One Cold Night

of his life. The thought that the groom could be back — that he may actually have taken Lisa — sent a ripple of cool, nauseating dread through Dave’s body. He sat stiffly forward in Detective Ramos’s chair, forcing a deep breath and along with it the convictions of a second chance. This time, he would not be helpless; he would not allow that miserable psychotic creep to control him; this time, Dave would get him.
    He picked up Bruno’s phone and dialed Joe Rinaldi, a CIS nightwatch tech who often worked late. Whenever he called for a trace on Marie Rothka’s incoming calls he could tell by the downshifted greeting that they had lost the groom again: the pause, then a break in the tech’s voice as he began to speak, then the badnews about this guy’s genius and how he hijacked analog signals to elude the digital trace.
    “Hey, Dave.” Rinaldi sounded energized; it wasn’t the usual greeting. “I just picked up the phone to call you. We made the trace! You’re gonna love this: It’s a landline, and it’s local. Blaustein’s got a unit on its way over there now.”

Chapter 10
    Wednesday, 7:53 a.m.
    The wailing of sirens along Water Street came with the suddenness of a deluge. Susan flew down the front steps of her shop to see what was happening. In the exquisite light of early morning, squad cars jammed to a stop just beyond the yellow police tape, sending reporters and onlookers into frightened clumps on the sidewalks. The police flung open their car doors, leaving them gaping as they ran across the street into the Café Luxembourg, the new patisserie that was due to open next week.
    Everyone seemed to swarm back into the street at once, and it was almost impossible for Susan to get through. Lupe Ramos stood on the café’s stoop, shouting into a bullhorn: “Stand back! This is a police investigation! Anyone interfering will be arrested! Do you hear me? Stand back now! ”
    A local television van pulled up, rigged with satellite dishes pointed skyward. A man with a large camera on his shoulder jumped out, followed by a woman in a red skirt suit. They spotted Susan and rushed over.
    “Are you a relative of the deceased?”
    Susan came to a standstill and looked at the woman, stunned.
    “What did you say?”
    “Any relation to the deceased?”
    Was it true? Could it possibly be true that Lisa had been across the street the whole time and that she was, she was...
    “Let the family through!” Lupe’s voice pierced the chaos. “Do not bother the family or I promise you —” She stopped speaking when Susan reached the top of the stoop.
    Susan glimpsed police inside the café. One of them caught Lupe’s eye, slightly shook his head and shrugged, indicating, it seemed to Susan, that his search had come up blank. A cold sweat gathered on Susan’s face. What exactly was happening here?
    “Is it true?” Susan asked Lupe. “That woman said Lisa was—”
    Lupe lowered the bullhorn and escorted Susan into the café. The door snapped shut behind them and it was quiet. What looked like a hundred faces outside gathered together, watching through the door’s glass panels.
    “It’s not true.” Lupe Ramos looked small, shrunken to her normal size without the dual elevations of stoop and megaphone. Her eyes were bloodshot around pinprick pupils still reacting to the bright light of early morning. “They’ll throw anything at you to get a reaction, so don’t react, okay? You’re gonna have to deal with this now.”
    The cop who had signaled Lupe to come inside approached her. “Zip.”
    Beneath the delicate structure of her heart-shapedface, Lupe’s jaw tightened. “I didn’t think she was here; that woulda been too easy.”
    Susan followed Lupe through the pretty space: blue antiqued floor, round marble tables on curlicue black-iron stands, a huge old mirror framed in nicked wood behind a long espresso bar and pastry display.
    “Please tell me what’s going on,” Susan asked.
    “An old case of your husband’s got a call today—”
    And Susan knew: Marie Rothka. She knew all about the phone calls that poor woman got from the man who had abducted her daughter. And now, she knew all about Marie’s sickening fear the day her child had vanished.
    “— and it traced to here.”
    Susan also knew that the Rothka traces never came out. For a criminal as brilliant and elusive as Dave had described him, this didn’t seem to make sense.
    The next thought — Why did that psycho call today?