One Cold Night

continued to the subway. As soon as they heard the news reports this morning, they immediately called and e-mailed one another to confirm their memories of last night.
    “Let’s bring them all in, the couple and the friends,” Lupe said. “We’ll stack them into the interview rooms and get their statements.” Her mind landed back on Peter Adkins: Old flame comes back to find his birth daughter and dole out a helping of revenge. It made sense, but was it true? Was Adkins the groom? It would be convenient: two birds with one stone. But Lupe didn’t go for convenience; in her dinners, yes, but not in her work. She looked over at Dave Strauss. How exactly did he fit into all this? He was the guy who hadn’t found the groom in the first place, and now it almost seemed like the groom had come back to provoke him into something... but what? Andwhy? She wondered if the psycho was punishing the detective for calling him a loser in the New York Times. The entire NYPD had gotten a charge out of that one. Was that partly it? Had Dave Strauss wounded the groom’s overstimulated ego? But there had to be more.

Chapter 12
    Wednesday, 10:00 a.m.
    “Two girls. Two Octobers. One year apart.”
    Five detectives Dave didn’t know from the Eight-four kept their eyes on Lupe Ramos, standing in front of the long dry-erase board that stretched nearly all the way across the wall of the conference room. A metal lip at the base of the board held red and black markers and a roll of tape. On the left side of the board was Becky’s name, in red; on the right side Lisa’s, in black. Between the names, lines were forming, webbing their stories.
    Dave glanced across the table at Marie Rothka, Becky’s mother; he hadn’t seen her for nearly six months. Her long dark hair had gone gray and been chopped short. She looked smaller now, fragile, though the day he had first met her last October she had struck him as a buoyant, earthy woman, the kind of busy mother you appreciated but ignored. For the past eight months she had volunteered at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, and when she had shown up at the precinct this morning, insisting herexperience might prove useful, Dave had been unable to turn her away. He had learned that victims’ families tended to react in one of two ways: They either withdrew in anger and pain at their loss or became determined and often effective helpers. Marie was the second variety. As the mother of a missing child, she held special status as a perpetually questing soul in search of answers. Dave had let her stay because he had come to like and respect her, and he refused to judge her desperation; he also recognized that she might in fact be able to help in some as-yet-undefined way. Looking at Marie now, so alone at the table of detectives, Dave’s mind skipped to another helpless mother: Lolita’s mother, Charlotte Haze. He wondered how her daughter’s plight would have transformed her had she not been hit by a car just at the moment she’d understood the truth about her new husband’s intentions for her daughter. Would she have managed to banish Humbert and save Lolita? Obviously Nabokov had had to kill Charlotte or there would have been no story, a mother being a child’s fiercest protector. Just as Dave’s mind skipped another step to Susan — was she a mother or not? — and the digression of his thoughts began to swallow him, Marie caught his eye and brought him back to the moment on the starkest terms. Her presence was a constant reminder that his failure to find Becky may have somehow led to Lisa’s disappearance. The questions were how and why.
    Ramos pulled a piece of tape off the roll and stuck Becky Rothka’s photograph to the board. “Becky Rothka, last year, thirteen years old,” she said. Next to Becky’s photo, she taped Lisa’s. “Lisa Bailey, fourteen. A year ago, thirteen. Same age. Similar physicalappearance. Last October they were both eighth graders at the same school, but they didn’t know each other. Another coincidence, or whatever; Becky was adopted and Lisa was adopted. Strauss, you wanna explain that? Dave Strauss here’s got a gold shield from the Seven-eight over in the Slope,” Ramos said by way of introduction. “He’s been working Becky’s case and he’s also a family member of Lisa Bailey, the second missing girl.”
    The other detectives appeared to grow more alert at this information; they all now looked at Dave.
    Dave felt sick