“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.