One Cold Night

anything, but Lupe wasn’t about to probe.
    “Been looking around for a telephone handset,” she told Dave. “Did you hear a page?”
    “Handset.” He stared at her, digesting the word, absorbing the idea. “It’s not there?”
    “It’s not with the phone base in the office,” Lupe said. “It’s not anywhere. I checked.”
    Just then Bruno appeared in the yard door. “Nothing in the basement,” he said.
    “Made any calls lately, Bronson?” Lupe asked him. “’Cause you didn’t hang up the phone.”
    Bruno nodded deeply, understanding. He shoved his hands into his pockets and brought out his deflated pack of cigarettes. “Mind if I smoke?” Without waiting for an answer, he lit up, inhaling deeply and exhaling in a dragon breath of smoke. He picked a sliver of tobacco off the tip of his tongue.
    “How far’s the range of a cordless phone?” Lupe asked anyone.
    “A coupla hundred feet,” Bruno said.
    In a world of satellites and Wi-Fi hot spots, that surprised her. “You’re kidding me. They fly to the moon and send back pictures.”
    “Not this kind of phone,” Bruno said. “Believe me, I know. In Russia, I was engineer.”
    “You sure about that?”
    “Yes, I’m sure! I know who I am! I was big engineer—”
    “No, Brunofskaya, I mean the range of the phone.”
    “Oh. Well. No.” She watched the irritation pass over his big Russian face. She loved this guy. “Without the phone I’m not one thousand percent sure—”
    “So we don’t really know,” Lupe said, “where he made the call from. And we don’t know if that face you maybe-maybe-not saw in the window last night,Strauss, is real. And we don’t know if Lisa’s right here or if she’s on the other side of the city or the other side of the country by now.”
    “What we know,” Bruno echoed, “is that we don’t know.”
    “In a nutshell,” Lupe said, shaking her head. “What time did Mrs. Rothka get her phone call?”
    “Seven,” Dave answered.
    She checked her watch. “Over an hour ago. Shit. ”
    Dave stood up and it seemed like his whole body went rigid, like he was an arrow that was about to shoot.
    “Listen,” he said with the kind of tight voice that told her he wished he didn’t have to take the time to explain all this. “He doesn’t stay local; he leaves the area, that’s his pattern. We’ve probably only got sixteen hours, tops, if it’s the same guy who took Becky. Around midnight of the first day he had her, he planned to do some kind of ceremony with her.”
    “The groom, ” Bruno grumbled. “A marriage. ”
    “That’s how he thinks of it,” Dave said. “He waits for nightfall, but midnight’s the deadline.”
    “Why midnight?” Lupe asked.
    “Something he said to the mother the day after he took the girl.” Dave kept his voice low and his eyes off his wife, who looked to Lupe like she might vomit any second. “He told her he would kill Becky at midnight, but marry her first.”
    Susan buckled over, her arms folded over her waist, and wept.
    “How we doing on our APB on Adkins? Anything yet?” Lupe asked Bruno.
    “Peter had nothing to do with this,” Susan managed to say through her tears. “I haven’t seen him or heard from him in years. He never even knew about Lisa.”
    “Yo,” Lupe said to Dave, just spat it out. “You didn’t tell her?” Would it hurt Susan to know that some guy who looked like her old teenage boyfriend was spotted lurking around the neighborhood just two days ago?
    “Tell me what?” Susan tried to wipe her face dry with the palms of her hands, but it was useless.
    Like the nice guy Dave was, he hesitated before answering. Sweet, Lupe thought, how these two hold so much back, always saving each other from life’s ugly truths. In her own romances she’d always taken the tough-love approach; but then again, look where it’d gotten her: alone.
    “Ramos and Bruno answered a suspicious-person call on Monday,” Dave said oh-so-carefully to his stunned-looking wife. “A man whose description matches Peter Adkins’s was seen hanging around on Water Street. He wasn’t there when the detectives arrived.”
    A deep vertical line appeared on Susan’s forehead. “You think it was Peter? Here?”
    “We don’t know exactly what to think,” Dave answered her. “We’re collecting information right now, following any possible lead. But we have to keep open to the chance that it might have been.”
    Susan shook her head, saying nothing. The