“Can I borrow twenty bucks?” she asked. “I mean, I know you’re hurting for money and all, so I’ll be sure to mail it to you from Indiana.”

“I tell you what. Get out of that cab and stay with me a little longer. I’ll make sure you get home.”

“I told you I have to go. My flight’s in, like, three hours.”

“Fine, here’s your money.” He removed a hundred-dollar bill from the money clip in his pocket. Chelsea reached through the window to take it, but Jake snatched his hand back. “As my father always says, there’s no such thing as a handout. You’ve got to earn this money, young lady.”

Chelsea tilted her head to one side. “And what would your father propose I do to earn it?”

“That is it,” the driver said. “Get out of my cab.” He opened his door, and Chelsea knew it was only a matter of seconds before he was going to pull her physically from the car.

She and Jake were still laughing by the time they made their way to the entry stairwell of a basement apartment around the corner.

Chelsea felt the cold concrete against her exposed toes as she dropped to her knees and tried not to think about Mark. This was just a onetime thing. Spring break. New York. Jake Gyllenhaal. It was all a fantasy, and tomorrow, it would be as if nothing happened.

Jake was touching her hair softly at first, but by the time he got close, he was gripping her head firmly with his fingers, guiding her movements. He felt the wire hook in her right earlobe come loose. He did not want it to fall to the ground. Not now. Not at this moment. She might stop what she was doing. He slipped the earring into his pocket and replaced his hand on the back of her head.

When she had finished, he helped her to her feet and gave her a quick peck on the mouth. He loved girls who swallowed, but that didn’t mean he needed to put his tongue in there afterward. She laughed when he brushed the dust from the knees of her pants.

“Where’s my hundred bucks?” she said.

“Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll take Nick’s car.”

“Don’t you be ridiculous. Give me my money, or my pimp’s coming after you.”

He slipped a hundred-dollar bill into her purse. “Let’s get you a cab before your pimp says I’m monopolizing you.”

“If I can turn tricks in doorways, I’m perfectly capable of hailing my own cab. And now I even have money to pay. You better get back.”

“You sure?”

“Go on. I mean it.”

He kissed her one more time before walking away. He was nearly back to Pulse when he placed his hands in his coat pockets to warm them. He felt the tiny glass beads of her earring. He thought of turning back to find her, but didn’t want to spoil the perfect ending.

CHAPTER 42

ROGAN LOOKED LIKE he’d just seen William Shatner walk through 100 Centre Street in a hula skirt.

“You figured you were innocent, so it was your God-given right to offer up another innocent man to take your place in prison?” Rogan was still coming to terms with Myers’s newfound experimentation with honesty-and he wasn’t happy about it.

Jake Myers stared at his hands. He was seated in the same District Attorney’s conference room, at the same table, where, just yesterday, Jaime Rodriguez had told them about a club janitor who might be of interest.

Susan Parker was a sleazebag of a lawyer, but she was at least trying to protect her new client from Rogan’s outrage. “Give the guy a break. You had him on a murder he knew he didn’t commit, and he freaked out.”

Donovan rose from the table and paced their side of the room. “You could have told him to come clean, Susan. Instead, you orchestrated this.”

Jake looked up from his hands. “You were going to send me to fucking prison for the rest of my life. What was I supposed to do?”

“You could have told us the truth that first night we talked to you at Pulse,” Ellie said.

“Fine. So kill me. I made a mistake. A bunch of cops barged into the club and started asking questions about some girl I got a little crazy with. I’d had a couple drinks-and more, as you now know-and I flipped, okay? I didn’t see how anything I had to say could even matter. But then all I kept hearing about was the evidence you had against me. The cabdriver. My DNA. The time of death. I had nothing. For once, I did a decent thing-I went straight home that night so I wouldn’t have to put up with Nick begging me for the details. I had no one to vouch for me.”

“Then along came Symanski,” Ellie said, “ready to sell his last remaining months to take care of his daughter and unborn grandchild.”

Jake chewed on his lower lip. Without all the hair gel and ridiculous clothing, she could see how Chelsea Hart had found him attractive.

“When Susan first called me, it sounded crazy. But the guy was dying anyway, and he came to me. This wasn’t my idea. He wanted the money. And when Susan told me he had a prior rape conviction, I figured, better him than me. Once I remembered about the earring, I knew we could use that so you’d believe him.”

“It didn’t dawn on you that the person you were helping the most was Chelsea Hart’s actual killer?” Ellie said.

He stared at his hands again. “I wasn’t thinking about that.”

“You were only thinking about yourself.”

“Maybe,” he said quietly, before glancing up at her. “But it’s not like you were looking for anyone other than me, were you?”

Rogan leaned across the table and pointed a finger at Myers. “Don’t put this on us.”

Myers slumped into his chair. Any remaining bravado was gone as he looked to Max Donovan with desperate eyes. “You believe me, right?”

As Ellie scanned the faces in the room, she had no doubt that, at that moment, they all, in fact, believed him.

“DAMN IT.” Simon Knight slammed his fist against his desk. “So now I have to explain to the mayor’s office why Jake Myers is a free man?”

Donovan started to explain that they’d returned a protesting Myers to custody to face obstruction charges, but Knight waved him off.

“Are we absolutely positive about this? Why did Symanski run if the entire point was to take the blame? The guy stabbed a cop, for Christ’s sake.”

Cut, Ellie thought, looking at the white gauze. “According to his daughter, Symanski panicked. The plan sounded fine in theory, but when we showed up at his house, the thought of living his last months in prison got to him. He figured that as long as we found the earring, Jake would get sprung even if he got away. And once I had him cornered in the alley, he decided he’d rather die right then and there. Suicide by cop.”

“So where are we?” Knight asked. “We start from scratch?”

“We’ve got more than you think. We know we’ve got someone who started killing in the late nineties, almost ten years ago.”

Knight furrowed his brow. “Why are you so sure Lucy Feeney was his first kill?”

“There’s no way to be sure until we find the asshole, but it does fit a pattern. What ties the girls together is the collection of their hair. The victims are all grabbed after going out to the clubs, but my guess is that’s not part of anything special to him. It’s opportunistic. It allows him to find girls when they’re vulnerable. It allows him to hide himself by preying upon that vulnerability in a city where a lot of girls have bad things happen to them at four in the morning. So it’s really about the killing and the hair. Lucy Feeney was strangled and also stabbed. She also had her hair blatantly hacked off, like Chelsea Hart.”

“A total release,” Knight said.

“Exactly. No restraint. No fear yet that his MO will be detected. With Robbie Harrington, he strangles her, but does not couple it with stabbing. He’s more discreet about the hair, limiting himself to the bangs. He doesn’t want police to see the pattern. With Alice Butler, he switches things up again. He stabs her eighteen times. There’s some slight bruising on her neck, but he doesn’t strangle her. Something about the fact that she got her hair cut short set him off, but my guess is that he still took a souvenir, either by somehow collecting some of the clippings from the salon when she had it cut, or snipping off some small pieces after he killed her-so subtly that no one noticed.”