“Oh, so now you don’t even know your own source.”

“Look, this one wasn’t even my call. Kittrie’s been all over it. He’s got a really quick trigger finger. He’ll go to press with anything to get a head start on the other papers.”

Ellie felt like screaming into the telephone. She had spoken to Kittrie herself that morning. She had listened while he’d explained how cautious he was in his reporting. It was the reason why he hadn’t run with McIlroy’s story about the three cold cases.

“Don’t try to blame this on your boss, Peter.”

“Look, I’ve already said more than I should. Please don’t jump to conclusions. And stop treating me like a suspect. Haven’t I earned even a little bit of your trust by now?”

She remembered her own anger that morning in Eckels’s office, her outrage that her lieutenant had not given her the benefit of the doubt. She and Peter had a lot more between them than she and Eckels did.

“So when are you going to print?” Ellie asked, her voice calmer now.

“Afternoon edition. It’ll be on newsstands in a couple of hours.”

“Okay, thanks for the heads-up.”

“We can talk about this more later?”

“Yeah, okay. I’ll call you when I free up. It might be late.”

“You know me. I like late. Need a guy on the porch at three a.m.? I’m your man.”

ROGAN BEGAN DECONSTRUCTING the morning’s developments the second Ellie hit the passenger seat. His assessment was blunt: “Simon Knight’s a fucking prick.”

“He wasn’t that bad.”

“Are you kidding me? I hate guys like that. Pretend they’re down with the cops. Equals. Part of the team. The minute there’s a disagreement, he threatens to pull rank.”

“But, J. J., I thought you were ‘right as rain’ with all of this.”

“You don’t think sarcasm suits me, huh? And what was that shit when we left about Dateline? Like you’re some monkey performing a trick. You’re Heather Fucking Mills crying on the Today Show. Does he think that’s easy, for you to go on national television and talk about that shit with your father, and then all he can say is you were great, like it’s appropriate for some passing conversation?”

Ellie had never heard anyone but Jess acknowledge that her occasional forays into the media had not been for her own enjoyment. Rogan, however, apparently got it.

“So, at the risk of getting all relationship-y on you again, are we okay?”

“Yeah, we’re cool. Honestly, you saved my ass back there. I almost stepped in it, huh?”

She laughed. “What? You don’t think Eckels would’ve backed us up if we’d gone on strike from the investigation?”

“Right, because whenever I think of Eckels, that’s what I picture-backup. There was a minute there, though, when I thought you were going somewhere else. I’m starting to get a read on you. You had to be doing the math. Jake Myers is too young to have killed those other women, but Symanski’s not. He’s in his forties now, right?”

“Forty-six.”

“But you didn’t say anything.”

“Better for us to take a look at it first, right? Just the two of us.”

“You’re actually having doubts about Jake Myers?”

More than doubts. “I don’t want to, but, yeah, honestly, I am. I’ll feel a whole lot less guilty about it if it turns out Symanski’s good for all four of the murders.”

Ellie used her cell to call the records department for Leon Symanski’s contact information, then dialed the phone number. A man who sounded of the right age picked up.

“Is this the pharmacy?” she asked.

“You’ve got the wrong number,” the man replied.

She apologized and flipped her phone shut. “He’s home,” she said. “You ready to roll?”

“Twenty bucks says this is nothing. Symanski’s either some loudmouth talking out of school, or Rodriguez made the whole thing up. You want a piece of that action?”

She took the bet, unsure whether it was one she wanted to win.

CHAPTER 30

DARRELL WASHINGTON FLICKED his favorite lighter, the one shaped like a bullet. He ran the flame up and down the length of the Optimo, spinning the blunt slowly to give it a good bake. They cost a little more than Swisher Sweets, but Optimos burned forever and were so mild that, with strong weed, you could barely taste the cigar.

Darrell lay back on a bare mattress on the floor of his mother’s living room on the eleventh floor of LaGuardia House 6 and gave his lighter another flick. He took a long toke off the fat blunt and held his breath, deep inside his lungs, before letting it go.

His mom would go ape-shit if she caught him smoking inside again. Some noise about how she could lose her public housing, all because of his weed. That didn’t sound right to him.

Besides, even if she smelled it when she got home, he’d deny it. Darrell wasn’t good at much, but he was good at lying. His whole life, no one had ever been able to get a read on him.

It wasn’t likely to come up anyways. His mom was working uptown today, taking care of some rich old white lady in a wheelchair. Then she usually walked his nieces home from P.S. 2 at the end of the day, even though it was only three blocks away. As far as Darrell could tell, there wasn’t nothing his mom wouldn’t do to make sure those two little girls didn’t wind up like his sister.

Compared to Sharnell, Darrell was the one who’d turned out right. He was twenty years old. No prison. No guns. No gangs. Compared to everyone else he knew, he was doing all right.

He just didn’t have the dollar bills they had. Coming up, his friends would all say to forget those by-the-hour jobs he was always working and losing. They’d make more slangin’ in a day than he’d bring home in an entire two-week paycheck. But Darrell still lived a life that made him a chump as far as most of the people around LaGuardia saw it. His most recent job was at the new Home Depot on Twenty-third Street, but he lost that when he spilled a can of paint on aisle 8 and forgot to clean it up before his break. He stayed with his mom. He helped out with his nieces. He did day work here and there as a mover for a couple of companies who took work off of Craigslist.

Today’s Optimo and its skunky contents came out of cash he got for doing a job for this guy he knew. He called the guy Jack but had no idea if that was the dude’s real name.

About a year ago, Jack had shown up with a tape recorder, asking questions about gangs in the projects. Most folks either laughed at him or gave him the stink eye, but Darrell saw an opportunity. He told Jack he’d talk to him as long as no one knew about it. They’d meet every once in a while at Tompkins Square. Darrell would talk and leave with some easy cash in his pocket.

Darrell figured the dude for a cop, but Jack never pressured him to name any names. Instead he’d just sit and listen while Darrell explained the difference between the genuine article, hard-core gang members, and poo-butt juvenile wannabes. And the various factions-Bloods, Crips, MS-13, Saint James Boys-weren’t about turf, like something out of West Side Story. With new condos and clubs popping up every week, there wasn’t no turf left to fight over. Instead, it was all about the rock. The chronic. The X. The horse. You name the drug, you could find it in the projects. And with each new condo or club, the market expanded, and there was more to fight over.

Sometimes Darrell would talk about stuff that had nothing to do with gangs or drugs. Life in the projects. Life on the streets. Just life. Jack would still pay him, and for a while Darrell wondered if maybe Jack was a faggot.

About eight months back, Jack stopped coming around. Then he showed up again yesterday morning with another job. This time Darrell had to do more than talk, but he also got paid a lot more.

The job wasn’t exactly legal, but Jack had learned enough about Darrell in their earlier talks to know he wasn’t squeaky clean. He just didn’t do any major thugging. As far as Darrell could tell, the police had their hands full. As long as he stayed away from drugs, gangs, and guns, he’d stay alive and out of prison.