume that involves credit cards.”

“Yeah, right. Okay, yeah. I can get that for you. Definitely.” It was clear from Bell’s eagerly nodding head that he was happy to have finally found a way to be useful.

“A list of employees would be nice, too,” she added.

The nodding continued for a few rounds, but then slowed to a pensive halt. “Employees. From here?” Bell asked, pointing to the ground in front of him.

“Unless you know of some other club this girl went to before someone tossed her body by the East River.”

“But-but what does that have to do with-”

“Um, hello? Does the name Darryl Littlejohn ring a bell?”

A couple of years earlier, a student from Ellie’s alma mater, John Jay College, disappeared after having a final drink at a SoHo bar just before closing time. Her barely recognizable naked body was found the next day on a road outside Spring Creek Park in Brooklyn. It took police a week to conclude that the helpful bouncer who told them he’d seen the victim leave alone was in fact the same man who’d stuffed a sock in the girl’s mouth, wrapped her entire head with transparent packing tape, and then brutally raped and strangled her. When she saw the victim’s photograph in the newspaper, Ellie thought that she might have met the criminology graduate student during an alumni event at John Jay’s Women’s Center.

“That’s my point,” Bell said. “That guy had, like, five felony convictions.”

Seven, actually, Ellie thought. And he was on parole. His mere presence in that bar past nine o’clock at night would have been enough to violate him if his PO had known.

“We don’t run that kind of club. I do background checks. We do drug testing. We have biannual employment reviews.” Bell ticked off each of his good deeds on his fingers.

“Scott, calm down.” Rogan put his hand on Bell’s shoulder and gave it a small squeeze. It was one of the standard moves that Ellie rarely got to use. For Rogan, and about ninety percent of cops, a small touch like that was a sign of brotherhood, a soothing indication that the touch’s recipient was viewed as one of the good guys. From thirty-year-old Ellie, with her wavy blond hair and a body that men always seemed to notice no matter how modestly she dressed, that kind of contact was viewed-depending on the confidence of the recipient-as either provocative or emasculating.

“When are you gonna clue in?” Rogan continued. “We are not code enforcement. We’re not vice. We want to find out who murdered this sweet college girl who was visiting New York from Indiana. That’s all we’re trying to do. There’s no problem here.” Rogan moved his hand across the gap between the two men’s chests. They were copacetic.

“Yeah, all right. I got it on the computer in back. With the credit cards.”

“Good man, Scott.”

“I gotta call my boss, though, okay? The manager.”

“You wouldn’t be doing your job if you didn’t. But you’ll tell him we’re cool, right?”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“Do we need to worry about him back there alone?” Ellie asked, watching Bell walk through an office door at the rear of the club.

“I don’t get that feeling,” Rogan said, helping himself to a spot behind the counter to check out the labels on the various liquor bottles. “Do you?”

“Nope.”

“Just checking?”

“Yep.”

Ellie was grateful to have a few minutes away from Scott Bell so she could refocus her attention on the photograph of Chelsea Hart that had been bothering her.

“Take a look again at this,” she said, laying the now-familiar image before Rogan on the bar. “Notice anything significant?”

“No, but apparently I’m supposed to. What’s up?”

“Earrings. She was wearing earrings last night at dinner, but not this morning when we found her at the park.”

He squinted, mentally pulling up an image of the body he’d seen at the crime scene. “You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

He was silent for a few seconds, and Ellie assumed he was having the same thoughts that ran through her mind when she’d first made the observation. No pawnshop would buy what was obviously costume jewelry, so there was no point following that avenue. The earrings could have fallen out in a struggle. Or, more interestingly, they could have been removed as a souvenir.

“Any ideas about how we use that information?” Rogan asked.

“Not yet.”

“Well, at least we know what to look for.”

“If only we knew where to look.”

BELL RETURNED from the back office carrying a thin stack of paper just as Rogan’s cell phone rang. Rogan flipped open the phone, read the screen, and excused himself to the corner of the bar.

Bell handed Ellie a two-page document, neatly stapled together in the upper left-hand corner. “This is a list of bills last night for parties with bottle service-amounts with form of payment. A couple of them paid cash, but there’s a bunch of credit cards there as well.”

Ellie gave the single-spaced document a quick scan and had to suppress a cough. The two parties who paid with cash had racked up bills of nearly a thousand dollars each. Most of the credit card charges went into the four digits.

“Are these charges just for drinks?” she asked.

Bell folded his arms across his chest, his confidence returning for a subject matter that was familiar territory. “Depends on what you mean by ‘just drinks.’ We don’t serve food, that’s for sure. But people pay big for bottle service.”

“That just means you pay for a bottle of liquor. Even if you use a triple markup, how much can that be?”

“We don’t look at it as a markup.” His grin told a different story. “It’s not just a bottle. It’s bottle service. You get the VIP room. You get a private server assigned to your room to mix and pour the drinks. It’s the personal touch that people are paying for.”

“That,” Rogan said, returning from his phone call, “and not having to wait in a five-man-deep crowd around the bar, just to get a drink.”

Ellie suddenly got the picture. In a world where a $15 martini bought you crummy service, the wealthy were willing to pay for something different.

“So how much is, I don’t know, a bottle of Grey Goose, for example?”

“We’re at $350.”

Now she did allow herself a cough.

“Bungalow 8’s at $400,” Bell continued. “I hear a few places are about to go even higher.”

“Some of these bills are a few thousand dollars,” Ellie said, thinking of a month’s worth of take-home pay. “A group small enough to fit in one room goes through ten bottles of liquor?”

Bell shook his head. “No. They order ten bottles of liquor. One guy drinks Goose. His girl likes Patrón. His bro prefers Jack.”

“And if they don’t finish it all-”

“It’s just money.” Bell handed Ellie a second, thicker printout, also neatly stapled. “I also got you our list of people here.”

Ellie flipped through the document. Six pages. Two columns on each. Names, social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers. Bell’s boss must have instructed him to give full cooperation. Probably about sixty employees, all told.

“Now, like I said, on that”-Bell pressed his palms together in a prayer position near his chin-“we do everything we’re supposed to. But we’ve got a lot of people, you know? And if someone squeaked through-”

“I told you we’re not out to sweat you,” Rogan said. “We didn’t even mention the fact that this girl we’re talking about was underage.”

“Oh, Jesus. We check ID. I tell the guys every night. And we really check them. Like, no way some kid’s getting in here with a Hawaii driver’s license that says his name’s McLovin, you know?”

Ellie smiled. “Her friends say she had a fake ID, with a real name and everything. Thanks for this,” she said, holding up the pages Bell had given her. She retrieved a business card from the badge case she kept clipped to her waist and offered it to Bell between her index and middle fingers. “Give us a call if you remember anything from last night that might be pertinent.”

“Yeah, okay. Thanks.”

They were almost at the exit when Bell called after them.

“Hey, um, I don’t suppose there’s some way you could leave our name out of the reports or anything, huh? You know, my boss wanted me to ask.”

“Sorry,” Rogan said, as he opened the heavy brown door. They both squinted as they emerged back out into the light. “That phone call earlier was from Florkoski at CSU. The latent she pulled from the button on Chelsea Hart’s shirt didn’t belong to the victim.”

CHAPTER 12

THEY HAD A LATENT PRINT. Now all they needed was a suspect.

That left them back at their adjacent desks, divvying up their to-do list. In her one year as a detective, Ellie had gotten used to other cops assuming she would be the one to do this kind of paper-driven legwork, perhaps because she was junior, but most likely because some of the older detectives-at least in the general investigation units-were not yet comfortable with the technological end of modern police work.

She and Rogan, however, were sharing the load. He had the list of the club’s credit card charges, while she ran the list of its employees through the department’s database of crime reports and through NCIC for criminal records.

Rogan scribbled something on the notes in front of him, and then thanked the person at the other end of the line before hanging up. “I still can’t get over these bar bills. Here’s one for three thousand dollars, plus the guy tacked on a five-hundred-dollar tip.”

Ellie shook her head disapprovingly. “That’s barely fifteen percent. Cheap bastard. I’m never complaining again about paying ten bucks for a drink. And where I usually go, that’s with a twenty-five-percent tip.”

“Only in New York,” Rogan said. “I got a buddy who just moved to the city a year ago from Atlanta. He says, his whole life, he thought he was doing pretty good. Had some money in his pocket. Then he came here and saw what money really is.”

She saw her opening. “Well, if you don’t mind me saying, you at least look like you’re doing better than some folks.”

“You must mean my fine ’do,” Rogan said, running one hand across his shiny bald head. “Thirteen bucks at the Astor Place barber.”

“Nice. I meant the clothes. Sorry, I notice those kinds of things.”

“That’s just taste.”

Ellie didn’t respond.

“Go ahead,” Rogan said with a toss of his hand. “Ask.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” She typed another name into the computer and hit the enter key.

“I don’t blame you. You want to know. You want to know how I can wear the clothes in my closet, smoke a decent cigar every once in a while, drive a decent ride. Even for a detective first-grade, it’s a stretch.”

Ellie apparently wasn’t as curious as she thought. She’d seen Rogan smoking a cigar outside on Twenty-first Street two days ago, but hadn’t thought to wonder about its price. And she’d never even seen Rogan in his own car.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

“It only makes sense you’d speculate. Who wants a partner on the take, right?”

“That’s not what I meant-”

“Or dealing drugs on the side. Maybe a few too many bets. When a brother’s got some extra spending money, he must be up to no good. Is that about right?”

Ellie’s eyes were wide, and she was suddenly very aware of the teaspoon full of hazelnut spread in her mouth. Rogan just kept staring at her. Other detectives in the squad were looking at them. She had no idea what to say.

Then Rogan slapped his hands together and began to laugh. At her, not with her. “Oh, lord, someone take a picture of that.”

Other detectives joined the amusement.

“He pulled that speech on me six months ago.” The voice belonged to John Shannon, the detective who sat with his back to hers, facing his own partner. Shannon might have grunted a hello to Ellie, once, a few days ago. “He gets everyone with that. Welcome to the club, Hatcher.”

When the hilarity subsided, she leaned over toward Rogan. “Thanks. I’m in a club now.”

“Sorry. I couldn’t resist. Works every time. Look, it’s no big deal. A few years ago, my grandmama died. A few years before that, she married the guy who sang ‘Just Between Us.’” Rogan hummed one bar, and Ellie immediately recognized the tune. “Anyway, she left each of us a little extra money. Not enough to treat the house at a place like Pulse-not like that shit-but, you know, invested in the right places, I can indulge myself once in a while.”

“You don’t need to explain.” Even though she hadn’t meant to imply any type of accusation against Rogan, she found herself grateful for the information.

“Like I said, it’s all relative in New York. Three thousand dollars for a night of partying. That’s some crazy shit.”

“Do you have a sense yet who the idiots are who shelled out that kind of money last night?”

“Investment bankers. Commercial developers. And, with at least some of these, apparently shortchanged shareholders and duped clients. So far I’ve already got three corporate cards.”

“No known pimps? Rapists? Perhaps even a very naughty pornographer?” Ellie asked.

“Not yet. Anyone worth checking out on your end?”

Just as Rogan finished asking the question, the last employee on the list popped up clean on NCIC. “I gotta hand it to Bell. He wasn’t kidding when he said they ran a tight ship. Most of these places are run by lowlifes, but I’ve got nothing.”

“Nothing? Impossible.”

The arrest of the SoHo bouncer had revealed the flagrant disregard that bar managers showed for the city’s hiring regulations. That case had been a wake-up call, but only so much can change over a few years in an industry driven by profit margins.

“That goes without saying, but it’s not much. I’ve got one guy-Jaime Rodriguez-with a six-year-old Burg II conviction and a couple pops two years ago for suspected drug distribution, but no convictions.”

“How does he get popped twice without charges? How hard is it to make a drug case?”

“Both times, he was picked up on the street in the Bronx,” Ellie said, looking at her notes. “High-crime neighborhood, late at night. Seen walking between open car windows and a nearby building. No drugs found in the searches incident to arrest.”

It was a standard setup for street-level drug dealing. Rodriguez would’ve been the negotiator, coming to an agreement on price and quantity with the customers in their cars and then directing them to a nearby location. He’d send a signal to someone-most likely a juvenile-who would run to an area stash house and meet the buyers at the agreed-upon delivery spot. Rodriguez keeps his hands clean.

“I get the picture,” Rogan said. “I wouldn’t call that nothing. The vic had meth in her system, and if it didn’t come from her friends, it came from somewhere else.”

“Problem is, Rodriguez wasn’t working last night.”

“Damn.”

“We’ll get to him, but-”

“Yeah, I know. Anyone else?”

“I got a janitor. Leon Symanski.”

“A Polish janitor? Insert joke here.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to say that.” Ellie wagged a finger in Rogan’s direction. “Leon the janitor has a prior conviction for sexual misconduct. But it was twenty years ago.”

“Could you track down any of the facts?”

“I already had the reports faxed over. He admitted having sex with a sixteen-year-old who lived in his building. Apparently the girl was a regular at the Symanski apartment-talking to the wife, helping with the baby, that kind of thing. The dad was snooping around the girl’s room and found some records from an abortion clinic. He pulled her out of the Symanskis’ apartment and was smacking her around in the hallway. All hell broke loose, and when the cops showed up, Symanski owned up that he was the one who got the girl pregnant. The girl said it was consensual, but at sixteen, of course, that doesn’t matter.”

“Twenty years ago?”

“Yeah. Symanski would’ve been twenty-six at the time. He got a year’s probation. No problems since.”

“A year of probation? No time?” Rogan asked.

“Weird, huh?”

“I’ve got to think that even twenty years ago you got more for sleeping with a teenager than shoplifting.”

“Right. So that’s why I don’t think we’ve got anything here. My Spidey senses tell me that whatever ADA caught Symanski’s case didn’t think it was a predator kind of situation.” Although all kids under the age of consent were legally off-limits, those in law enforcement frequently used their discretion to distinguish between men wrapped up in a precocious teenager’s March-September experiment and the true sex offenders. “Twenty years of law-abiding behavior since then suggests they got it right.”

“I’ll call Mariah Florkoski at CSU to make sure she compares the latent from the victim’s shirt against both Rodriguez and Symanski. Maybe one of them somehow got left out of NCIC.”

“Can’t hurt,” she said. It wasn’t likely to help, either. Florkoski had already run the latent in the NCIC database, which should have contained prints for both Rodriguez and Symanski.

“Well, on that uplifting note, I say we get some rest and start anew tomorrow,” Rogan said. “We’ll start with the biggest credit card charge and work our way down until we find the right VIP lounge. We should have a doodle from the sketch artist by then. That will help.”

Ellie was never good at walking away from a case before she at least had a theory. She’d been that way even with her petty fraud cases. But fresh eyes and a rested mind could make up for hours of spinning the same old wheels. As much as she hated to leave, she could feel in her bones they weren’t going to break this case today. Starting again tomorrow sounded good.

THE MAN WAS DISAPPOINTED to find a woman named Gail in the seldom-used lunchroom. She was one of a few different two-hundred-pound assistants who seemed to roam the building. He found her unpleasant to look at. Her hair dye was so black it was blue. She wore too much blush, too much lipstick, and too colorful an outfit for her amorphous frame.

But he made a point of being pleasant, even to his most disgusting coworkers.

“Hey, Gail.”

Gail glanced up from her fashion magazine, grunted a hello, and removed her second Twix bar from the wrapper. The idea of a woman like Gail using her break to focus on fashion and beauty tips struck him as pathetic. Here’s a tip on self-improvement: Walk around the block and stop eating candy bars.

The man fed a dollar into one of two side-by-side vending machines. It took three attempts before the machine registered his credit. He pushed the buttons B and 3 and watched the black metal spiral spin on the second row of the machine, releasing a bag of peanut M &Ms. He retrieved the candy and his quarter of change from the machine.

On the muted television that hung on the wall next to the vending machine, the credits were rolling on The Oprah Winfrey Show. The man watched as Oprah peacocked across the set of her talk show in a red turtleneck and black pants, alternately pointing at the guests in their comfortable chairs and pumping her flattened palms robustly above her head. He could imagine her voice, imploring her audience to “give it up” for the earnest speakers.

“I just love her,” Gail said.

“Doesn’t everyone?” the man said in agreement.

He made his way back to his office and sat in his black leather desk chair. Using the remote control on his desk, he turned up the volume on his flat-screen TV. He pulled on the sides of his M &Ms bag to open it, then shook a couple of the colored candies directly into his mouth.

The chipper music on the television changed to a lower, more staccato tune, and Oprah’s designer set was replaced by an image of the station’s talking-heads duo sitting behind a desk. As seemed to be the case at least twice a week in New York, the top story was a fire, this time at a home in Long Island. Cause? Most likely an electrical problem, although police were investigating reported connections between the homeowner and the Mafia. The flames made good film from the helicopter hovering above. More at eleven.

Up in the Boogie Down Bronx, police exchanged bullets with a car full of teenagers outside the Morris housing projects in a late-night shootout. One suspect was in custody, and police continued the search for four more.

Only two stories, then straight to commercials. A freckle-faced imp fed his oatmeal to the family DVD machine; it was time for a visit to the appliance store. He flipped to another network. A dog rubbed his backside on the carpet; time to buy rug cleaner. Flip. A smiling brunette trying to convince him he needed pore-cleansing facial strips.

Back to ABC.

One more advertisement-another canine, this time selling him on light beer-and then the talking heads returned. The attractive Latina woman on the right side of the screen broke the story:

It was supposed to be the spring break of a lifetime, the trip that a young midwestern woman would always remember. But after the body of an Indiana college student was found early this morning in Manhattan’s East River Park, the police are now searching for her killer.

Sources tell WABC that the victim is nineteen-year-old Chelsea Hart, a freshman at Indiana University in Bloomington. She was visiting New York City this week for spring break. Friends who accompanied Hart to a nightclub last night in the Meatpacking District say they tried to persuade her to leave earlier in the evening, but Hart chose to stay behind for one last drink. That decision proved deadly.

The frame cut to the face of a young woman with cropped black hair. The bottom of the television screen read, “Jordan McLaughlin, friend of victim.” A reporter held a WABC microphone below her chin. The man recognized the girl from the previous night. She’d been wearing a short yellow dress.

“All we heard before we came here was how the city had changed from the old days, how it was good for tourists now. That it was safe for us to come here alone. Now I wish we’d stayed home.”

The clip ended, and the attractive news anchor returned to the screen. “Police are still investigating. We’ll bring you more, right here at WABC, as the story unfolds.”

The gray-haired male anchor on the left side of the screen used the Indiana girl’s comment about good ol’ safe New York to segue into another crime story, this time a home invasion in Westchester.

The man flipped through the other networks, searching for additional reports about the early morning discovery of the dead body in East River Park. Nothing. Either the other stations were all finished with their coverage, or only the ABC affiliate had broken the story.

Chelsea Hart. A college student from Indiana. He thought about the driver’s license he’d grasped between his fingers only a few hours earlier on his living room floor. Jennifer Green. Date of birth in 1983.

So she had been from Indiana, but the license wasn’t real after all. She was only nineteen years old. Her name was not Jennifer Green. And she’d been a college student from Bloomington.

The realization that he’d been ignorant of these basic details about the girl struck him as bizarre. He was the one who’d slid off her tight black pants and seen the purple birthmark on her right hip, peeking out from beneath those silky bikini panties. He was the one who’d run his fingers through those long blond waves before cutting them off to take home with him. He was the one who’d felt the firmness of her veins beneath the soft pale skin around her throat.

A lizard appeared on the screen to push insurance. As he hit the mute button on the television, the man wished he’d had more time last night. He had rushed with Chelsea, formerly known as Jennifer Green. He would take more time with his next project, once he found her. To his surprise, he was already anticipating it.

He still needed to put in another couple of hours of work, but he was rested from the quick catnap he’d caught after his meeting. He would start looking tonight.

CHAPTER 13

THE PERSPECTIVE OF the camera continually changed, but the images always came to her in black and white. Sometimes Ellie watched the scenes unfold through the eyes of the victims. On other nights, she was a neutral and omnipotent observer floating overhead.

This time, she was pushing open the unlatched heavy oak door of a prairie-style home. She walked through the living room, passing in front of a fireplace, and then turned into a long hallway that led to the bedrooms.

She found the boy’s body first, laid out on his twin bed with a plastic shopping bag over his head, a rope around his throat. His mother was in the master bathroom, blindfolded in the tub with a bandanna. Ellie knew that the woman had been tortured before being drowned-held repeatedly under water to the brink of suffocation, then revived, only to be submerged again.

As she descended the basement stairs, she tried to block the image that she knew would come next. William Summer had saved the twelve-year-old daughter for last.

Just as Ellie caught sight of the soiled rag next to the girl’s body, a rumbling sound pulled her away from the nightmare. She opened her eyes and remembered she was alone in her Murray Hill living room. According to her cable box, it was 9:58. She had dozed off watching a show about Dexter, a wily serial killer who targeted people who truly deserved to die for their own heinous wrongdoings. If only real murderers were so delightfully discriminating.

She grabbed her vibrating cell phone from the coffee table and flipped it open.

“Hatcher.”

“Morse.”

It was Peter. “Hey. I didn’t check the screen first.”

“Guess what I learned today?”

“What?” She smiled at the sight of the plush green frog heads springing from her toes. She had tried to find a way to leave behind the slippers her mother had purchased for her in Kansas, but she had to admit they were actually pretty cute.

“Writing the news all day straight, and then coming home to write some more, totally sucks.”

“Isn’t that pretty much what your life was like before you met me?”

“I suppose.”

“And while I was in Kansas?”

“And your point would be?”

“Write one more page and then go to sleep.”

“A page? Do you have any idea how long it takes me to write a page?”

“You write fast,” Ellie said. She had seen him hammer out articles as fast as he could type them.

“That’s when I’m Peter Morse, crime beat reporter for a tabloid that calls itself a newspaper. It’s different with my own stuff.”

“Fine. Write another paragraph and go to sleep.”

“I think I’m fried for the night. It didn’t help that I got stuck at work. WABC beat everyone to the punch on a body this morning at East River Park, so I had to stay and bang something out for tomorrow morning’s paper. Kittrie must think it’s going to be a big story, because he awoke from his deep slumber as an editor and insisted we work on the coverage as a team.”

George Kittrie was Peter’s editor, and, at least according to the stories Peter had a tendency to tell, he was about as fond of Peter as Lieutenant Eckels was of Ellie.

“You probably don’t want to know, but that’s actually my case.”

“So instead of scrambling for two hours at the paper trying to satisfy Kittrie, I could have just called you?”

“Nope.”

“Oh, come on. I could have at least weaseled my way into a little hint.”

“Nothing. Nada. I’m Fort Knox.”

“I know. You sure you don’t want company?”

“Two nights on our own. I told you.”

“You are such a cop.”

“Good night.”

“’Night, Detective.”

She rose from the sofa and cleared away the debris from her dinner, lamb rogan josh and samosas delivered from a neighborhood Indian joint. Her stomach still felt hot from the spicy brown sauce on the lamb dish, and it dawned on Ellie how acclimated she had become during her decade in New York to the consumption of foods whose ingredients were a complete mystery to her.

She flipped to the early round of the late-night news. The local ABC affiliate may have been the first to break the story of Chelsea Hart’s murder, but now the department’s Public Information Office had released an official statement, and the case was finding its place in every stratum of the media.

Watching a case transform from real-life incident to ubiquitous cultural phenomenon reminded Ellie of the sprouting process in Gremlins, a movie she still watched every year on Christmas Day. It all started with a single, manageable creature. But add a little water, and suddenly several new balls of mischief were spawned, brewing until they transformed into separate and independent troublemakers that had to be watched over and cared for, each with the potential to hatch its own havoc-wreaking offspring.

And so it was with crime reporting. It started with a single case, followed by the first story. But that initial media coverage provided the germinating water, and from there, the sprouting began. By the end of the week, she would have a precinct full of Gremlins.

Ellie flipped between the two ten o’clock news programs. Both covered all the bases: Chelsea’s name and age; the fact that she was on spring break, alone at night in the Meatpacking District; the discovery of her strangled corpse early this morning by joggers along the East River. No mention of the mutilation of her body or the violent removal of her beautiful hair. Give them time, she thought. Peter had scrambled quickly for the basics, but by tomorrow, reporters would be contacting everyone Chelsea Hart had ever met-at the hotel, at the club, back home in Indiana. Whether they wanted to or not, the public would eventually gain access to all of the ugly and salacious details that boosted ratings and swelled circulation numbers.

And Ellie’s job would get that much harder.

SHE CHANGED THE CHANNEL to a Seinfeld repeat to keep her company while she got ready for bed. She had removed her contact lenses and started to brush her teeth when she heard keys in the front door.

She heard a soft clank, followed by her brother’s voice. “Chain!”

Ellie called out an apology through sudsy toothpaste foam, made her way to the front door (it didn’t take long in her small one-bedroom), and released the safety chain.

“You’ve been doing that a lot lately.” Jess set his hard-shell Fender guitar case by the door, shook off his black thrift-store jacket, and tossed it on the nearest piece of furniture, an off-white armchair in the corner. “Should I take that as a hint that it’s time for me to find another couch? I could swing it now that the job’s working out all right.”

For two months, Jess had been working as a doorman at Vibrations, an establishment on the Westside Highway that euphemistically billed itself as a “gentlemen’s club.” Jess and Ellie preferred to call it the Shake Shack. The Shimmy Shed. Booty Barn. The Rubby Cubby. Titty Towers. The T and A Getaway. Even though Ellie hoped a better job was waiting for her brother somewhere down the road, a part of her wanted him to stay at Vibrations forever just so they could continue conjuring up alternative names for his employer.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “What would I have done this morning without a roommate to put together my backpack?”

“Did I get everything? I was a little creeped out going through your underwear drawer.”

“Perfect.” In truth, he had forgotten about the Kahr K9 that she now carried as a backup gun and the corresponding ankle holster, but she saw no reason to nitpick. “Seriously, Jess, it’s been nice having you here through all this.”

In reality, the stressful events of the last two months had little to do with Jess’s presence as her couch-inhabiting roommate. Jess tended to move several times a year, depending on his employment status, dating status, and the tolerance of his friends. In between the various moves, he frequently spent days or weeks in her living room. Given that it was Jess who’d helped Ellie find this rent-stabilized apartment in the first place, it only seemed right. Karma and all.

“You sure?” he asked.

“Mos def.”

“In that case, what the fuck is that shitastic smell?”

“Dinner. Indian.” She patted her full belly. “You missed out.”

“Jesus, why don’t you bury a piece of cheese beneath the sofa cushions while you’re at it? This room’ll stink for a week. Not to mention the increased risk of another upchuck incident after this morning’s festivities.”

Ellie jumped onto the sofa and pulled the window up a few inches.

“Thanks,” Jess said, plopping down next to her. “So what’d you do tonight? No, wait, let me guess.” He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his temples like a mind reader. “You worked late on your case, came home and called Mom, then ate takeout and watched TV. How did I do?” he asked, opening his eyes.

“You’ve got the Ellie Hatcher schedule down to a T.”

“How’s Mom?” Jess asked.

Ellie shrugged. “You know.”

Jess knew precisely. That’s why he had a tendency not to be around when Ellie made her nightly phone calls to their mother in Wichita. Same reminiscing. Same self-pity about her present life as a bookkeeper and widow whose children didn’t visit enough. Same vodka-glazed voice. Somehow Jess managed to distance himself from all of it, but Ellie still felt the need to look after her mother despite the fourteen hundred miles lying between them.

“You’re not working tonight?” Ellie asked.

“Nah. I got the guys together for a couple hours of practice instead. I figured finding a dead body with my sister this morning was a pretty good excuse to play hooky.”

“You didn’t give them any details, did you?”

“Dead chick in the park was about all they needed to hear. Don’t worry. I’m not divulging any secrets of your case. Unless someone offers to pay. Now that would be different.”

She knew for a fact that her brother was only kidding. After the Wichita police charged William Summer with the College Hill Strangler murders, both Jess and Ellie had been hounded by the media for their stories. How would your father have felt about the arrest? What is it like to know he died without the answers you now have? Why are you so convinced that William Summer killed your father, despite the city’s insistence it was a suicide?

Ellie had played along with the game, hoping the media attention would put pressure on the city. Lord knew her mother could use the pension. But Jess’s position had been firm: Not even if they paid me a million dollars. And Ellie had known from the tone of his voice that he meant it. If Jess was going to be in the public spotlight, it was going to be as a rock god, not for anything having to do with policing or dead bodies.

“No Peter tonight?” Jess asked. Ellie arched an eyebrow in his direction. “Okay, for once, I wasn’t trying to be dirty. No Mr. Morse this evening?”

“No. There’s no Mr. Morse.”

“Problems in paradise?”

“I just sleep better alone, in my own apartment.”

“Yeah, right, because your bed’s so comfortable. I slept on that mattress while you were in Kansas, and it’s like lying in a giant taco shell.”

Ellie had never been particularly at ease discussing romantic relationships with her older brother. Jess, of course, seemed to have no problems whatsoever opening up about his various encounters, sometimes going so far as to describe the bizarre things his freakier girlfriends had suggested. Ellie usually tuned out and escaped to a mental happy place to avoid the images.

“We took a couple nights off so he can write,” she said.

“His novel?”

“I didn’t ask him for specifics, but I don’t think so.”

Peter had told her on their first date that he’d been struggling for years on the same manuscript-a novel about a Manhattan-based journalist living, like Peter, in Hell’s Kitchen. Now his writing had been rejuvenated by his idea for a true-crime book based on the First Date case.

“That little bitch would be dead if you hadn’t saved his scrawny ass.”

“Well, as he sees it, his ass wouldn’t have been thrust into the middle of the case in the first place if it hadn’t been for me.”

“So you’re supposed to be understanding while he uses this case to become a celebrity journalist?”

She shrugged. “I get where he’s coming from. He lived through it all too, and if he wants to write about it, that’s his prerogative. As long as I don’t get dragged into it.”

Ellie’d had enough of the spotlight for a lifetime. First it was the flurry of stories a year ago about the College Hill Strangler arrest. Then it was the First Date case. A month ago, when she sat down with Dateline for an exclusive interview about the crimes of William Summer, she had sworn she was done being a story.

“Maybe if you’re really lucky, the jacket of his book will be that class picture you love so much.”

“Fuck you twice,” Ellie said, flipping him the bird for good measure.

For some reason, the media covering the College Hill Strangler arrest had all seemed to glom on to the same goofy school photograph of Ellie in fifth grade, with bright shiny eyes and an enormous toothy grin, completely oblivious to her ridiculous bangs and the asymmetrical pigtails jutting from the sides of her head. To the best of Ellie’s recollection, she had cut her own bangs the night before, desperate to emulate the look of her most recent pop hero, Debbie Gibson.

After the media had unearthed the photograph, Jess had terrorized her for weeks, e-mailing her links to every online story he could find containing the image and taping copies of the picture in the most innocuous places-the inside of her medicine cabinet, the side of a milk carton, even a wallet-sized version around the grip of her service weapon. The reign of horror had finally ended after Ellie dug out an old picture of Jess in his Wham days. A white tank top emblazoned “Go Go” in pink neon letters would do nothing for Dog Park’s street cred.

“You know what we should do?” Jess said. “Let’s go out.”

“It’s already past ten o’clock.”

“No place worth going any earlier. Come on. You’re home. I’m home. I’m still totally torqued by what I saw this morning. When was the last time we went out-like really went out?”

Ellie hadn’t outgrown the stage of occasional late nights, but she was ready to hit the sack. She started to make her excuses, but then realized there was one place she wouldn’t mind checking out.

“Ever heard of a club called Pulse?”

CHAPTER 14

NOT ONLY HAD JESS heard of Pulse, he was pretty sure he knew someone who worked there. He scrolled through his cell phone directory until he came to the name he was looking for.

“Here she is. Vanessa.”

“Vanessa Hutchinson?” Ellie asked.

“I don’t do last names. I met her a few weeks ago at a bar in Williamsburg. She’s a friend of Kate. You met her once. She came with me to Johnny’s about a year ago.”

“The lawyer?”

“No, that was Rose. Kate’s in marketing or something. Short brown hair? Really tiny?”

Jess was proving once again the vast reach of his impressive social network, yet another difference between them. Ellie would love to be one of those women with a tight circle of best friends, but a good portion of her life was dominated by a job that made her an outsider to most women, and those same women certainly didn’t want her cozying up to their husbands and boyfriends. Between work, serial monogamy, and part-time caregiving to the rest of the Hatcher family, she had enough on her plate anyway.

Her brother, in contrast, had a way of meeting people once and forging lasting friendships with them, even if he didn’t run into them again for a year. And, more curiously, many of his social supporters were former girlfriends and past hookups who never seemed to begrudge Jess his refusal to commit to one woman (or one job, for that matter, or one mailing address) for more than a month at a time. Ellie’s best guess was that he had a way of attracting women who at least appreciated that, with Jess, what you saw was what you got: a fun guy and a good man who chose to remain in a perpetual state of adolescence.

“Who’s the Vanessa Hutchinson you know?” Jess asked.

“A bartender at Pulse. Mid-twenties, as I recall. No priors.”

Jess gave her a perplexed look, and Ellie explained her newfound interest in the club, as well as the list she’d been given of all of the club’s current employees.

“I should’ve known you had an ulterior motive for checking out a Grade A meat market.”

“I figured it wouldn’t hurt to get a firsthand glimpse of the scene, see if anyone remembers seeing Chelsea.”

“I guess hanging out with the yuppies one night isn’t going to kill me.”

“Now I’m having second thoughts,” she said.

“You’re killing me, El. I was just getting my brain into club mode.” He bounced his shoulders and mimicked the ubiquitous and repetitive uhnn-chk, uhnn-chk beat of techno music.

“I’m not even sure we could get in.”

“What good is that handy dandy badge for, if not pushing your way past a behemoth of a doorman?”

“That would defeat the whole purpose. I was thinking I’d just go and hang out. Watch people. Talk a little. Be stealthy. But the club manager will recognize me. I was just there this afternoon-”

“Yeah, looking like, well, the way you look when you’re working.”

Ellie gave him an insulted look.

“Sorry, but you know you can do better. Get yourself all slutted up, and you’ll blend in with the rest of the chicks. Besides, the manager of a club that big and that crowded is not going to pay attention to the likes of us.”

She remembered Scott Bell, the club manager, speaking almost identical words that afternoon: When you spend enough time in clubs, everyone looks the same.

Fifteen minutes later, Ellie emerged from her bedroom. Clothes? On. Makeup? Slathered. Hair? Fluffed, thanks to some backcombing and a few spritzes of spray.

“Let’s get a move on before I change my mind.”

Jess looked up from the black Hefty bag that he was digging around in on the living room floor. She recognized it as the bag of belongings from his last semi-permanent address, which he had snuck behind her television while she was in Kansas.

He took a look at the outfit she had chosen: a black turtleneck sweater, her best jeans, and a pair of short black boots.

“That’s what I thought,” he said, continuing his rummaging. “Aha. I knew there was something in here that did not belong to me.”

He pulled out a purple baby doll dress with a halter neckline.

“Seriously?”

ELLIE OFFERED to splurge for a cab to the Meatpacking District. With her bare legs popping out of her tiny new dress and her feet covered in nothing but her one pair of high-heeled sandals, a few bucks for a heated car struck her as a bargain.

She made sure to keep her knees together as she swung herself out of the taxi. “Jesus. I don’t know what kind of woman lent you this dress, but I’m having a hard time not pulling a Britney here.”

“Hey, you were the one who said you wanted to blend. Plus, I got news for you. The very attractive woman who left that dress behind is five inches taller than you.”

Ellie was relieved to see fewer than twenty people waiting behind the red velvet rope erected outside the club entrance. She could tolerate a line of that length. Noticing that most of the other patrons were dressed at least somewhat appropriately for an early March night, she punched Jess in the bicep. “I was fine in what I had on.”

“Those are the people who are waiting outside when it’s not even eleven o’clock yet.” Jess grabbed Ellie by the wrist and marched along the velvet rope to the muscled doorman posted at the club’s double doors. He was dressed entirely in black, all the way down to the cord spiraling from the earpiece he wore in his right ear.

“Jess Hatcher. I’m on the list.”

The man eyeballed Jess first. With his usual scruffy dark hair, three days’ beard, and long sleeved black T-shirt and skinny jeans, he could have been anything from a bicycle messenger to the lead singer of any one of the current postpunk bands that she found so interchangeable. Then the man’s gaze turned to Ellie.

The Hatchers apparently passed with enough credibility for him to check the list. A frown started to form on his face as he browsed the clipboard. Then he flipped to a second page.

“You’re good,” he said, stamping their hands with a rubber triangle sopped in red ink. When he stepped aside so they could enter, Ellie heard a few exasperated huffs from the dejected souls behind the velvet rope and realized she had never been so appreciative of special treatment. Down with egalitarianism. She was too freezing to care about the masses.

“I called Vanessa while you were changing,” Jess explained. “And, you were right, her last name is indeed Hutchinson.”

Once they were inside the club, Ellie had to concede that Jess had been right about her wardrobe choice. What had been a dimly lit empty warehouse just a few hours ago was now brimming with activity-primarily of the dancing, drinking, and flirting varieties, and almost entirely by young, fashion-forward, beautiful people. Not a single Gap sweater in the house.

Jess led the way, forging a circuitous path around the dance floor, past the runway, and through the three-person-deep huddle encircling the bar. He raised a hand toward a tall, thin waitress with long blond hair, heavy bangs, and a lot of black mascara. In the middle of a vigorous rattling of a silver martini shaker over her shoulder, the woman caught Jess’s eye and flashed him a bright wide smile. Vanessa Hutchinson was beautiful.

She pulled the lid off the shaker and poured something bright blue into a martini glass, then handed the glass and a bottle of beer to a guy across the counter. He handed her forty dollars and told her to keep the change. Ellie wondered if she’d just witnessed a big tip to Vanessa, a big rip-off of the customer, or both.

Vanessa ignored the many patrons who were eagerly competing for her eye contact and instead beelined toward Jess. “Hey, man. How are you?” She couldn’t manage a hug with the bar between them, but she did raise her arm high for some quick hand-squeezing contact.

“Good. Pretty good. Thanks for taking care of us on short notice. This is my sister, Ellie.”

Ellie said hey and thanked Vanessa for setting them up with the doorman.

“Not a problem. Jack Daniels straight up, and what else?” she asked Ellie.

“Johnnie Walker Black.”

“Jack and Johnnie. I guess whisky runs in the family.”

Seconds later, she handed the drinks to Jess and waved off the money Ellie tried to hand her. “I’ve got my hands full here, but you guys have fun, all right?”

Jess thanked Vanessa again and asked her to find them if she got a break. She assured them she would.

“Now what?” Jess asked, handing Ellie her drink.

“Now we watch.”

AT 11:04 P.M., Bill Harrington sat alone in his living room, watching the evening news from his recliner.

A disturbing discovery to tell you about tonight in Manhattan. In the early hours of the morning, joggers found the partially nude body of nineteen-year-old Chelsea Hart at a construction site along the East River. Police tell us that Hart was a freshman at Indiana University and was in New York City for spring break. Police believe she was last seen alive at a club in the Meatpacking District on the west side of Manhattan. Anyone with information related to the case should call NYPD’s tip line at-

Bill Harrington pressed down the footrest of his chair, stood, and made his way to the kitchen for a pen and pad of paper. He did not know anything at all about Chelsea Hart or her trip from Indiana, but he could not help but wonder if her murder had something to do with the dream that had pulled him from his bed so early that same morning, brushing his cheek like the tip of an angel’s wing.

CHAPTER 15

“THIS DETECTIVE WORK’S really hard.” Jess used a gap between two customers seated at the bar to drop off his empty glass.

It had taken them only fifteen minutes to circle the entire club. Now they were back where they began, at the bar.

“So tell me what you noticed,” Ellie said.

Jess shrugged. “Hot girls. Rich guys. A lot of booze and bad dancing.”

“See, here’s what I noticed. That girl over there?” She pointed to a petite brunette in a sleeveless turtleneck and skinny black pants. “She’s wearing the turtleneck to cover up marks on her throat, but when she looked in the mirror she didn’t see the finger-shaped bruises on the backs of both her arms. That explains the scratch on her boyfriend’s face.”

Jess looked at the brunette’s male companion, a tall guy with a prominent forehead, five o’clock shadow, and, sure enough, a couple of claw marks near his right eye.

“My guess is it happened last night or this morning,” Ellie explained over the mind-numbing dance music. “He’s taking her out tonight to make it up to her.”

“Jesus, Ellie. Being you has got to be pretty fuckin’ depressing.”

“That girl over there?” Ellie pointed to a younger-looking woman in a clingy wrap dress and high-heeled boots. “She just handed her ID to a guy who was heading out for a smoking break. He’ll be back any minute with some jailbait girl in tow. Oh, and there he is now,” she said, just as a young couple walked through the entrance.

“Ellie Hatcher. Crime-detecting robot.”

“And, finally, my guess is the bouncer-the one posted over there by the side exit-his name’s Jaime Rodriguez. Also on the list of Pulse employees.”

Ellie was fairly certain she recognized the man from the booking photos she’d pulled up on her computer earlier in the day, when she ran all of the employees for criminal histories.

If the bouncer was in fact Rodriguez, he’d cleaned up considerably in the last two years. In each of his prior booking photos, he’d carried that rough look found on so many kids who were raised more by the streets than by their parents. He’d worn his hair long and unwashed, his face concealed by sideburns and a goatee, his mouth set in a scowl. Now he was clean shaven with close-cropped hair and looked downright friendly. Had Rodriguez changed, or had he simply upgraded his chosen locale for slinging drugs?

Jess ran off for a second round of drinks, and Ellie continued her people-watching. From what she could tell, Rodriguez’s job tonight was to stand near the exit to make sure no patrons used it to sneak their friends in. A false alarm set off by an open door would invoke hysteria, and locking the exit from the inside was the kind of stunt that could get a club’s ticket pulled with the city. So there Rodriguez stood, exchanging a few words here and there with passing patrons.

One male customer must have been a regular. He had moppish blond hair and wore black dress pants, a gray sports coat, and a blue collared shirt that matched his eyes. He emerged from behind the long white curtains that separated the VIP rooms from the rest of the club and headed directly for Rodriguez, checking out the surroundings as he walked. After a brief but close-faced exchange, the two men dapped fists, top to bottom, bottom to top, then straight on.

The mop-haired man walked back to the VIP lounge, and a tall, thin woman emerged, with that had-to-be-a-model look about her. Once past the curtains, the woman scanned the club, spotted Rodriguez, and made her way over to him. Ellie noticed the woman’s hand touch the bouncer’s, then immediately saw Rodriguez’s other hand pass over the top of the model’s handbag.

Only twenty minutes in the club, and she’d already witnessed the staff involved in a hand-to-hand. If she was going to need leverage over Rodriguez or the club’s management, she had some now.

A few minutes later, the same mop-haired guy emerged again from the VIP lounge. Another conversation with Rodriguez, this one a little longer. Rodriguez pulled a couple bills off the roll he’d taken from the model and handed them to the blond. The blond gave the bills a passing glance and pushed them into his front jacket pocket.

Jess was back at Ellie’s side now and handed her another drink.

As Ellie took a sip, she watched the man return to his private room and shook her head at his appearance. They were in the middle of Manhattan, and this guy looked like he’d just hopped off a surfboard. Why a grown man would opt for such a teeny-bopper hairstyle was beyond her.

The fuddy-duddy nature of her own thoughts made Ellie feel old. She supposed that if she were a mere decade younger, she’d think the guy was good looking. Hot. Smokin’. Whatever the young people were calling it these days.

Then she realized she’d stumbled onto something better than the kind of small-time hand-to-hand drug transactions that were taking place in every club in the city tonight. The guy in the VIP lounge had blond moppish hair. Cute more than good looking. Like an older Zac Whatever-His-Name-Was.

“Jess, we need to talk to Vanessa. Now.”

CHAPTER 16

VANESSA MET THEM at the end of the bar, in front of the office door Ellie had seen the club manager use earlier that day.

“Jess. I love you, man, but I gotta work.”

“This’ll just take a sec.”

“If someone just walked through that curtain over there”-Ellie pointed to the place where she’d last seen the shaggy-haired blond-“can you tell which VIP room that is?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Can you find out what credit card’s being used to hold the room?”

A worried look crossed Vanessa’s face. “Look, I don’t know what you guys have in mind, but-”

Ellie leaned in closer. “I’m a cop. I was here today with my partner, talking to your manager, Scott Bell. Is he here?”

Vanessa’s expression changed to one of recognition. “Oh, shit. Is this about that girl?”

“Scott told you?”

“I heard him talking about it on the phone when I came in tonight. Oh, my God. I thought you were just here with Jess-”

“I am. Do you remember seeing Chelsea Hart here last night? She would’ve been drinking Angel’s Tips.”

“For chicks who want to get wasted off a milkshake. No, I’d remember that one.”

“I really need that credit card information. You can run it past Scott if you have to-”

Vanessa didn’t require convincing. She walked directly to the cash register behind the bar. She hit a button to open the drawer, flipped through a few pieces of paper, and returned with an American Express Black Card bearing the name Capital Research Technologies.

Ellie didn’t need to check the list of credit card accounts in her purse to be certain, but she made the comparison anyway. Same card. Same club. One night earlier.

J. J. ROGAN WALKED through the front doors of Pulse a mere fifteen minutes later.

“Nice outfit,” Rogan observed. Rogan was sporting the same suit he’d worn to work during the day, and Ellie wondered if he’d been out himself when she’d interrupted. “Don’t you ever sleep, Hatcher?”

“That’s what my body double’s for.”

“Hold on a sec,” Rogan said, his attention pulled away by something-or someone-behind him. “I thought you said you were going home.”

An attractive woman in her mid-thirties with caramel-colored curls and alabaster skin flashed a perfect smile. “I had second thoughts. How could I resist a peek?”

“Do I even want to know what you said to the bouncer to finagle your ass in here?”

“I’m heading out now,” she said, jingling a set of BMW keys. “I know you’ve got to work. Are you the partner?”

“That’d be me. Ellie Hatcher.”

“Sydney Reese. He’s been good to you so far?”

“The best.”

“A-hem,” Rogan said pointedly. “I hate to interrupt the girl talk, but we sort of have a homicide investigation going here.”

Sydney waved good-bye and blew Rogan a kiss before leaving.

“What have you got so far?” Rogan asked.

Ellie led the way toward the rear of the club. With the help of two uniform officers from the Tenth Precinct and the cooperation of Scott Bell, the assistant club manager, she had gathered everyone from the Capital Research Technologies VIP lounge into the back office. She had also called Chelsea’s friends, Stefanie Hyder and Jordan McLaughlin, and asked them to come down right away.

In the process, she’d lost her unofficial partner. Once the amateur sleuthing had been replaced by official police work, Jess had given up all interest in Pulse and left to meet an ex-girlfriend in SoHo.

“We need to interview these people fast,” Ellie said. “Some of them are already talking about lawyers and their rights and when they can leave.”

“Rich folks are so difficult,” Rogan said.

At best, Ellie had only enough suspicion to justify a brief detention of the customers in the VIP room. Anything beyond that would require probable cause.

“I’ve already talked to the guy who set off my radar in the first place.” She pointed to the blond guy with shaggy hair. “His name’s Nick Warden. It’s his Am Ex holding the VIP room. I saw him connect one of the club’s bouncers-that guy Rodriguez-and some model for a drug deal, then take a piece of the profits afterward. And, you’re gonna love this. He’s twenty-five years old. Has his own hedge fund company.”

The look on Rogan’s face made it clear he knew the type but didn’t have to like it.

“He’s of course denying the drug deal, but he admits he was here last night. He tells me these two”-she pointed to two men whom she had separated on opposing sides of the small office-“were here with him last night as well. The big one’s Tony Russo, a financial analyst. The skinny guy, Jake Myers, works with Warden at his hedge fund. Warden insists the rest of these folks weren’t around last night, at least not with him.”

“And Chelsea?”

“I showed him the picture we got out of Jordan’s cell phone. Our Nick said right away he remembered her. At least he knows not to pull any obvious bullshit. ‘The party girl’ is what he called her.”

“A girl from Bloomington struck this guy as a party girl?” Rogan asked. “She had to be a bigger player than her friends let on.”

“Or more so than they realized.”

A quick and dirty test of Nick Warden’s credibility was to ask everyone else in the room whether they’d been at Pulse the previous evening. Ellie had separated the VIPs quickly, so there’d been no time for them to sync their stories.

They started with the friends who, at least according to Nick, had not been partying with them the night before. To a person, they denied having been at the club. After getting their basic contact information and head shots for good measure, Ellie and Rogan had cut them loose. They had to. No choice.

With one exception. The model. Her name turned out to be Ashlee Swain. Ellie had requested consent to search her purse, but she refused. Swain’s fortitude earned her a pair of handcuffs, her Miranda warnings, and a search incident to arrest.

“Word to the wise,” Ellie said, removing a small ziplock bag from Swain’s purse. “There’s always an easy way and a hard way.”

“Whatever,” Swain said. “I want a lawyer.”

Ellie held the bag up toward the office’s overhead fluorescent lights. She recognized the crushed tan crystalline substance as a snortable form of crystal meth. Same euphoria, agitation, and sexually compulsive behavior. None of the mess and paraphernalia required for smoking. None of the hypodermics that came with slamming.

“What’s the matter? Afraid of needles and fumes? You sure you don’t want to corroborate my testimony that the bouncer over there sold to you?” Ellie took a look at Jaime Rodriguez, who was playing it cool. “Remember: easy way and hard way.”

“Are you sure you’re supposed to be talking to me? Because what I remember is that I’m a two-L at Cardozo Law School who has read the Supreme Court’s opinion in Edwards v. Arizona, and I know I just asked for a lawyer. And for a first-time buy, the hard way, as you call it, is a heartfelt apology, a stop at drug court, and a clean record once I’m done.”

The woman was six feet tall, drop-dead gorgeous, and knew her legal rights. At that moment, Ellie really hated her. But Ashlee Swain’s recreational drug use was not her current priority. She turned the woman over to one of the uniformed officers to process the drug case.

“Two VIPs to go,” she said, looking at Tony Russo and Jake Myers. “You want the financial analyst or the hedge fund dude?”

“I’ll take the hedge fund prick,” Rogan said.

TONY RUSSO HAD a thick body and a square head that was losing its black hair. Combined with his large facial features, he might have been typecast as a Brooklyn butcher were it not for the wardrobe, a black sports coat over a sky blue dress shirt and dark gray pants. Ellie began by asking him when he was last at Pulse.

“What do you mean? I’m here right now.”

“Before now,” Ellie clarified. “When was the last time you were here before tonight?”

“I don’t know. I come here all the time. Wait. Last night. That’s how much I’m here. I was here last night.”

“Who was with you?”

“A bunch of people. What is this about? What do you mean, who was with me?”

“I’m just asking you who generally you were with.”

“Well, the same people who were with me are the same people I was with. How’s that for esoteric?”

“You’re making my head hurt, Tony. Who was in your company last night?”

“It’s always Nick’s friends. Nick was here. Jake-that dude over there, Nick’s partner-he was here.” Russo looked around and saw that the others were all gone from the office or leaving. “That was it, I guess. Most of those other people, they were just girls Nick waved in from the dance floor, you know? Or maybe he knew a few of ’em, I don’t know. You gotta ask him. He’s always the ringleader, you know?”

“But you didn’t just get waved in. You and Nick are friends?”

“Yeah, tight. Him and Jake, too. Are you gonna cut me loose here pretty soon, babe?”

“Hey, J. J., Tony here thinks I’m a babe.”

“Man’s got good taste,” Rogan said, keeping his attention fixed on Jake Myers.

“Yeah, we’re about done. I just need to know whether you remember seeing this girl last night.” Ellie showed him the photograph of Chelsea, monitoring him closely for his reaction.

Despite his seeming indifference, Russo took a good look at the picture. No nervousness. No evasiveness. Same breezy, cocky demeanor.

He tapped the photograph a few times with his index finger. “Yeah, yeah, I remember her. Go Hoosiers. She was a real babe. Not as good as you, of course.”

“Did you talk to her at all?”

“Nah. I got a girl. She’s out of town, but I’m not stupid, you know?”

“Not even on a night out with Nick?”

“Not even. Altar boy. Can’t you tell?”

Actually, Ellie could.

“So, who was she with?”

Now, for the first time, she did sense a change in Russo’s easygoing manner. His smile fell as his brow furrowed.

“Seriously, what’s going on? I just want to get out of here.”

“This girl was murdered last night.”

“Ah, Jesus. Nick, did you hear this, man? One of those Indiana chicks last night-”

“Hey,” Ellie said, “I can’t have you guys talking to each other right now. Talk to me,” she said, pointing to herself. “No one’s accusing anyone. I just need to know who this girl was talking to last night.”

“Everyone, man. I don’t know. She was toasted, you know? Partying. Getting her freak on.”

“Did she talk to Nick?”

“That’s bullshit. It wasn’t like that. She wasn’t talking to anyone. She was just dancing and hanging out-with anyone and everyone.”

“So she was dancing and hanging out with Nick?”

Russo shook his head in frustration, apparently finding Ellie considerably less babe-ish now. “Yeah, fine,” he said, lowering his voice, “she was dancing with Nick. But she was also dancing with Jake. And our buddy Tom. And some other dude-um, Patrick, another friend of Nick’s.”

“But she didn’t dance with you.”

“No, but that’s only because I don’t dance. Seriously, it wasn’t what you’re thinking. She wasn’t with anyone. That’s how Nick nights are. Girls come in for the free booze and to be our eye candy for the night. No one’s looking for a girlfriend.”

“Not even for one night?”

Russo didn’t respond.

“When you left, did you leave alone?”

“I told you. Altar boy.”

“I didn’t mean with another woman. I want to know if you saw your friends leave.”

“I don’t like where this is going. My friends are decent guys.”

“Then you shouldn’t mind telling me who left and when.”

“You just don’t get it,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t take this the wrong way. I’m not trying to be a prick, but I don’t want to say anything that’s gonna bite one of my boys in the ass. I want a lawyer, like that Cardozo chick said.”

Great. The model had not only invoked her own rights, but had done so loudly enough for Tony Russo to get an introductory lesson about his own.

Ellie turned to check on Rogan. With the pace of the last thirty minutes, this had been her first opportunity to take a look at Jake Myers, who was trendier than his preppy friends. He was about six feet tall. Thin. Dark brown hair. He had an interesting face-long and narrow with a prominent chin and sleepy eyelids. He reminded Ellie of someone. She was just about to put her finger on it when she heard a high-pitched female voice behind her.

“That’s him. That’s the guy who looks like Jake Gyllenhaal.”

CHAPTER 17

“HOW MANY TIMES do I have to tell you?” Jake Myers’s voice was strained. Twenty minutes in, and he was sticking by his story. “She told me she had an early flight and left the club before I did. I haven’t heard from her since.”

“What time did she leave?” Rogan asked.

“I don’t know. I remember that bitchy friend of hers coming by and trying to get her to leave right before.”

“Well, that bitchy friend just ID’d you as the last person to see Chelsea Hart alive. You might want to start coming up with specifics.”

Myers licked his lips nervously. “My guess is she left about half an hour after that, but I’m not sure. It was a late night, and I wasn’t checking my watch.”

“Did you walk her out?”

“No. She left by herself, as far as I could tell.”

“Were you outside of the club with her at all?” Rogan asked.

“No.”

“Not at any point?”

“I told you, we were just dancing and hanging out.”

“When did you leave?”

“Late. Ask Nick. He was with me.”

“Anyone else leave with you?”

“No, just me and Nick.”

“Here’s the problem with that, Jake. Nick’s not talking. Neither is your friend Tony Russo.”

Myers had a hard time hiding the slight smile. “Well, I don’t have any control of that, do I? We left at closing time, so I’m assuming it was four, but sometimes the clubs go a little later if they don’t think they’ll get caught. Like I said-”

Rogan completed the sentence for him: “You weren’t checking your watch. Did anything happen between you and Chelsea before she left?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Single guy. Hot girl. Flirting. Did anything come of that?”

“No, man. I was just dancing with her.”

“You didn’t have any sexual contact at all?” Rogan was making sure to lock down all of Jake’s various denials, no ambiguities to exploit down the road if they caught him in a lie.

“No. I kissed her-not even, just a peck-when she left. That was it.”

“And no drugs?”

“I told you. I could tell she was drunk, but I didn’t take any drugs. I didn’t give her any drugs. And I didn’t see her with any drugs.”

Ellie interrupted. “Her friend says you were pretty eager to have Chelsea stick around. You didn’t want her to leave.”

“We were having a good time. Did I think maybe it was going somewhere? Sure, but when she said she had to go, she had to go. No means no, right?”

“Not always,” she said.

“It does with me. There’s always another girl.”

“Was there one last night?” Ellie asked.

“No,” Jake said quietly, some of the attitude falling into line.

“All right. Let me talk to my partner for a second,” Rogan said. He waved Ellie to the front of the office, and she followed. “What do you think?”

“I think he’s lying.”

“Well, he’s not coming up with any details.” Innocent people tended to have excellent memories when it came time to account for their whereabouts.

“And I’m not buying all that indignation. Fear? Nervousness? That’s what I would understand from him right now. But he’s so put out by half an hour of conversation?”

“That’s ’cause lying is hard work.”

“And we know he’s lying about the drugs. It’s too much of a coincidence that Chelsea had meth in her system, and we just happen to catch these guys hooking up a girl with meth through Rodriguez.”

“But Rodriguez wasn’t working last night.”

“Doesn’t matter. If he’s dealing out of the club, then he’s probably working with someone else who supplies on his days off. These clubs have more drugs going in and out of them than a Duane Reade. A club can’t be known as a place to score unless they’ve got every night covered. And if Myers is lying about the meth-”

“Then he’s also lying about the girl leaving alone, him leaving without a girl, and everything being Doris Day innocent.”

“Otherwise his friends would back him up,” Ellie said. “Instead, they invoke, and he’s sitting pretty. He’s rolling the dice that we don’t have enough to hold them. The minute we cut them loose, they’ll get together and line up their stories.”

“Not exactly a high-stakes bet,” Rogan said. “No PC for the murder, and the ADA will shoot us down on material witness warrants.”

“So let’s give Mr. Myers what he wants. Let’s go ahead and spring him.”

“So he can get his buddy Nick to vouch that they left together?”

“Nope. Because we’re about to introduce Nick Warden to the overnight comforts of the Tenth Precinct.”

“JAIME RODRIGUEZ. NICK WARDEN. You’re both under arrest for criminal sale of a controlled substance and conspiracy to commit criminal sale of a controlled substance.”

Ellie placed her cuffs on Nick Warden, while Rogan pulled Rodriguez’s wrists behind his back. They might not have probable cause to hold anyone for Chelsea Hart’s murder, but she’d personally witnessed Warden negotiate the drug deal between Rodriguez and that Amazon of a law student.

They walked the two men toward the back of the office, where officers from the Tenth Precinct would take them out a rear exit to complete the booking process.

Jake Myers took a step in their direction. “Whoa, what are you doing?”

Ellie pointed him back toward his corner at the front of the office. “Stay over there. Move again, and I’ll arrest you for obstructing. Someone get Mr. Myers a glass of water to keep him busy, all right?”

The decision to book Warden entitled her to conduct a search incident to arrest. She pulled a money clip from his jacket pocket, and slipped the entire wad into a baggie. If some of the cash came back with Rodriguez’s fingerprints, it would at least corroborate the deal she’d seen go down between them.

“Smile for the camera,” she said, snapping a quick head shot with her cell phone.

Rogan finished a check of Rodriguez’s pockets and gave her a slight head shake. No drugs. Either Rodriguez had sold the last of the ice he was holding to the model, or he had managed to pass off his stash to someone else in the club before he was herded into the back office.

Without anything to corroborate Ellie’s testimony, the defense would argue that she had misinterpreted a harmless conversation between Warden and Rodriguez. Not that it mattered.

As a uniformed officer led Warden through the back door, he shot a look at Myers, who was drinking his glass of water as directed. A night in jail would be a good test of Warden’s loyalty.

Rogan passed Rodriguez off to another officer. “Maybe Warden will wake up tomorrow telling us he didn’t leave with Myers after all.”

“At the very least we’ve bought ourselves some time until tomorrow afternoon’s arraignment. The labs might be back by then.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a witness placing Myers with Chelsea after she left the club.”

“Oh, and by the way,” Ellie said, “that glass of water Myers is drinking from as we speak? He might just leave behind tidy little fingerprints to match the latent on Chelsea Hart’s button.”

“Detectives?” A uniformed officer looked at them apologetically. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s an older couple here asking for you. They’re refusing to leave.”

PAUL AND MIRIAM HART looked out of place at the club’s entrance in their wool sweaters and matching khaki pants.

“Those two men,” Miriam said. “The men who were pulled out of here. Were they the ones?”

Ellie placed a hand gently on Miriam’s forearm. “Tonight we made real progress. But we arrested those two men-for now-only on drug charges. We believe one of them may have information about what happened to Chelsea last night.”

“What about the man Stefanie identified?” Paul asked. “Stefanie called us from the cab. She said she left Chelsea alone with him, and that you’d found him here.”

Ellie swallowed. “We are following up on that.”

“What do you mean, following up?”

She didn’t want to tell them that Rogan was currently cutting Myers loose out the club’s back exit. “I would call him a person of interest for now.”

“You’re arresting him, then?”

She did her best to explain the legal requirements for an arrest and all of the ways that making an arrest too early would jeopardize the chances of a conviction down the road.

“So he just goes home?” Paul said. “We go back to our hotel room and turn off the lights and go to sleep with the knowledge that your ‘person of interest’ is out there doing God knows what?”

Ellie had tossed and turned her way through countless numbers of those kinds of nights, and she wasn’t going to lie to these people. “Yes, that’s exactly what you need to do. And you’ll probably have to do the same tomorrow, and maybe the next day. But I promise you, I would not ask something so painful of you if it weren’t absolutely necessary. We are making progress. I promise.”

“A drug arrest is progress?”

Miriam began to apologize for her husband, but Ellie stopped her. “I know I have no right, but I’m asking you to trust us.”

As she helped the Harts into the back of a patrol car that would carry them to their complimentary suite at the Hilton, she told herself that Nick Warden’s night in the Tenth Precinct would turn out to be more than just another drug bust. It had to.

SLEEP. WHAT ELLIE NEEDED next was sleep. She had been awake for twenty-two hours and desperately needed to catch a few hours of shuteye. The thought of a soft pillow and clean-ish sheets was paradise.

What welcomed her instead was Peter Morse, sitting on the step that led to her building’s doorway, staring at his cell phone. His brown hair was tousled, as usual, and he looked cold in a fashionably crumpled corduroy jacket thrown over a T-shirt and jeans.

“Hey, you.” He stood to greet her, as if waiting outside her door in the middle of the night was perfectly normal. “I’ve been calling you.”

“I know. Didn’t you get my text?” After Peter’s name popped up twice on the screen of her cell, Ellie had sent him a text around midnight, telling him she was wrapping up some work on a case.

“Yeah, that’s why I figured I had a chance of finding you awake this late. I didn’t realize you’d be out all night and coming home wearing-wow, you look frickin’ amazing.”

“Thanks. It’s borrowed.” Ellie slipped her key into the building’s security lock, and Peter followed her inside and into the elevator. “Not to be rude, but what the heck are you doing here?”

“I was hoping to exploit a technicality in your two-nights-alone rule. I figured after midnight, we had achieved formal compliance.”

“It’s nearly three in the morning,” she said.

“It was only two when I got here.”

“You waited in the cold for an hour?” As she opened the door, she called out Jess’s name, but the apartment was empty. “I suppose it’s romantic, in a stalkerish sort of way. So are you coming in?”

He paused at the doorway.

“Peter, I don’t have a lot of experience with men showing up at my doorstep at three in the morning, but I sort of figured an invitation to spend the night would have been way up there on the best-case scenarios for you.”

He followed her inside and gave her a soft kiss on the lips.

“Seriously, where were you?”

She pulled her head back. “Seriously? I was working on a case. Oh, my God, is that why you sat outside my building for an hour? You thought you were going to catch me with someone else?”

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said. “All I know is that when you didn’t answer your door, I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I just sat there like some lovelorn teenager waiting for my phone to ring.”

“Sad.”

Peter leaned in for another kiss, but she pulled away again.

“So when do you explain why you just asked me where I was, even though I told you three hours ago I was working?”

“Can we just forget about it? I’m exhausted, and that best-case scenario you mentioned is sounding pretty appealing right now.”

“Did you think I lied to you?”

“No, of course not. I just-I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like we ever said anything about being exclusive. So, yeah, the thought crossed my mind.”

“But I told you I was working.”

“Ellie, people offer all kinds of explanations when they’re dating around. Things are still pretty new with us. You wanted the night off. You were out late. You texted instead of called. All I said was that the thought crossed my mind. Can we please drop the subject?”

“Have I acted like a person who’s still on the market? I thought everything was fine.”

“Everything is fine. I shouldn’t have asked where you were. It was a slip of the tongue. Chalk it up to being tired, or recovering from the emasculation of waiting outside your door.”

“But it wasn’t a slip of the tongue,” Ellie said. “You were very clear about wanting to know where I was, even after I told you. And if everything were really fine, I don’t think a thought like that would cross your mind, as you called it. If something is bothering you about the way things are between us, I wish you’d talk to me about it.”

Peter gave her a patient smile. “Nothing’s bothering me. Let’s go to bed, okay?”

“See? You say that like we’re skipping over something. Like there’s something you want to get off your chest but it’s easier to let it slide.”

He let out an exasperated groan. “How do you do that? How do you know exactly what a person is thinking?”

“If I knew what you were thinking, I wouldn’t be pressing you to tell me.”

“Pressing? More like waterboarding. Trust me, Ellie. You don’t really want to have this discussion with me.”

“Well, you can’t just leave it at that. Is this about your book?” She thought she had done a good job of keeping her apprehensions to herself.

“No, that’s just pie in the sky. I’m talking about Kansas. About your dad and that case. About you going to Wichita for a month. I shouldn’t have had to learn the details on Dateline like the rest of the country, Ellie. You never even talked to me about it. You’d stay up late talking to Jess-I’d hear you out here in the living room-but never once spoke about any of it with me.”

“You’re jealous? Jess is my brother. My father was his dad, too. And it’s our mother.”

“You don’t need to explain to me that you and your brother share the same parents. I’m not jealous. I wish you would have let me in, just a little. And, yeah, I guess it sort of made me wonder what exactly we were doing.”

Much of what Ellie had learned about the College Hill Strangler during her trip to Wichita was now part of the public record, easily attainable with a few Google searches. After believing for nearly two decades that the killer who’d haunted her father for his entire career had been responsible for his death, Ellie finally received concrete proof from the WPD: on the night of Jerry Hatcher’s death, William Summer had been the best man at his sister’s wedding in Olathe, more the 175 miles from the country road where Ellie’s father died in his Mercury Sable after a single bullet was discharged from his service weapon into the roof of his mouth.

The implication was clear. If Summer hadn’t pulled the trigger, then her father had. He had chosen to end his life, leaving behind two children and a mother who was incapable of caring either for herself or them on her own. Ellie was still learning how to accept a version of history she had always rejected.

She poured herself a glass of water from the Brita pitcher in her refrigerator and carried it to the coffee table. And then Ellie did something she rarely did. She apologized. “I’m so sorry. You should have heard it all from me, in my words-not in sound bites from a television show.”

Peter pushed her hair from her eyes and kissed her forehead, then her lips. “Let’s get some sleep.”

For the first night since she returned to New York from Kansas, Ellie Hatcher did not dream about William Summer.

THREE HOURS LATER, a man closed the door of his Upper East Side apartment behind him and used two different keys to secure two separate locks. He walked the two flights of stairs down to 105th Street.

It was still dark, the streets relatively deserted, but the man could see when he turned the corner that the Chinese man who operated the newsstand at 103rd and Lex had just unlatched his makeshift storefront and was using a pocketknife to free stacks of newspapers from the constraints of cotton twine.

The man slowed his pace. He did not want to be in a position where he either had to wait for the news man or help him. Then he might be remembered as the impatient man who was waiting for the morning’s papers, or the friendly man who had assisted with the twine. He preferred not to have any adjectives associated with him.

Once the papers were stacked and the Asian was back in his booth, the man allowed himself to approach. He selected three local papers-the Daily Post, the Sun, and the Times. Extended three dollars across the row of candy bars-exact change.

He folded all three newspapers together, tucked them under his arm, and made his way back to 105th Street. Turned the corner. Into the building. Up two flights of stairs. Past the locks.

Inside his apartment, he unfolded the papers and placed them side by side on the small dining table in the corner of his living room. Chelsea Hart’s murder was splashed across the front page of both the Sun and the Daily Post. Front page of the New York Times Metro section. This would not have happened if she were not a college student from Indiana.

He recognized the photograph used by both the Post and the Times. It was the same picture Chelsea had used to make her fake ID card. The photograph in the Sun was different-candid, casual, less professional.

The man began to read the text of the Sun article but then looked again at the image of Chelsea Hart. Even with the cropping, he understood the photo’s significance. The red shirt. Collar necklace. Beaded earrings that matched the one buried beneath his floorboards.

He knew precisely when and where that photograph had been taken. He even remembered the limoncello-shooting tomcat who’d snapped it.

CHAPTER 18

THE COVERAGE OF Chelsea Hart’s murder had hit full throttle by Tuesday morning. It was the lead story on NY1’s morning show, and Chelsea’s photograph dominated the front page of both the New York Sun and the Daily Post. The case even warranted a story in the Metro section of the New York Times.

Ellie noticed that the Sun had run the photograph with which she was now long familiar-cropped around Chelsea’s smiling, happy face while she waited for a table at Luna, the last restaurant she’d ever frequent. She wondered whether the Sun had paid Chelsea’s friend Jordan for the picture or simply given her the standard line about how important it was for the public to see Chelsea as she had actually lived.

In contrast, both the Daily Post and the New York Times ran the same formal, posed headshot-Chelsea’s senior high school portrait, provided directly by the Hart family. After their talk the previous day with a caseworker from the Polly Klaas Foundation, Paul and Miriam Hart had apparently taken a page from the parents of Elizabeth Smart and Natalee Holloway, marshaling all of their resources to launch an orchestrated public relations campaign to ensure that their daughter’s case was at the top of every news cycle until they found something resembling justice. Press releases. Photographs. Tearful public statements from designated family representatives.

Ellie didn’t blame them. Given the symbiotic relationship between the media and law enforcement, nothing put the screws to the criminal justice system like a watchful public. She had taken advantage of that reality in her own life to call attention to her father’s death. She could not imagine the lengths she would go to as a parent who had lost a child.

The publicity surrounding the case had no doubt influenced Lieutenant Dan Eckels’s decision to summon them once again into his office. He sat. They stood.

“We’re more than twenty-four hours out,” Eckels said, steepling his fingers. “Tell me what we’ve got.”

Rogan spoke up first, giving the lieutenant a rundown of the investigation, ending with the events of the previous night.

“Good call arresting the friend instead of Myers,” he said, clearly directing the comment to Rogan. “If you’d hooked up Myers and he broke on what you had, the DA wouldn’t have run with it.”

“Thanks, Lou, but it was Hatcher’s idea.”

The idea earned Ellie a nod of acknowledgment. To the untrained eye, it was just a tilt of Eckels’s chin, but to Ellie it was the Thirteenth Precinct equivalent of Armstrong’s one small step from the Apollo 11.

“That explains the call from Kluger in the mayor’s office this morning. Apparently he got wind of some kind of arrest last night from the parents. What the hell kind of luck do we have that our vic’s somehow related to the deputy chief of staff?”

“Actually,” Ellie said, “I think he’s a frat brother of the father’s brother-in-law.”

Eckels gave her an annoyed look, and she decided it was best to move on.

“I just got a call from the city’s taxi commission,” she reported. “They circulated the picture I sent them yesterday of the victim. One of the drivers thinks he may have seen her that night outside Pulse. We’ll follow up.”

“Good, because we’ve been popular this morning. I also heard from the DA’s office. They want to get in early, so I’d start by having them set up a face-to-face with your Nick Warden before his arraignment. A night in jail might have given your hedge fund boy some different priorities.”

Eckels peeled off the top sheet of a Post-it pad next to his phone. He started to reach toward Rogan, but then handed the yellow square to Ellie. ADA Max Donovan for Knight, followed by a phone number. “Some kid called Donovan was the one to reach out, but it’ll be Knight’s case.”

Ellie had no idea who Max Donovan was, but anyone who followed New York City criminal trials knew about Simon Knight, the chief prosecutor of the trial unit at the district attorney’s office. His day-to-day job was to run the busiest trial unit in one of the nation’s largest prosecutor’s offices, break in the newbies, and ensure that the other assistants didn’t wuss out. His personal and early attention to the Chelsea Hart case was yet another indication that this one was big.

“We’ll call this Max Donovan straight away, sir.”

“Very good.”

Ellie and Rogan meted out tasks on the short walk back to their desks. She’d track down the cabdriver while he checked in with ADA Donovan, the medical examiner, and the crime scene unit.

She’d just plopped down into her chair when Eckels called out after them. “And, in case this wasn’t clear, don’t screw up.”

Nothing like a pep talk to kick-start the day.

ACCORDING TO THE TAXI COMMISSION, the driver who last saw Chelsea Hart alive was one Tahir Kadhim. Ellie dialed his number, then flipped open the Daily Post and checked out the byline: reporting by George Kittrie and Peter Morse.

Last night Peter had mentioned staying late at the paper to write something up with his editor. Now she saw that Kittrie had taken first billing for himself. Given the history there, she could only imagine Peter’s aggravation. A few years earlier, Kittrie had made the leap from career crime-beat reporter to author, and then editor, when he published a book about all of the opportunistic crimes that had been perpetrated in the chaos following September 11. From what Ellie understood, the book had put enough extra cash in Kittrie’s pocket to pay for a cottage in East Hampton. In the back of Ellie’s mind, she wondered whether George Kittrie was in part responsible for Peter’s excitement about writing a true-crime book. She also wondered if Kittrie’s success as an author might explain why Peter harbored such resentment toward his boss.

“Balay!”

Ellie held the phone away from her ear. The man on the other end of the line was yelling over some kind of Persian music in the background.

“This is Detective Hatcher. NYPD. Is this Tahir Kadhim?”

The music immediately quieted. “Yes, this is Tahir. This is about the picture, yes?”

Ellie was relieved she wouldn’t need a translator. The city’s taxi drivers sometimes appeared to have problems with the English language when you told them to turn on the air conditioning or turn down the radio, but their difficulties often faded away under less convenient circumstances.

“That’s right. The taxi commission told me you recognized the girl in the photograph?”

“I was not certain last night when I first saw it because of how it was printed from the fax, but I sent in a message nonetheless because I did think it was the same girl. But now that girl is the one in the newspapers. It is most definitely the same girl I saw yesterday morning.”

“We’re going to need to talk to you in person, Mr. Kadhim. Where should we meet you?”

“Where are you located?”

“Thirteenth Precinct. Twenty-first and Second Avenue.”

“I am ten blocks away. You will help me with parking?”

“I think that can be arranged.”

Rogan was still on the phone when Ellie hung up. He covered the mouthpiece with his palm. “Asshole put me on hold and never came back.”

Ellie scanned the DD5 containing the information that had come in about the case on the department’s tip line. The vast majority of calls were complaints about the city’s 4:00 a.m. closing time for bars-thirteen separate calls, by her count. Every time some crime was even tangentially associated with the late-night bar scene, the same people who complained on a weekly basis about the noise at the clubs in their neighborhood used the case as an opportunity to lobby against their favorite pet peeve.

Then there were the usual crackpots: three-count them, three-psychics offering their abilities to communicate with the dead; a woman whose schnauzer got sick early the previous morning, certainly a sign that he shared a karmic connection with Chelsea Hart; and some crank call from a guy who wanted to know if the girl had any cute midwestern friends heading to the city for the funeral.

No false confessions yet, but there was still time.

One entry tucked in among the rest caught her attention. “Bill Harrington. Daughter (Roberta, aka Robbie) murdered 8 years ago. Similar. Flann McIlroy thought there were others.” At the end of the notation was a ten-digit phone number. Ellie recognized the Long Island area code.

She found herself staring at two words: Flann McIlroy.

Detective Flann McIlroy had been famous-infamous, many would say-for his creative theories about investigations, creative enough to earn him the nickname “McIlMulder” within the department, an allusion to the agent who chased space aliens on the television show The X-Files. Ellie’s own experience with him had been far too brief, but she had come to trust him as both a man and a cop. If Flann had spoken to a murder victim’s father about his suspicions of a broader pattern, then Bill Harrington at least deserved a return phone call.

She wrote down the name “Roberta Harrington” and walked the slip of paper down to the records department. She was still trying to learn the names of the Thirteenth Precinct staff, something that had paid off in her previous assignments. A clerk who introduced herself as Shawnda promised she would order the old police reports from the Central Records Division immediately. Ellie thanked her for her time and made a point of repeating her first name.

Rogan was just hanging up his telephone when Ellie returned to her desk. “Something better shake soon, because the lawyers want us at the courthouse in two hours.”

TAHIR KADHIM WAS DARK, slight, and reluctant to leave his taxicab in front of a fire hydrant on East Twenty-first Street.

“It’s the only spot on the street, Mr. Kadhim,” Ellie said. “I’ll leave a permit on the dash.”

“Some meter maid will not believe that a taxicab is with the police. If the city tows my car, that is my entire day, not to mention the record I get on my medallion number.”

“We really need to speak with you.”

“Must I go inside? Why can we not speak out here?”

Ellie didn’t see the harm in getting the quick version of the driver’s story now, to avoid what she could foresee was going to be a headache-inducing conversation about the lack of adequate parking, the ineptitude of municipal employees, and the financial burdens of cabdrivers. She hopped into the passenger seat, and Kadhim hit his emergency blinker. At least it wasn’t the meter.

“You said you recognize this girl?”

She pulled an eight-by-ten printout of Chelsea Hart from a manila folder.

“Yes, that is right,” he said, tapping the photograph for emphasis. “I stopped Sunday night for her. She hailed me down, I think it was at Fifteenth and Ninth Avenue.”

“Where did you take her?” If Chelsea had left Pulse and headed to another club by herself, she would have an even tougher time linking Jake Myers to the murder.

“I did not take her. She stopped my cab, but I did not drive her.”

Ellie waited for Kadhim to explain, but he did not. “Did she change her mind?”

“No. See, there is a bit of a problem here. I want to help. That is why I called when I saw the picture. I did not have to call, you know.”

“What are you trying to say, Mr. Kadhim?”

“The Taxi and Limousine Commission. They are crazy. They have these rules, and they think nothing of shutting us down.”

“Mr. Khadim, I assure you, I am not trying to jam you up about some taxicab regulation. I just need you to tell me everything you can remember about this girl. Her name was Chelsea Hart. She was from Indiana. Her parents flew here yesterday to identify her body. I’d like to have something to tell them, sir.”

“You do not report to the commission?”

Ellie shook her head and waited for him to speak.

“She got inside the cab and told me to take her to the Hilton at Rockefeller Center. Before driving away, I checked to be sure she could pay me in cash. She could not. She asked me if I could take her Visa card instead.”

“But aren’t you all upgraded? The GPS, automation, credit cards.” The cabdrivers had gone on strike twice to try to prevent the change, but ultimately the commission had prevailed. Ellie peered over the partition into the backseat and saw the required equipment in Kadhim’s taxi.

“The credit card processing is broken,” Kadhim explained. “I told that to the young lady, but she said she had spent all of her cash. It happens a lot in that part of town at that time of night.”

“What time was it?” Ellie asked.

“It was not quite closing time, I remember. It was probably three thirty.”

An hour after Stefanie and Jordan left. Thirty minutes later than Jake Myers’s faltering estimate of when Chelsea had supposedly walked out alone.

“So what happened when she said she couldn’t pay cash?”

“I told her I would not drive her.”

Ellie now understood why Khadim had been nervous. She remembered from the taxi strike that the drivers were especially upset about a rule that required them to pull their cabs out of service if their credit card machines malfunctioned.

“Then what?”

“That is when the man offered to give her the money she needed.”

“Wait a second. There was a man with her?”

“She was alone. At first. But then when we were talking about how she was to pay her fare, a man came and knocked on the window. He…he propositioned her, if you understand.”

“Yes, okay, I think I know what you mean by that,” Ellie said, nodding even though she was having trouble picturing the scenario. “A man came up out of nowhere and knocked on your taxi window and offered to pay her for sexual favors?”

“No. It was not like that. She was talking to me, but then when the tapping began at the window, she lowered the glass and spoke to the man. I do not recall all of it, but it was along the lines of persuading her to stay with him, wherever she had been prior to coming outside. She told him she needed to go to her hotel-that she had an early flight in the morning-but that now she didn’t have any money, and I would not take her credit card. I remember that: she said, ‘And now this guy won’t take my fucking credit card.’ Not angry, but as if she were trying to be humorous. They both seemed intoxicated.”

“And what did the man say?”

“That is when he propositioned her. He said something like, I can give you the money. But then when she reached out of the window, he said she would have to earn it. I did not want them in my cab any more after that. Not every driver allows Taxicab Confessions in the back of their car, you know. I was about to order her to get out, but then she left on her own with the man. They were laughing, like it was a game.”

“Do any of these men look familiar?”

Ellie handed Kadhim four photographs. Kadhim flipped through them quickly and apathetically, past Nick Warden, Tony Russo, and Jaime Rodriguez-until he landed on the final picture. Jake Myers. “This man,” he said, handing the photograph to her. “This is the man she left with.”

“You’re sure?”

“I am positive. He was wearing a thin black tie, and his clothing was too tight. Pardon my French, but he looked like an asshole.”

That description alone left no doubt in her mind that the person Kadhim had seen with Chelsea Hart had been Jake Myers. But it was the two calls J. J. Rogan had placed while Ellie was wrapping up her conversation with Kadhim that persuaded her they had their man.

One call was to Mariah Florkoski at the crime scene unit. The fingerprint on the top button of Chelsea Hart’s blouse was an eight-point match to a latent print pulled from the glass of water Ellie had so generously offered to Jake Myers last night. And she’d found seminal fluid in the stain on the same shirt.

The other call was to the medical examiner. The rape kit was back. The oral swab was also positive for seminal fluid.

Now all they needed was a DNA sample.

CHAPTER 19

ONE HUNDRED CENTRE STREET not only famously houses many of the city’s criminal courts, but is also home to most of Manhattan’s five hundred assistant district attorneys. Rogan and Ellie checked in with a receptionist on the fifteenth floor and were directed to the office of ADA Max Donovan in the Homicide Investigation Unit.

Ellie already knew that the professional lives of ADAs were not glamorous. She had met with enough of them to know that the spacious, mahogany-highlighted offices, complete with brass lamps, antique scales, and matching volumes of leather-bound books, were the stuff of fictional lawyers on television. Most prosecutors worked long hours out of cubbyhole-sized cubes of clutter, all for a paycheck that wasn’t enough to cover both Manhattan rent and law school student loans.

Still, she would have thought that an attorney who’d been in the office long enough to earn a slot trying murder cases would warrant digs better than these. An ornately framed diploma from Columbia Law School stood out alongside Max Donovan’s metal desk, ratty chairs, and dented file cabinet. Apparently any luxuries to be found in the office were enjoyed even further up the food chain.

Donovan was tall, with broad shoulders and dark curly hair. If he felt any self-consciousness about his humble surroundings, he didn’t show it. He rose from his desk to welcome them with hearty handshakes, and then gestured for them to have a seat themselves. Ellie noticed the lawyer watching her as she crossed her legs in the charcoal-colored pencil skirt she’d chosen that morning. She also noticed a subtle smell that reminded her of white truffles.

“So I’ve already received a call this morning from Mr. Warden’s lawyer, looking for a deal.”

“So a night in jail did work wonders,” Rogan said, smiling.

“I assume you two don’t care about the drug charges on Warden. We’re just looking for cooperation in the event he’s covering for Jake Myers.”

“We’re more certain of that now,” Ellie said. “CSU matched Myers’s prints to a latent they pulled from the victim’s shirt. We also located a cabdriver who can place Jake Myers outside the club with the victim just before closing time. That contradicts his statement in two ways: he said Chelsea left earlier, and he said he was never outside the club with her.”

“Good,” Donovan said, straightening his blue-striped tie. “We’re getting somewhere. And we’re going to have some leverage against Warden. I just got the crime lab reports from last night.”

“That was fast,” she said. In the bureaucratic world of NYPD, evidence related to Warden’s drug bust had to be processed by a separate-and typically slower-unit than the physical evidence in the Chelsea Hart murder case.

“It’s amazing what they can do when you tell them Simon Knight needs something yesterday. The drugs you took off the girl-”

“Ashlee Swain,” Ellie reminded him.

“Right. The drugs came back positive as crystal meth, with Jaime Rodriguez’s fingerprints on the baggie. We’ve also got Warden’s prints, plus Rodriguez’s, on the money you seized from Warden’s pocket. And the weight came in at precisely an eighth of an ounce.”

“Hot damn,” Rogan said. The prints corroborated Ellie’s version of what went down between Rodriguez, Warden, and the model. And thanks to the Rockefeller drug laws, an eight ball of meth could get Warden up to nine years.

“Warden’s lawyer is ready to deal,” Donovan said. “Her client went through drug court once already as a college sophomore after he got popped for DUI on Christmas break and the police found a small amount of cocaine in his impounded car. That, combined with the drug weight and his current participation in distribution, will keep him out of drug court and on the felony docket.”

Ellie smiled. After news like this, the preppy rich kid with the surfer haircut would not be so protective of his friend.

“Shoot,” Donovan said, checking his watch. “I better run if I’m going to talk to this lawyer before arraignment.”

“Who’s the lawyer?” Rogan asked.

“Her name’s Susan Parker. I expected one of the big gun criminal defense lawyers, but she’s an associate at one of those fringy finance firms. They’ve got a reputation for pushing the envelope-moving business offshore, hiding conflicts of interest, just about anything to avoid SEC oversight. I assume they represent Warden’s hedge fund. Parker’s not much older than Warden himself. She was probably sent over here to work something out. If it gets complicated, they’ll bring in a shark. But not to worry. We’re not going to let it get complicated.”

“Real quick, before we go: we drafted an affidavit based on Jake Myers’s statements last night and the cabdriver’s ID,” Ellie said, holding up the four-page document she’d hammered out at the precinct. It was accompanied by an application for an arrest warrant and a search warrant for Jake Myers’s apartment, car, and a DNA sample. “We figured it was enough for PC. Do you want us to hold off until you get Warden’s story, or go ahead and get it signed while we’re here?”

“May I?” Donovan asked. She handed him the document and watched as Donovan scanned the pages, nodding occasionally. “Nice work. You write better than half the trial lawyers in the office.”

“That’s not exactly high praise for your coworkers.” As Donovan handed the affidavit back to her, Ellie noticed Rogan eyeing her with a smirk. “So what were your thoughts on the timing?”

“Right. Go ahead and get the warrant signed. Better to pick Myers up now. You never know where a guy like that might run off to.”

“THAT WAS QUITE the mutual admiration society up there,” Rogan said as they jogged down the courthouse steps on Centre Street. It had required all of fifteen minutes to get the warrants reviewed and signed.

“What are you talking about?”

“What are you talking about? I felt like I was standing in between Angelina and Billy Bob back in the old dirty days.”

“Please, because he said that stupid thing about my writing? He’s just a typical lawyer trying to get on our good side so he can screw us over down the road.”

“Excuse me, but I’ve been shined on by half the ADAs in the county, and that’s not what all that was about. I saw the way he was looking at you.”

“You are having far too much fun teasing me,” Ellie said.

“I’d say that from the looks of things, it was more like you were having fun teasing him. Crossing your legs. Getting his advice about the warrant. I think I even caught a hair twirl in there.”

“All right, that’s enough.” It was not a hair twirl. Maybe a flip, at most. Ellie did have to admit that she’d noticed Donovan looking at her.

She’d noticed other things as well during their brief introduction: Donovan’s height-he must have been about six-one-and solid build. Cool gray eyes and square jaw. A thin-lipped smile that was cute without being cocky. Sort of a John Kennedy Jr. look. No wedding band. That nice truffle smell.

That really was enough, she thought to herself. These loopy teenage daydreams were clearly the result of clinical levels of sleep deprivation. She felt a slight pang of guilt recalling one of the reasons for her sleeplessness-her late night with Peter Morse.

“Ready to pick up our boy Myers?” Rogan asked.

“I’ve been ready since the second he called Chelsea’s friend a bitch.”

THE SIGN THAT WELCOMED them was black marble with silver letters. Universal Capital Management.

It sounded serious. Large. Trustworthy. Established. In truth, it was a ten-month old, four-man shop occupying only half a floor of a midlevel office building on Fifth Avenue and Forty-third Street.

The receptionist informed them they would need an appointment to see Mr. Myers, but Ellie and Rogan ignored her and found their way down a narrow hallway leading to four offices. The first was empty. A nameplate on the desk read Nicolas J. Warden.

At door number two stood a man with a familiar face.

“Detectives. I didn’t realize you’d be coming here.”

Jake Myers apparently left his New Wave wardrobe at home during business hours. In a conservative navy suit and red power tie, and without mass quantities of gel to mold his hair into a gravity-defying shape, he almost didn’t look like an ass.

Rogan grabbed Myers’s arm, pushed him against the hallway wall, and began patting down his suit. “We don’t usually give people a shout-out before arresting them for murder.” He read Myers his Miranda rights while placing him in handcuffs.

“You’re making a mistake,” Myers said. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

Ellie pulled Myers around to face her. “You’re the one who made a mistake. Last night, you were sure your boys would cover for you. Well, tomorrow Nick Warden will be selling short and trading swap futures in his office next door, looking for someone else to help him run the company while you spend the rest of your life in prison.”

“I thought cops were supposed to investigate. You won’t listen to anything I tell you.”

“Let’s take a look at what you’ve told us so far. You told us you didn’t leave the club with Chelsea Hart, do drugs with her, or have sexual contact with her.” She ticked off his lies on her fingers. “So, as far as we’re concerned, everything you’ve ever said to us is a lie.”

Ellie was new to homicide cases, but she had arrested enough suspects to be familiar with the typical responses to confrontation. Regret. Panic. Anger. Defiance. She also recognized the physical acts that tended to accompany these emotions. Regret and panic tended to trigger tears, while anger often brought violence. Defiance was usually accompanied by either an adamant and detailed story of innocence or an invocation of counsel. And sometimes spit. Spit paired well with anger, too. She hated it when the angry and the defiant spit.

But Jake Myers caught her by surprise.

He smiled. He grinned like a man with a well-kept secret. Whatever apprehension they had temporarily instilled in him was gone, and the arrogance she’d initially witnessed at Pulse was back in its full glory. “Fine. Do what you have to do, beautiful.”

Ellie pictured herself delivering a knee strike to Myers’s groin, followed by a left jab into his skinny head. That’s what she had to do. At least a good smack. Something.

Instead, she said, “I take it you’re not answering any questions.”

“Not without a lawyer. You’re welcome to my DNA, however.”

It was Rogan who delivered the slap to the back of Myers’s head, and it wasn’t just in Ellie’s imagination. “Not another word.”

And that was the last they heard out of Jake Myers for three days.

THAT EVENING, at precisely 5:30 p.m., the man watched the entrance of Mesa Grill from a counter at an Au Bon Pain across the street.

He had come across the bartender accidentally the previous night. He had been walking downtown, looking for his next project; given the changes in the city over the last several years, it was his impression that downtown was the best place to look for the kind of girls he liked-girls who had fun, too much fun.

He started in Washington Square Park. A lot of NYU girls there. Hippie chicks. Down-and-outs. But compared to Chelsea, none of the girls he saw had that kind of spark.

From the park, he’d made his way over to the West Village. Spent some time in three different sex shops. He figured any woman who worked in a place like that would eventually be easy to grab. But to his disappointment, the employees had all been men. Most of the customers, too. It was the neighborhood, he figured.

He’d gotten his hopes up at a store called Fantasy when he’d spotted one of the employees from behind. She’d been reaching for a foot-long purple dildo from a top shelf. She must have been six feet tall. Thin. Long, white-blond hair. Then she had turned around, and it was clear that she was a he. Not his type.

From the Village, he had headed to the Flatiron. The district had once been known as Ladies’ Mile, famous for the department stores that drew the country’s most elegant women, shopping for the finest luxuries. First ladies frequented Arnold Constable at Nineteenth Street and Broadway. Tiffany & Co. had sat at Fourteenth Street and University before the jeweler decided that Union Square had coarsened. A century ago, this neighborhood had catered to the choosiest of women. Now, a hundred years later, he hoped that he might find precisely what he was searching for, somewhere on Broadway before he reached Madison Park.

The sidewalks were crammed with hundreds of interchangeable girls in blue jeans and winter coats, carrying shopping bags and designer purses. Most were in groups. Those who weren’t were attached to their cell phones-so uninteresting that they couldn’t stand the idea of being alone with their own thoughts for the handful of minutes it took to move on to the next purchase.

The man wondered if perhaps he was too spoiled in New York. He suspected that in any average city, the majority of these girls he’d written off would shine like flawless D-grade diamonds. Maybe his problem was that he had it too good. So many, many girls, not paying attention.

So he had tried again once he reached Twenty-third Street, making the turn where Broadway met Fifth Avenue. If anything, Fifth Avenue was even more crowded than Broadway. More girls. More shopping. More vacuous phone calls: “Nothing. What are you doing? Where are you? I’m going into Banana.”

He tried to remind himself that this was only his first attempt to find his next project, and less than twenty-four hours since Chelsea Hart. He had decided to call it an evening when he passed a busy restaurant. The brightly painted letters on the front window read “MESA.” High ceilings. Big crowd at the bar. Probably expensive. He was looking in the window, wondering whether it was expensive-stupid or expensive-good, when he noticed the bartender with the blond ponytail. She was pouring from two bottles into a martini shaker and talking to a middle-aged couple at the bar.

He spent a lot of time in bars. Despite the stereotype about bartenders, they really weren’t good listeners. If they were, he’d spend less time in bars. But this girl, she was really listening. She was nodding, laughing, looking the female half of the couple right in the eye, even as she frantically mixed away. Giving the mixer a vigorous shake, she scratched her cheek with her sleeve. Then she laughed about something. He could tell it was a real laugh, from the belly.

A margarita sounded good.

He’d waited until the seat next to the couple was empty before he ordered. House margarita, rocks and salt. Good, generic, forgettable order. As he sipped his drink, he’d learned more about the bartender, eavesdropping on her conversation with the couple. She was an aspiring writer. Two published short stories, a few magazine essays, and one unpublished novella. Now she was working on her first thriller, an attempt to go commercial at the suggestion of her agent. The setup featured a small-town female cop who realized her son was a serial killer.

He also overheard the bartender swap shifts with her bald male colleague for Tuesday and Thursday. She’d be covering his 11:00 to 5:30 shift; he’d take her usual 5:30 to midnight. “Thanks a lot for doing that,” the bald guy had said. “Not a problem,” she’d replied. “It’ll be nice to actually have a night to go out like a regular person.”

Only one pop-in, and he’d already nailed down a big piece of her schedule.

After he’d signaled for the check, he noticed that the top of the computerized slip of paper listed the name Rachel next to the date and time. He owed her twelve dollars. He opened his wallet and fingered a hundred-dollar bill inside, smiling as he remembered finding it in Chelsea’s purse. He removed a ten and a five instead and left both bills on the bar. Not too cheap, not too generous.

Now it was Tuesday evening, and the bartender should have just wrapped up the first of her two day-shifts this week. He watched from the bakery window, coffee in hand, as the girl he presumed was called Rachel buttoned up her beige peacoat and dashed across three lanes of traffic on Fifth Avenue.

Taking the corner onto Fifteenth Street, she passed directly in front of him. He lowered his gaze and then made his way to the exit, also turning at Fifteenth.

He was thirty feet behind her. He caught a whiff of musky perfume. He figured she probably spritzed herself on the way out of the restaurant to mask the smell of southwestern food.

He noticed she wore flat black loafers. Hopefully she would turn to something less practical when she wasn’t working. A healthy girl like her could run in loafers.

She reached her right hand to the nape of her neck, slipped off her ponytail elastic, and shook her blond waves loose. He stole a glimpse of her profile reflected in the window of a sushi restaurant as she passed. She looked good with her hair down.

Before she reached Union Square Park, she turned and disappeared into a storefront.

He crossed Fifteenth Street and kept his head down as he walked directly toward the park. He glanced in his periphery as he passed the spot where she had disappeared. “Park Bar.”

When he reached Union Square West, he found a seat at an unoccupied picnic table near the curb. He would sit here, and he would wait. And watch.

Patience. Diligence. Dedication. Timing.

He had found his project. Now he had to nail down the routine, learn the habits. Chelsea had caught him off guard. This time, nothing should be unexpected.

As he sat at the picnic table, watching subway riders dash to their trains at Union Square, he found himself smiling and remembering a line from Jack Finney’s classic novel Time and Again: “Suddenly I had to close my eyes because actual tears were smarting at the very nearly uncontainable thrill of being here. The Ladies’ Mile was great, the sidewalks and entrances of the block after block of big glittering ladies’ stores…”

He too had a very nearly uncontainable thrill of being in the Ladies’ Mile.

CHAPTER 20

“WHAT CAN I GET YOU, HATCHER?”

“Johnnie Walker Black. Rocks.”

“A week on the job together, and I still don’t know your drink,” Rogan said. “That ain’t right.”

As much as Ellie wanted to go home, flip on the tube, and crash on the couch, this had been her first invitation for a group drink out of the Thirteenth Precinct, and she was not about to blow the opportunity. They were celebrating Jake Myers’s arrest at Plug Uglies, a cop bar on Third Ave. between Twentieth and Twenty-first.

Even though this wood-paneled pub-originally named for one of the city’s old Irish gangs, now accessorized with the shoulder patches of hundreds of police and firemen-was the official hangout of the Thirteenth Precinct, this was Ellie’s first visit with other cops. Her only previous invitation had come from Jess after her first day in the homicide squad-not his sort of place, but it was close to work, and with a $2 happy hour, it was one of the few spots in Manhattan where her brother could afford to pick up a tab.

Tonight, drinks were on Rogan, and that meant that half the squad tagged along, even though they had nothing to do with the Chelsea Hart case. When it came time to celebrate, a case clearance for one was a win for all.

She spotted a familiar face at the end of the bar and indicated to Rogan she’d be right back.

“Hey, stranger.”

Peter Morse greeted her with a peck on the cheek. Ellie automatically looked around to confirm that the other cops were preoccupied.

“How’d you know I’d be here?” she asked.

“I didn’t. I’m meeting Kittrie.” Peter glanced at his watch. “His idea to be here, and now he’s fifteen minutes late. Typical.”

“He made you stay late last night, took top billing on this morning’s story, and now you’re having a drink with him? I thought you hated that guy.”

“Doesn’t matter-he’s the boss. Everyone’s tiptoeing around him anyway these days, ever since Justine accidentally connected to his line and heard some doctor saying something about a tumor. I’m convinced she made up the whole thing to fuck with me, but I’m not going to risk being an a-hole to the guy. He wanted to work together on the Hart story, we worked together. He wants to have a drink, I’m having a drink.”

“And he just happened to pick Plug Uglies out of all the bars in Manhattan?”

“Of course not. He’s convinced you pick up the best dirt at cop bars. Little does he know I have found a much more pleasurable method of cultivating inside sources.”

Peter placed his palm on the small of her back, and she pulled away. Enough PDA for one night.

“Ah, except I don’t actually give you any inside information. I just use you for the sex.”

Peter snapped his fingers. “I knew there was a problem with my plan. That probably explains why I’m in the doghouse with Kittrie. He’s pissed we didn’t get a better picture of your victim.”

“You had the same one as the Times.”

“Exactly. But the Sun didn’t. Now he says I shouldn’t have just taken whatever the family handed us. He says the graduation shot was too controlled.”

“What did he expect you to do? Go to her MySpace page and steal pictures off the Web?”

“That’s actually not a bad idea.”

“Too late. We already told the family to pull down the profile. But it would still be less tacky than nagging Chelsea’s friends. That’s how the Sun got their picture.”

“You’re tracking journalists’ practices now?”

Ellie got the impression he didn’t agree with her assessment about the tastelessness of chasing down a murder victim’s loved ones to help a story. “No, but it’s the only way they could’ve gotten it. One of Chelsea’s friends snapped it with her cell phone the night before the murder.” She was still annoyed that the photograph had run on the front page of tens of thousands of newspapers, with Chelsea’s missing earrings on full display.

She felt a hand on her right shoulder and turned to find herself in the middle of an enthusiastic handshake. The man pumping her arm was about forty years old, medium height and build, with wire-rimmed glasses and not much remaining hair.

“Hi there. George Kittrie. I believe you’re the famous Ellie Hatcher?”

“Hopefully less famous by the day.”

“Not if we have anything to say about it, isn’t that right, Peter?” Kittrie nudged the visibly uncomfortable reporter. “Ignore me. I’m being a jerk, even if I was only kidding.”

Kittrie looked familiar. She tried to place him-probably the author photo on his book. “Have we met before?”

“Nah, but you may have seen me around. I’m a big believer that any crime-beat reporter worth his salt has got to hit the cop bars. It’s all about contacts. I had a real good relationship with Flann McIlroy, by the way.”

Given the circumstances of McIlroy’s death, Ellie supposed her name would always be linked with his in New York City law enforcement circles.

“What kind of drink can we get you?” Kittrie asked.

She turned to see J. J. Rogan encircled by Thirteenth Precinct cops, a lonely Johnnie Walker Black on the bar next to him, getting more watered down by the second, calling out to her: Drink me.

“I’ve got some friends waiting for me,” she said.

“Sounded like a celebration when I passed. I don’t suppose there’s a break in the Chelsea Hart case.”

“Just an after-work drink is all.” The Daily Post would get wind of Jake Myers’s arrest soon enough from the Public Information Office. She said her good-byes and left poor Peter on his man date with Kittrie.

As Ellie made her way over to Rogan, she saw that the first patrol officer who responded to Chelsea’s crime scene was holding court. If she had to guess, he was probably leaving out the part where he tossed his cookies and was sent off to fetch her clothes.

She plucked her drink from the bar, and Rogan nodded his head in her direction.

“Capra here was just telling everyone about being first on the scene this morning.”

Ellie saw a hint of color creep into the cheeks of the young officer. “First uniform on the scene, Detective. Your partner, of course, was first man there. Or woman, or-”

“Someone get this officer another drink,” she said with a laugh. John Shannon, the detective whose desk was behind hers, raised his glass in a toast. The rest of the crowd, however, greeted her with stony stares and uncomfortable glances. It was apparently going to take more than one arrest and a round of drinks to win some folks over.

Her cell phone vibrated at her waist. The screen read, “Unavailable.”

“Hatcher.” Ellie plugged one ear shut with her index finger.

“Hi, it’s Max Donovan from the DA’s office.”

“You got our message?” She maneuvered her way to the front of the bar.

Their message had actually been left by Rogan. She stole a look at her partner.

“Yeah, this is my first chance to get back to you. The good news is, well, it couldn’t be any better. I cut a deal with Nick Warden.”

“He’s flipping on Jake?”

Ellie opened her backpack and pulled out a manila folder that the Central Records Division had delivered that morning. It contained the file on the murder of Roberta Harrington, aka Robbie. The original reports dated back to the summer of 2000. Given that Jake Myers was barely out of middle school at the time, any connection between the two cases now seemed impossible.

She skimmed while Donovan brought her up to speed.

“No question. It helped that I could go in there this morning with the fingerprint match and the cabdriver’s ID. I told him, ‘Look, we’ve got our case against Jake. The only question is whether we’re going to have one against you, too.’ Once he and his lawyer heard what we already had on Myers, and what Warden was looking at on his drug case, it was easy. The guy’s got loyalty, though. He wanted a deal for Jaime Rodriguez, too.”

“You’re kidding me? White-collar recreational drug user taking care of his dealer? Who’s ever heard of such a thing?”

“I know, right? I guess Warden feels bad about getting the guy in trouble. He said Rodriguez hooking up the girl with some dope was kind of like helping him out, too. This isn’t exactly politically correct, but I got the impression she was quite the box of chocolates?”

“If tall, thin, and ridiculously sexy is your kind of thing.”

“Absolutely not.”

“So you made the deal? I thought Rodriguez would be looking at some serious time with his prior conviction.”

“His prior for Burg of a dwelling with a gun counts as a violent predicate. He was looking at six years minimum under the second felony law. But we made the deal. He and Warden both get dismissals. Rodriguez will lose his job with the club just for the arrest, and he’ll have a hard time finding work anywhere else.”

“You don’t need to sell me on it,” Ellie said, her eyes still scanning the Harrington file as she flipped to the next report. She hadn’t known a prosecutor to ever care in the past whether she approved of a plea deal. Besides, she had learned a long time ago that drug cases-no matter what quantities, no matter how many priors, and despite all the rhetoric about the war on drugs-were all expendable when the prosecution of a violent crime was at stake.

“Our case against Myers is looking strong. Warden’s not only going to testify that Jake left with Chelsea alone, well before closing, but he’s got real corroboration. And it’s good.”

Ellie stopped multitasking so she could focus on Donovan’s news.

“His lawyer produced a photograph that Warden took with his cell phone that night inside the club. He was snapping the picture because some cow-Warden’s words, not mine, I swear-was making an idiot of herself on the runway, but guess who pops up in the background? Jake Myers walking hand in hand with Chelsea Hart out of the front doors of Pulse. And the time stamp says 3:03, almost an hour before closing.”

Sex. Alcohol. Drugs. Now they’d caught Jake Myers in a lie on his alibi, proving not only opportunity, but consciousness of guilt. Unless the DNA on Chelsea Hart’s shirt belonged to someone else, Myers was done.

“How long will it take for the crime lab to give us DNA results from the stain on Chelsea’s shirt?”

“A couple of weeks, but Simon Knight swears he can find a shortcut. The mayor’s office is breathing down our necks.”

“Too bad Myers invoked,” she said. “With Warden flipping on him, we might’ve been able to get a confession.”

“We’re going to get him anyway. If all cops were as good as you and your partner, my job would be a lot easier. I was just telling Knight what a dream witness you are. Smart. Articulate.”

“For a cop.”

“Sorry. That’s not what I meant. It was actually my insanely awkward way of trying to transition into asking if you wanted to get something to eat. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been running around all day, and I’m starving.”

In Ellie’s mind, she could feel laser beams from Peter’s eyes penetrating the back of her skull and piercing her neocortex where the words of their phone conversation were being processed.

“Sorry, I’ve got plans tonight.”

“So, does that mean maybe some other night, or should I take that as an extremely polite shutout?”

“It doesn’t sound very polite when you put it that way,” she said with an embarrassed laugh.

“Okay, I think I can take a hint. I hope it’s not weird I asked. Knight will kill me if I alienated our star witness.”

“Consider me wholly unalienated. People get hungry. They eat, sometimes together. Not a problem.”

If Peter had been eavesdropping on her neocortex, she was pretty sure she’d passed with flying colors. Still, Ellie couldn’t help but notice that she was still smiling as she flipped her phone shut, took a sip of her drink, and returned to her reading.

TEN MINUTES LATER, she had finished reviewing the Robbie Harrington file. Her smile was gone. She drained the rest of her whisky, tucked the file into her backpack, and sent a quick text message to Peter, who was still with his boss, chatting up a couple of cops who looked familiar from the Thirteenth Precinct: “I’ve got a little work left, but call me later.”

When she returned to the squad’s huddle, John Shannon was in the middle of some story about a witness who’d made the moves on his partner that day. “She was a ten all right,” he said, taking a swig from his mug of amber-colored beer. “As in four teeth and a six-pack.”

Ellie cut through the laughter and thanked Rogan for the drink.

“You’re heading out already?” he asked.

“Yeah. Another drink, and I might fall asleep right here in the bar. That call before was from Max Donovan at the DA’s office.”

Rogan snuck a peek at the cell phone clipped to his waist.

“That’s funny. He didn’t call me. Hey,” he said to anyone within earshot, “why do you think a young, single ADA might have called Hatcher here for the case update instead of her more senior, and equally fine-looking, partner?”

That got a laugh out of the crowd, but not as much as Ellie’s follow-up: “He was asking for your home number.”

“Nice,” Rogan said, giving her a high five.

She ran through a quick summary of Donovan’s update, pulling on her coat as she talked.

“News like that, and you can’t stay for another drink? Come on.”

“I can’t keep up with you. I’ve got to go home and hit the sack.”

But as Ellie walked out of the bar, she knew she wasn’t going home anytime soon. The case against Jake Myers was sealed up tight. But she had just read the police reports on the murder of Robbie Harrington, and now she was wondering if perhaps it had all been a little too easy.

CHAPTER 21

ON THE NIGHT OF August 16, 2000, a homeless woman named Loretta Thompson thought she had found a safe place to sleep when she passed a pile of Mexican serape blankets tossed into the basement entrance of a Chinese massage parlor on the corner of Fourth Street and Avenue B.

It was a warm, dry night, and Loretta had decided not to check into one of the shelters, filled as they were with strung-out and angry women. She was not like the others. She just needed a break-a friend to take her in for a few weeks, an employer to take a chance on her-some way to get back on her feet after leaving the man whose beatings had caused her to miscarry the only child she’d ever managed to conceive.

When she reached the bottom of the unlit stairwell, she realized that the blankets were wrapped around something firm. Her hope was that it was a rug-something she could use as padding between her body and the filthy concrete. But when she pulled one of the blankets loose from the bundle, she felt something heavy shift beneath it. She tugged at the blanket with more force to get a better look.

Her screams awakened multiple Fourth Street residents. The 911 calls followed.

It took police three days to identify the body as Robbie Harrington, a twenty-four-year-old artist who paid her bills working at a tattoo parlor on the Lower East Side. She was last seen having a drink alone at a dive bar a few blocks from her job. She had been strangled with a brown leather belt that was left wrapped around her neck.

According to the log notes on the outside of the Harrington file, the active investigation had been put to rest about a year after Robbie’s body had been found, and her murder joined the legions of cold case files that gather dust until a new lead lands unexpectedly in the department’s lap. But three years ago, someone had brushed off the dust from the case. Three years ago, Detective Flann McIlroy had requested this file and read the same reports that Ellie had just finished reviewing for the second time at her desk.

She could see why the media reports of Chelsea Hart’s murder would have caught Bill Harrington’s attention. Like Chelsea, Robbie was a very young, white, blond female murdered after leaving a New York City bar, although her club of choice on the Lower East Side was significantly less glitzy than Pulse.

Ellie picked up the phone and dialed the number that Harrington had left that morning when he contacted the department’s tip line. She took note of the Nassau County area code, a change from the Pittsburgh number listed for the Harringtons at the time of their daughter’s death.

“Hello?” The man had a smoker’s voice.

“This is Detective Ellie Hatcher with the New York Police Department. I’m calling for Bill Harrington.”

“This is him.”

“You called the tip line about a recent case of ours?”

“I did. I’m feeling foolish about it now. I don’t know anything about that poor girl’s murder other than what I heard on the news. The minute I called, I regretted it. Some old man’s imagination could keep you from leads that might actually get you somewhere.”

Ellie realized that the man had probably experienced his share of false leads and crank calls eight years ago. “Why don’t you go ahead and tell me why you called.”

“This is going to sound crazy, but I had a dream the other night, and I think it was a message from Robbie. I wasn’t calling the tip line for myself. I was calling for her.”

IT TOOK THE MAN some effort to get the words out, but Ellie eventually put the picture together. Flann McIlroy had tracked Bill Harrington down out of the blue three years earlier, looking for additional information about Robbie’s murder. By then, Bill had retired, and he and his wife, Penny, were living in Mineola on Long Island. It had been a year since they’d communicated with anyone from the NYPD about their daughter’s case.

“At first, when the trail went cold, we’d call every month or so. Usually it was me, not Penny. Then every month became every season, and then just every August on the anniversary. Ultimately, it was our older daughter Jenna who convinced us that to move on with our lives, we needed to accept the probability that we would never know who took away our girl from us. I think that most of Penny’s reason for wanting to move closer to New York was to show that she hadn’t forgotten about Robbie. Being near to the city that Robbie had insisted on living in was my wife’s way of being close to our daughter after it was too late.”

“I’m sorry if my call has dredged all of this up for you again, Mr. Harrington.” Ellie hoped she had made the right decision contacting this man.

“I told you, it was the dream that did the dredging. I called you, remember?”

“You said in your message that Flann McIlroy told you he thought there were others. What did you mean by that?”

“That’s what he said when he called us three years ago. He had been working a few months before that on a different case and had pulled up a mess of cold cases looking for patterns, I guess. He told us it turned out the case he was working was some kind of a domestic thing. But in the process of looking at all those old cases, he thought he’d noticed some connections between Robbie’s death and a couple of other unsolved murders.”

“Did he tell you anything about the other cases?”

“No names or anything. He said the others were girls around the same age, and they had been out on the town before-well, before someone got to them.”

“Did he have any leads? I’m trying to understand why he would have called to tell you all this if he didn’t have any developments to report.”

“I remember exactly why he called. He said the same thing, in fact-that he was sorry for calling us and wouldn’t have done it if he didn’t think it might be important. It was the strangest thing, though. I couldn’t imagine how an offhand comment could possibly matter.”

An offhand comment. Ellie’s fingers involuntarily clenched the handset of the telephone as she braced herself for what Harrington was about to tell her. She did not want the nagging feeling that had pulled her from the bar tonight to go any further. She wanted Flann to have had another reason for calling.

“He wanted to talk to Penny about something she said when we identified Robbie’s body.”

Ellie knew immediately which single sentence in the voluminous police reports had triggered Flann’s phone call. It was the same line that had caused her to leave the bar earlier than she’d intended. Victim’s mother confirmed ID but said victim’s hair looked odd.

“What exactly did Detective McIlroy want to know?” Ellie asked. “Would it be better for me to speak directly with your wife?”

“Penny’s not in a position to answer any questions. She has early-onset Alzheimer’s. It’s advanced.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It is what it is. She recognizes me on good days but doesn’t understand why I look so old. The only silver lining I’ve been able to find in my wife’s condition is that she seems to have no memory of Robbie’s murder. She either forgets her daughters altogether, or remembers them as they were when they were young and we were still living as a family in Pittsburgh.”

“Were her memories gone by the time Detective McIlroy contacted you?”

“They were fading, certainly, but she was still home with me then. She did speak with him directly, and I tried a couple of times to work with her on the information the detective wanted. I never did quite understand what the issue was.”

“What about at the time she made the comment, after the two of you identified the body. Didn’t she give some idea of what she meant back then?”

“Not to be specific. She just blurted out that Robbie’s hair looked funny when she saw her lying like that on the table. She brought it up later when we were driving back home, but it was just this observation that made her realize how little we’d seen Robbie since she moved to the city. I guess a mother is like that-figures she should know when her own daughter changes her appearance.”

“But you don’t know exactly what the change was?” The fact that Chelsea Hart’s hair had been crudely chopped off had not been released to the public, and Ellie did not want to share the information with Harrington. But she had to think that such a brutal transformation would have been noticed by more than just one of Robbie’s parents.

“It looked a little shorter to me, but Penny was just so bothered by it, saying it didn’t seem like a style Robbie would go for. I don’t know enough about those kinds of things to be any more specific than that, and by the time anyone asked Penny about it, it was too late. I tried and tried, but all she could say by then was that Robbie liked her hair long. No, wait, that wasn’t it-because Robbie did sometimes keep her hair a little neater, cut up above her shoulders, I guess.”

“So, I’m sorry-what is it your wife meant?”

“I don’t know what it’s called, but Penny was saying Robbie liked her hair to be-you know, even. All the same around, how most of the girls wore it back then. She didn’t like it being different lengths, the way you see it now, with all the long hair, but then short on the top.”

“Do you mean bangs, where it’s cut above the eyebrows?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Bangs. When Detective McIlroy called a few years ago, I finally got Penny to focus, and she told me that Robbie didn’t like bangs. Apparently she was wearing her hair that way when she was killed.”

“And you passed that on to Detective McIlroy?”

“I did. But what does any of this have to do with that girl who was found in the park? I called because she’d also been out all night like my Robbie, and there was something about the picture that reminded me of her, and, well, I told you about my dream.”

If Robbie Harrington really had sent her father to the NYPD tip line, perhaps it was because she was in a position to know something that her father could not-that whoever strangled her on August 16, 2000, may have claimed another victim yesterday morning.