One Cold Night

moneyed neighborhoods of Dumbo and the Heights, seedy Fulton Street feeding into a cluster of hopeful new malls, the crossroads of two major bridges, and low-income projects across the street from Metrotech Plaza, the spiffy corporate development that was a perfect hunting ground for drugged-out perps looking for easy prey.
    They went upstairs to the Detectives Unit, a bigroom filled with old desks holding a motley collection of computers and typewriters. It was not unlike Dave’s unit at the Seven-eight: different room, same beige walls; different faces, same expressions. Dave then noticed, in a far corner, a single hanging fern with bright green leaves; someone was watering it regularly. He looked around him and wondered who was who, here at the Eight-four; who, specifically, was nurturing optimism.
    Bruno went straight to his own desk, where he landed heavily in the room’s only large executive chair, spun around and picked up his desk phone. He punched in a number and breathed into the receiver while he waited for an answer. Meanwhile, he hooked a nearby rolling chair with one of his leather boots and sent it in Dave’s direction. Dave arranged it by the side of Bruno’s desk and sat down. He checked his watch; in ten minutes he would call the CIS tech lab to see what, if anything, the automatic trace had picked up on Marie Rothka’s line.
    “Hey!” Bruno spat into the phone.
    Dave figured Bruno was calling Lupe Ramos, with the assumption that he reserved his nastiest tones just for her.
    “No, you listen to me for once! Strauss here’s got an open case, one year ago, missing girl, never found.”
    Each phrase struck Dave like a piano hammer, hitting the wrong note.
    “The perp’s a psycho, probably butchered the girl; he calls the mother sometimes; he called her this morning, said he’s got a new girl. Says her name is Lisa.”
    Dave heard the faraway prattle of Ramos’s overheatedreaction emanating from the phone. Bruno held the receiver away from his ear and raised one eyebrow at Dave, confirming what he had to put up with. Then he replaced the receiver to his ear.
    “He calls her to make her happy! Why do you think he calls her? He gets his kicks. Listen to me, Loopy, we gotta figure out what we got here, repeater or copying cat or goddamn cranking nothing.”
    More tinny chatter spilled out of the phone.
    “Strauss’s got all his own case files on the way over. Two plus two, baby. I’m not stupid. It’s you, me and him.”
    Dave closed his eyes and pictured Lisa the last time he’d seen her: sitting next to Susan at the kitchen counter, spreading cream cheese onto half a bagel, chirping about her acoustic guitar teacher. Her white socks had glittery silver stripes.
    “We just walked in,” Bruno said. “We gotta check the trace Strauss has on the mother’s phone, see if it caught anything. I’m telling you we just walked in! Gimme a chance to look!”
    Bruno slammed down the receiver next to the base of the phone and rolled himself to the neighboring desk. Contrasted with Bruno’s messy desk, this one was almost schoolmarmishly neat, with a calendar-blotter in a maroon leatherette frame, a well-stocked mug of pens, and a small photograph of Lupe Ramos and a boy about thirteen years old pressing their faces together and smiling. Her son, obviously; he looked just like her. On the blotter sat a neat manila envelope with the location code for Forensics stamped in the corner. The fingerprint results. Dave wanted to snatch the envelope out of Bruno’s lumbering hands but held back. Bruno pinched open the metal clasp as he rolledback to his own desk, snorting and shaking his head at Dave for more confirmation that Ramos’s bossiness was out of line. He picked up the phone before the chair had stopped rolling.
    “Yeah, got it. How the hell do I know? You sure you gave him the right phone number this time, eh? You want results, you gotta cross your i ’s and dot your t ’s, and I mean every goddamn time.” Bruno slid the printout out of the envelope, scanned it, then handed it to Dave.
    There it was: four fresh print hits for Lisa, one on the alarm keypad, two on the paintbrush handle and one on the screwdriver she had presumably used to pry open the can of paint. There was no question now that she had been at the store last night.
    Dave closed his eyes and tumbled backward one year into the bitter moment when he realized the groom had gotten away. It had been the most helpless feeling