One Cold Night

October. In the most basic way, his fingerprints and any DNA traces would make the connection between the two crimes and definitively identify him. But there was more to understand and more to do; the world would not be safe until they caught him.
    “Small,” the groom had said in his call to Marie that morning, “but not as good.”
    How had Theo Childress known that Lisa was a spirited girl? How had he known anything about her other than the bare-bones facts in that one article nearly a year ago and the news bulletins today? How, Dave wondered, had the groom known enough about Lisa to torment both Marie and Dave? And how did Peter Adkins fit into any of this?
    Because Theo Childress and Peter Adkins had known each other, Dave thought in a flash of understanding. They had researched, discussed and planned this together.
    Dave lowered Lisa to the ground, where he could cradle her better on his lap, and wondered how she had survived this ordeal. Had her lack of goodness been her strength? Not that she wasn’t good — she was wonderful — but she wasn’t anyone’s perfect little girl. Tears pooled in Dave’s eyes as he felt her skin against his own and smelled in her hair the scent he had recognized back at the Stutley house.
    Lisa’s breath slowed. Dave couldn’t see her face but he kept still so he wouldn’t wake her if she had fallen asleep. His eyes now wandered the apple-strewn clearing.
    A hole had been freshly dug in the ground between two trees, with a small mountain of dark brown earth piled next to it. A shovel poked out of the mound. Nextto it, on the other side of the dirt pile, was what appeared to be a filled-in and grown-over grave. By the confused expression on John Childress’s face, it looked as if he were seeing this graveyard for the first time.
    Dave had a feeling he had finally found Becky Rothka. He also realized he could be wrong; the grave would have to be opened and its contents analyzed. It was almost comforting to think of it in scientific terms. But then he recalled Marie Rothka’s face just that morning, lined with a year’s worth of anguish, and any small comfort shattered. He thought of the groom whispering into Marie Rothka’s telephone ear, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” as if she might have divined something from that, and the memory rising in Marie’s mind just in time to save Lisa, in a cruel twist that would also deny her any more hope of Becky’s return.
    There was a rustle in the trees, and Bruno, Andrews and some of the searchers rushed into the clearing. They stopped, taking in the scene. After some confusion, Bruno and Andrews helped Braithwaite lift Adkins, handcuffed, off the ground, forcing him to his feet so he could walk himself out of the orchard. Dave knew that Adkins would face federal kidnapping charges and possibly also accessory to murder, depending on how far back his association with Theo Childress went.
    As Adkins was walked past, Dave said, “Wait a minute.”
    Bruno and Andrews, with Adkins between them, stopped. Bruno’s forehead gleamed with sweat and he was breathing heavily. His large hand held Adkins’s arm in a vise grip that looked profoundly satisfying to Dave.
    Dave looked up into the face of the first man Susan had loved; the man who had fathered Lisa; the man who had sought to destroy their family.
    “Why?” Dave asked him.
    “I believe in redemption,” Adkins said with such earnest confidence Dave pitied him. “I have to. Otherwise I’d go...”
    He didn’t finish but Dave knew the rest: crazy.
    Dave watched Adkins being led from the clearing. He was not a large man, and whatever charisma had once drawn Susan to him was gone. All he had left was that inner stalk of confidence, that hope of redemption. He looked meek, Dave thought, insubstantial and pathetic.
    As if he could read Dave’s mind, Adkins turned around to deliver a final, desperate blow:
    “Don’t think this day is over.”
    Dave instantly knew what he meant. It fit like a puzzle piece into Lupe Ramos’s hunch about her suspicious character from Monday and the face floating in the window last night. He had been real. He had been watching from the apartment at Seventy-seven, where he later wrote the letter on Adkins’s pad. He had escaped over the connected rooftops and somehow gotten into the Café Luxembourg to steal their phone in a flourish of misdirection, then put on his FedEx cap and entered Dave’s building — and stayed there.