One Cold Night

them. Leaving the shop, he knew she had meant, but another possibility now hung in the air. It was a question he hadn’t considered and wouldn’t consider now; nor did he answer her or kiss her or say good-bye. Without planning to end the conversation so abruptly, he turned and left the office.
    Dave walked through the factory with its gleaming machinery and nested molds stacked on stainless-steel counters. Always, a heavy scent of chocolate hung in the air here. He didn’t smell it today; all he smelled and tasted and felt was the catapult of transformation. Susan had lied to him, enormously, about her past. All their talks about having a baby together, about her not being sure, would have made different sense had he known her history.
    He checked his watch: It was nearing four thirty. Somehow four hours had passed since they had started looking for Lisa. Four hours of time he, as a detective, had been deprived of a set of basic facts. One and a half years as a husband. Three years as a lover and best friend. He passed through the shop, onto the cobblestone street, into the chaos of a crime scene that suddenly was unlike any other he had experienced.
    Peter Adkins, Dave thought; Lisa’s father and Susan’s first lover. He walked forward to give Detectives Ramos and Bruno the information about Lisa’s real parentage, suddenly thinking of that famous line from Tolstoy about all happy families being alike. Until his life with Susan and Lisa, he had not known how universally that idea had translated to modern times, even to reconstituted families like the Bailey-Strausses. Until today they had been happy on the simplest and best of terms, happy individually and happy together. How could it be possible for happiness simply to evaporate? It couldn’t, Dave decided, and if it was in his power to save Lisa and his marriage and this family, he would do it; but already he sensed that half the fight would be within himself.
    He found Ramos and Bruno standing together on the sidewalk just outside the shop’s front door, silent as a stubborn old couple.
    Dave kept it as simple as he could: “Susan is Lisa’s birth mother. Lisa just found out tonight, which is what they argued about. The birth father was told Lisa was aborted.”
    “Shit!” Ramos exclaimed; no subtle professionalism there. “You didn’t know either?”
    “Not until right now.”
    “Shit!” Ramos looked at Bruno, who was slowly nodding his head. “Whaddaya think of that, Brunofsky?”
    “Women.” Bruno grimaced at her and shook his head.
    “That suspicious-person report you had here last week,” Dave said. “Mind telling me the guy’s description?”
    “‘Plain’ was what the caller said,” Ramos answered.
    “Blond,” Bruno added.
    “Medium height.” Ramos.
    “And the scar.” Bruno.
    “What scar?” Dave asked.
    “Pink scar on his face.” Ramos. “Under one of his eyes.”
    “Susan described Lisa’s birth father as five foot nine with blond hair and blue eyes. She didn’t mention a scar, but he could have gotten it after she knew him. His name’s Peter Adkins, grew up in Vernon, Texas. He’d be about thirty-one now.”
    Ramos flipped open her cell phone. Its purple screen was vivid in the darkness, with a cartoony white poodle prancing back and forth. She dialed her night sergeant and requested an all-points bulletin on one Peter Adkins currently, or formerly, of Vernon, Texas. “Caucasian male, approximately thirty-one years old, blond hair, blue eyes, possible scar on face.”
    Dave walked away before she ended her call. He needed to be alone to think, just for a minute, until Ramos and Bruno had had time to regroup. Then the search for Peter Adkins would begin in earnest; finding him now was urgent. When a child disappeared it was always the parents, both of them or all of them, whom you sought first.

Chapter 8
    Wednesday, 4:30 a.m.
    Susan was startled by Glory McInnis’s sudden appearance at the office door, just when she was about to succumb to an avalanche of sobs after watching Dave walk away. Glory’s face was streaked with tears and her short cinnamon hair was stiff and messy from sleep. Susan had seen Lisa’s best friend many times, but never like this; she looked as bewildered as Susan felt. Both parents stood behind her, each with a hand on one of her shoulders as if simultaneously siphoning themselves into her while holding her in place; he was white, she was black, and Glory’s smooth mocha skin was