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.”