One Cold Night

extras until finally Lupe Ramos raised her voice to shout, “Police investigation! Clear the area, please! ” It was the least polite and most effective please Susan had ever heard.
    A bank of lights illuminated the search for physical clues, burning hotter and brighter than natural day. A cadre of police officers had gone off on a street-by-streetcanvass of the neighborhood. Dave had left with Alexei Bruno to “dig up some information” — meaning, Susan figured, to look for Peter Adkins — and also to interview Lisa’s friends. Lupe Ramos alternated between directing the investigation and assaulting the horticulturist’s door, at one point shouting into her phone about a search warrant that was not being issued fast enough. And the fingerprint analysis was under way to confirm — or discount — everyone’s assumption that Lisa had been here tonight.
    Finally, dawn arrived in full, unpeeling steadily across an azure sky. The police lights stayed defiantly on as forensic analysts combed through the yellow paint and cobblestones and concrete sidewalks for hair, fabric threads, any telltale remainders of an asyet-undefined event. Police photographers systematically documented the scene from every angle with an unsettling workaday familiarity. Susan kept reminding herself of Dave’s wisdom to let the police do their jobs, a challenge that got harder as reporters and television crews began to arrive. The police broadcast, Susan realized, had been picked up by the media, who now waited like vultures for any sign of blood.

Chapter 9
    Wednesday, 7:05 a.m.
    Dave paused at the entrance of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade to watch the pale light of early morning overtake the sky. Across the East River, lower Manhattan looked perfectly still, looming, throwing out great shadows. Dave thought of Susan and how fragile and despondent she had looked when he left her in her office. He could still feel the cool air on his hand when he pulled it out of hers and the abandoned look on her face that followed. He could still feel the moment of his own retreat and his inability to stop it. She was Lisa’s mother. It made no sense and yet it made perfect sense.
    Dave and Bruno had spent the last two hours interviewing Lisa’s friends and schoolmates. They had just woken the fourth kid on the list, made her and her parents nearly hysterical with fear, and learned nothing. Bruno was now walking heavily up Montague Street, his back to the river, lighting a cigarette. Dave had been captivated by the spasm of light behind him and a sudden thought of Susan, for whom he yearnedwith a new sense of unrequited future, and turned around to look across the river at Manhattan, huge and stark. It was the same view from the loft, he was just noticing when his cell phone began to ring — the same view, yet the slight shift in angle completely transformed it.
    He unhooked his phone from the belt loop of his jeans and flipped it open.
    “Strauss,” he answered.
    “Dave, it’s Marie Rothka.”
    Always, when he heard Marie’s voice, something inside him froze. Last fall, in the early weeks of the search for Becky, Marie had called him often. Then the calls trickled to occasional reminders that the groom was still at large, when he felt bored or cruel and phoned in his occasional taunts to a still-grieving mother. After a few more months, the calls stopped. Hearing from Marie today, with Lisa missing, the timing couldn’t have been stranger.
    “He called. Just now.”
    Dave turned around and began walking in Bruno’s direction.
    “Okay, Marie. I’ll check on the trace. Maybe this time...” Maybe this time they’d find him. Maybe, but doubtful. Each time the groom had called he had hijacked someone else’s analog cell number. They’d get a crude location from which he would be long gone.
    “There’s more, Dave.” She paused. “He said he has a new bride. He called her Lisa.”
    Dave stopped walking, and listened.
    “He described her as pale and light. He said she was small like Becky,” Marie cried, “‘but not as good.’”
    The last time the groom had called Marie, sixmonths ago, he had told her he would “remarry,” give Dave another chance to find him, but “next time change one thing.” Dave’s mind had entertained a host of possibilities, individual alterations to a highly plotted crime. Up to now he had considered everything, except that he might strike Dave’s own family — because that had been unthinkable.