From the safety of the doorway, she surveyed the alley again. Two spots remaining: the Dumpster or the last doorway. They were almost directly across from each other on opposite sides of the alley. There was no way to check them sequentially and still be covered.

Fifty-fifty odds.

She stretched farther, struggling to see inside the next doorway. Nothing but darkness.

If it were her, she would choose the Dumpster. It was deeper, invulnerable to angles. Behind a barrier of that size, her adversary would not have to expose himself to get to her. And a Dumpster wouldn’t block her in. She could still bolt around her adversary. In the doorway, it was close combat. No escape.

She would definitely pick the Dumpster. Better than fifty-fifty. Where the hell was Rogan?

Crouching low again, she ran to the second Dumpster. She turned the corner, keeping a tight stance. It was clear.

She immediately rotated clockwise to get a look inside the final doorway. Also clear.

Damn it. She felt her shoulders drop as the stress fell from her deltoids. She reholstered the Glock. Her mistake had been pausing at the alley’s entrance. Symanski had used the opportunity to jump the fence. She unclipped her cell phone from her waist to call Rogan.

She had flipped the phone open and was scrolling for Rogan’s number when she saw a blur moving next to her. She turned toward it.

Symanski had pushed open the metal lid of the Dumpster with his left hand and was reaching toward her with his right. She caught only a quick glimpse of the blade of his knife before her Glock tumbled to the ground and she felt a searing pain on the back of her right hand.

She saw blood.

Two steps, and she scooped up her Glock. She spun toward Symanski, who was pulling himself out of the Dumpster. Even with her cut hand, she had a shot. Symanski stumbled and fell to the ground. He knelt before her, knife in hand.

“Drop it, Symanski.”

“Just kill me. Shoot me.”

Ellie felt her finger against the trigger. Only five pounds of pressure. That’s all it would take to put this guy down. Not like this, not with him on his knees like this. Only if he takes another swipe at me.

“Drop the knife.”

“I did it. I strangled her, and I cut her up, and I took her earring. I don’t want to die in prison. Kill me.”

She heard sirens approaching and saw the knife in Symanski’s hand begin to shake. She took a quick step toward him with her left foot, preparing to land a right heel against his knife hand in a push kick.

But as she lifted her leg, Symanski lunged at her and grabbed her ankle with his left hand while he raised his knife with his right. The weight of his body carried both of them to the ground. She saw Rogan in her periphery, running down the alley toward them, but there wasn’t time.

There wasn’t time to wait. There wasn’t time to think. In a millisecond, her instincts processed the only information that mattered. Symanski was on top of her. He had a knife. She’d lost control over her service weapon once already. If it happened again, she was dead. There wouldn’t be time to reach for the backup gun inside her boot.

Ellie was bracing herself for the kickback of the Glock when she felt Symanski’s body weight leaving hers. She heard a crash as Rogan threw Symanski against the Dumpster, once, then twice, then a third time-all in seconds-before Symanski’s body went limp and he dropped the knife.

“What about the others?” Ellie screamed. “How many other girls did you kill?”

But Symanski wasn’t answering. Rogan checked to make sure he was breathing. “He’s out.”

“He did it, Rogan. He gave it up. He killed Chelsea Hart.”

Rogan looked at her with a furrowed brow, then dropped his gaze to the concrete beneath his feet and shook his head.

And then Ellie understood. What Rogan had seen was a man on his knees in an empty alley at gunpoint. What the hell kind of confession was that?

CHAPTER 33

“DOES IT HURT?”

From Ellie’s vantage point on the ambulance floor, Rogan looked as sheepish as she’d ever seen him. She caught the eye of the EMT who was placing another stitch in the back of her hand.

“Will you be insulted if I don’t say that you’ve managed to magically convert all of my pain into an unprecedented feeling of euphoria?”

The man shook his head.

“This very nice man is sewing, with a needle, into the back of my hand. As Samuel Jackson might say, yes, it mother-fucking hurts.”

“I’d feel less guilty if you said you had a thing for pain.”

“I don’t, but you shouldn’t feel guilty. You told me not to run. And you were right. We would have tracked him down anyway.”

After all that running-up into the subway station, back down on the west side-Ellie had made the arrest only two blocks from Symanski’s house.

“When I saw you going after him, I went for the car. I thought I’d have a better chance of catching up to you, but I lost you at the train station.”

“It’s okay, J. J. It’s not your fault. Besides, you saved me.”

“Yeah, right. Turns out I saved the bad guy. You would’ve blasted him pretty good if I hadn’t come along.”

“Like I said, you saved me.”

Rogan took a closer look at her wounded hand. “How many does she need?”

“Twelve.”

That meant four more to go. They both winced at the thought. “She’s gonna have one bitch of a scar.”

“Hello? The she is sitting right here and can handle a little mark on the back of her hand. It’ll be a conversation piece. I can make up various tales of adventure to explain my mysterious defect.”

Rogan continued to mutter apologies until the twelfth stitch was completed, then asked the EMT to give them some privacy.

“What happened in that alley?”

She gave him a play-by-play, including Symanski’s confession. “I didn’t get a chance to ask him about the other girls. We need to talk to him about Lucy Feeney. Robbie Harrington. Alice Butler. There could be others.”

“We can’t talk to him about anything just now. He was still out cold when the wagon carried him away, and when he eventually comes to, the first thing he’ll do is ask for a lawyer, and then we’ll have a better shot at questioning Elvis. You really got him to cop to killing Chelsea Hart?”

“What do you mean, I got him to?”

“Hey, it’s just us. I saw what I saw.”

A man on his knees in an empty alley at gunpoint.

“It wasn’t like that. He attacked me. He cut me,” she said, holding up her patched-up hand for emphasis.

“And then you took control of the situation, pointed a gun at the man, and asked him for a confession?”

“No. He still had the knife. He was begging me to shoot. I wasn’t even questioning him. He blurted it out. He couldn’t have been more eager to confess. ‘I strangled her, and I cut her up, and I took her earring.’ That’s what he said.”

Before she had allowed the EMT to stitch her hand, she had made him write down the exact words in her notebook, not because she thought she’d ever forget them, but so she could back up her testimony with a contemporaneous written record.

Rogan had her run through everything two more times to make sure he understood it all.

“The DA’s still going to have a problem with that. Whether you were threatening to kill him, or he was begging you to do it, he was still under distress. They’re going to argue that he just said that because he knew he was about to go down for life in prison, and he’d rather die. Maybe you pressured him because you had all those doubts about Myers.”

“The DA’s going to say that, or you’re saying that?”

“All Symanski said was that he cut her up. That doesn’t bother you? What about the hair?”

The news about the killer chopping off Chelsea’s hair had still not gone public.

“That’s what he meant by ‘cut her up.’ He cut her body. He cut her hair. And what about the earring, J. J.? You’ve seen the picture. It’s the exact same earring.”