It all looked cheerless to me.

My plan was to tolerate him. I figured it was the best I could do. Like my walk to 1 Lefrak City Plaza, though, the man I came to meet was confounding. With his sky-blue shirt and recent trim, his neck still ruddy from the clippers, he looked the part, yet the socks peeking out from the cuffs of his pants were patterned in spectacled kittens, and he smelled like he’d been cooking with sage though it was 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday. When we made our introductions his tone oozed pity like I knew it would, but his folksy accent—Rhode Island or Mass was my guess—softened the blow.

“So,” Dr. Carson Gates said as we took our seats. He folded his hands. “You’re here. That’s good.”

“Is it?” My own hands were clasped in an impenetrable ball. It was the only way I could keep them from twitching.

“I bet there are a dozen places you’d rather be. The DMV. A dentist’s office, needle hovering above your gums.” He shivered, not just for effect. “But you came. So yeah, it’s a good start.”

It’s a requirement, I thought, indignant, but I didn’t hate this guy with the clear eyes and wacky socks. For what it was worth, the delicate fern on his desk appeared to be thriving. Go through the motions, I told myself. Give him what he wants and you can go home. At the same time, I felt like my head was filled with bees. Talking was easy, except when it wasn’t.

“You don’t think I can help,” said Carson. “No, it’s okay—I get that a lot. I want you to know something, though.” He leaned in, studying me. “I won’t give up on you, Shana. You can do this. Start at the beginning. Just take it slow.”

The beginning. Where was that, exactly? Nowhere I wanted to take a stranger, even if he did smell nice. But maybe I could go back partway, just far enough to make him happy. Back to a limestone building on East Fifth Street, and a day that grabbed me by the throat and still hasn’t let go.

—

I was shoulder-deep in a fatal hit-and-run when my NCO supervisor called me into his office and told me to brace myself. Change of plans, he said. This has you written all over it, Shana. I figured he was talking about my investigative method—upending people like stones in a garden to find what’s lurking underneath is kind of my thing—but that wasn’t it. They needed me, and me alone, in a way I could never have imagined.

The guys from the Seventh Precinct were investigating a series of murders below Houston. Another body had turned up, this time in the East Village—my domain. They knew some things about their suspect already, and it was their latest intel that made the sergeant yank me from my desk and send me down to Pitt Street, where the case was laid out like a map on a table: in the span of four months, three murders, all women. Becca Wolkwitz. Lanie Miner, Jess Lowenthal. There was no evidence of abusive relationships, no history of drugs or run-ins with bad crowds to explain why they’d been plucked from the street and turned into statistics. The only common thread was all three women used the same dating app, and all had dated a man named Blake Bram.