One Cold Night

willing to pay well, and Carla answered it.”
    “Lawton,” Ramos said. “That share a border with Texas, by any chance?”
    Marie nodded, glancing quickly at Dave.
    He remembered now how close Lawton, Oklahoma, was to Texas; right over the border, not too far from Vernon, where Susan had grown up. And he remembered how Loder Hull, Becky’s birth father, had jumped onto their radar screen when it turned out there was no death certificate for him at the Lawton City Hall. He’d flashed on their screen pretty hotly for as long as it took to determine that his death certificate had been misfiled under L instead of H. It had been an innocent mistake, but in the hour-long interim when the dead man became a real suspect, Dave’s imagination had processed dozens of scenarios. Loder Hull had become a monster in his mind, a father with hidden depths of rage against his own flesh.
    “Birth father’s death was confirmed?” Ramos asked.
    “Yes,” Dave said.
    “How old were Carla Hull’s other kids at the time Becky was born?”
    “We never met them,” Marie answered, “but I believe they were all very young. When we spoke on the phone there was always crying and shouting, you know, chaos.”
    “Any of them ever come looking for their baby sister?”
    Marie shook her head. “No.”
    “We pretty well established that no one in the Hull family had anything to do with Becky’s abduction,” Dave said. “We talked to them all. Everyone checked out.”
    “Who were your suspects at the time?” Ramos asked Strauss.
    Dave didn’t have to look at his files to recall the roller-coaster ride through the hall of mirrors those days and weeks following Becky’s disappearance; the names and faces that took on gruesome dimensions before vanishing from view; the dizzying heights when he thought he was onto something and the plunging disappointment when he realized he wasn’t.
    “We looked hard at one of Becky’s teachers who was trafficking in pornography on the Internet,” Dave said, “but he wasn’t interested in kids and he had a solid alibi. We also tried to find a guy the mailman saw lurking around the outside of Becky’s school that day. Guy was zipped up in a red sweatshirt, wearing the hood, long sleeves, long pants. We couldn’t get much on him and he wasn’t seen again. All we know about him was that he was average height, and white.”
    The detectives remaining in the conference room traded glances and nodded. Dave knew what they were thinking, because he was thinking it too: an average-looking white man, probably with blond hair under his red hood and possibly a scar beneath one eye. They were all fixing on Peter Adkins as Ramos and Bruno’s suspicious person and Dave’s groom. Maybe they were right. But what if they were wrong?
    “Then?” Ramos asked.
    “Nothing,” Dave said. “By night, we had nothing.”
    Ramos faced her table of detectives. “We got two girls born the same week in the same general area. Both adopted out. Similar physical description. White guy lurking around Becky’s school. White guy lurking around Lisa’s neighborhood. And we got the phone call this morning.”
    She paused to let her gaze jump from face to face to face, commanding full attention in the room’s sudden quiet.
    “Okay,” she said, “let’s just say the groom is Peter Adkins, Lisa’s birth father. Let’s say he’s trying to get his due as a father, or maybe he’s out for some kind of revenge since he was told his baby was aborted and he found out she wasn’t. Let’s just say he was looking for Lisa the first time but took Becky by mistake — easy, since the girls at thirteen looked a lot alike, their birth records probably trace to the same part of the country, and they went to the same school. Let’s say this guy’s not quite right in the head and he’s got Lisa now, and for whatever sick reasons of his own he plans to do to her the same he did to Becky.”
    Dave glanced at Marie, whose face had gone pale at the straightforwardness of Ramos’s analysis: two girlscaught in the same web, with Becky taken, simply, by mistake.
    Ramos walked over to the board, picked up the red marker and circled PETER ADKINS, adding a floating question mark beneath it. Then she drew a red tendril reaching to Lisa’s black name.
    Watching Ramos, with the first blossom of Becky’s and Lisa’s twining maps in red and black behind him, Dave felt an unwelcome yet familiar impulse. An image of Peter Adkins began