Harper half smiled. ‘Listen, they’re wrong. Denise has a profile of the guy. It’s very good. It’s based on his behaviour patterns. Imagine what his wife would see and you’ll get the picture. She’ll see a violent, preoccupied and secretive husband who shows small signs of the kills. He’ll have dirty fingernails, scratches, blood stains, and he’ll make frequent changes of clothes and stay away from home.’

Eddie looked hard at Tom. ‘You serious, Tom?’

‘Yeah, it’s a good profile.’

‘No, I mean about praising someone else for casework? Are you ill or something?’

‘Hey, I praise when it’s due, which isn’t often.’

‘Denise,’ said Eddie, ‘you need a medal for getting a good word out of this sonofabitch. Can I be the first to congratulate you?’

‘Knock it off, Eddie. Just tell us - do you think you can get Lafayette and Lassiter to go public with this? The killer’s wife knows him. She’ll recognize him. It’s a chance.’

‘We publish these telltale signs of the killer and wait until she calls? Is that what you’re saying?’ said Eddie.

‘Yeah. Exactly.’

‘I’ll try for you both. You know Lafayette thinks Denise is a good thing and Lassiter will want to look like he’s making a difference, so it might be okay.’

‘We also think that there’s more to find out about where Lottie was held for four days before she was murdered. I want to look into it,’ said Tom.

‘Why? Lottie Bixley’s got nothing to do with Sebastian.’

‘We don’t know that for sure. I found cherry blossom at the scene, which is something. In the profile, we suggest that maybe the family were away from home for the four days Lottie was held.’

‘That’s a long shot,’ said Eddie.

‘Just go with it,’ said Tom. ‘Listen, I went back through the case in my mind and we didn’t even start to do work on Lottie’s murder. We were preoccupied with the Kitty situation. Things got messy and then I was off the case. We need to speak to some people who knew Lottie. There might be some play in checking out her last movements.’

‘Maybe,’ said Eddie. ‘Denise, what do you think?’

‘We need to look into it,’ said Denise. ‘My take is that Lottie might have been an opportunity he couldn’t bear to miss, so he may have made mistakes there that we haven’t spotted.’

‘Okay,’ said Kasper. ‘I get it that Lottie is a different package. You’re saying it’s like someone likes real fine food but sometimes they just want a good old hamburger.’

‘Yeah, something like that,’ said Denise.

‘For some reason,’ said Tom, ‘whoever killed Lottie held her for four days and then discarded her quickly. We got to figure what happened.’

‘So we need to go speak to some hookers,’ said Eddie. ‘See if we can get anyone talking.’

On the way over to Lottie Bixley’s last known location, Eddie Kasper stopped at the station house to pass Denise’s profile to Lafayette at Blue Team. Captain Lafayette looked at it gratefully and promised to consider it carefully. He agreed that they needed something to big-up the department’s efforts after the débâcle with Winston Carlisle and this would keep the hungry mouths at One Police Plaza quiet for a day or two.

If Lafayette could get the executives to agree to the profile, every newspaper would run the short 500-word description covering her key points. The headline would read: ‘Is This Your Husband Or Boyfriend?’ There would be many across New York having sleepless nights.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Marty Fox’s Home

November 27, 2.05 p.m.

Marty Fox sat in his bedroom waiting for his wife to emerge from the bathroom. He’d set up a nice early lunch for them both in a quiet restaurant that he knew she liked and now they were going to do something they hadn’t done in about ten years - slip off into bed for the afternoon. Marty drank a few glasses of good wine with his meal and their conversation had turned all nostalgic - there was a time when the only woman he wanted was her, and somehow he’d remembered it as they sipped their red wine and talked about the years of struggle and good fun. Good years. Very good years. Just a little distant now.

Sitting alone, Marty was finding it difficult to concentrate. The photograph in the paper shocked the life out of him. Kitty Hunyardi, her name was, but Marty was sure it was the same girl that he’d seen on Nick’s cell phone. What the hell did it mean? He felt terrified by the prospect that Nick was involved in Kitty’s death somehow, but he kept on trying to convince himself he was mistaken. The last session with his patient, Nick had been too fucking weird. Maybe his memory was confused. Marty didn’t like weird. He liked categories so that he could file these things away, far away from his conscious mind. But he couldn’t file Nick. All that stuff about the girl called Chloe and her apparent murder. The photographs of Kitty. It was too much for Marty. Way too much. Fantasy or reality? Marty didn’t know. And then the reports of Kitty’s murder in the papers and on the news, and suddenly everywhere he fucking looked, he could see the news about a guy who stalked and followed women. A guy who was unstable. A guy who could be Nick.

Marty Fox stroked his forehead slowly. The word ‘coincidence’ was a very reassuring one in these circumstances. Yeah, he’d been running that same word around his head for a few days now. Sure, a coincidence: two unrelated events that seem connected but are only similar by chance. That’s all it was. An alignment of unconnected events. They must happen a million times a day. It was nothing at all to worry about. Nothing.

Marty started to yank off his socks. His feet had that yellowing look of a life spent too long in the dark. He looked up at the décor. Wallpaper borders of twisting roses and fake brass wall lamps. His wife’s taste was not his own, for sure, but he’d let her indulge herself. He’d passed on the responsibility. Maybe he shouldn’t have given up like that - let her have the house. Maybe that was where they began going their separate ways. Sitting there with his yellow feet, and the dizzy feeling of being overfed under the light of fake brass lamps, he felt like a failed car salesman having a bad day at a cheap motel.

Life had become a series of disappointments welded together with the hope of an affair. That’s what Marty had done to himself. Sure, for a long time he’d thought he was a smart ass to be getting so much off-limits sex, he’d even enjoyed fooling his wife, but all he was doing was pouring good old gasoline into a leaking tank.

He’d loved her so much, too. She’d been able to funnel the idiot inside him somewhere good. Without her, there was no way he would’ve got his qualifications let alone set up his practice in New York City.

Why had he thrown it away? Or, moreover, when had he thrown it away? The shock of Nick had made Marty melancholy. It’d also made him run to the one place he’d only ever wanted to be.

‘I never was good enough for you, babe,’ he said to himself in the room. ‘Maybe I just became the asshole I always thought I was.’

Marty wondered for a moment if anything in life was really and truly redeemable. If the betrayals could be undone, somehow, his failures and mistakes wiped away with a gleaming new beginning. He pulled off his trousers. He didn’t think so.

The worst thing was the fact that while his beautiful, far-too-good-for-him wife was refreshing herself in the bathroom, approaching their promised intimacy without bitterness or recriminations, all he could think of was Nick and a girl called Kitty.

Maybe Nick just happened to be around the same Kitty, maybe he wasn’t a psycho killer. Marty had even considered going to the cops. Yeah, and getting caught up in a whole world of shit he’d rather keep clear of. Instead of going to the cops, he did a little research. He wanted to know more about the girl called Chloe. He didn’t know whether Nick had somehow been involved in Chloe’s murder or if he’d grown up near to it and kind of fantasized about it. His curiosity had got the better of him, though. He’d spent a few hours looking up the case on the internet. He wished he hadn’t. It took him a while to track it down, but he found it in the archives of the New York Times. The story had hit the nationals it was so gruesome. And that was when the tension really started to get to Marty.