April was very well aware of all the time factors. A life-and-death situation was bad enough without the press lowering their odds of saving the woman.
“No, I didn’t say I wasn’t looking for her, Dr. Frank.” April got up and threw the garbage from his lunch into an overflowing wastebasket in the corner. “But there’s no point in going out in the field until I have my ducks in a row.”
“What ducks?” Jason demanded. “Every second counts if we want to find her alive.”
“I know that. There are a lot of us working on this. We’re waiting for some information before we make a move.”
“Jesus, what information?”
“I’m waiting for a voice confirmation on the nine-one-one call from Queens. Remember, you listened to it, but weren’t able to make that confirmation for me?” The tape and the tape machine were still on the table.
“What’s taking so long?” Dr. Frank looked at his watch.
April shook her head. She didn’t know why it was taking so long. “Why don’t you go home for a while? I’ll call you as soon as I know.”
“I can’t go home,” he said miserably.
“Well, you can stay here, but when I go out, you can’t come with me. Look, if I learn something, I’ll call you.”
“I want to be there when you find her.”
It wasn’t so easy. It didn’t work like that. April stared at him. They might find Emma Chapman soon. They might not find her for days. By then the press would be involved. Dr. Frank would be on TV. The precinct chief would be making statements. Emma Chapman would probably be dead, and there’d be a media free-for-all. She didn’t want to say any of that.
“Look,” she said, “you’ve done a lot. You broke the case. Don’t tell anybody I said it, but it’s the truth. Now you have to let me do my job.”
“Please, April. She needs me.” Jason was pleading with her. “I have to be there.”
So, now they were friends. He was calling her by her first name. She shook her head. “I have no choice. This isn’t my call. You can’t come in the car with me. It could endanger you. It could endanger me or your wife. You have to go home. As soon as I have something, I’ll call you. As soon as we locate her, you’ll be there. I promise.”
“No. That isn’t good enough.”
“Dr. Frank, I understand how you feel. Believe me, I understand. You’re a professional in your field, and you don’t think anybody else knows how to do anything. But I’m a professional in my field. I’ve been well trained to do what I do.”
“But this is different—”
“Dr. Frank, would you send a civilian out on a battle-field?”
“This is different.” He was still protesting.
“Look, here you’re an untrained civilian. Do you want to get in the way of the investigation and waste time?”
“No, but—”
“Then go home and take a shower. Call me in an hour, okay?”
“Do I smell that bad?”
April didn’t smile. “You look like you’d feel a lot better, Doctor, if you stood under the shower for a while.”
“Twenty minutes,” he said, looking at his watch again.
April went back upstairs. Everybody was out in the field. The squad room was nearly empty, and Sanchez wasn’t back. She beeped him. He called in a few minutes later.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“I’m not exactly sure. Either there are other priorities ahead of us, or the machine that does voice matches is down, or the person who runs the machine left early. I could try another lab,” he suggested. “Too bad she didn’t say a few more words. Then we’d be able to tell it was Chapman’s voice calling from Queens and wouldn’t have to be going through all this. Any luck with the husband?”
“About the voice match? I played it for him five times.”
“What did he say?”
“The only recognizable word on the tape is ‘help.’ He said the woman sounded drugged. He wasn’t sure it was his wife. He got really upset because he couldn’t be sure.”
“Should I try another lab?”
“Look, the husband’s panicked about time, and so am I. He seems sure the guy isn’t going to keep her around for long. He thinks if he hasn’t killed her already, he’ll do it soon. I’m going to go out to Queens with the pictures.”
“You’re not going to wait for confirmation on the nine-one-one?”
“I can’t sit here waiting.… Anyway, I think it’s Queens,” April said.
“Any particular reason?”
April thought for a second. She trusted the shrink. That was the reason. “It fits the profile,” she said finally.
“Okay, I’ll leave now and meet you. Where are you going?”
She told him, picked up her bag and the stack of photos, and went to tell Joyce what she and Sanchez were doing.
Joyce gave her a sour look. “Okay, but keep it quiet. You heard what the chief said about leaking the story.”
Actually April hadn’t heard what he said. Sergeant Joyce reported what he said. The chief hadn’t spoken to April in the nine months she had been there, and probably had no idea who she was. But all the same April knew what he’d have to say to her now. Detective Woo and Sergeant Sanchez were on their way out to Queens, fine. He wouldn’t limit their investigation to the neighborhood. But if the missing woman turned up in Queens, it better be those detectives from the Two-O in Manhattan who located her. And they better do it without alerting the whole world.
“You want me to call in?” April asked.
Joyce looked at April as if she were some kind of moron.
“Yes, call in. Just be cryptic. You know what cryptic means?”
A flush of outrage at the insult spread across April’s face as she nodded that she knew what the word meant. Sure, her supervisor had put a lot of other people on April Woo’s case without reassigning it away from her. But that wouldn’t stop April from hating Joyce anyway.
66
“Hey, April Woo. What the hell are you doing out here?”
April stared in surprise at the large red-faced desk sergeant. She had just stepped into the Astoria precinct near where she lived and was startled to hear her name. She didn’t think she knew anyone here.
“I don’t believe this. We go to school together, through the Academy together, and you don’t remember me,” the sergeant said, throwing up his hands. “I’m really hurt.”
She struggled for a second, trying to fit the familiar voice into the chubby form in front of her. The guy was fat. Nobody in the Academy was fat. Nobody she ever knew was that fat.
“Come on, April, it’s—”
“Oh, my God, it’s Tony.” She moved forward to shake his hand. “God, Tony, you’ve put on a few pounds.”
“Yeah,” he said sheepishly. “It happens.”
“What are you doing sitting at a desk in Queens? Last time I saw you you were on foot patrol in Little Italy.”
“Yeah, you got out of that faster than I did. Weren’t you in a car in Brooklyn?”
“Oh, God, has it been that long? I was a detective in the Fifth for four and a half years after that,” she said proudly.
“The old neighborhood. Hey, that’s great. I’ve been here for three years.” He shrugged. “Can’t complain.”
“Better not,” she said with a smile. “I live around here.”
“No kidding? You never stop in. Where are you working now?”
April made a face. “Upper West Side, the Two-O.”
He whistled. “Manhattan. You have all the luck.”
April ducked her head. She had known he would say that. There were over thirty-five thousand cops in NYPD. Once people got posted in the hinterlands, it was like they were filed away in a drawer and forgotten. It was real hard to get into Manhattan after a few years in Queens or the Bronx. Only way was to be in some special unit. April spent a second of spiteful satisfaction thinking of Jimmy Wong, not ever likely to come out of Night Watch in Brooklyn. H
a. She was going to be sergeant before him. Make him lose face twice. Double stupid Jimmy Wong.
This was amazing. She had been standing there talking to Tony for almost three full minutes without a single interruption. Boy, this place was really quiet. She’d probably shoot herself if she had to work out here. She had left the car double-parked outside. There was hardly any traffic, and nothing much going on outside the precinct on the street. Really quiet.
The building was more like the 5th in appearance than the Two-O. The Two-O was big, a blue brick building that looked like a school. This was made of sandstone that was dark with age. It was low and squat, old and shabby.
“So, if you didn’t know I was here, to what do we owe the honor of your visit?” Tony said, attempting gallantry.
April had a quick vision of the captured noblewoman in the cave and shook her head. “Have you had a complaint last night, or maybe today? A woman, thirty-three, white, name of Emma Chapman?”
He shook his head. “What about her?”
“She disappeared from the street last night in Manhattan.”
“What makes you think she’s out here?” Tony looked unimpressed.
“It’s a long story. There was an incomplete nine-one-one from Queens last night. Might have been her. There are a few other indications.”
“Look, April, you better go upstairs. There’s a shift change in a few minutes. I’ll ask around when the guys come in, see if anybody knows anything.”
April pulled the sheets with the photos of Emma Chapman and Troland Grebs out of her bag and handed some over. The face of Emma Chapman jumped out at her again. The high cheekbones, the generous mouth, Caucasian eyes, blue as the sky on a sunny day. The colors of the woman that didn’t show in the black-and-white repro were summer colors. She had white skin and hair the color of sand, pale sand, red lips. April wore red lipstick, too, sometimes; but her colors were winter. She had black hair and black eyes tucked deep in Mongolian folds, brown skin. The kind of beauty Emma Chapman had was not just in the eye of the beholder. She was beautiful to anybody who looked at her. In the picture Emma had a wedding ring on her finger and a gold chain around her neck. April had no good jewelry except some pearl earrings, and a jade ring for good luck. It wasn’t a very good piece of jade. It was too dark a green, and it didn’t give much luck.
“These are the people we’re looking for,” she told Tony.
“Who’s the guy?”
“He’s the suspect in her abduction.”
She turned and headed up the stairs to the detectives’ room. They were always on the second floor and looked pretty much the same. A lot of desks, filing cabinets, a questioning room with a big table where the detectives sometimes had lunch. The obligatory lockers in the back. The only difference was this one had a wet patch in the ceiling from which a steady drip was falling into a half-filled pail on the floor. The room was empty. As April studied the drip in the bucket, a voice came out of nowhere.
“If they don’t come and fix that soon, the whole ceiling will come down on us. I hope it happens after eleven. I’m Detective Bergman. What can I do for you?”
April took two steps further into the room before she realized that Bergman’s desk was hidden behind a bank of filing cabinets. Very clever. He could see her, but she couldn’t see him. She crossed the room toward the voice.
“Detective April Woo, from the Two-O,” she said, showing her ID. She tried not to be startled when she finally got a look at Bergman. He was a burly man with intense dark eyes that seemed to jump right out of his briar patch of a beard.
“We need some help with a search,” she added.
“Who you looking for, Detective?”
April pulled out her copies of the two tapes and the photo sheets and settled into the hard metal chair by his desk.
“You have a tape machine?” she asked.
Bergman with all the hair on his face nodded curiously. Yeah, he had a tape machine. It was just after four. April hoped Sanchez would hurry up and get over the bridge before the traffic got worse.
67
Claudia Bartello looked up in surprise at her tenant in the leather jacket, the jeans, and the motorcycle boots.
“I thought you weren’t dressed,” she said accusingly, looking sharply around the room.
Troland glared at her. He couldn’t believe it. Her head seemed to come out of her neck at a funny angle that he hadn’t noticed before. There was something wrong with her. Maybe that was why she stood inside the door the whole time that first day when he came and didn’t even ask him in.
Now she looked like a joke to him. She looked like some kind of enraged comic book crone with a lumpy body, swollen ankles, and a mouth that seemed to be shaking a stick at him.
“Where is she?” she demanded, turning toward the closed bedroom door. “I want to see her.”
What should he do? Troland didn’t feel like moving his mouth to talk to her. She was an ugly thing that was upsetting him. He had work to do, a whole lot of work, and he hadn’t slept the night before. He could feel the muscles cramping in his neck and hands and shoulders. He was so deeply into it he hadn’t felt any fatigue until now.
He wanted to punch her in the mouth for interrupting him. His face was impassive, but his hand closed tightly around the lighter in his pocket.
“Why don’t you answer me? You never answer me.”
Suddenly the old lady launched into a full-blown tirade with a whole list of complaints that made no sense. She was screaming and carrying on like the crazy woman who had upset him so much in the subway. He had walked out of the car, and she had followed him, hitching up her filthy skirt and urinating between cars as he tried to get away.
“I want you out of here. I want you out.” The crone jabbed her finger at his chest. “I won’t have dirty business in my house. I told you that before. You don’t listen. You never listened.”
The finger kept jabbing at him. He backed a few inches away from it, trying to decide what to do. He couldn’t believe this. She was hardly four and a half feet tall and didn’t seem to get that it wasn’t a good idea to scream at him. He couldn’t hear when somebody started screaming at him. The pressure to do something about it was building up.
His gaze shifted uneasily to the bedroom. He’d left all his stuff there. He didn’t want to leave the witch alone in there with his stuff too long. She was tricky. Sometimes she seemed to be fainting and she really wasn’t. She just went somewhere else for a while and wouldn’t talk to him or listen or groan or anything. He didn’t like that.
He had a feeling she got some kind of power when she passed out. Like she was charging up from some outside evil source he didn’t know about. It was clear to him now that coming to her here was an even more important thing than he had thought. She was more than a fallen angel who had betrayed him. She was actually a witch he had been sent to burn. He couldn’t leave her for a second. The last time he left her she got the ropes untied. No one he ever tied up got out before, which more than proved she was a witch. He had to get back to her right away.
He was trying to figure it out, how he was going to get it all done. And the old woman was still shrieking at him, distracting him from what was important.
“Get your stuff and get out now,” she was screaming.
“Shhh,” he said, opening his mouth for the first time.
There was just no way he was ready to get out. He had stenciled the whole body, thighs, crotch, breasts, everything. But all he’d actually tattooed so far was the area around the navel.
It was coming out pretty good, if you looked beyond the puffiness and irritation of the skin. In some places it had blown up pretty bad. It occurred to him that she might be allergic to the ink, even though he had gotten the best kind, the one with the brightest colors. But he wasn’t going to let the possibility of an allergic reaction worry him. What difference did it make?
Well, the difference was that here he had come all this way to do something special on this par
ticular body, and she turned out to be some kind of witch that was trying to fuck it up. Well, she wanted to puff up, that was fine. He’d burn her up. He just had to get her decorated first.
She was married to a doctor, but Troland was the Doctor of Death. Troland had decided to incorporate the doctor’s staff down the middle of her body with the twisted snakes and the flames around it. Except that he’d leave a space on her chest for the brand. Then the Harley-Davidson wheels and the eagles’ wings would come out of the snakes’ shoulders and spill out her sides while the serpents’ teeth devoured her nipples. He had only gotten that far. He hadn’t decided yet what to put on her neck and cheeks. And now this bitch was telling him he had to get out. No way he was going to get out.
“Don’t tell me to shhh,” she cried. “It’s my house. I’ll say what I want.”
It became clear that the crone wasn’t going away. She took two steps toward the bedroom. “I’m going to see what kind of dirty stuff you’re doing in there—”
The pressure had built up so much he wasn’t thinking any more when he grabbed her. He just wanted it to stop. At first he took hold of her and shook her as if she were a sack of laundry. But she wasn’t quiet. Her bones made cracking sounds like they were all breaking at once, and she squawked with surprise.
“Shut up!” Even now she was infuriating.
His hands went around her scraggy throat. The skin hung down from her chin, crepey and soft. He almost gagged with disgust. Now she was off balance, hanging by his hands, heavy and inert. Not so hard to kill, but hard to handle.
The package continued making gurgling noises while he wrung her neck, trying to get it to stop. He flung her away from him when her bladder emptied, wetting his boots.
Burning Time Page 31
