“A witness against who?”

“Pick one. It’s eventually going to be either Myers or Symanski. The whole point is, we’ve got to figure out which one of them killed Chelsea, and whoever it turns out to be, I’m already part of the picture of the case. They don’t want me to be a problem at trial.”

“No, we couldn’t let that happen to the dream team, could we now?”

“I know you’re not a big fan of Simon Knight.”

“And you are? That guy doesn’t give a shit about anyone. He just wants to win his cases. And he’d sell either one of us out in a heartbeat if necessary. Casey had a trial about eight years ago where the defendant said Casey planted evidence. Instead of proving the fat fuck was a liar, Knight went in front of the jury and said, ‘So what?’ Detective Casey might be a bad cop, but all the other evidence showed the guy was good for it.”

“The rogue detective framed a guilty man,” Ellie said.

“Except Casey was a good, honest cop. And Knight didn’t care what he said about the man as long as he got his conviction.”

“That’s a DA’s job.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Well, Knight’s getting my back on this one. Big-time.”

“As long as you realize that could all change, like that,” he said, snapping his fingers.

“I’m a big girl, Rogan.”

“Did you tell him about those cold cases?”

“No, not yet. I want to, though. It was different before we knew about Symanski. Now that he’s part of the picture-”

“Okay.”

“Okay, as in, you’re okay with it? Or okay, as in, you’re pissed at me and want me to stop justifying my position?”

“Believe it or not, okay as in okay. I see the point. If we’re taking another look at the case against Myers anyway, we should at least make sure we do it right.”

Ellie wanted to jump on Rogan’s wheelchair and give him a big bear hug. Instead, she nodded. Nodding was always an acceptable way for cops to communicate with each other.

She was scooching her way out of her crouch when she spotted the woman in an orange coat step from the elevator. In the time it took Ellie to realize she looked familiar, the woman caught sight of the officer posted outside Symanski’s door and stepped back into the elevator.

“Did you see that?” Ellie asked.

“What?”

“The woman at Symanski’s house. The pregnant girl.” Ellie was already running down the hall. “She got spooked and jumped into the elevator.”

Ellie pushed the call button, but the elevator was heading down. Slamming open the door to the stairwell, she took the stairs two at a time. She could hear Rogan’s footsteps behind her.

“Try the second floor,” she yelled. “I’m going to the lobby.”

On the first floor, she looked both ways, but there was no sign of the bright orange coat. She bolted out the hospital doors to Seventh Avenue in time to see the woman shut the passenger-side door of a gold Acura Legend.

And, once again, the day dealt Ellie a surprise. As the car drove off, she recognized Jaime Rodriguez behind the wheel.

ROGAN WAS WAITING for her when she emerged from the stairwell on the hospital’s third floor.

“I asked the nurse whether a pregnant woman had been here earlier to see Symanski.”

“And?”

“No luck. But a guy delivering flowers from the gift shop overheard me. He says a pregnant lady in a bright orange coat was downstairs half an hour ago throwing a fit because her father had been taken here by the police.”

“Her father?”

“Yep. And for some reason Symanski didn’t want us knowing who she was when we asked about her at the house.”

Ellie thought about the bare dresser drawers in Symanski’s guest room. The empty hangers in the closet.

She removed her notebook from her bag. The most recent entry was Symanski’s confession, scrawled at her command by the EMT: “I strangled her, and I cut her up, and I took her earring.” Just above the confession were two words in her own handwriting: “Pemetrexed” and “Cisplatin,” the two prescriptions she had discovered in Symanski’s medicine cabinet. She had no doubt they would turn out to be treatments for his mesothelioma. She recalled joking morbidly with Peter last night about the apparent ubiquity of cancer.

Symanski knew he was dying, but he hadn’t called the law firm of Datz & Grossman to solve his problems. He had tried to handle them on his own.

“We need to look at Jake Myers’s banking records.”

CHAPTER 36

“OH, COME ON, MAN. You have got to be kidding me. Them?”

The girl with the platinum blond hair and four-inch heels obviously wasn’t happy that the bouncer had waved two other women past the velvet rope at Tenjune without a wait. Implicit in the girl’s outrage was her belief that she was taller, thinner, and hotter than Rachel Peck and her friend Gina, a belief that was undoubtedly true, but which failed to take into account the network of friendships among the little people who kept the city’s biggest hot spots up and running.

Rachel high-fived the bouncer at the door. “Thanks, Rico. You’re the best.”

Two years earlier, before a very active gym membership and his discovery of tight black T-shirts, Rico the bouncer was Ricardo the Mesa Grill busboy. News to the blonde in the stripper shoes: to get into a club like Tenjune, you either have to be somebody or know somebody.

They made their way down the stairs, past a lounge area of velvet seating, to the crocodile-skin bar. An old Beastie Boys song blasted through the speakers, mixed and scratched together with a Madonna tune.

“Two Bombay Sapphire martinis,” Rachel asked once she finally got the bartender’s attention. “No vermouth. Up. Twists.”

The bartender looked annoyed when she handed him a credit card. Too bad for him. At thirty-five dollars a round, a splurge like tonight belonged on the Visa.

She tucked her card in the front pocket of her jeans and handed Gina her glass, then took a big sip from her own to bring the meniscus to a safer level. One good bump in the crowd could cost her half a cocktail. The gin was cold and smooth as it ran down her throat.

She followed Gina into the next room, where they found comfortable standing space not too far from the club’s horseshoe-shaped dance floor.

“To girls’ night,” Gina said, leaning forward to be heard.

Rachel clinked her glass against her friend’s and took another swallow. The toast was a subtle reference to Rachel’s recent breakup with a stockbroker she’d met three months earlier while she was bartending at the restaurant. She usually brushed off the advances of the drunken, overgrown frat boys knocking back tequila shots at the bar, but Hayden had seemed different. He’d flirted with her that night, no question, but he’d come back the next day at lunch, alone, to ask for her number. It seemed like a classy move on his part.

For a while, Rachel allowed herself to believe that she might have lucked in to one of those relationships girls somehow seemed to find in the city. Hayden was a decent guy with a good income. He was smart and fun and actually read her short stories and appeared to appreciate them. She even entertained the thought that if things worked out, she could quit bartending and focus on her writing full-time.

But like anything that seemed too good to be true, Hayden had an imperfection. A big one, too, unless you could look past an insatiable fondness for cocaine and the other women who started to look pretty attractive after a few lines. The first time Rachel found evidence of another woman at Hayden’s apartment-maraschino cherries and sour mix in the refrigerator for some girlie drink Hayden would never imbibe-she forgave him. It was the coke, he said. He’d stop using, he said. It wasn’t an addiction.

And then when she found his stash in the nightstand, she forgave him again. He had a bigger problem than he realized, he said. He’d get help.