Page 26 of Find Me

Her fingers began to tremble. She forced herself to focus on typing the letters accurately and quickly.Where are you?

No reply. Lindsay clicked out of her text messages and into email, trying to use that format instead. She immediately received an automated reply.Your message wasn’t delivered because the address could not be found or is unable to receive mail.

Just like that, Hope was gone again.

17

Monday, June 21, 7:30 p.m.

When Ellie walked into her apartment, Max had CNN muted on the television, Smashing Pumpkins streaming on the speakers, and the apartment already smelling like really good tomato sauce. In their texts about dinner, they had decided to stay in and make spaghetti pomodoro. It was fast, cheap, and delicious, and had butter as the final ingredient, making it a perfect at-home meal, as far as Ellie was concerned.

Max gestured to the TV screen. “Hey, did you see that Kansas might get itself a new senator? Any chance she’ll take Uncle Steve with her?”

She had gotten theNew York Timesalert on her phone before she jumped on the subway. The CEO of LockeHome, where Steve was the head of security, was running for the Senate as an independent. Speculation was that it might be an initial step toward an eventual presidential campaign.

“Zilch. Steve would rather live at the bottom of the ocean than in Washington, DC.”

She pinched away a tiny pop of sauce that had made its way from the pan into Max’s dark wavy hair. “You started without me?” Anotherreason Ellie liked the recipe was that it was one of the only things she could actually cook by herself without thinking Max would have made it taste a lot better.

“Figured I was here, might as well. Sauce is done except for your favorite part.” He knew she doubled the butter when he wasn’t looking. He gestured to a half-consumed Manhattan on the countertop and asked if she wanted one.

“Better go straight to wine.”

“I take it you and Jess had fun, then?”

Fun. She wouldn’t call it that.

She had spent most of her life wondering if she was destined to turn out exactly like her father—distracted, distant, consumed by thoughts that could not be shared with others. It wasn’t until William Summer was behind bars that she had allowed herself to be open to the idea of a life in the light with the happy, normal people. Now she was living with a man she loved, and still hadn’t told him about the bombshell that had been dropped on her day. Through no fault of Max’s own, some part of her was still afraid to let him see the darkness that still resided within her.

She was about to fill him in when Max beat her to it. “Oh, you asked about Lindsay Kelly this morning. What was that about? Did Bunning hire her?”

She liked the way Max could recite the name of her most recent arrestee as if it were one of his own cases.

“No, actually, it’s not about any case I’m working.” Not any current case, at least. “It was about my dad and William Summer.”

He stirred the sauce, but said nothing, waiting for her to explain. It didn’t take her long. She realized how little she actually knew. A missing woman with a mysterious background. A DNA match. And from that, both she and Lindsay Kelly had contemplated an apprentice serial killer, staging a detective’s suicide twenty years earlier so he could continue his murderous spree for years to come.

Unlike Steve and Jess, Max allowed her to speak without interrupting her to argue. It all sounded different now. She began to form her own dissenting opinion.

“Summer was adamant that he acted alone,” she said, thinking aloud.

“But isn’t that consistent with his psychological profile? You said that once he knew he was caught, it became a point of pride with him. He was eager to take credit for his work.”

“Yes, but he also loved to play cat-and-mouse games with the police. If there had been a second person to offer, he would have dangled the idea in front of the investigators like a piece of raw meat. He would have dragged it out endlessly, making them beg for a name. You’re a prosecutor. Wouldn’t the DA’s office have been willing to make a deal with him to give up the second person, if there had been one to offer?”

When they first met, Max was on the go-to list of ADAs entrusted with homicide trials at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. When they moved in together, he had voluntarily transferred to the white-collar unit to avoid any conflicts with Ellie’s police work.

“I assume. Could give the possibility of parole at least. But he never once even mentioned the possibility?”

She shook her head. Ellie had used her mother’s lawsuit against the city as leverage to get access to the case evidence. She remembered the pride in Summer’s voice as he took credit, on tape, for each and every one of the murders. He not only denied involvement by anyone else but seemed almost offended by the suggestion.

And for the first time, she saw the largest hole in what had felt like a plausible theory just two hours earlier. “And this DNA profile was only at one of Summer’s crime scenes, and it was definitely from blood,” she said. “Summer left semen behind at almost every scene.”

She knew she didn’t need to spell out the rest of the argument to Max. If the blood sample belonged to William Summer’s imagined coconspirator, it meant that the accomplice had somehow left behind DNAevidence at only one victim’s house, and only with one small spot of blood, even though Summer himself had been unconcerned about leaving behind his own bodily fluids.

Ellie realized that she had developed a classic case of tunnel vision. When she first heard from Lindsay Kelly, they had reinforced each other’s suspicions, allowing them both to see what they had wanted to see. When Steve and Jess tried to expose the holes in the theory, she had dug in her heels, pushing herself further into the tunnel.

If only her first phone call had been to Max, who had never attempted to steer her in either direction. She said as much to Max.

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