“Nope. Because we’re about to introduce Nick Warden to the overnight comforts of the Tenth Precinct.”

“JAIME RODRIGUEZ. NICK WARDEN. You’re both under arrest for criminal sale of a controlled substance and conspiracy to commit criminal sale of a controlled substance.”

Ellie placed her cuffs on Nick Warden, while Rogan pulled Rodriguez’s wrists behind his back. They might not have probable cause to hold anyone for Chelsea Hart’s murder, but she’d personally witnessed Warden negotiate the drug deal between Rodriguez and that Amazon of a law student.

They walked the two men toward the back of the office, where officers from the Tenth Precinct would take them out a rear exit to complete the booking process.

Jake Myers took a step in their direction. “Whoa, what are you doing?”

Ellie pointed him back toward his corner at the front of the office. “Stay over there. Move again, and I’ll arrest you for obstructing. Someone get Mr. Myers a glass of water to keep him busy, all right?”

The decision to book Warden entitled her to conduct a search incident to arrest. She pulled a money clip from his jacket pocket, and slipped the entire wad into a baggie. If some of the cash came back with Rodriguez’s fingerprints, it would at least corroborate the deal she’d seen go down between them.

“Smile for the camera,” she said, snapping a quick head shot with her cell phone.

Rogan finished a check of Rodriguez’s pockets and gave her a slight head shake. No drugs. Either Rodriguez had sold the last of the ice he was holding to the model, or he had managed to pass off his stash to someone else in the club before he was herded into the back office.

Without anything to corroborate Ellie’s testimony, the defense would argue that she had misinterpreted a harmless conversation between Warden and Rodriguez. Not that it mattered.

As a uniformed officer led Warden through the back door, he shot a look at Myers, who was drinking his glass of water as directed. A night in jail would be a good test of Warden’s loyalty.

Rogan passed Rodriguez off to another officer. “Maybe Warden will wake up tomorrow telling us he didn’t leave with Myers after all.”

“At the very least we’ve bought ourselves some time until tomorrow afternoon’s arraignment. The labs might be back by then.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a witness placing Myers with Chelsea after she left the club.”

“Oh, and by the way,” Ellie said, “that glass of water Myers is drinking from as we speak? He might just leave behind tidy little fingerprints to match the latent on Chelsea Hart’s button.”

“Detectives?” A uniformed officer looked at them apologetically. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s an older couple here asking for you. They’re refusing to leave.”

PAUL AND MIRIAM HART looked out of place at the club’s entrance in their wool sweaters and matching khaki pants.

“Those two men,” Miriam said. “The men who were pulled out of here. Were they the ones?”

Ellie placed a hand gently on Miriam’s forearm. “Tonight we made real progress. But we arrested those two men-for now-only on drug charges. We believe one of them may have information about what happened to Chelsea last night.”

“What about the man Stefanie identified?” Paul asked. “Stefanie called us from the cab. She said she left Chelsea alone with him, and that you’d found him here.”

Ellie swallowed. “We are following up on that.”

“What do you mean, following up?”

She didn’t want to tell them that Rogan was currently cutting Myers loose out the club’s back exit. “I would call him a person of interest for now.”

“You’re arresting him, then?”

She did her best to explain the legal requirements for an arrest and all of the ways that making an arrest too early would jeopardize the chances of a conviction down the road.

“So he just goes home?” Paul said. “We go back to our hotel room and turn off the lights and go to sleep with the knowledge that your ‘person of interest’ is out there doing God knows what?”

Ellie had tossed and turned her way through countless numbers of those kinds of nights, and she wasn’t going to lie to these people. “Yes, that’s exactly what you need to do. And you’ll probably have to do the same tomorrow, and maybe the next day. But I promise you, I would not ask something so painful of you if it weren’t absolutely necessary. We are making progress. I promise.”

“A drug arrest is progress?”

Miriam began to apologize for her husband, but Ellie stopped her. “I know I have no right, but I’m asking you to trust us.”

As she helped the Harts into the back of a patrol car that would carry them to their complimentary suite at the Hilton, she told herself that Nick Warden’s night in the Tenth Precinct would turn out to be more than just another drug bust. It had to.

SLEEP. WHAT ELLIE NEEDED next was sleep. She had been awake for twenty-two hours and desperately needed to catch a few hours of shuteye. The thought of a soft pillow and clean-ish sheets was paradise.

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?”