One Cold Night

her face contort against its will as she thought of all the things she wanted to say to Lisa, and how now... now it was too late.

Chapter 11
    Wednesday, 8:18 a.m.
    Lupe Ramos watched Dave Strauss lead his distraught wife into the café’s backyard for a private chat. Nice guy, smart, but maybe not lucky. Lupe wouldn’t have wanted to be him right now. She wondered how he’d navigate the return of an ugly, unsolved case, the surprise of his wife’s having told him a whopping lie, and the fact that a teenage girl he was supposed to watch out for was missing with a capital M. If Lisa’s biological father turned out to be the suspicious person lurking around Water Street a few days ago, and if it turned out he took Lisa, and worse yet, if he turned out to be this Groom character, they were all going to be in for one steep climb today — Dave Strauss in particular. Lupe was aware that she didn’t know this detective very well at all, but she’d seen cops go suicidal and homicidal under stress; she’d keep her eye on him.
    At this point in the investigation, nothing was clear. Lupe still harbored the scant hope that Lisa was just your standard AWOL teenager on an emotionalbender, and that it might even be possible to get home to Orlando in time to sail the Euphrates with him after school. Why not hope? Wasn’t that the stuff you were supposed to start every new day full of?
    Right now, they had one good fact: the seven-a.m. call to Marie had been traced to a landline right here at the Café Luxembourg. So it had made sense to shoot some backup over here to check for missing girls and random psychos. It made even more sense that the cops who did the initial sweep had found neither. There was no evidence of breaking and entering, which could have meant anything, including the possibility that whoever made the call had a key (or had gotten a key, or had stumbled on an unlocked door). Hopefully the caller had left some small clue lying around, such as a set of fingerprints on the phone. Hope did spring eternal.
    “I’m gonna look for the phone,” Lupe told Bruno, who was crouched down behind the coffee bar, scanning shelves of delicate white espresso cups and tiny saucers, dessert plates, and baskets of brand-new stainless-steel utensils. “You check out the counter area for starters.”
    He grunted. He hated it when she ordered him to do something he was already doing; she couldn’t imagine why.
    “I’ll check out the office. Vronsky, you wanna hit the basement when you’re done there?”
    “Since when do I get to want anything, eh?”
    “That’s an excellent question. Hmm. Let me think about it.” She walked away, both of them knowing she wouldn’t waste a second on Bruno’s chronic frustration.
    She passed a gleaming copper espresso machine and found an open door to the right of an empty pastry display. On the left side in a short, dark hall was a blue door with an enamel sign, WC. Across from it was another blue door, unmarked.
    The door was a few inches ajar. With her elbow, she pushed it all the way open, careful not to touch anything. The office was ready to go, with a built-in desk and shelves holding just a few files. There was an in-basket with a small stack of papers, an out-basket with a smaller stack of papers, a desktop computer, a framed poster of a French liqueur advertisement leaning against the wall — the kind you saw at just about every overpriced caffeine pit stop — and on the corner of the desk, a phone.
    Correction: part of a phone. There was a base — black plastic, multiline, with ten blank speed-dial slots — but no handset.
    Lupe picked up a pencil with the end of her sleeve and used the eraser to press the page button on the phone’s base. The handset did not respond. She scanned the office, front to back and top to bottom, checking every place the handset might have either dropped or been set down. Leaving the pencil on the desktop (so if Forensics questioned it she could tell them, Yes, that’s the one I touched ), she went back into the hall. Her eyes traveled everywhere, looking for that phone. The bathroom with its hoity-toity pedestal sink and white wainscoting. The coffee bar area where Bruno had already checked, though not specifically for a missing telephone handset. The café itself, with its cute little decorative shelves and pretty tables. And finally the backyard, where Dave and Susan sat together. She was crying; he was watching her cry. Could have meant