New York to Dallas

city outside.
    “Is this a new facility, Detective?”
    “Relatively, Lieutenant. It’s about five years old.”
    Five years? Eve thought. Every cop she knew could’ve taken the shine off the place in five days.
    They turned into SVU with its wide bullpen, its line of cubes for aides and uniforms. Cops at the desks, some in jackets, some in shirtsleeves, working the ’links, the comps. She wouldn’t say every movement stopped when she walked in, but there was a beat.
    In it she got stares close enough to the beady eye to put her at ease.
    Ricchio used the traditional boss’s attached office with unshuttered window. He stepped out immediately, held out a hand to Eve.
    “Lieutenant Dallas, Mr. Roarke, thank you for responding so quickly. Please, come into my office. How about some coffee?”
    She started to refuse. Let’s get down to business . But she remembered this was a world where cops smiled and said please a lot. “Thanks, just black.”
    “The same,” Roarke told him.
    He programmed the AutoChef, and after passing out the coffee, gesturing to his visitor’s chairs—ones with actual cushions—he sat on the edge of his desk.
    He wore a suit and tie, and had a lot of wavy brown hair around a face with a deep tan and lantern jaw. His eyes shifted to Bree, back to Eve.
    “I expect you’ve read Detective Jones’s statement and report.”
    “I have. But I’d rather hear her account, if you don’t mind.”
    “Bree?”
    “Yes, sir. I didn’t get home until a few minutes after four this morning. My partner, Detective Walker, and I worked a long one. My sister and I share an apartment. I assumed Melinda was home in bed. I never checked. I went directly to bed, and as I’d taken the next day off, I slept late. I . . .”
    She wavered a moment.
    “It’s my policy,” Ricchio said, “when my detectives put in long hours, close a case, and have nothing hot waiting, they take a day to recoup.”
    “Understood.”
    “I didn’t get up until about ten-thirty,” Bree continued. “And I assumed Melinda had gone to work. There was a message from her on the fridge, as is our routine. She said she’d gotten a call, had gone out to meet with a rape victim she’d been counseling. She left the message at twenty-three-thirty.”
    “Is it usual for her to meet a vic that late?”
    “Yes, ma’am—sir. Pardon me, Lieutenant, I understand you prefer sir. ”
    “ Ma’am ’s somebody’s tight-assed aunt.”
    It nearly got a smile from Bree. “Yes, sir. It’s never too late or too early for Melly. If somebody needs her, she’d be there. I didn’t think anything of it. I’d have known if she’d left the message under duress. She didn’t.”
    “She didn’t tell you who she intended to meet or where?”
    “No, but that wasn’t unusual, but . . . if she’d come back, she’d have deleted the message, so it gave me a bad feeling. I decided to check in with her. When I did so, I got McQueen’s message.”
    As she said McQueen’s name, Bree began to turn a silver ring around and around her finger.
    “I checked the apartment, cleared it. I contacted my lieutenant and apprised him of the situation. He dispatched two officers and a Crime Scene Unit to my location, and put out an alert on Melinda and her vehicle. Her vehicle was found in the unsecured lot of a motel approximately three-quarters of a mile from our apartment. No one interviewed remembered seeing Melinda or McQueen.”
    “Has the picture of the female we believe is McQueen’s current partner been shown?”
    “As soon as we received it from your department, Lieutenant. We didn’t get any hits. We’ve run down or are running down everyone booked into the motel last night. So far, we’ve cleared everyone.”
    “They didn’t book,” Eve put in. “They didn’t stay there. They dumped her vehicle there, possibly transferred her to another. Most likely a van. You might re-interview asking about a van parked near where you located your sister’s car. Highest probability?” she continued when Bree took out a notebook. “The female suspect met Melinda Jones outside of the designated location. Probably some sort of restaurant—down-scale, but busy. Café, diner, bar. Requests the vic to take her somewhere else, maybe quieter. She wouldn’t want to go in with her target, be seen with her. The suspect’s behavior is nervous, upset—as the vic would expect, and being predisposed to help she lets the suspect into her vehicle. Is