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drunk who needed to control everyone around him in order to keep hold of himself; the top-ranking salesman in his office; the devout Christian; the neighbor with a perfect lawn. His reaction to a call about Lisa being out late could land anywhere in a range from concerned to outraged. She fingered the phone’s rubber buttons and thought about it but didn’t dial. She would wait, she decided, before she said anything to them, because probably Dave was right: Lisa would waltz in any minute now and Susan’s worry would dissolve. She would have hersister/daughter back and they would have their chance to really talk it out. Then she would prepare herself to make the same confession to Dave.
    She set the phone down on the coffee table and walked over to the open window. Leaning out, she felt the night chill on her face. Goose pimples formed on her uncovered arms. She looked toward the right, in the direction of the park, then toward the left, in the direction of Water Street. It was quiet out, and cold. Lisa was nowhere in sight.
    At the card table, she snapped three more puzzle pieces into place, increasing the length of blue. It seemed like some kind of background, but there was still no indication of what, if any, image would emerge after all the pieces had been assembled.
    She picked up her BlackBerry and thumbed another message, this time directly to Lisa’s e-mail address. When I was your age I was in love. At least I believed I was. Madly madly in love. His name was Peter and my dear sweet darling the truth is that you look like him. You look like your father. The boy-man who gave us all the gift of you. I have so much to tell you.

Chapter 4
    Wednesday, 12:10 a.m.
    Riding upward in the mirrored elevator, Dave closed his eyes and took a deep breath, feeling the exhaustion of a long day seep into him. He hoped Lisa was home by now. Susan’s call had alarmed him more than he had let on; he knew the statistics, and Lisa was a ripe age for the creeps who loved girls so much they didn’t care how badly they hurt them. A little overripe, actually, the peak age being closer to eleven. He hated thinking this way about his own family, but after a shift at the precinct it was hard not to see criminals everywhere or to think of your loved ones as potential victims. It was a bitter, skewed view of life you constantly fought and never quite overcame. He took another deep breath, and opened his eyes to the mirrored kaleidoscope of himself.
    This elevator had always made him uneasy; someone’s bad idea to make a small space feel larger by installing mirrors everywhere, instead trapped you with the nagging crone of your own self-doubts. Faced with his multitudinous reflections, he wasreminded of how his good looks were fading as he neared forty. If a mirror didn’t lie, these mirrors were a funhouse of stark physical truth. His leanness was threatening to turn his face gaunt, and his eyes were becoming permanently underscored by dark shadows. In the bathroom mirror, he had dozens of gray hairs salting his short hair; here, hundreds. Like it or not, time was on the move. Forty years old, almost. How had he gotten to this moment on the clock of his life, this tipping point between youth and middle age, energy and fatigue, idealism and resignation? Lately, he had been thinking a lot about that, looking backward at the decisions that had set him on the road to the here and now.
    Just tonight, in the slow hours of an uncharacteristically calm city — after putting away his files on Becky Rothka, which he had combed for the umpteenth time with no fresh revelations — he had finished rereading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. He had read it first in high school, then had chosen it as the subject of his senior thesis in college, and recently had decided it was time to read it again to see if he understood it differently now. Lolita, after all, was ultimately the reason he had become a cop. Though he had been born into a family of cops, college