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point was when Heather moved in—the roommate?”

Ellie nodded to confirm she knew to whom Courtney was referring.

“Last spring Megan’s parents told her she needed to find a roommate to share the costs of the apartment. Keith offered to move in and share the rent. It was a ridiculous suggestion for all kinds of reasons. She’d never get her work done if he was around. Not to mention that there’s no way he could afford the rent her parents were looking for. Not to mention the fact that she was only twenty years old, for Christ’s sake.”

“Plenty of reasons not to shack up.”

“Right. But instead of fighting over it all, Megan took the easy route and told him that her parents would never allow it. And then he asked whether she had even talked to her parents about it. She made the mistake of telling him the truth.”

“She never approached them?”

“Of course not,” Courtney said. “It was an absurd idea, but not to Keith. I guess after she found Heather and rented the extra room to her, Keith treated every interaction with Heather—or even remotely related to her—as an excuse to remind Megan that she had rejected him. You don’t even know that girl. Now we never have any privacy. We could have kept that as an extra room. You never took me seriously. And on that last one, Megan finally had to admit he was right. For her, for her life, the thought of living together was crazy. But for Keith, it had meant everything.”

“And that’s what ended it.”

“Yep. It was hard on her, but he came with too much drama, you know? He was always trying to pull her away from school. It would be just like him to use a message board aimed at college students to get to her.”

“But when Megan told you about the postings, you didn’t think Keith might be responsible?”

“It never even dawned on me. It should have, though, right? He wanted to isolate her. He knew her routine. Maybe if she was too afraid to live her life, she’d go back to him. It’s so obvious.”

Ellie was careful not to overvalue Courtney’s instincts. She had seen witnesses respond this way before. Once they believed police had homed in on a suspect, witnesses changed their perceptions so that suddenly the suspect’s name at the top of the list seemed inevitable.

“All I’ve got on Keith right now is a first name and pierced lower lip,” Ellie said. “You got a last name for us?”

Courtney pressed her eyes closed. “Shit. This is impossible, right? Megan had to have told me his last name at some point. I just don’t remember. It was always ‘Keith this, Keith that.’ I don’t know. Something Spanish, I think. He said he was half Dominican. Maybe…Guzaro, or Guittierez. For some reason, I think it began with a G.”

“What about a phone number? Address?” They had already checked Megan’s cell phone for a Keith, but she must have erased his number after the breakup.

Courtney shook her head. “He always went to her place. He still lives with his mother. Wait.” She hopped up from the sofa, made her way to a dining room table covered with books and notebooks, and flipped open a laptop. “I have a picture.”

Ellie rose from the couch and looked over Courtney’s shoulder while she clicked through a library of photos. Girls at a bowling alley. Another set on a beach somewhere with tall fruity drinks. On the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Courtney sniffled. “Okay, here he is.”

Ellie leaned forward to get a better look. Megan was on the left side of the screen, her long blond hair curled softly around her shoulders, a broad smile across her face. The young man with his arm around her shoulder mugged for the camera, replicating a model’s exaggerated pout. He had creamy light brown skin and dark brown wavy hair. She could see how his racial identity might appear ambiguous. Nice smile. Round cheeks. He would have been a good-looking kid without the two platinum hoops dangling from either side of his lower lip like metal fangs.

“Any others?” Ellie asked.

Courtney shook her head. “No, I snapped this during one of the few times he tagged along. I doubt you’ll find any pictures of him at Megan’s either. She deleted them all to prove that the breakup was for good. She still wore the necklace he gave her, though. I noticed that.”

“Can you e-mail the picture to me?” Ellie asked. She rattled off her personal Gmail address while Courtney typed, then watched as Courtney hit the send key on a message she had labeled “Predator.”

“We should have gone to the same school,” Courtney said, thinking aloud. “The original plan was for both of us to go to Columbia, but she didn’t get in. I should have gone to NYU with her. Maybe then—”

“Courtney, you don’t know me from a hole in the ground, but trust me, I speak from experience: Don’t start down that road of maybes. You’ll create the kind of demons that can destroy you for years.”

When Courtney closed the door behind her, Ellie pictured the girl back at the dining room table, clicking again through the files of old photographs, and knew her advice was useless.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

4:50 P.M.

Ellie had parallel-parked on Twenty-first Street and was about to open the car door when she spotted Lieutenant Robin Tucker in her rearview mirror. She decided to avoid an encounter and stayed put inside the car, watching as her lieutenant let the precinct door swing closed behind her. Tucker paused just outside the precinct, opened a slim gold metallic handbag, and swept some gloss across her lips. She reached into the same bag again and then clipped her hair into a messy bun at the nape of her neck. As she walked in Ellie’s direction, Tucker’s tan trench blew open, revealing a dark green wrap dress that played up her pale skin. From the looks of things, Tucker had spruced herself up for something.

Ellie slumped into her seat and continued to watch as Tucker smiled and gave a friendly wave to someone on the other side of the street. As she turned to cross Twenty-first, Ellie lost sight of her in the rearview mirror.

She adjusted the right side-view mirror to get a better look. Browsing the cars parked on the north side of the street, she speculated about which one was her lieutenant’s intended destination.

Then her eyes fell on a black Infiniti sedan.

“No fucking way,” she said to no one in particular. She adjusted the side-view mirror again to confirm what she had seen. Sure enough, she recognized the Infiniti’s driver.

Robin Tucker had spruced herself up for none other than Nick Dillon, the head of corporate security for Sparks Industries.

Ellie found Rogan hunched over a spread of documents across his desktop. She recognized the pages as call logs, most of them from AT&T wireless, and a few from Verizon.

“You got the call dumps already?”

Rogan nodded, but didn’t look up from his papers. “Cell phone and landline. A lot more activity on the cell, of course.”

Phone companies could produce itemized lists of call activity for cell phones, but for landlines they could provide information only about outbound long-distance calls. Fortunately for this case, young people tended to use their cell phones for most of their calls.

“You happen to see Tucker walk out of here?”

“Hmmm?”

“She was all dressed up.”

Silence.

“And guess who was waiting for her outside?”

“Hmmm?”

“Nick Dillon. Un-freakin’-believable.”

Silence.