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here.”

Ellie followed her partner up the basement stairs to find Aunt Joanna waiting eagerly at the kitchen table.

“Did you get everything you needed?”

“We’re good for now,” Rogan said.

“Because Dick can be a little ornery at times. He’ll listen to me, though, if you need me to intervene.”

They thanked the woman for her generosity and then showed themselves to the front door.

“A grand a month times, what, ten ads on there? Not bad cash when you’re living in your aunt’s basement. You sure there’s not the possibility of a little love connection there, Hatcher?”

“With Jabba the Hutt? Don’t think so.”

As Rogan took the corner at the end of the block, Ellie found herself laughing. “Dick Boyd? You know they called him Dick Boy on the playground.”

“Damn. Glad I didn’t grow up with the likes of you.”

“So Long Island was a bust. Now what?”

“Run Megan’s calls through the reverse directory and see what comes up?”

“Or go to her friends. I got a list from the mom. According to her, there’s one girl we go to first. She’s in the city.”

“Okay, you see her, but drop me at the precinct and I’ll start working on the phone history. See if our girl was calling anyone her parents didn’t know about.”

Ellie dialed Courtney Chang’s number.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

4:05 P.M.

Morningside Heights got its name from Morningside Park, which lines the east side of the neighborhood from 110th Street to 123rd. But most New Yorkers thought of Morningside Heights as an academic bastion in the middle of uptown, housing egghead students from nearby Columbia University and Barnard College. The late comedian George Carlin had called his old neighborhood White Harlem, and local business owners had now taken to calling the place SoHa, short for south of Harlem. With gentrification across the entire borough of Manhattan, many saw Morningside Heights as simply an extension of the Upper West Side.

But Ellie and many others had a different cultural referent for this neighborhood. She parked in front of a fire hydrant at 112th and Broadway, looked up at the blue-backed neon sign that read “Tom’s Restaurant,” and could almost picture Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer at a booth inside the window. Courtney Chang lived above the diner that was first immortalized in song by Suzanne Vega and later on the television show Seinfeld as the ensemble’s daily diner.

Courtney was waiting at her apartment, just as she’d promised when Ellie phoned. She opened the front door and turned away with nothing but a “Come on in,” and then plopped herself down on an overstuffed mocha-colored sofa littered with crumpled tissues.

“Sorry.” She plucked up some of the mess from the couch and threw it to the floor, making room for Ellie to take a seat. “Whatever, I just can’t care about this right now.”

“Of course not,” Ellie said. “Megan’s parents told us how close you two are.”

“She’s my best friend. Was, I guess. Was my best friend. Since junior high school. We used to be inseparable.”

“Used to be?”

“Before college.” She used her fist, balled inside the overly long sleeve of her Columbia University sweatshirt, to push a shoulder-length strand of shiny black hair from her eyes. “We carpooled to school, took all our classes together, spent the night at each other’s houses every weekend. Like I said, inseparable. But now I’m up here, and she’s downtown, and, well, it wasn’t always easy to find time for each other. I can’t believe it’s too late.” She wiped a tear from her cheek with her sleeve.

Ellie was beginning to wonder whether she’d made a mistake relying on Patricia Gunther’s information about her daughter’s friends. She was relieved when she asked Courtney if she’d happened to speak to Megan within the last couple of days.

Courtney nodded. “Of course. Probably like…ten times. Patty told you about that fucking message board? Sorry—”

Ellie smiled. “No problem. And, yes, we know about the messages. We’re trying to determine who might have posted them.”

“You’re the police. Can’t you just—”

“We tried. The information isn’t there. Whoever posted this stuff about Megan covered his tracks technologically. I was hoping you’d help me figure it out the old-fashioned way. Did Megan have any enemies?”

Courtney shook her head. “No, that’s why the whole thing was so weird. I figured it was just someone from campus trying to screw with her mind. I told her it was no big deal. I can’t believe this. I actually told her to blow it off. To forget about it. What was I thinking?”

“You were thinking what anyone would have assumed at the time. The truth is that ninety-nine-point-nine- nine percent of the time, words really are just words. You couldn’t have known, Courtney.”

“So poor Megan’s the unlucky one out of ten thousand. Because we all just assumed she’d be on the right side of the odds.”

“Let me guess,” Ellie said, catching how quickly Courtney had translated a percentage into the odds. “Math major?”

“Physics,” she said wearily.

“I know this is probably the worst day of your life, but anything you can think of—anything that might stand out—could make a big difference.”

Courtney shook her head. “Megan wasn’t the kind of person to make enemies. There was no drama with her. She studied. She worked out. She tried to make time for friends.”

“Boyfriends?”

“Not lately.”

“But before?”

“That was about as close as Megan ever came to having anything close to a scandal in her life. Freshman year she went totally gaga over this guy—”

“Keith.”

“Right, Keith.” Courtney’s expression changed as she realized the significance of Ellie’s preexisting knowledge of Megan’s ex-boyfriend. “You don’t think that…Oh, my God, why didn’t I figure that out?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“I should have thought of Keith when she told me about those postings. I work a frickin’ domestic violence hotline, for Christ’s sake. It’s all about power and control, and, yeah, Keith wanted both of those. Writing those awful things about her—trying to scare her, and of course through a site read by NYU students, no less.”

“You’re going a little too fast for me here, Courtney. Take a deep breath, slow down, and tell me what you know about Keith.”

“Megan met him at a club first semester of freshman year. He’s like a DJ or something. They were crazy about each other right away, but then Keith took it way too seriously. It’s like he could never get enough attention from her. He was jealous—not of other guys, because Megan wasn’t like that—but of her life. Her classes. Her reading. Me, when we had the time for each other.”

“When did they break up?”

“About three months ago. But they were on and off for a good four months before that. I’d say the tipping