One Cold Night

reflections inthe mirrored elevator and kept her eyes down on her feet. She descended quickly and passed through the lobby and onto the sidewalk, where a couple of policemen nodded at her as she walked by. Afternoon was simmering in the air, pulling down the sun, preparing for another night.
    She headed for the factory, thinking that if she did something, busied her hands, it might free her mind. She could do the office filing, the task both she and her assistant most disliked, and which therefore rarely got done; it would occupy and punish her at once, and that felt right. Or she could cut ribbons into foot-long sections. Or she could wipe out candy molds that had gathered dust on the top shelves in the factory. It didn’t matter what.
    At the corner of Washington Street, she turned right onto Water. A lot of people — police, reporters and sundry vultures keen on the misery of others — were clustered in front of her store and also in front of the building Dave and the police had been watching so closely all last night. Her instinct was to avoid them, to protect her privacy, but instead she marched directly into the crowd near the store.
    A reporter standing in front of the shop swerved suddenly in her direction. The man’s avidity repelled Susan, inspiring her to break into a trot, passing the shop and the factory, realizing that what she really wanted was to see what was inside that building everyone was so interested in. That she wanted to know exactly what the detectives knew came to her with clarity as she reached the front door of Seventy-seven Water Street.
    “Excuse me, lady, but where do you think you’re going?” The voice seemed to sail up from below. Shelooked down and saw a policeman, a dwarf, looking up at her.
    “Inside,” she answered him.
    Behind her, another officer emerged from the crowd. This one was tall and skinny with a pronounced Adam’s apple. “Sorry, but you can’t.”
    “Please,” she said, “I’m Susan Bailey-Strauss!”
    Sudden camera flashes blinded her, voices flew, and she twisted around to shield her face.

Chapter 22
    Wednesday, 4:57 p.m.
    Lupe Ramos sat at her desk, arranging and rearranging her pens, pencils, pads, paper clips and file folders; she flipped her Rolodex to the first A and closed the plastic cover; emptied her pencil sharpener; changed the angle of her phone.
    The Gardiner police had just reported in. Traces of Lisa were in the house, though she herself was still unaccounted for; it looked like he’d had her in one of the bedrooms, then moved her. The locals were organizing a search party to canvass the area. They’d also learned that a car parked in front of the rental house was registered to Peter Adkins, so their instincts about him had been right; fingerprints in the car had already confirmed it.
    Meanwhile Donna Klein had been a treasure trove of information. Like her husband’s size-nine foot and his taste for work boots. And better yet, that big envelope she’d brought with her, crammed with printouts from Peter’s hard drive before he moved out, along with some handwritten notes. One was a lined yellowsheet with a phone number to reach him if he wasn’t at the Water Street apartment... a number in Gardiner, New York. The phone number on that note, placed on top of Lisa’s letter, had made a perfect handwriting match, like a ghost getting sucked back into the body that had spawned it. That was the clincher for Lupe: having the page in her hand, and knowing who wrote it.
    So now they had Lisa pinpointed, and they knew who had her, and Dave Strauss and Alexei Bruno were about ready to land. Good. Thing was, Lupe wondered if her radar was failing her — if Lisa Bailey was upstate, what was this feeling nagging her about Brooklyn? Why was she sitting here, out of the action?
    And what did “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” mean? Marie Rothka had just called that one in; she said she’d tried to call Dave first but his cell was out of range. She said the apple ditty was something the groom had repeated to her a couple times during one of his phone calls to her. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. If the investigation hadn’t shifted some of its focus upstate, Lupe would have discounted it as just another misplaced memory — everyone had them and you couldn’t dwell. But apples, autumn, upstate... She tried calling Dave herself but his cell was still out of range and so was Bruno’s.
    She turned her mind back to