“Nah,” Melino said. “I can think of only a few in ten years. So many damn kids in this precinct it’s hard for a parent to keep track of them. This precinct’s one of the few in New York with a Community Patrol Officers Program—beat cops. When we get a missing kid, we assign a C-POP officer to go out and find the boy—they’re usually boys. We almost always find the kid at a friend’s house and he forgot to tell his mother where he went.”

“Yeah, I thought that might be the case,” Decker said. “Reason I didn’t file earlier is because I wanted to do a door-to-door and a street search—”

“You already done those things, there’s nothing more we can do except file the report,” Melino said.

“Yeah, I know.”

“You a family friend or what?”

“A family friend.”

The cop said, “Go inside. Desk sergeant named Weiczorek will help you out.”

Decker passed through the entry cubicle and into the main precinct.

And he’d thought his station house was in need of repairs.

The room looked like an unfinished basement. There were exposed pipes and electrical wires vining down the walls, fluorescent tubing running across the ceiling. Immediately to his right was a wall lined with rusted file cabinets that probably contained old cases—all out in the open. The main reception area was about twenty by forty feet, bisected by a corridor floored with the same washed-out-green marble he’d seen in the sally port. The corridor led to a wall made up of the same mustard tiles and several closed doors—no doubt the offices of the higher-ups. In the back corner was a table that held two computers with keyboards, a typewriter, a pea-green phone, a paper cup with lipstick marks, and a stack of papers defying gravity. Above the table were more exposed wires, a junction box, a wall-mounted cabinet of keys, a small map of the precinct, and a framed RAPID MOBILIZATION PLAN hung too high to be effectively read—even for a man his size.

Flanking the corridor on the right was a long cubicle enclosed by a one-way mirror—probably the dispatch area. In front of the mirror were royal-blue plastic chairs bolted to the floor and a seven-foot locker decorated with a poster of a group of police officers, the caption saying that New York was looking for “THE FINEST.” On the left side of the walkway was the reception desk, fronted by a four-foot-high wooden barrier that spanned the length of the room. The front desk was filled by a computer, a log-in sheet, and loose papers. Behind the desk was a cork bulletin board covered with memos, business cards, wanted posters, and two Polaroids—a snapshot of a missing old man and a picture of a pit bull. Under the dog someone had written, “He goes for the nuts.”