McIlroy, on the other hand, got wrapped up in the fact that the murder was on the eighth floor, and the victim was stabbed eighty-eight times. He even studied photographs of the bloody smears of the crime scene until he was convinced they were shaped in a chain of number eights. The rest of the homicide task force wrote it off as another crazy McIl-Mulder theory, but McIlroy hit the neighborhood homeless shelters and found a paranoid schizophrenic who’d been treated by the victim two years earlier while he was on his meds. Off his meds, he’d been walking the streets on the Upper West Side mumbling to whoever’d listen about the number eight.

Jenkins ran a palm over his head stubble. “I think some people would say he’s lucky. And they’d also say it was bad form, working another team’s case. But what really pissed the task force off were the department’s press releases. McIlroy looked like a lone hero.”

“And we know how that must’ve gone over.” Ellie thought of the barbs about McIl-Mulder she’d overheard among older detectives. She wasn’t sure which seemed to bother them more – his supposedly half-baked theories or the astonishing coincidence that the press always seemed to have a heads-up on the inner workings of his investigations.

Jenkins shrugged. “He’s still the favored boy there, at least with the brass. But he’s got a reputation – well, it sounds like you’ve heard about it. I could tell them I need you here. I can keep my own people when I need to.”

“No, sir. If I can help there and come back when I’m through, that’s what I’d like to do.”

“I didn’t have a doubt in my mind that you’d say precisely that.” He handed her a slip of paper with McIlroy’s name and an address scrawled on it. The tell in his jaw was gone. Ellie took it as a sign of something Jenkins would never say aloud – he had been worried about her ability to handle the scrutiny that would come with the assignment, but he no longer was.

It took Ellie only ten minutes and one box to pack up her desk, and the box was only half full. A picture with her mom and brother taken two Thanksgivings ago back in Wichita, a handful of hair clips, her favorite water glass, a jar of Nutella, a spoon, a cigarette lighter, and the potpourri of pens, Post-its, Jolly Ranchers, and other crap that fell out of her top desk drawer. That was it. All she had gathered in thirteen months.