LYING ON HER COUCH that evening, Ellie closed the files and tossed them on the coffee table. By this point, she had read them enough times to have memorized the critical details.

Lucy Feeney had been killed nearly a decade ago. She was three months past her twenty-first birthday, still in that phase where making full use of one’s legal age was a top priority. She and three roommates shared a converted two-bedroom in Washington Heights, but Lucy could be found downtown during most of her waking hours, where she’d spent the last two years waiting tables at six different restaurants.

The week of Lucy’s murder, she and her roommates, in various combinations, had gone out partying on each of the previous four nights. The roommates’ appetites for adventure had been sated. Lucy’s had not. On the evening of September 23, 1998, she hit the bars on her own. According to her roommates, it wasn’t an unusual move for any of them. They enjoyed semi-regular status at a sufficient number of places that they could be comfortable on their own.

The last time anyone saw Lucy Feeney alive, she was at B Bar on Bowery, enjoying a Cosmopolitan. The bartender remembered her. He also recalled sneaking her a couple extra shots of Stoli, one of the privileges of semi-regular bar status. He did not, however, spend enough time with her to recall anything about the man with whom he saw her leaving shortly before closing time.

Lucy’s roommates did not report her missing for two days, another indication of the kind of lifestyle the girls considered to be normal. Lucy’s naked body wasn’t found until three days after that, wrapped in black plastic garbage bags and dumped in the Bronx near the Harlem River.

She’d been strangled. Stabbed four times in the chest and stomach. And her blond hair had been chopped off in blunt chunks near the roots, just like Chelsea Hart’s.

The second of the three files was Robbie Harrington’s. She too was strangled after a night of barhopping, nearly two years after Lucy Feeney. And if Robbie’s mother was correct in her observation about her daughter’s changed hairstyle, Robbie’s killer may also have tampered with her hair, albeit with more subtlety.

That left the third file, Alice Butler. Alice disappeared a year and a half after Robbie Harrington’s murder. She was twenty-two years old at the time-slightly older than Lucy Feeney, a couple of years younger than Robbie Harrington. Alice had been an on-and-off student at the City University of New York for two and a half years, earning barely enough credit hours to be considered a college sophomore by the time she dropped out for good a year before her death.

She worked behind the counter of a New York Sports Club on the Upper East Side, but lived with her sister in Elizabeth, New Jersey. On the night of her murder, Alice borrowed her sister’s Toyota Corolla for a night of partying in the city with a girlfriend. When she parked on the corner of Thirty-ninth Street and Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, she failed to notice the adjacent fire hydrant. By the time she and her friend returned to the spot at three in the morning, the Corolla had been towed.

According to Alice’s friend, Alice grew increasingly angry while they waited to claim the car at the city tow lot. No doubt fueled by alcohol, she began muttering about abandoning her sister’s car and walking back to Jersey if necessary. The friend left an impatient Alice by herself in line while she sought out a restroom. When she returned five minutes later, Alice was gone.

Ellie recognized a familiar name in the Alice Butler file: Dan Eckels. Six years earlier, shortly before he’d earned his white-shirt status, her lieutenant had been the lead detective on the Butler murder case. As far as she could tell, he’d worked the case as well as possible. The best leads in the days following Alice’s disappearance were three separate phone calls from drivers reporting that they’d seen a blonde matching Alice’s description walking alone on the West Side Highway. Alice’s deteriorated body was found ten days later in Fort Tryon Park, dumped in a ravine between the Cloisters and the Henry Hudson Parkway. Bruises around her throat suggested she had been manually strangled, but the official cause of death had been the eighteen stab wounds to her neck, chest, and abdomen.

Including Chelsea Hart, Ellie was looking at four victims. All were young and blond, killed after late nights in Manhattan bars. But she knew that wasn’t enough for a pattern. Thanks to the inherently dangerous mix of sex, drugs, and alcohol at four in the morning, the sad reality was that several women were killed in the city each year under similar circumstances. Based solely on their demographics, Lucy Feeney, Robbie Harrington, Alice Butler, and now Chelsea Hart were just four of many.

But she could not get past the hair.

Lucy Feeney and Chelsea Hart both had had their hair hacked off, leaving portions of their scalps exposed. Robbie Harrington, in contrast, had been wearing new and unexpected bangs.

Snipping off a few fringes of hair around the victim’s face was a far cry from the kind of angry chop job she’d witnessed on Chelsea.

Since her first skim through the files that morning, Ellie had known there was only one way to determine whether there was a pattern, but she’d forced herself to hold off. She told herself she should sit on it for the day before digging up the past for a murder victim’s family. Flann had been known for his far-fetched theories. This could all be yet another McIlMulder wild goose chase.

She looked at her watch. It was seven twenty. Eleven hours since she’d left One Police Plaza with the cold case files. Eleven hours since she’d taken her first browse of them in the elevator. Eleven hours since she’d opened her cell phone and entered a New Jersey telephone number. Eleven hours since she’d flipped the phone shut without hitting the call button.

Eleven hours, and there was still only one option. She picked up the phone and dialed before she changed her mind.

THE WOMAN WHO picked up on the fourth ring seemed put out. Ellie could detect a television playing in the background, along with the sounds of children’s voices. Someone was accusing someone else of hogging something or other.

“Hi. I’m looking for Michelle Butler?”

Ellie realized she should have run Alice’s sister through the system. After six years, she could be anywhere, and this phone number could belong to anyone.

“It’s Trent now. Has been for a while. I’ve really got my hands full-”

“My name’s Ellie Hatcher. I’m a detective with the NYPD. I’m calling about Alice.”

Five full seconds of background noise, then the woman said, “Kids, in the family room.” The kids protested, but apparently realized that Mom meant business when she followed up with, “Now. I mean it.”

“Have you found someone?”

Ellie swallowed, hearing the hope in the woman’s voice, picturing the tears that were probably already welling in Michelle Trent’s eyes as she braced herself for words that were long overdue.

“No. And I’m very sorry to call under those circumstances, Mrs. Trent. But your sister’s case came to my attention in the course of another investigation.”

“Is this going to happen every time some other girl gets killed after drinking too much? Another detective called me-it must have been three years ago.”

“Flann McIlroy?”

“Something like that. Yeah.”

“Why did he call you?”

“Jesus Christ. Don’t you people talk to each other?”

Ellie silently cursed McIlroy for not making any notes in the case files. “I’m very sorry,” she said once again. “I would speak to Detective McIlroy directly, but he’s passed on.”

Michelle either hadn’t seen the stories about Flann’s murder in the papers, or hadn’t made the connection to the detective who’d phoned her three years earlier.