One Cold Night

The half-year silence alone should have warned him. Between Becky’s disappearance and the last phone call, the groom had taunted him, circled him. And then he had simply vanished. Why hadn’t Dave seen this coming? All the pieces had been there — the two girls looking so much alike, same age and same school last year on the day Becky disappeared — and he had been unwilling to look because he had not wanted to see it. He had always thought of himself as tough and honest, and he was, but he was human and therefore addled by weaknesses. He had failed to recognize the vulnerability of his family because the fear of losing them had been too great. And just as he thought that, something else came clear: the groom’s strength was the opposite of Dave’s weakness — he was completely alone, and utterly ruthless.
    He told Marie he’d call her back, closed his phone and broke into a run. So this was it; so this was how the groom would one-up Dave, plunge the hovering knife right into his heart. It would only have been more perfect if he had taken Susan, instead.
    In minutes they were in the car, Bruno driving impatiently in the direction of Tillary Street and the precinct. Dave, in the passenger seat, held on to the dashboard to absorb the jolts.
    “First of all, you don’t know it’s the same guy. This one, maybe he heard about Lisa on the news, put it together,now he’s copying the cat.” Bruno’s voice was gruff and certain, with the stub end of his cigarette hanging from his lip as he spoke.
    “No way the press has the news out yet,” Dave said, though he knew anything was possible.
    “You saw the reporters hanging like Vulcans at the scene.” Bruno turned the car onto Gold Street and screeched to a halt in front of the squat concrete edifice of the Eighty-fourth Precinct. “Maybe it’s not in the morning paper, but radio and TV?” He snapped his fingers and rolled his eyes, then squashed out his cigarette in an ashtray too crammed to shut. “Come on, man, you know as well as I do the news is out.”
    Dave ground his jaw; he had to will away every last bit of wishful thinking. Bruno was right: The news of Lisa’s disappearance had to be out already, which meant the call to Marie could have been a prank from just about anyone who knew enough about Dave’s family and his past cases to put two and two together. Dave thought of the article about him in the Metro section of the New York Times last year, featuring the Harvard-grad cop and his lovely family. Publicity for a cop was generally a bad move, but his sergeant had urged him to do it as a way of “interfacing with the city.” It was in the wake of Becky Rothka’s disappearance, and city families were frightened; bottom line, the brass had wanted to put a human face on the department’s failure to save an innocent girl plucked from its streets. Dave had taken the department’s bravado a step further when in print he had called the groom “a pathetic loser who wouldn’t stay free for long.” He should have known not to vent his frustration to a reporter, and as soon as the words had slipped from his mouth he regrettedthem; but it was too late. The paper used his foolish, impulsive remark for the article’s headline. Every time he thought of it now, he cringed; goading a psychopath was never a good idea. The public had loved it, though. For a while, after the article came out, people recognized Dave; but then they forgot him, and that suited him better. Anyone could have seen the article, learned Lisa’s name, seen her picture and made the call this morning. It really could have been a prank; but Dave was certain Marie would recognize the groom’s voice. It then occurred to him that the groom himself could have been a prank caller, having heard the news that Lisa Bailey — sister-in-law of Detective Dave Strauss — was missing and decided to pull Dave’s chain just for kicks.
    They left the car in front of the station and hurried into the precinct’s small, grim lobby. A front-desk officer sat behind a sheet of bulletproof glass; the dropped ceiling was discolored by veins of rusty water; four olive-green plastic chairs with cigarette burns sat empty along one wall. Not a welcoming place, but then no amount of new paint could have cheered up a typical urban precinct. Dave had a working knowledge of the Eight-four’s stats; it was a tough precinct, with highly contrasting demographics butting right up against one another: the