All Day and a Night by Alafair Burke

expert witness in a lot of insanity cases. We saw one of those courtroom sketches in the newspaper a few years ago, and I remember Helen telling me he was one of her professors during her internship. It was at Cedar Ridge Behavioral and Psychiatric Care. Even back then, I guess he was such a big deal that he’d travel across the state in different clinical rotations. That’s how she got to work with him.”
    “And you remembered his name all these years later?” Rogan asked. Ellie could tell her partner was still searching for a revealing slip of the tongue, something to confirm the other detectives’ suspicions.
    “No, I remembered the case. It was awful. The nanny who killed the children?”
    They both nodded their recognition, but Ellie’s mind was somewhere else. Something about the connection between this Dr. Sumner and Helen Brunswick was bothering her.
    “Helen and I were saying it was every parent’s nightmare. Then she made the comment about knowing the defendant’s psychiatric expert from her early interest in abnormal psych. I was grabbing at straws yesterday, Googled the case, and found Sumner’s name. I left a message with his office, but I guess . . .” His voice trailed off. He guessed that busy psychiatrists didn’t return phone calls from suspected murderers.
    Ellie realized now what had been nagging her. The internship he’d mentioned hadn’t been listed on his wife’s credentials, apparently because she hadn’t completed it.
    “Where did you call Dr. Sumner?” she asked.
    “At his office.”
    “I mean, where geographically ?” she clarified. “He’s in the city?”
    Mitch nodded.
    “But before, you said your wife was able to work with him because he traveled around the state.”
    “Yeah, that’s right, because at the time, she was still in her internship at Cedar Ridge.”
    Rogan saw where the conversation was heading. “And Cedar Ridge is where exactly?”
    “Upstate. Just outside Syracuse.”
    “Which direction outside?” Rogan asked.
    “Um, I guess east? About thirty miles?”
    Ellie looked to Rogan for a lesson in New York State geography, but he was moving on. “What exactly was your wife studying with Dr. Sumner up there?”
    “At the time, she was specializing in the treatment of people who manifested antisocial and criminal behavior. She never spoke much about it, other than to say it got to be too much for her.”
    Ellie was doing the math in her head. Helen Brunswick would have been starting a postgrad internship right around the time someone was murdering women in Utica.
    T hey waited until the elevator doors closed to speak.
    “East of Syracuse,” Ellie said. “That’s near Anthony Amaro’s territory, right?”
    “Yep, thirty miles east makes it closer to Utica than Syracuse, in fact.”
    “And it sounds like she was working with the heavy-duty nutjobs. It’s conceivable that one of them has been stalking her all this time.”
    “Nearly twenty years. That’s a long time, Hatcher.”
    “Could be someone who was hospitalized or on his meds in the interim. Something could have retriggered the obsession. Come to think of it, her murder coinciding with the end of her marriage made Mitch look guilty.” The elevator doors parted, and she continued to speak as they made their way to the building’s exit. “But if someone was watching her, the breakup could have been the event that convinced her stalker to make a move.”
    “There’s a far simpler explanation: he knew his wife’s past—at a loonybin in Utica, right around the time someone was killing the women of Utica—and that’s exactly why he hired someone to replicate Amaro’s MO when he took her out.” He held the lobby door open and she stepped outside.
    She was still processing Rogan’s response when a man with a camera stepped in front of them and snapped a picture. He was faster than the well-coiffed woman with the microphone: “Detectives, why were you speaking with Dr. Mitch