Monday morning, October 26: Still no Kristine. Kathy and Kevin went to Baruch. Joining them was Nick Papanikolu, a darkly handsome, quiet graduate student who had lived with Kristine for three years; since breaking up two and a half years ago, they had been the closest of friends. Kristine's disappearance has since taken over Nick's life; he dropped out of school to search for her, and virtually lives at Kevin and Kathy's. They tried to get Persaud's home address from Baruch, but a clerk in the personnel office told them they'd need a subpoena. Through a chain of acquaintances, they came up with an approximate address in Bushwick.

Nick and Kevin drove out to a rowof attached redbricks with aluminum awnings, gated windows and doors, shrubs, and chain-link fences. In front of one: Indian and Guyanese flags. Its sidewalk bore a child's worn wet-cement legend: RUDY.

Nick and Kevin waited in the car. When an older man approached the house, they approached him. Rudy's uncle. He had seen Rudy Saturday morning and then not again until Sunday evening. At 5:30, a woman appeared. Rudy's mother. "We started hitting her with all these facts," Kevin recalls, "and told her we needed to question Rudy and to have him here at seven."

Nick and Kevin waited in the car. At seven, a police van pulled up. Two officers got out, guns drawn. (The NYPD refused to grant New York an interview with the two officers.) They ordered Nick and Kevin out of the car and lightly frisked them. Then a young man climbed out of the back of the police van. "He was dressed very preppy," Kevin recalls. "Cardigan sweater, white shirt, dark dress pants, Jansport backpack." It was Rudy. Apparently alerted by his mother that two men were harassing the family, he had gone to the precinct and obtained a police escort.

"Where's Kristine?" Kevin demanded.

"How should I know?" came Rudy's flippant answer, according to both men.

"You killed Kristine!" Nick insisted. Where is she?"

"He said, 'I don't know what you're talking about,' and 'Why don't you go file a missing-persons report,' " recalls Kevin.

Kevin asked Rudy what he and Kristine had done on Saturday, since "you were the last one seen with her." He said that he had dropped Kristine off two blocks from her house between 3 and 4 p.m., because she wanted to go to the health-food store, and that that was the last time he had seen her.

Kevin asked Rudy where he'd gone with Kristine. Rudy told Kevin they went shopping. Kevin asked where. Rudy said, "Some mall." Kevin and Nick kept the questions up: Which mall? Which stores? Rudy said he had stayed in the car while she shopped.

Five days later, when the news media were told of Kristine's disappearance, reporters canvassed Kristine's neighborhood, as had the police and Nick, Kathy, and Kevin -- all asking whether anyone had seen her on Saturday. A Laundromat owner said he'd seen her through his window, and a health-food-store worker thought she may have seen Kristine in the store -- "after dark," at about 7 p.m.