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with a wavy appearance. “Eighteen years ago, someone who had your job and someone else who had our job assured someone who cared about this woman that at least her killer would never see another day of freedom. This isn’t about transparency or process. This is about whether the kind of man who could do this to a woman—to six women—gets a second shot, just because some fishing expedition turns up DNA from a sloughed skin cell overlooked twenty years ago.”
    Ellie knew Rogan was right, but found herself saying, “We’re getting way ahead of ourselves.” Barely into the assignment, she was already playing mediator. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and the lab will find Amaro’s DNA. What about the letter? Did that go to the crime lab?”
    “It was the first thing we did. I think we hoped to find something linking it to a sick practical joke. Maybe a leak with the medical examiner to a wannabe comedian. Instead, we’re still at a dead end: the envelope was self-sealing, the stamp self-adhesive. No prints. It was postmarked eight days after the Brunswick murder, mailed from Manhattan. That’s all we got. Now the reality is setting in, and we’re wishing we’d made better use of all this time.”
    “What about the therapist, Helen Brunswick?” she asked. “No physical evidence there, either?”
    “You’ll need to get all the details from the Brooklyn detectives who’ve been working the case,” Max said. “My understanding is that they have plenty of trace evidence—hairs, fingerprints, skin cells—but with no certainty that any of it necessarily belongs to the killer. They just heard back yesterday that none of the profiles hit in the DNA database.”
    On television, these things happen in a matter of minutes. Even in a high-profile case, it had taken six weeks for the lab to run DNA through the database.
    Rogan finally took a seat next to Ellie. He tapped his neatly trimmed nails on the tabletop. “The fractures alone would never have been enough to connect Helen Brunswick to these old cases,” he said. “So it’s really about the letter; whoever sent it knew about her injuries. And they wanted to make sure someone made the connection to Anthony Amaro. Brunswick’s husband found the body. That means he had eight days to figure out he was the primary suspect and respond accordingly.”
    “Is the husband still talking,” Ellie asked, “or has he lawyered up?”
    “Last I heard,” Max said, “he was still cooperating. But you should check with the detectives at the 7-8 first. They know you’re taking over.”
    “Great,” Rogan said. “I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to hear from us.”

CHAPTER
FIVE
    C arrie picked the exact wrong time to leave work.
    Had she bolted from the building as soon as she quit, no one would have heard the news, and so no one would have been paying attention as she walked away with nothing but a purse, a briefcase, and maybe one extra bag filled with her most important office possessions. Alternatively, she could have waited out the other attorneys. She’d pulled enough all-nighters to know how quiet the place eventually got—albeit well after midnight, and that gunner Theo Mayers seemed to linger past two on a regular basis.
    But, no. Carrie stupidly decided to break the news about her change of employment at seven o’clock. She had picked that time because she could definitely count on catching her mentor, Mark, to tell him personally. But then she wasted two hours in her own office, backing up personal files onto a thumb drive and wadding newspaper around picture frames and her beloved crystal elephant—the one she’d won in a raffle and had kept simply because it was the only thing she’d ever own from Tiffany.
    At least when she walked out she should have gone incognito—maybe taking the stairs down to the thirty-second floor (land of the printing department, an obscure collection of state legislative histories that didn’t fit in the firm’s library, and an