One Cold Night

quiet after that was painful.
    “Okay then,” Lupe said, “let’s get back on track here. Let’s try to find the guy, for starters, and let’s try to find the phone handset that made that call. Then we’ll get some fingerprints if we’re lucky. Then we’ll know.”
    “If we’re lucky,” Bruno echoed.
    Susan stared into space; poor woman. Over theyears, Lupe had dated her share of jerks, but at least the boy who’d gotten her pregnant when she was fifteen had had the good sense to die young and leave his memory intact. Not so Susan Bailey’s first boyfriend, this Peter Adkins — stalker, groom, whatever.
    Lupe took out her cell phone and keyed in an auto-dial to her sergeant. “Let’s run a full Amber Alert on Lisa Bailey; you got the stats.”
    The precinct’s conference room wasn’t much to look at — a windowless, rectangular room with pea green walls and a dry-erase board that stretched across one whole wall — but Lupe had used it before as command central for tough cases. You needed a room big enough to hold a lot of people and to really spread your files out, and this was going to be it. Her sergeant sent her five detectives out of the rotation pool, and they arranged themselves around the long table.
    Bruno, meanwhile, wheeled in his executive chair and parked it at the head of the table. Lupe rolled it around the corner, to the side. Then she put the biggest of the padded conference room chairs at the head and sat herself down. He glared at her, standing behind his oversize chair, but leave it to the big, tough Russian to say nothing about her little coup. Really, she loved him.
    “Do me a favor, Bronski,” she said, “and see if we got anything good off the call-ins yet.”
    A special police phone number had been broadcast for potential witnesses to call in any tips on the case. All the local television and radio stations had been airing the number since the Amber Alert went out. There were bound to be plenty of calls, there always were;contrary to reputation, New Yorkers loved to get involved.
    Bruno aimed two heavy breaths right at her before stalking out of the room. Dave Strauss either didn’t notice or didn’t want to notice. He sat down with the pile of manila folders and envelopes he’d had sent over from the Seven-eight and began to look through them.
    A secretary came in with nice fresh yellow pads and plastic cups filled with sharpened pencils, which she dotted along the table’s center. Ramos was about to get started briefing the other detectives when Bruno burst into the room, his mood brightened. He held a stack of papers listing a transcription of each and every phone tip. It looked like they already had at least a hundred.
    “The power of publicity, baby!” Bruno plopped the papers on the table in front of Lupe’s chair.
    She gave everyone a quick rundown of what to look for, and between them all it took just a few minutes to pull out the interesting calls.
    A couple who lived in Dumbo had seen Lisa in the park at about ten thirty last night, when they were out walking their dog. They said Lisa was alone, sitting on a bench, and seemed to be watching a man who was skipping stones into the river. The man was blond and average size, about thirty, but she didn’t seem to know him. The couple did not see Lisa again after they left the park.
    The next set of witnesses was a group of five young women. One of them, by mutual agreement, had placed the call to the police. They had finished dinner at the restaurant on Main Street at about eleven o’clock. They’d all had a little too much to drink butremembered that a medium-height white man with blond hair, wearing a brown canvas jacket, had been standing on the curb across from the restaurant. He seemed to be waiting for something, or thinking something over, and he seemed nervous. As they walked up the street on their way to the subway, they talked about him. One friend said he reminded her of a guy she’d recently been set up with on a blind date, and if this guy was on his way to a blind date now, he’d do the woman who was waiting for him a favor by not showing up. The friends had broken into laughter and were still laughing when they reached the corner of Main and Water streets. They all noticed a girl sitting alone on a curb. One of them had made a comment about her seeming young to be out alone, but the women were preoccupied trading stories about bad blind dates and they forgot about the girl as they