The sound of his desk phone broke his train of thought. “Decker.”

“Hi, Detective Decker. My name’s Ellie Hatcher. I’m a detective with the NYPD.”

Hatcher had started to explain her connection to Lindsay Kelly when he interrupted. “Ms. Kelly told me she reached out to you. She was convinced that the bad guy must have had an accomplice who had targeted Hope Miller twenty-three years later. She gave me the impression you agreed.”

He felt a little guilty for misleading Lindsay earlier, asking her all those questions without telling her what he knew about Lopez. Fuck it, he thought. She’s a defense lawyer. She should know better than to trust him.

“‘Convinced’ is an overstatement. It was a possibility, but it was always conjecture. Having noodled it over for a while, I’m inclined to contact Lindsay and tell her I think any connection between her friend and the College Hill Strangler is a stretch. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing anything before I made the call. Don’t suppose Hope Miller has turned up?”

“Definitely not.” He looked again at his computer screen, wishing he knew more about Alex Lopez. “Actually, I do have a name to match to the blood samples, but you’ll understand once I tell you that this information definitely can’t go to a defense lawyer who’s also Hope Miller’s BFF.”

He could almost picture the detective sitting up straighter on the other end of the line. “Of course,” she said.

“A thirty-six-year-old Hispanic male named Alex Lopez.” He recited the date of birth from Lopez’s Alaska driver’s license. “Someone shot him in the head and dumped his body in the water.”

“Sometime after his blood wound up on the floor where Hope Miller was last seen.”

“Correct. We haven’t made the announcement yet. I’m hoping we’ll be able to put out a search for Hope Miller as a person of interest at the same time.”

“So he was only a kid when his blood was found inside Janice Beale’s house,” Hatcher said.

“Thirteen, to be exact. And of course his blood could have been there however long before that.” The implication was clear. Alex Lopez was far too young to have been wrapped up with a serial killer more than two decades earlier. “Anyway, I don’t have a bead on the guy yet. He only moved here in January, and told his girlfriend he grew up in Phoenix before moving to Alaska. But obviously he was in Kansas at some point. Problem is, Lopez is a pretty common name, and little kids don’t exactly have driver’s licenses. Got any local knowledge to impart? If the shoe were on the other foot, I’d send you to the YMCA summer program and two grade-school principals, and you’d probably be able to track down eighty percent of the kids who grew up out here.”