One Cold Night

eye contact with anyone but Lisa, who had been open and warm with the Rothka family. Lisa seemed to understand what she meant to them, that her life was the long shadow ofBecky’s death. When Lisa had hugged Charles, then Charlie, then Marie, Dave had watched as the bereaved mother ran her fingertips gently over Lisa’s face. The face that so resembled Becky’s.
    Detectives Lupe Ramos and Alexei Bruno had also come to the service, along with Officer Zeb Johnson, but the trio kept a respectable distance. Dave knew the drill, having attended so many funerals of strangers he couldn’t count them. You were the dark suit against the wall or by the tree. You showed deference to the pain and helplessness of the family; unless spoken to, you held your silence.
    About a dozen other people were there — friends, family and neighbors of the Rothkas, Dave assumed. They knew now that Becky had been killed within twenty-four hours of her capture. If they had found and buried her then, hundreds of people, swollen with fresh anguish, would have come to see her off. Dave’s mind was still processing the autopsy report he had read late yesterday, with details he had sought for a whole year now pressing at his consciousness. Each of Becky’s fingertips had been vertically sliced. That would account for the blood found with the green necklace beads in the Bronx Dumpster near where the letter was mailed; it also accounted for her inability to write the letter herself, which was the usual tack of a kidnapper hoping to convince you his prey was still alive. Later, she had been raped and strangled, probably simultaneously. The terror that poor girl had suffered was appalling, yet it wasn’t the worst Dave had ever seen; he had worked on equally deranged and vicious crimes against people just as innocent as Becky Rothka. Becky. So now they had some answers, and her family had remains toproperly bury. It was going to have to be good enough — but it was not enough.
    There were some things forensics would never decipher: how and why and in exactly what ways the minds of two men with dangerous yearnings had come together. Peter Adkins’s appointment book could tell them only that the two had first met before either girl’s abduction. Who had spoken first about the girls? There were reasons therapist and patient were supposed to keep a professional distance from each other; too many psychic doors were open to safely approach the corridors of friendship. And yet everyone knew it happened. A first step was taken, then another, and before you knew it you were someplace you never meant to go.
    What had Theo Childress said to Peter to make him think that he might actually be able to possess his lost daughter? And what had Peter said to fuel Theo’s dangerous imagination? The thing was, they were two different men with two different minds and ultimately two different plans. Theo clearly envisioned and desired a darkness unthinkable to most everyone else on earth, probably even Peter Adkins.
    What exactly Theo had wanted, they might never know. His demented journey had already gained at least two markers in cold cases that had been pried open and reexamined in the past few days: a girl in New Jersey three years ago, and eight months earlier a girl in Pennsylvania. He was starting to look like a bona fide serial killer; one more for the books. As for Peter, Dave would get his crack at interviewing him in a couple of days, once the psychiatrists had him stabilized. He looked forward to it, but what he really wanted was what he would never have: a chance toquestion the groom, face-to-face, and ask him why ... the inevitable, unanswerable question that would always burn in Dave’s chest.
    Dave imagined himself in a drab interrogation room, questioning Theo Childress. But instead of two voices interacting there would be only one — his. He didn’t really believe the groom would have ever talked, not to him. He could see a superimposition of two faces — the pale boy from the photograph and the scar-faced man who had gotten so close to Susan — staring him down with nothing but reticent mockery in his eyes. Now, standing beside Susan, mere inches between them, Dave sensed the loss of balance that had become so familiar in the last few days: the driving purpose mixed with helplessness; the ascendance of love overlaid by a memory of desolation as he had heard the news that his nemesis had trapped his beloved wife in an elevator.
    Susan pulled