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panted.
    “You weigh too much for that,” Jess called out, sticking out his tongue as he ran backward. “Come on. What could be good enough to get the attention of a group of New Yorkers?”
    As they approached the three runners, she could see that the men’s expressions were anxious. The one with the fanny pack flipped his phone shut.
    “They’re on the way,” he announced.
    A wave of relief washed over the runners’ faces. Ellie had seen the phenomenon countless times when she’d arrived in uniform to a crime scene, NYPD badge in hand.
    Jess had wondered what could distract New Yorkers from their routine, and she had a bad feeling about the answer. She tried to tell herself it might only be vandalism, maybe a bum seeking a temporary camping zone.
    “Something worth seeing here?” she asked.
    “You might not want to look,” one of the men said.
    Ellie readied herself for the worst, but she could not have anticipated the scene she encountered as the runners stepped aside. A section ofwire had fallen slack between two metal braces that had been knocked to the ground, leaving a substantial gap in the perimeter around the construction site.
    The woman—she was just a girl, really—was propped like a rag doll against a pile of white PVC pipes, arms at her sides, legs splayed in front of her. Her sleeveless red top had been unbuttoned, exposing a black satin push-up bra and matching panties. Her legs were bare. High-heeled gold sandals dangled from her feet, but whatever other clothes had covered the lower half of her body were gone.
    It was the rage behind the violence that struck Ellie immediately. She had seen her fair share of murder scenes, but had never come across this kind of brutality. The girl’s wavy hair had been hacked off in handfuls, leaving large portions of her scalp exposed. Her body and face had been crosshatched with short, deep stab wounds resembling the outlines of a tic-tac-toe game. Ellie winced as she imagined the terror that must have come at the first sight of the blade.
    She heard one of the men say that they had been unable to find a pulse, but Ellie had already concluded there was no point in checking. She forced herself to focus on the clinical facts she would need for her report.
    A chain of ligature marks blossomed around the girl’s neck like purple delphinium. Her eyes were bulging, and her swollen tongue extended between lips caked with dried saliva and bile. Rigor mortis had not yet set in, but the girl’s skin—no doubt vibrant and pearly just a few hours earlier—was now gray and entering a deeper stage of lividity, particularly in the body’s lower extremities. Lumps of red blood cells had formed boxcars in her retinas.
    As gruesome as the mutilation had been, it had also been gratuitous. It was the strangling that most likely claimed her life.
    The jingling that Ellie had noted earlier was louder now. It was coming from somewhere near the body.
    She was startled by a retching sound behind her. She turned to seeJess doubled over next to a black tarp draped across a fence post, just as she became aware of sirens sounding in the distance.
    “May I?” she asked the jogger, reaching for his cell phone. Punching in a number she had memorized surprisingly quickly, she led the joggers away from what would soon be marked as a crime scene.
    By the time she hung up, the first car of uniform officers had arrived.

CHAPTER 4
    THE JINGLING TURNED OUT to be a Gwen Stefani ring tone on the dead girl’s cell phone. The alarm had been set to go off at 5:32 a.m. Thirty-two minutes after Ellie woke up. One hour and twenty-eight minutes before she was due at the Thirteenth Precinct.
    What had been the significance of that specific moment to this unnamed girl? It could have been her preferred time to get up on a Monday morning. Or maybe it was a reminder to go home on Sunday night. Time to take her medications, or walk her dog. Whatever the alarm’s original purpose, by 5:32 a.m., the