One Cold Night

they were looking for were two people, not one. That face Strauss saw last night in the window of Seventy-seven, thought he saw but wasn’t sure... maybe Adkins didn’t write that letter; maybe that face wrote it on Adkins’s pad.
    More facts. She wanted more hard data to get this straight. She picked up the phone to assail the FedEx voice-mail system one more time, and to her amazement got through to a real live human voice.
    “Yes, Detective Ramos, I’m sorry I missed your calls before; I’ve been working on this.” He spoke quickly in English but with a strong Indian accent.
    “Glad you’ve been busy, Mr. Song.” Yeah, right.
    “Singh. Sanjay Singh. I’ve been through the entire system. It took a while but I finally managed to contact everyone on that route this morning.”
    “Shoot.”
    “Detective Ramos, I am sorry to say there is no electronic tracking of a letter or package or anything at all going to the name or address you gave me. Nothing at all. Yes, I admit, sometimes a missive eludes our system, but, my dear lady, in this case I can attest that no one at all picked up or delivered that package because I have personally spoken to everyone who might have. Detective Ramos, I have nothing to offer you. I am sorry.”
    She almost hated to stop his train before it crashed, just to find out how fast he could talk, but it came as a relief when he put on his own brakes.
    “Thank you, Mr. Singh.”
    “Detective Ramos, please, I am happy to help.”
    She hung up the phone, plucked two paper clips from their holder, joined them, and pulled.
    They were looking for two men, not one. One was Peter Adkins, who had Lisa upstate. The other was someone else, the face, who had stayed behind and watched, made the call and hand-delivered that letter himself. What she didn’t know yet was which one was the real groom.
    Dave Strauss’s radar was working — if he had thought it was a waste of time to fly up to Gardiner, he would have said so — and her radar was working, too. It was brilliant of him to be moments from landing in Gardiner, New York. And it was brilliant of her to have stayed behind in Brooklyn. Whether or not Peter Adkins was the groom was something they’d figure out later. There was no time to be fair in how they divvied up the spoils; if they were lucky, if they could both succeed, they’d end the day with one living girl between them and a bad guy apiece.
    Her phone rang again — suddenly she was the most popular girl in the squad room — but this time it was a call from inside the case. Officer Sullivan, the only dwarf on the NYPD, or any PD as far as she knew, was reporting in from Water Street.
    “Boss, we got a situation down here. Susan Bailey-Strauss wants to get inside the building, won’t take no for an answer. How do we handle her?”
    Lupe wasn’t sure. “Hold her there; we’re on our way.”
    She shot up from her chair, letting it roll across the floor behind her as she hurried to the squad room door. Quick down the hall with a stop in the conference room to address the task force with the latest developments. Her new instructions were for Zeb Johnson to handle the situation with Susan Bailey-Strauss; for half the group to stay here and cover Dave and Bruno upstate; and the other half to go with her and deploy on foot, quietly, to prowl the waterfront. They would carry walkie-talkies, keep them turned to the lowest volume, and stay alert for anything or anyone suspicious. She didn’t know who they were looking for exactly, but her gut told her the face was there, somewhere, lurking.
    Lupe figured that Peter Adkins’s abduction of Lisa had either piqued the real groom’s interest today and brought him to the scene to get his kicks; or that Peter Adkins was the real groom and this guy was some true-crime lunatic who belonged in an asylum; or they were partners with a bigger plan.
    One thing was for sure: The case had split in two. There was what, or who, she needed to find here in Brooklyn. And there was Dave’s pursuit of Lisa, and Peter Adkins, upstate.
    Lupe walked at a fast clip along the glossy linoleumon her way to the staircase down and out of the precinct, uncapping her lipstick with one hand and speed-dialing her cell with the other. Bruno’s number was still out of range, but this time Dave’s wasn’t and he answered quickly.
    “Yo, it’s me; you still in the air?”
    “Landing,” Dave told her.
    “Good.” The lipstick went on smooth, thick and