“You want the basics first, or should we just head to the body?”

“The basics would be great.”

“Victim’s name was Rachel Peck. Twenty-six-year-old white female. Works as a bartender. On-and-off party girl. Her girlfriend called police last night at one a.m. after Peck went out for a smoke and never came back.”

“Went out from where?”

“Some club.”

“It wasn’t a place called Pulse, was it?” she asked.

The fact that Chelsea Hart had met Jake Myers at Pulse had been widely reported in the press, and Dodge could see where Ellie was headed.

“No,” he said firmly. “Some joint called Tenjune.”

Ellie was familiar with it. “In the Meatpacking District. Three blocks from Pulse.”

“You know how many kids are partying within a three-block radius in that neighborhood? This particular kid told her friend she was going for a smoke and never came back. As you can imagine, the friend’s call-along with a hundred others just like it-got the blow-off at dispatch. Peck’s body got called in at four a.m. from your brother’s fine establishment.”

“Any witnesses?”

“Nope. She was behind a Dumpster at the back of the lot. The way the lot’s situated, a car could pull in behind the Dumpster, ditch a body, and spin right back onto the West Side Highway. As long as they were fast enough, it would look like a car pulling in just to turn around. We do, however, have a suspect.”

Ellie’s surprise must have registered on her face.

“I tried telling you on the phone,” Dodge said. “But you were in such a hurry to get down here, I figured, what the hell. As we speak, my partner’s holding one Hayden Holden Hammond, the victim’s ex-boyfriend.”

“Hayden…Holden…Hammond?”

“Yeah, we’ll see how cute the parents find the alliteration when their kid becomes known as the new Preppy Murderer. Not to mention the instant hit he’ll be in prison.”

“You’re sure it’s him?”

Dodge nodded. “The girlfriend who reported Peck missing says the two had a messy breakup earlier this week. She finally clued in that he was a cheater and a cokehead, and he got a little rough with her when she broke it off. When we found him this morning, he was coked through the ceiling and his apartment looked like he’d been on a three-day bender. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a confession within the hour.”

“Are you ready to meet Miss Peck?” Karr asked. Ellie nodded, and Karr led the way through the large, sterile room. As they passed two other covered bodies on stainless steel tables, she tried to rein in her curiosity. She had enough corpses to think about as things stood.

When they arrived at the third table, Karr stopped and folded down the white sheet.

“Dr. Karr was telling me a little bit about your case before you got here. Based on what he told me, I think your brother might’ve missed the mark when he called you. About the only commonality is that they were both strangled. And, as you can see, my vic’s still got all her hair. Our biggest problem with her body’s going to be getting rid of it. When we called her father out in Idaho, he made it clear he wouldn’t be coming to claim her.”

Ellie was listening to Dodge’s words, but she could not take her eyes from Rachel Peck. She didn’t need the medical examiner to explain the obvious signs of manual strangulation-the bruises around the woman’s neck, the bloating in her face and eyes. But she did not agree that the similarities between Rachel Peck and Chelsea Hart ended there.

Rachel had been spared the repetitive cuts that had been etched into Chelsea Hart’s entire body, but her face had been the target of the same kind of short, deep stab wounds-one hatched across each of her cheekbones, along with a series of vertical and horizontal marks on her forehead.

But it was the hair that disturbed her most. Rachel’s long, dark blond hair had been pulled into two girlish pigtails on either side of her face. Her bangs were thick and choppy-nothing like the soft, fashionable fringe that so many women were wearing these days.

Something about the look tugged at the back of Ellie’s brain, but she couldn’t quite pull from her memory whatever past image was troubling her. She did, however, know that something was very wrong.

“She may have all her hair, but look at it.”

“What about it?” Dodge asked.

“The stripper who called my brother said it looked like part of a costume. You can’t see that?”

“I don’t understand half the silly things women do in the name of fashion. Aren’t bell bottoms back in?”

Ellie looked at Dr. Karr for support, but got nothing in return but a blank stare.

“No sane woman in Manhattan went to Tenjune looking like that. And if she did, she certainly didn’t get in. Did you ask Rachel’s friend whether she wore her hair this way when they went out?”

“She hasn’t come in for the official ID yet. We found Peck’s credit card in her front pocket. Got her DMV photo from there.”

“You need to get the friend down here.”

“Look, I let you come here because I figured if you wanted to waste your time, it was up to you. But don’t barge in here accusing me of missing the boat because I didn’t chat up the victim’s friends about whether she was having a bad hair day. This is the real world, sweetheart, not a scene out of Legally Blonde.”

Sweetheart. The same term of endearment that she’d actually appreciated this morning from Manny the coffee guy lost all appeal in this context. Ellie forced herself to maintain a level tone. “I apologize that it came across that way. There are other aspects to the Hart case that you would have no reason to know about. One of the angles we’re looking into is the possibility our killer’s a hair fetishist.”

“Isn’t your killer already in custody?”

“Yes, we have a suspect. But we’re also looking at some older cases. It’s just an angle. But, I’m telling you, as a woman, you’re going to find out that your victim’s hair did not look like that when she left the house with her friend.”

“Fine,” Dodge said, apparently mollified for the time being. “We’ll look into it. My guess is maybe she put it that way for some kinky schoolgirl fantasy that she and Hammond were acting out before the reunion went bad. Or maybe Hammond did it to her while he was coked up. What I do know is that we’ve got the right guy, and that he was high enough to have done just about anything. Take a look at these marks.”

He waved her over so they were standing by the victim’s head, looking at her body upside down. “See those cuts on her forehead? H-three. Hayden Holden Hammond. That cocksucker left us a calling card.”

Ellie could see the pattern now among what had originally looked like random lines. Three vertical marks. Four horizontal ones.

“One thing I will say,” Dr. Karr said, “is that these cuts to Rachel Peck could have been made-and I emphasize the words could have been-by the same knife used on Chelsea Hart. They’re of the same approximate width. My guess is a blade of about one and a half to two inches in both instances. Sharp, of course. We don’t know how long, since the cuts were inflicted by slicing into the skin rather than deep plunges.”

“Sounds like eighty percent of the knives you’d find in any kitchen,” Dodge said.

“Fair enough,” Karr said with a nod. “But I thought it was something I should share with you both. The other similarity, of course, is the manual strangulation, but you already knew that. As for anything else, that remains for the autopsy I am still waiting to begin.”

Ellie took the hint for what it was. “Thank you for holding off on my account. You’ve got photographs of her in the event I need them later?”

“Of course.”

She had begun to make her way to the exit when she heard Dr. Karr behind her.

“You and your brother might want to be careful in the coming days,” he said.