“Shit. Shit. What time is it?”
“Five forty-five.”
“Damn it. Ninety minutes. I was only going to wait ninety minutes.”
Max Donovan was coming to on the living room floor next to her. He grabbed a corner of the fleece throw Ellie was clutching to her chest, then settled for a blue pillow instead.
“Shit, we fell asleep,” he said.
“Master of the fucking obvious.”
“My brother, Jess,” Ellie said by way of explanation, scrambling to her feet and wrapping herself in the throw.
“Hey.” Max offered Jess his free hand. “Max Donovan. Uh, sorry about the circumstances.”
“You’ll understand if I don’t return the gesture. I really don’t need to think about where that hand’s been at six in the morning.”
“Jesus, Jess.”
Jess dropped a newspaper on the coffee table. “I thought you’d want to see this. Hot off the presses.”
It was a copy of the Daily Post. A glamor shot of Rachel Peck occupied the entire front page.
With no further pleasantries, Max was simultaneously pulling on his pants and pushing buttons on his cell phone.
“Why the fuck haven’t you called me?…You’ve just been sitting there?…Nothing?…Damn it… No, don’t leave. You stay there until we tell you to leave.”
Ellie had pulled on a blue terry-cloth robe by the time Donovan hung up.
“He never got home. Eckels is in the wind.” He was struggling to get his arms into the sleeves of yesterday’s shirt. “We need to get a warrant. I need to call Knight.”
He was fumbling with the buttons of his cell again when Ellie caught sight of the newspaper headline blaring above Rachel Peck’s photograph: “The Barber of Manhattan: A Serial Killer Strikes Again?” On the bottom of the page in smaller print: “Creep Collects Hair as Souvenirs.”
“That Peter sure does work for a class act,” Jess said.
Ellie found herself reading the words again. Then a third time. Then she picked up the paper and rifled through the pages until she found the cover story.
The nagging feeling that she’d had in her gut before she’d fallen asleep was returning. That feeling that they’d been missing something. The facts unstacked into a jumble of individual blocks, floating in random rotations in her mind-flipping, rearranging, and then settling back down into a new and entirely different pattern.
And then the tumblers clicked. Same victims. Same pattern. Same facts. Different man.
“Stop. Hang up, Max. It’s not Eckels. Hang up.”
She was already hitting a button on her own phone. It rang three times before she got an answer.
“Peter, I need you to tell me about George Kittrie.”
THEY WERE INSIDE Kittrie’s apartment within an hour. Three minutes to make the call to the Twenty-third Precinct to post officers outside the building. Fifteen minutes in the cab on the way to the Upper East Side, while Donovan persuaded Judge Capers to authorize a telephonic no-knock warrant. Five minutes to track down the super and his master keys. Another two minutes to figure out that Kittrie had installed an unauthorized security lock that the super could not bypass. Eighteen minutes to call in the old-fashioned battering ram.
Now Ellie, Donovan, and four backup officers were inside the apartment, and Rogan was on the way. She led a protective sweep through the apartment. As she’d expected, it was unoccupied.
“Damn it. He got to Eckels. I just know it. I should have figured this out yesterday. We could’ve stopped him.”
There was no legitimate way that Kittrie could know about the common link between the murders. When she had called him about the three cold cases, she had kept the fact about the hair to herself. And the killer had been so careful to hide his MO that Ellie herself had been unsure of the connection, even after speaking to Robbie’s father and Alice’s sister. Only after seeing Rachel Peck with her own eyes was she certain.
She’d thought through all of the possible leaks, but there were none. Rogan was solid. And even if Knight or Donovan might have been the type to talk, there hadn’t been time. Kittrie had sent Peter to get a quote from her before she told either of them about the cold cases.
She had assumed that Capra had been the source for the story about Chelsea Hart’s hair, but in fact there had been no leak at all. Kittrie had even covered his tracks by getting the information slightly wrong-asking her whether Chelsea’s head was shaved. And there had been no contact with Flann McIlroy three years earlier. She had assumed that Peter was lying when he said Kittrie had a quick trigger on running the presses, but it had been Kittrie who lied about his contacts with Flann.
George Kittrie knew that a killer was collecting his victims’ hair because he had committed the murders.
When she had met Kittrie with Peter at Plug Uglies, he had looked familiar. Kittrie played it smart, convincing her she could have seen him at the bar during one of his investigative happy hours. But now she knew where she’d spotted him before. He had been caught in the background of the photograph Jordan McLaughlin had given her of the three girls at the Little Italy restaurant.
They had an APB out on Kittrie’s 2004 Ford Taurus and an emergency service unit on its way to his East Hampton cottage. In the meantime, there was nothing to do but begin a search of the apartment.
She snapped on a pair of latex gloves and started with the desk. She found what she was looking for in the file drawer, inside a folder labeled “Medical Records.” She couldn’t make out the terminology on the stack of papers from Sloan Kettering, but she didn’t need an M.D. to understand that repeated references to glioblastoma multi-forme in the cerebral hemisphere were not good.
Those rumors Peter had heard about his boss’s condition were true: George Kittrie had an inoperable brain tumor.
“When we found out about Symanski’s mesothelioma, we were talking about the desperate things people do when they know they’re dying. Symanski wanted to go out a hero. Kittrie wants to take others with him. Or maybe he wants to get caught. If this thing goes to trial, we might even hear some expert argue that it was the brain tumor causing his violent tendencies all along.”
“And why is he so focused on you?” Donovan asked.
“I’ve gotten a lot of media attention, and that’s probably important to him. It could have been those things I said in the Dateline interview about William Summer being a loser. A man like Kittrie could empathize with someone like Summer. Both share the same desires. Both men stopped acting on those desires for long periods of time, which is probably seen by them as a sign of power and control. Summer was just given a life sentence, and now Kittrie finds himself at the end of his life. I can see how his desire to kill again could get transferred onto me.”