Chelsea Hart. A college student from Indiana. He thought about the driver’s license he’d grasped between his fingers only a few hours earlier on his living room floor. Jennifer Green. Date of birth in 1983.

So she had been from Indiana, but the license wasn’t real after all. She was only nineteen years old. Her name was not Jennifer Green. And she’d been a college student from Bloomington.

The realization that he’d been ignorant of these basic details about the girl struck him as bizarre. He was the one who’d slid off her tight black pants and seen the purple birthmark on her right hip, peeking out from beneath those silky bikini panties. He was the one who’d run his fingers through those long blond waves before cutting them off to take home with him. He was the one who’d felt the firmness of her veins beneath the soft pale skin around her throat.

A lizard appeared on the screen to push insurance. As he hit the mute button on the television, the man wished he’d had more time last night. He had rushed with Chelsea, formerly known as Jennifer Green. He would take more time with his next project, once he found her. To his surprise, he was already anticipating it.

He still needed to put in another couple of hours of work, but he was rested from the quick catnap he’d caught after his meeting. He would start looking tonight.

THE PERSPECTIVE OF the camera continually changed, but the images always came to her in black and white. Sometimes Ellie watched the scenes unfold through the eyes of the victims. On other nights, she was a neutral and omnipotent observer floating overhead.

This time, she was pushing open the unlatched heavy oak door of a prairie-style home. She walked through the living room, passing in front of a fireplace, and then turned into a long hallway that led to the bedrooms.

She found the boy’s body first, laid out on his twin bed with a plastic shopping bag over his head, a rope around his throat. His mother was in the master bathroom, blindfolded in the tub with a bandanna. Ellie knew that the woman had been tortured before being drowned-held repeatedly under water to the brink of suffocation, then revived, only to be submerged again.

As she descended the basement stairs, she tried to block the image that she knew would come next. William Summer had saved the twelve-year-old daughter for last.

Just as Ellie caught sight of the soiled rag next to the girl’s body, a rumbling sound pulled her away from the nightmare. She opened her eyes and remembered she was alone in her Murray Hill living room. According to her cable box, it was 9:58. She had dozed off watching a show about Dexter, a wily serial killer who targeted people who truly deserved to die for their own heinous wrongdoings. If only real murderers were so delightfully discriminating.

She grabbed her vibrating cell phone from the coffee table and flipped it open.

“Hatcher.”

“Morse.”

It was Peter. “Hey. I didn’t check the screen first.”

“Guess what I learned today?”

“What?” She smiled at the sight of the plush green frog heads springing from her toes. She had tried to find a way to leave behind the slippers her mother had purchased for her in Kansas, but she had to admit they were actually pretty cute.

“Writing the news all day straight, and then coming home to write some more, totally sucks.”

“Isn’t that pretty much what your life was like before you met me?”

“I suppose.”

“And while I was in Kansas?”

“And your point would be?”

“Write one more page and then go to sleep.”

“A page? Do you have any idea how long it takes me to write a page?”

“You write fast,” Ellie said. She had seen him hammer out articles as fast as he could type them.

“That’s when I’m Peter Morse, crime beat reporter for a tabloid that calls itself a newspaper. It’s different with my own stuff.”

“Fine. Write another paragraph and go to sleep.”

“I think I’m fried for the night. It didn’t help that I got stuck at work. WABC beat everyone to the punch on a body this morning at East River Park, so I had to stay and bang something out for tomorrow morning’s paper. Kittrie must think it’s going to be a big story, because he awoke from his deep slumber as an editor and insisted we work on the coverage as a team.”

George Kittrie was Peter’s editor, and, at least according to the stories Peter had a tendency to tell, he was about as fond of Peter as Lieutenant Eckels was of Ellie.

“You probably don’t want to know, but that’s actually my case.”

“So instead of scrambling for two hours at the paper trying to satisfy Kittrie, I could have just called you?”

“Nope.”

“Oh, come on. I could have at least weaseled my way into a little hint.”

“Nothing. Nada. I’m Fort Knox.”

“I know. You sure you don’t want company?”

“Two nights on our own. I told you.”

“You are such a cop.”

“Good night.”

“’Night, Detective.”

She rose from the sofa and cleared away the debris from her dinner, lamb rogan josh and samosas delivered from a neighborhood Indian joint. Her stomach still felt hot from the spicy brown sauce on the lamb dish, and it dawned on Ellie how acclimated she had become during her decade in New York to the consumption of foods whose ingredients were a complete mystery to her.

She flipped to the early round of the late-night news. The local ABC affiliate may have been the first to break the story of Chelsea Hart’s murder, but now the department’s Public Information Office had released an official statement, and the case was finding its place in every stratum of the media.

Watching a case transform from real-life incident to ubiquitous cultural phenomenon reminded Ellie of the sprouting process in Gremlins, a movie she still watched every year on Christmas Day. It all started with a single, manageable creature. But add a little water, and suddenly several new balls of mischief were spawned, brewing until they transformed into separate and independent troublemakers that had to be watched over and cared for, each with the potential to hatch its own havoc-wreaking offspring.

And so it was with crime reporting. It started with a single case, followed by the first story. But that initial media coverage provided the germinating water, and from there, the sprouting began. By the end of the week, she would have a precinct full of Gremlins.

Ellie flipped between the two ten o’clock news programs. Both covered all the bases: Chelsea’s name and age; the fact that she was on spring break, alone at night in the Meatpacking District; the discovery of her strangled corpse early this morning by joggers along the East River. No mention of the mutilation of her body or the violent removal of her beautiful hair. Give them time, she thought. Peter had scrambled quickly for the basics, but by tomorrow, reporters would be contacting everyone Chelsea Hart had ever met-at the hotel, at the club, back home in Indiana. Whether they wanted to or not, the public would eventually gain access to all of the ugly and salacious details that boosted ratings and swelled circulation numbers.

And Ellie’s job would get that much harder.

SHE CHANGED THE CHANNEL to a Seinfeld repeat to keep her company while she got ready for bed. She had removed her contact lenses and started to brush her teeth when she heard keys in the front door.

She heard a soft clank, followed by her brother’s voice. “Chain!”

Ellie called out an apology through sudsy toothpaste foam, made her way to the front door (it didn’t take long in her small one-bedroom), and released the safety chain.

“You’ve been doing that a lot lately.” Jess set his hard-shell Fender guitar case by the door, shook off his black thrift-store jacket, and tossed it on the nearest piece of furniture, an off-white armchair in the corner. “Should I take that as a hint that it’s time for me to find another couch? I could swing it now that the job’s working out all right.”