Zero Hour

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s hear the rest.”

“Detective, no disrespect, but I need to get back to the bank—”

“Once more and you’ll be on your way,” Ruiz said, cutting off his objection with a firm look.

DeSanto shook his head with resignation, sighed heavily.

“Around two o’clock or so, after Mary’s third message, I decide to call Corinna’s, ask for Pat, pass on the information that the wife’s upset and he’d better get in touch,” he said. “What I’m guessing — this is when I call — is that he got caught up in some heavy action over there made him forget all about the wife for a while, you know how it goes.”

Actually, Ruiz didn’t. Not firsthand. Never in a million years, firsthand.

“And then what?” he said.

“Then the phone rings again practically while I’m reaching for it. I figure this’ll be Mary again, but instead it’s Corinna, who’s also half out of her skull with worry.”

“Looking for Pat?” Ruiz said.

“Yeah.” DeSanto’s voice had begun to tremble a little. “Said he’d left her place to meet somebody on business—”

“This is around ten o’clock.”

“He got the Jag out of the garage around ten-ish, right,” DeSanto said. “Told her he’d see her in an hour, hour-and-a-half, but never came back.”

“She didn’t mention who the somebody he’d gone to meet might be?”

“No.”

“Didn’t mention where they were supposed to be hooking up?”

“No.”

“Or what kind of business he could have had at that hour? In the middle of an ice storm?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t question her about it.”

“No, I didn’t,” DeSanto said. He shrugged. “It was one of those situations I explained to you.”

“When you felt you weren’t supposed to ask.”

DeSanto nodded.

“The next few days I’m on Corinna’s case like you wouldn’t believe,” he said. “Phoning her, arguing she needs to tell the cops whatever she knows. But she insists Pat would be against it. Says it’d ruin his marriage, bring everything about the two of them out into the open.”

And maybe bring out whatever it was he’d been doing to jump about five income brackets a year as a glorified parts salesman, Ruiz thought.

“So it goes back and forth between you,” he said.

“Without her budging an inch,” DeSanto said. “Corinna’s all crazed. Goes ballistic on me, saying I don’t know what it’s like to be in her shoes, stuff like that. Meanwhile, she tells me she’s checked some parking-violations page online, found out the Jag’s been towed to one of those police lots on the West Side. Which to me really proves something bad’s happened. Why in the world would Pat abandon it otherwise?”

“But you still held out on contacting the police yourself.”

DeSanto expelled another long sigh.

“It was a mistake,” he said. “Looking back now, if I’d do anything different, it’d be to call you people right away. But if Pat’s marriage blew up, I didn’t want the bomb that fell from the sky to have my name on its nose cone. I made a promise to him… I mean, years ago. Swore I’d keep his thing with Corinna secret no matter what. And stupid as it sounds, I felt it was on her to decide what to say about it. How much to say.” He shook his head. “When it finally got to where I had enough of waiting for her to get off the fence, and was ready to make the call, Corinna told me she’d been in touch with somebody who could help.”

Ruiz looked at him. This was one of the details that had piqued his interest during DeSanto’s first rendering of his story. “You’re positive that’s all she told you.”

“Yeah.”

“No mention of who that somebody was.”

“None.”

“But you didn’t get the impression it was the authorities.”

“That wasn’t the feeling that came across to me over the phone, no.”

“What sort of feeling did come across?”

DeSanto shook his head, spreading his hands a little.

“I can’t explain it,” he said. “Just that it wasn’t the police, you know.”

Ruiz let his answer stand right there, seeing no point in pressing any further. But he wondered if the somebody in question could have been the same person Sullivan had gone to meet that night he vanished, or if there were at least two mysterious somebodies in the picture so far.

He flipped a page in his pad, quickly read over his few remaining lines of scribbled notes, decided he was almost finished with DeSanto.

“Your final phone conversation with Corinna was yesterday?” he asked.

DeSanto nodded.

“If you want to refer to it as a conversation,” he said. “It was more like I talked, she yelled in my ear, then hung up on me.”

“And you didn’t hear from her after that.”

“No.” DeSanto said. “I tried to call back later on, got her machine. Would’ve tried again today… but then I saw that notice in this morning’s paper.”

“The police blotter.”

DeSanto nodded.

“I’m telling you, Detective, I almost choked on my breakfast,” he said. “Thought I’d never get the air back in my lungs.”

Silence. Ruiz gave himself a minute to digest it all. A man and woman having an adulterous affair disappear, you might assume they’d gone off into the rosy sunset hand-in-hand — except for their four-year-old daughter being left behind at the day care center. Plus, he himself had been in Corinna Banks’s apartment for a walkaround, and there had been every indication she’d only meant to step out for a few minutes. Freezer food thawing in the sink. Clothes in her mini washer/dryer. The television on, and the cable guide’s scheduler set for two different programs airing later on that night. So what to make of things?

Ruiz knew he had to act fast tracking down these two people — the longer you waited, the colder any trail they’d left would become. His first steps would be to run what DeSanto had told him by his squad commander, establish a liaison with the Nassau County detectives who were presumably on the Sullivan case… and have that Jaguar pulled out of DOT impound for inspection right away. He also wanted the okay to go wide with this thing. Call a news conference, issue regular press releases, get images of Sullivan and Banks onto the airwaves. He would personally distribute fliers and handbills all over town… whatever could be done to get the public’s help in conducting the investigation. With two missing persons here, and no clues to either one’s whereabouts, you wanted to open up as many sources of information as possible.

Ruiz sat thoughtfully for another minute, wondering if there was anything more to be gotten out of DeSanto while he still had the guy here in front of him. Then he decided he might as well recheck DeSanto’s contact information — his address, home and work phone numbers, and so forth — and let him head back to the office. They were done for the time being… aside from that one little question he’d been meaning to ask.

“Something I’m curious about, Mr. DeSanto,” Ruiz said. “You say you put off calling us because you felt obliged to keep your buddy’s secrets… went in circles with Corinna about that for a whole week… so how come you contacted me directly instead of using the anonymous tip line? That way you could have communicated everything you know, and still not have your name on that marriage bomb you mentioned.”

DeSanto didn’t answer for a moment. Then he tugged and smoothed his suit jacket again and sighed.

“When I read about Corinna, her disappearing so soon after Pat…” He looked at Ruiz, swallowed hard. “Me