What welcomed her instead was Peter Morse, sitting on the step that led to her building’s doorway, staring at his cell phone. His brown hair was tousled, as usual, and he looked cold in a fashionably crumpled corduroy jacket thrown over a T-shirt and jeans.
“Hey, you.” He stood to greet her, as if waiting outside her door in the middle of the night was perfectly normal. “I’ve been calling you.”
“I know. Didn’t you get my text?” After Peter’s name popped up twice on the screen of her cell, Ellie had sent him a text around midnight, telling him she was wrapping up some work on a case.
“Yeah, that’s why I figured I had a chance of finding you awake this late. I didn’t realize you’d be out all night and coming home wearing-wow, you look frickin’ amazing.”
“Thanks. It’s borrowed.” Ellie slipped her key into the building’s security lock, and Peter followed her inside and into the elevator. “Not to be rude, but what the heck are you doing here?”
“I was hoping to exploit a technicality in your two-nights-alone rule. I figured after midnight, we had achieved formal compliance.”
“It’s nearly three in the morning,” she said.
“It was only two when I got here.”
“You waited in the cold for an hour?” As she opened the door, she called out Jess’s name, but the apartment was empty. “I suppose it’s romantic, in a stalkerish sort of way. So are you coming in?”
He paused at the doorway.
“Peter, I don’t have a lot of experience with men showing up at my doorstep at three in the morning, but I sort of figured an invitation to spend the night would have been way up there on the best-case scenarios for you.”
He followed her inside and gave her a soft kiss on the lips.
“Seriously, where were you?”
She pulled her head back. “Seriously? I was working on a case. Oh, my God, is that why you sat outside my building for an hour? You thought you were going to catch me with someone else?”
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said. “All I know is that when you didn’t answer your door, I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I just sat there like some lovelorn teenager waiting for my phone to ring.”
“Sad.”
Peter leaned in for another kiss, but she pulled away again.
“So when do you explain why you just asked me where I was, even though I told you three hours ago I was working?”
“Can we just forget about it? I’m exhausted, and that best-case scenario you mentioned is sounding pretty appealing right now.”
“Did you think I lied to you?”
“No, of course not. I just-I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like we ever said anything about being exclusive. So, yeah, the thought crossed my mind.”
“But I told you I was working.”
“Ellie, people offer all kinds of explanations when they’re dating around. Things are still pretty new with us. You wanted the night off. You were out late. You texted instead of called. All I said was that the thought crossed my mind. Can we please drop the subject?”
“Have I acted like a person who’s still on the market? I thought everything was fine.”
“Everything is fine. I shouldn’t have asked where you were. It was a slip of the tongue. Chalk it up to being tired, or recovering from the emasculation of waiting outside your door.”
“But it wasn’t a slip of the tongue,” Ellie said. “You were very clear about wanting to know where I was, even after I told you. And if everything were really fine, I don’t think a thought like that would cross your mind, as you called it. If something is bothering you about the way things are between us, I wish you’d talk to me about it.”
Peter gave her a patient smile. “Nothing’s bothering me. Let’s go to bed, okay?”
“See? You say that like we’re skipping over something. Like there’s something you want to get off your chest but it’s easier to let it slide.”
He let out an exasperated groan. “How do you do that? How do you know exactly what a person is thinking?”
“If I knew what you were thinking, I wouldn’t be pressing you to tell me.”
“Pressing? More like waterboarding. Trust me, Ellie. You don’t really want to have this discussion with me.”
“Well, you can’t just leave it at that. Is this about your book?” She thought she had done a good job of keeping her apprehensions to herself.
“No, that’s just pie in the sky. I’m talking about Kansas. About your dad and that case. About you going to Wichita for a month. I shouldn’t have had to learn the details on Dateline like the rest of the country, Ellie. You never even talked to me about it. You’d stay up late talking to Jess-I’d hear you out here in the living room-but never once spoke about any of it with me.”
“You’re jealous? Jess is my brother. My father was his dad, too. And it’s our mother.”
“You don’t need to explain to me that you and your brother share the same parents. I’m not jealous. I wish you would have let me in, just a little. And, yeah, I guess it sort of made me wonder what exactly we were doing.”
Much of what Ellie had learned about the College Hill Strangler during her trip to Wichita was now part of the public record, easily attainable with a few Google searches. After believing for nearly two decades that the killer who’d haunted her father for his entire career had been responsible for his death, Ellie finally received concrete proof from the WPD: on the night of Jerry Hatcher’s death, William Summer had been the best man at his sister’s wedding in Olathe, more the 175 miles from the country road where Ellie’s father died in his Mercury Sable after a single bullet was discharged from his service weapon into the roof of his mouth.
The implication was clear. If Summer hadn’t pulled the trigger, then her father had. He had chosen to end his life, leaving behind two children and a mother who was incapable of caring either for herself or them on her own. Ellie was still learning how to accept a version of history she had always rejected.
She poured herself a glass of water from the Brita pitcher in her refrigerator and carried it to the coffee table. And then Ellie did something she rarely did. She apologized. “I’m so sorry. You should have heard it all from me, in my words-not in sound bites from a television show.”
Peter pushed her hair from her eyes and kissed her forehead, then her lips. “Let’s get some sleep.”
For the first night since she returned to New York from Kansas, Ellie Hatcher did not dream about William Summer.
THREE HOURS LATER, a man closed the door of his Upper East Side apartment behind him and used two different keys to secure two separate locks. He walked the two flights of stairs down to 105th Street.
It was still dark, the streets relatively deserted, but the man could see when he turned the corner that the Chinese man who operated the newsstand at 103rd and Lex had just unlatched his makeshift storefront and was using a pocketknife to free stacks of newspapers from the constraints of cotton twine.
The man slowed his pace. He did not want to be in a position where he either had to wait for the news man or help him. Then he might be remembered as the impatient man who was waiting for the morning’s papers, or the friendly man who had assisted with the twine. He preferred not to have any adjectives associated with him.
Once the papers were stacked and the Asian was back in his booth, the man allowed himself to approach. He selected three local papers-the Daily Post, the Sun, and the Times. Extended three dollars across the row of candy bars-exact change.
He folded all three newspapers together, tucked them under his arm, and made his way back to 105th Street. Turned the corner. Into the building. Up two flights of stairs. Past the locks.