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where they were supposed to meet for
dinner, a little Italian place off Tremont Street, and she'd entered
the restaurant looking like a million bucks, a real knockout; but when
she saw him with the woman (who'd come up to him because he was in
uniform, they were all over the place, those cop groupies), Faye spun
around on her heels and stormed out, and he'd chased her down the
sidewalk and all the way home, she crying bitterly, her betrayed face
and she'd locked herself in the bathroom and he'd had to kick the door
in, and she'd stood there with a razor blade poised above her wrist ...
and he'd cried with her. The two of them holding each other on the
cold tiled floor, him pledging his eternal love. And only later, much
later, had she confessed that she'd only been pretending to slit her
wrists, that she had in fact sustained that pose during the time it'd
taken him to kick the door down ... Now Nalen was kissing her, his
strong arms tentacled around her as she struggled against his weight.
    "I'm still angry," she said as he rocked them off balance.
    "I'm sorry, Faye. Don't hate me, Faye."
    And finally her muscles relaxed, giving in, and he knew she would never
stop resenting him, never stop feeling trapped, and that this--his
burning hunger and her bitter resistance--was the sum total of their
lives together.

    FIVE PAST MIDNIGHT THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, NALEN
    rubbed his face hard. "Okay, people," he said, exhaustion slurring his
speech, "what've we got?"
    They were seated around the conference table--Nalen and McKissack,
Detective Sergeant Guy Fletcher, dispatcher Phillip Reingold, and
Detectives Hughie Boudreau and Irving Nussbaum. A squat black bookcase
crammed with mug shot binders leaned crookedly against the wall to
their left, and a mini-fridge used for bag lunches hummed industriously
to their right. The empty terrarium on top of the refrigerator had
once housed a live tarantula until somebody'd sprayed it with a lethal
dose of Windex; now there was nothing inside but a rubber octopus
floating on a sea of rubber bands everybody took turns shooting into
it. The carpet was a dingy, coffee-stained maroon.
    "Anybody else want a cup?" Hughie helped himself to coffee from the
machine, stirred in three heaping tablespoons of powdered nondairy
creamer and sat back down.
    "Okay." Nalen's stomach cramped at the thought of all that powdered
creamer. "What've we got, people? What, what, what?"
    "No abduction site," McKissack began. "No weapon. No eyewitnesses. No
physical evidence." He rocked back smugly in his chair and chewed on a
toothpick, since Nalen didn't allow smoking inside the station.
McKissack claimed he needed to keep his mouth moving no matter
what--pencil, chewing gum, finger. Claimed he had an oral fixation.
"Oh, and did I mention ... no suspects?"
    "Well, gee whiz ... thanks for nothing, Lieutenant," Nalen a a

    said, refusing to let his best detective's hard-bitten cynicism get
the better of him. "Now let's see what we do have." He flipped open
the case file. "We picked up some fibers on the victim's clothes.
Dark green, synthetic. Ten percent wool, sixty percent rayon, thirty
percent nylon."
    "Wow, that eliminates one percent of the population," McKis sack said
with snide glee.
    Nalen bristled to life. "What d'you want, McKissack? You want my
fucking job? Here, take my fucking hat."
    McKissack threw up his hands. "I don't want your job, Chief. They
aren't paying you enough."
    Nalen couldn't help smiling. That broke the tension.
    "The sooner we wrap things up," he said, "the sooner we can all go
home."
    "She disappeared sometime shortly after school let out on Tuesday,"
Hughie Boudreau began. Stress had painted violet circles underneath
his eyes. "The medical examiner's best guess for time of death is
somewhere between five-thirty and six-thirty P.M. No later than
six-thirty. That leaves four hours, give or take, still unaccounted
for."
    "There's our window,"