One Cold Night

were still assembling. Lupe wanted to know everything everyone had noticed, large or small. She wanted to hear all about Evelyn’s David Strauss and Donna’s Peter Adkins, if only to confirm for the record that they were one and the same man. In between interviews, she let the other detectives go back in, ask their own versions of the same questions — again. Some of the guys called it Cat and Mouse; personally, she liked Tenderize and Terrorize. You exhausted the person, then bored them with the same questions and exhausted them some more. You offered them a coffee or a soda and you didn’t bring it. Then you acted like you didn’t know they really wanted something — man, they were really thirsty now, or tired, or hungry, or they had topee — and you sat down and asked the same questions one more time. Eventually, if they were lying, a crack appeared and you stepped right in. If it didn’t, you’d bring the drink or escort them to the bathroom or both, then let them go.
    After a while she’d offered so much coffee, she herself got a craving for it. Between jackhammer sessions, she detoured into the conference room, where someone had mercifully set up a coffeepot, a stack of Styrofoam cups and some packets of sugar. An energy buzz hovered in the room, keyboards clacked, voices hummed into telephones. It wasn’t often you saw so much focus from a bunch of cops who prided themselves on who could tell the best joke or slack off the longest on a slow day.
    She prepped her coffee the way she liked it: black and all the way to the top. Sipping away a margin so she could walk with it, she let her attention fall on the web she and Strauss had drawn together on the board. Becky Rothka was written in red, center left. Lisa Bailey, in black, center right. Just above the two names, dead center, were Peter Adkins and then Dave Strauss, where the black and red lines tracing the paths of the two cases intersected. Becky’s red line sprouted up from there, ending in midair at a date in October one year ago, with the subset headers Bronx, Letter, and Phone Call shooting thin red fishing lines right into Lisa’s world. Her black line, snagged up and down with red hooks, hovered unfinished at today.
    Bronx, letter, phone call. Those were the three pieces they needed to unite the two sides of the board. Lupe had Federal Express working in-house to person-by-person track the letter; without confirmation that a FedEx worker had actually delivered it, and thatit came from where the slip said — simply, Bronx — there would be no Bronx. And until they got the fingerprints on the phone, well, there was no phone call either. Lupe wondered what would happen if those connections fell apart. She mentally erased the horizontal red lines from the map. No red lines — no Bronx, letter or phone call — no connections between the girls... except for Dave Strauss.
    She did not want to think that an MOS could have anything to do with this. But why was Strauss’s name on two addresses now connected to this case: Seventy-seven Water Street, and the rental house in Gardiner? And why, she kept wondering, had the Rothka case been the only one Strauss had failed to crack? Why was his name turning up everywhere?
    Dave Strauss, she thought. What were the chances? Johnson had met Strauss at two that morning. His wife had seen him come home around midnight. Lisa was last seen just past eleven o’clock. That gave him about an hour — for what? He said he worked to the end of his shift, so there had to be someone, somewhere, to vouch for him. Maybe it would be a useless exercise, maybe Lupe was being paranoid, but on the other hand there could be something revealing, something she was missing, in the Lisa-Peter-Susan-Dave connection.
    Lupe added it to her mental list: alibi for Strauss for that single hour. She wondered if he’d reached Gardiner yet. And why the local cops hadn’t called back with a report on that rental house. She needed to finish the interviews and get to her desk. She took a long, fast sip of the bitter coffee and started walking.

Chapter 20
    Wednesday, 3:59 p.m.
    They bumped along gravel for a long time, then shimmied to a stop. A door opened and slammed shut, swaying the car. Lisa listened to the crunch of footsteps. It would be easier if she hated instead of feared him. Dickie. Dickwad. Dickface. She had wet herself, and she felt hungry and cold, but the frozen feeling in her core was something else. It was the kind