One Cold Night

his colleagues out.
    “I’ll talk to the parents.” Ramos looked at Dave when she said it. “I mean the grandparents. They on their way, Strauss?”
    “Should be landing soon,” Dave answered.
    “Good,” she said, turning to the board to touch a manicured forefinger to Becky’s two-dimensional face. Dave was struck once again by the girls’ similarities: Both were small with blond hair, green eyes and a dusting of pale freckles across their noses and cheeks. The photographs also showed the difference a year and different temperaments could make. Becky, captured by her father’s camera in a bright summer sun, looked angelic, while Lisa’s image hinted at rebellion, with her bare midriff, belly-button stud and dash of mascara.
    Small like Becky but not as good. The groom’s words of that morning resonated in Dave’s mind. Lisa was good, though; having lived with her, Dave could attest to that. She was a complicated, bittersweet girl with a mind of her own, but she was good.
    Dave’s eyes hurt; he rubbed them but they only hurt more. His attention settled on the bulging files in front of him: a paper trail of Becky Rothka’s disappearance. Lisa’s high soprano seemed to rise out of the files; he couldn’t stop hearing her voice.
    The silver thread of a Joni Mitchell song Lisa had sung last week at a freshman recital at LaGuardia wove through his mind: standing alone on stage, drenched in spotlight, playing her guitar and singing. Lisa had mastered most of Mitchell’s songs, and for reasons Dave didn’t know she had chosen to sing “Woodstock.” He remembered Woodstock — seeing it reported on the evening news, anyway; he was just four years old at the time — but for Lisa and her generationthe passions of the sixties and seventies seemed to inspire an odd mixture of boutique recollection and yearning for meaning in a chain-store world. On stage, Lisa’s voice had sailed beyond the proscenium arch and filled the auditorium, and for the first time, Dave really got it. He got her talent, her gift; why she had to sing; why she had had to come to New York. Sitting in that packed auditorium next to Susan, Dave had felt the first stirrings of real love for Lisa. Since that night, the song had hummed through his mind. And now, inexplicably, it made him recall a moment he had long forgotten.
    Years ago when Dave lived in Manhattan, in another life, he had lain in bed with his girlfriend Claudia, in the Fifteenth Street apartment they had shared for five years, singing a Leonard Cohen song. He couldn’t remember which, something poignant about a lost love. Dave and Claudia had sung together, tripping over the words and laughing at themselves.
    Just two weeks later, he returned home from night-watch to find that she was gone.
    He did not pause to wonder if she was merely out; he knew she had left him. They had been arguing a single point for over a year: She wanted to get married; he wasn’t sure. She had become passionate on the question of how he could live with her for five years yet not want to marry her. Dave, in a classic failure, had been unable to explain.
    When she left, he was struck by how little he cared, deeply at least. He cared superficially, realizing he would have to move, since technically the apartment was hers. And he cared in that there had been a time he had felt he loved Claudia, and in some ways he would miss her. But they had never formed thatessential, unassailable bond that a couple needed to hold them together. He had come away from his life with Claudia wondering if he was incapable of such a bond.
    For the four years before he met Susan — during which time he had altered his life completely: making detective, changing assignments and even boroughs — he had dated many women but nothing lasted. One of his girlfriends told him, in parting, “You’re great, Dave” — what was her name? Mia? — “but some men aren’t built for commitment.” He had come to agree with Mia; attracting women and courting them was never a problem, but walking away was a little too easy, and always tempting.
    Then, when he found Susan — standing next to him on a work shift at the Park Slope Food Coop — she magnetized him in every way. He was bagging olives and without thinking he offered her one. A green, garlic-stuffed olive. She opened her mouth and tasted it; they both agreed it had a nice flavor, “Kind of a bite,” she had said. From the first moment, everything between them was