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the thousands of gorgeous young women in New York City with a professional head shot fell prey to the random violence of the city. Those were the crime stories that the local papers took hold of. Caroline Hunter had been famous for a few days, then relegated to the unsolved murder files.
    Ellie told McIlroy that she had a vague recollection of the story.
    “So did I. And when I caught this case and saw how pretty Amy Davis was, I immediately pictured the tabloid headlines. That got me thinking about the last time the media glommed on to one of these cases. Out of curiosity, I pulled the file. Caroline Hunter. Notice anything?”
    “Kind of hard not to,” Ellie said. “According to this article, Hunter was shot on the way home from a date she’d arranged on the Internet. She was even writing her Ph.D. on online relationships.”
    “Anything else?”
    “Two women, both attractive. Both in downtown Manhattan. Approximately the same age. One strangled, though; the other shot.” Ellie knew, however, that killers could change the way they killed, as long as the method itself was not an important part of what they considered their M.O.
    “What about the timing?”
    She calculated last Friday’s date in her head, then saw what McIlroy was getting at. “Exactly one year apart.”
    “To the day. Now you know why I said it’s more than a hunch.”
    “I believe you said one notch more,” Ellie added.
    “Still, it’s more. And that’s why we’re going to Amy Davis’s apartment. Your charge, Detective Hatcher, is to find me something that says we’re on the right track.”

4

    AMY DAVIS HAD LIVED IN A PREWAR WALK-UP APARTMENT ON Avenue C. This was the Lower East Side, not to be confused with SoHo, Tribeca, or some other fame-infused bastion of downtown coolness. In Alphabet City, gentrification had hit only building-by-building, block-by-block: The gamut ran from unmarked needle-exchange counters to Glamazon-infested martini bars. Davis’s building fell on the shabby end of the neighborhood’s spectrum.
    McIlroy pressed one of the roughly twenty doorbells lined up at the building’s entrance. A voice blurted through a speaker under the buzzers. “Dígame.”
    “Policía. Estamos aquí con respecto a asesinato.”
    Ellie was able to make out a few of the words. They were the police and were here about something . Her Spanish vocabulary could use an influx of nouns.
    The door was opened by a man in faded jeans, an oversized flannel shirt, and a coarse goatee. “You speak some pretty good español, man, but I’m fine with English.”
    McIlroy took care of a brief introduction. The superintendent’s name was Oswaldo Lopez. His friends all called him Oz, he added, checking out Ellie as he said it. The detectives followed him up the steep, zig-zag staircase that ran through the center of the building.
    “How long have you been the super here?” McIlroy asked between deep breaths, already starting to fall behind.
    “Around eight months.”
    “What can you tell us about Amy Davis?”
    “Pays her rent. Comes and goes. Keeps to herself, at least around the building. Like everyone else. It’s that kind of place.”
    “Any regular company?” Ellie asked.
    “Not that I noticed. But I’m not a doorman in a white-glove high-rise, you know what I’m saying?”
    Ellie knew exactly what he was saying. Oz probably responded to about half of the tenants’ complaints, based on who was most generous or persistent. He did not, however, make friends or keep tabs. It was, as he said, that kind of place .
    “When can we start showing the apartment?” Oz asked.
    “Sometime after we’ve put its current tenant in the ground,” McIlroy said without missing a beat.
    “No disrespect, man. The owner wanted to know.”
    “If Davis paid her rent, he doesn’t have anything to complain about until the end of the month. Now does he?”
    “Like I said, no disrespect.”
    When they reached the fifth of six floors, Oz removed a