One Cold Night

and absolutism tyrannizing a mind or a family or a society into all manner of unwinnable battles. Lately he’d begun to think this was the very conflict at the heart of terrorism, reaping death and destruction for the love — the love — of God.
    “So you asked him to leave.”
    “More or less.”
    “Meaning?”
    “I had to wait for the right moment.” She recrossed her legs in the opposite direction, stilling the quaking foot. “I was afraid he’d explode, Detectives. I was afraid. ”
    “Guy ever hurt you?” Bruno asked in his cut-to-thechase way. Dave was beginning to appreciate the contrast between their methods: he smoothed, Bruno jolted, resizing the platelets of a settled conversation. He was starting to understand Bruno’s usefulness and wondered if his gaffes and malapropisms were more orchestrated than accidental.
    “No,” she answered. “But he threatened.”
    “So finally he left,” Dave said. “Then what?”
    She sat back in her chair, relaxing at the very thought of Peter Adkins vacating her life. “I had the locks changed immediately, I can tell you that.”
    The phone on her credenza began to ring.
    “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have a patient in half an hour and I haven’t showered.”
    At her desk she opened a small drawer and from a chaos of papers extracted a business card. The phone rang three more times before stopping, presumably answered by a service.
    “Any chance you have his old calendars or a list of his patients?” Dave asked.
    “He took all that with him.” She smiled professionally, showing them the proverbial door. “And even if he hadn’t, I couldn’t show you. Doctor– patient confidentiality.”
    “His daughter is missing, Dr. Klein.”
    She thought a moment, and nodded. “He used to back up his calendar on the computer. I can print that out for you. Can I get back to you a little later with that?”
    Dave could tell she was the type who slowed down the more she was pressured, the kind of person who didn’t like to be told what to do. People like that worked best independently, and this woman, by the look of it, was very much alone. He wondered how decisively her work had trained her to distance herself from others, and if she realized that Lisa was real and that her life was actually in danger.
    “As soon as you can,” he said, squelching the desire to insist they needed it five minutes ago, not sometime this afternoon. “Maybe you could e-mail it to me in the next few minutes?” He walked across the room, pausing at the credenza to exchange business cards. Bruno meanwhile put the tiny glass kitten on the coffee table and waited at the door. “And if you can spare any photos of him, that could be helpful, too.”
    Donna reached into a drawer and began to pluck out photographs. She rifled through them, removing the ones that included her, and handed Dave three. “They’re all yours.”
    Dave held the four-by-six prints in his hand, resisting the urge to look too closely before leaving the apartment, though he was eager to see the man Susan had loved, the man who had fathered Lisa. And he wanted to see if Peter Adkins had a scar beneath one eye. He glanced at the top photo and saw a fair-haired man sitting on the very couch he himself had just vacated, smiling, one arm stretched along the back cushions. If there was a scar, Dave didn’t see one.
    “One more question,” Dave said. “Did Peter have a scar on his face? Under one of his eyes?”
    “No,” Donna said. “But I haven’t seen him in two months. I guess he could have had some kind of injury since then.” She sounded completely disinterested;but at this point, Dave was hardly surprised at her lack of concern for her soon-to-be ex-husband.
    “Do you know where he is now?”
    “You said one more question.”
    “Two.”
    She smiled. Then she shrugged her shoulders; finished with Peter, finished with them.
    “Don’t you forward his bills somewhere?”
    “Brooklyn,” she said. “Seventy-seven Water Street, near the waterfront. I’ve heard that area’s really coming up.”

Chapter 18
    Wednesday, 2:28 p.m.
    Back in the gold sedan, with Bruno at the wheel weaving lanes across the West Side Highway, Dave called Ramos to tell her about their meeting with Donna Klein.
    “She gave us an address for him, Seventy-seven Water Street.” He said it simply, knowing she’d hear it in boldface, and was not surprised at how quickly she reacted.
    “I’m on my way there right now.”