One Cold Night

waving them off with a, “Later, pals,” and moving along the street to Officer Zeb Johnson. He was standing on the sidewalk in front of Seventy-seven Water Street, perfectly still. Coulda been asleep on his feet, but she doubted it. She took him for about twenty-one, a kid. Liked him. He was handsome, too, but she wouldn’t go there; she had a hands-off policy at work.
    “What you got?” she asked when she was close enough not to shout.
    “No one’s gone in or out. Where’s that warrant?”
    “Bureaucracy, baby.”
    “So you don’t think she’s in there?”
    “Strauss doesn’t. He knows the perp better than anyone, without knowing him, if you know what I mean.”
    Johnson’s smile was television white.
    “I’m pushing for the warrant,” Lupe said, “but if you get a chance to go inside on the quiet, do it, and call me.” She winked.
    The smile was gone and he nodded. “You got it, boss.”
    She said good-bye-for-now and continued her prowl along Water Street. She had a strong gut feeling about this place, that there was something here for herto discover, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Not yet. So she’d keep prowling, keep looking. Up ahead, cobblestones gave way to asphalt, curving past the River Café with its strings of white lights and waiting limousines. She bought herself a chocolate ice-cream cone from the homemade place on the wharf, and licked it as she pawed her way to the end of the pier that faced lower Manhattan. In the summer, on a weekend, she’d brought her mother and Orlando here for ice cream. They’d watched as, one by one, nine Asian brides arrived like butterflies with their wedding parties to be photographed against the city.

Chapter 17
    Wednesday, 1:40 p.m.
    Dave found Bruno hunched at his desk, thick fingers flying across his computer keyboard. His hair had gotten greasy, and Dave now understood why the driving cap never left his head: The job’s hours routinely inflated without notice, like today, and without his morning shampoo Bruno’s halo of hair would be swimming in oil by night — the hat was his style statement as well as his policy against a bad-hair day. He had also developed a body odor. Dave had always loathed bullies and felt sorry for the people on whom they preyed, and big, smelly, lumbering Alexei Bruno, in his head-to-toe black leather, suddenly became that sad little boy in the playground trying hard not to crumble in front of the other kids. His rapidly deteriorating physical state quickly took Dave through reactions of pity and sympathy to, almost, fondness.
    “I got nothing yet from the DMV or the IRS,” Bruno said, “but here’s what I found so far on my own.” He swiveled to hand Dave a piece of paper on which seventeen phone numbers and five addresseswere scrawled. “Go for it to town. I’m in the chats and the blogs with the crazies.”
    Dave looked at the sheet of paper Bruno had handed him. In large, flowery handwriting, he had listed information for any and all Peter Adkinses ranging across the United States. Instead of spending hours chatting with all the Peter Adkinses in the country, Dave decided to see what the hard-core techies could do with Bruno’s list.
    Dave sat at Ramos’s desk and picked up her regulation cream-colored phone. He knew Joe Rinaldi’s number by heart and dialed it even though Rinaldi’s shift at CIS would have ended by now. Whoever picked up the phone would know Dave, so long as he wasn’t new.
    It was Patty Orenstein. “Dave Strauss!” she said. “I saw your name on last night’s log. Rothka’s active again?”
    “Unfortunately.”
    “Shoot.”
    He read all the numbers and addresses Bruno had collected off the Internet. “We’re looking for a Peter Adkins originally from Vernon, Texas, and who may have ended up in New York. Can you draw me a short line between a phone number and an address, as local as possible and as current as possible? Then I’ll take it from there.”
    “Reach you at the usual?” she asked.
    “My cell.”
    “Gotcha.”
    Patty was one of the fastest techs in the department; she could retrieve a wide range of information from landlines and digital sources, and had never made him wait more than ten minutes for an answer when he asked for it stat.
    Dave rested his elbows on Lupe Ramos’s neat desk and thought about Peter Adkins. It seemed he had loved Susan, before hating her, with the volatile passions of adolescence. Everyone went through that, and most