Burning Time awm-1

by Leslie Glass

  “About two weeks ago, did you have a young woman staying with you?” Raymond asked. The iced tea was cold and strong and very sweet.

  Roberta nodded. “Debby,” she said. “This is about Debby, isn’t it? Where is she? What happened to her?”

  “Debby?” Raymond said.

  “Shh, Bobbie. Let him ask the questions.”

  Raymond took out the picture. “We’re looking for this girl. Her name is Ellen Roane.”

  Bobbie and Gena took the photo of Ellen Roane in shorts with a tennis racket in her hand, and a big happy smile on her face. The two women held it together, their heads almost touching as they bent over it. The recognition was immediate, but they continued holding the photo as if they didn’t want to let it go.

  “Debby,” Bobbie confirmed.

  “Such a nice girl,” Gena Howard said, still studying the picture. “She wanted a room where she could see the water. We put her on the third floor. She was just crazy about the ocean.… You know, I was really worried when she took off without her things.… But sometimes they do that when they don’t want to pay—”

  “You thought she left to avoid paying the bill?” Raymond asked incredulously.

  Gena looked at Bobbie, then shook her head. “We didn’t want to think that of her. And she had expensive things, more than the room was worth. It didn’t seem likely.”

  “We were afraid something happened to her,” Bobbie said softly. “But …”

  “Don’t you read the newspapers?” Raymond interrupted.

  Gena put her hand protectively on Bobbie’s shoulder and shook her head again. Bobbie kept her eyes on them, clearly frightened.

  “It’s always such bad news,” Bobbie explained.

  “We’ve got a lot of things to do to keep this place going,” Gena added defensively. “We have ten rooms, and it’s just us. We don’t really bother with the news.” She changed the subject. “We did keep her stuff in case she decided to come back. Like I said, it’s good stuff, worth more than the room. We hoped she’d come back.”

  “What happened to her?” Bobbie’s face was very pale.

  Raymond told her as gently as he could. “Somebody took her out into the desert and left her there.”

  “Oh.” She put her hand to her mouth.

  Jesse sat there drinking his iced tea. His expression hadn’t changed since they walked in. Raymond glanced at Jesse and wondered if he’d ever get to be that cool.

  “She was a pretty girl,” Gena said, still studying the photo. “Real pretty.”

  Raymond nodded. “Why don’t you tell us about her,” he suggested.

  “What do you want to know?” Gena finally relinquished the picture. Raymond took it back and reached for his notebook.

  It took some time to hear everything the two women had to say. They had never thought Debby was her real name, Bobbie said. She didn’t always answer to it. She kept pretty much to herself. Yes, they could see her on the beach from here, and they did see her, Gena supplied. But when they were looking, she was always alone.

  Raymond handed over the two old photos of Troland Grebs. Gena laid them down side by side and studied them doubtfully for a long time.

  “Those were taken a long time ago,” Raymond said helpfully. “He’s a lot older now.”

  “I don’t know,” Gena said.

  Bobbie lifted a shoulder diffidently. “Does he ride a motorcycle? There’s a guy hangs out at the beach that looks kinda like this. Same build, same blond hair.”

  “Oh?” Jesse said. It was the first time he had spoken. His glass of iced tea was empty now, except for the ice, and he was smearing the circles of moisture the glass left on the table with his finger. “Where do you see him?”

  “Around the beach. He hangs out,”

  “Are you sure he’s the one?” Gena asked. “This guy’s so young.”

  “Look, same mouth,” Bobbie insisted.

  The two women thought the guy who looked like this lived somewhere around here because he liked to come to the beach in the evening and watch the sun go down. He had a motorcycle. He’d probably be out there tonight.

  The deputies waited around until nine that night, but no one like Grebs showed up. They questioned some regulars who hung around the beach. A few of them thought the boy in the photo was someone they knew as Willy. One guy, an aging surfer who didn’t put on a shirt even though the temperature had dropped to the fifties, said he saw a girl who looked like Ellen get on Willy’s Harley-Davidson and drive off. He wasn’t sure when, thought maybe it was two weeks or so ago. As far as he knew, Willy hadn’t been around since.

  After he got this information from Raymond and Jesse, Newt came down out of the hills himself to try to establish Troland’s whereabouts. Grebs wasn’t at his apartment. The manager of the building said he hadn’t seen him in days. His office said Grebs was on vacation.

  61

  “Nine-one-one Emergency, can I help you?”

  “Yes, this is Detective Woo up in the Two-O,” April said. “I’d like you to check and see if you got a call last night from a woman, name of Emma Chapman.”

  “I’d need an official request, Detective—”

  “Woo,” April said. “Okay. Who shall I send it to?”

  Fifteen minutes later, April faxed a request for information downtown to Headquarters, where the 911 calls from all five boroughs came in, were recorded, and were dealt with.

  An hour later she tried again. “I’m trying to locate a call from a female, name of Emma Chapman.”

  “Okay, Detective. I can check that now. Would that be Manhattan?”

  “We don’t have a confirmation on that. We’re trying to locate her.”

  “You want me to run them all?”

  “Yes,” April said.

  “Any particular time?”

  “Yes, we’d like it right now.”

  “I mean any particular time last night?”

  “Oh.” April thought for a minute.

  “Where do you want us to start, Detective?” The operator sounded impatient.

  April didn’t let it bother her. Emma had called her husband at just before midnight. Would she call her husband first, or the police first?

  “Start at eleven-thirty,” April said, just to be safe.

  “All five?”

  “Yes.”

  “Manhattan, too?”

  “I want them all,” April said. How many times did she have to say it? Yes, she wanted five, all five boroughs, from eleven-thirty on. She sat back in her swivel chair.

  “It’s going to take some time.”

  “Why?” April asked.

  “You want last night. That isn’t even twenty-four hours ago.”

  So? What did that mean? Didn’t they have some kind of printout of who called on what complaint? April tried to imagine what it looked like down there at One Police Plaza where all 911 calls in the city came in. She’d certainly been sent out on enough calls to know they were dispatched through the closest precinct.

  But the calls were organized by borough. Did they have one huge room in the basement of Headquarters with dozens of operators answering the phones? Or did they have a different unit for each borough? She had never been there. She had no idea what the setup was. Probably a different unit for each borough, she guessed.

  “How long will it take?” she asked, careful not to sound impatient herself.

  “A while. There’s no one to do it right now.”

  April looked at her watch. Maybe she should go down there and do it herself. Then she looked up. She saw Sergeant Joyce in a new green-and-black plaid suit that was ugly in the extreme, talking rapidly to Bell, Davis, and Aspiranti. Even from here, she knew they were discussing the case.

  Bell had located the afternoon doorman of the building and gone to talk with him. The doorman was able to set the time of Chapman’s disappearance at just about six P.M. He had watched the actress walk to the end of the block. She crossed the street and he didn’t see her again after
that. Now they had a description of the clothes she was wearing: jeans and a gray sweatshirt. She sure wasn’t going out to dinner dressed like that.

  For a second, Joyce turned and looked in her direction. April didn’t like the look at all. “I’d like to talk to your supervisor,” April said, to irritate the voice on the phone.

  She always hated it when people did that to her.

  “Certainly. What was your name again?” the operator said sweetly.

  “Woo,” April said. “Detective Woo, from the Two-O. You already have my ID.”

  Ginora waved at her. “Dr. Frank on the line,” she called. “Want him to wait?”

  “Tell him I’ll call him back.”

  April sighed. Frank called every thirty minutes. He just wouldn’t let up. She repeated her request to the 911 supervisor. The supervisor said the calls from last night hadn’t been printed out yet. That meant someone would have to listen to every single tape for calls that came in during the time frame in question. Problem was, at the moment no one was available to get the tapes together and run them.

  “Look, this is an emergency—” April pressed. “Can I come there and do it myself?”

  “No—but … I’ll get someone on it—What’s your name again?”

  “Woo, Detective April Woo, and thanks.” April hung up.

  A few feet away at Aspiranti’s desk, Sergeant Joyce was waving at April to come join the discussion.

  62

  Jason dialed Detective Woo’s number for the tenth time. For the tenth time a woman’s voice answered the phone and informed him Detective Woo was busy. Would he like to leave a message? No, he would not. He had something to say all right, but it couldn’t be said in a message. He wanted to get Woo’s attention, get her so involved she’d let him tell her what to do.

  He’d been studying a map of New York City and his notes, but he needed more information. He needed the kind of information a person could only get from the police, and he needed a police car to take him around so he could see what different neighborhoods looked like. He was certain that if he could look around, he could find the right one.

  It didn’t occur to him that New York was a very big place, and his thinking might be unrealistic. N.Y.P.D. was not going to give him a car and driver to make his own investigations; and even if it did, he was not likely to find what he was looking for.

  He wasn’t thinking about the odds. He was counting on Woo’s doing what he asked because the alternative was unbearable. He had no way of knowing if any of them were doing the right things, going to the right places, asking the right questions.

  Apparently Woo had been sitting there on the phone for hours. How could she find Emma if she hadn’t left her desk all day? And what were the other detectives doing? Probably nothing.

  Sitting there in his office waiting for someone to get back to him was unbearable. Jason had canceled all his patients, but the phone kept ringing. There were still eight unreturned messages on his answering machine, three of them from Charles, wanting to know what was going on. Jason had spoken to Ronnie, Emma’s agent, three times already. Ronnie had been contacted by the police. Now she was hysterical. She wanted to come over and be with him, wanted to call in the army and the FBI. She had other suggestions, too. Jason couldn’t face calling Charles back and hearing more advice.

  There were a whole lot of things bothering him. One of them was that the phone kept ringing and none of the voices on his machine was Emma’s trying him again. What did that mean? Did that mean she was already dead, or that the guy caught her making the call and—And what? What would Grebs do?

  Jason knew what the trigger was to coming after Emma, but he simply didn’t have enough personal data about Troland Grebs to know what he planned to do to her once he had her. He had threatened to kill her, but as of midnight last night he hadn’t done it yet.

  Even though he tried to avoid checking the clocks every few minutes, the ticking went on. There was no relief from them. The clocks were driving him crazy.

  What was Grebs likely to do? Without a detailed history of his illness, it was impossible to predict. And there was no way to get a history of his illness. His parents were dead. According to his aunt, one brother, Willy, died in Vietnam. The other brother dropped out of sight years ago. She didn’t remember Grebs ever having counseling, and his company had no record of insurance claims for therapy. That much Jason had been able to find out.

  Troland Grebs had grown up on Twenty-eighth Street in downtown San Diego. Not far from the Gas Lamp district, the old red-light district where Grebs had once picked up prostitutes. Twenty-eighth Street was not far from the airport. Grebs liked familiar things, Jason knew. He worked at an airport. There were planes overhead all the time. Where he lived now, on Queen Palm Way, just off Crown Avenue, he had to cross a small bridge to get home every night. He probably ate in the fifties-style diner at the end of his block. These were the elements they had to look for here in New York, Jason was certain of it. The number, the names. The layout of the neighborhood. All these things would have special meaning for Grebs, and he would need them around him to feel safe.

  Grebs might never have been treated. But even if he had been hospitalized numerous times, it would take too long to find out where. There was no sheet for the mentally ill that listed how many times a person sought help for what symptoms, the way there was for felons and their arrests. Mental illness was a private thing. No central place stored information. A person could be hospitalized a dozen times, in a dozen different places. Each hospital kept only its own records, and none could tap into the records of the others just by hitting the right computer button.

  The danger of bureaucracy reminded Jason of Margret. He hadn’t thought about Margret in a long time. Margret was an out-patient of his at the Center when he was in training. He worked with her for a year, then she was assigned to someone else when he was rotated out. He took only two patients with him. That was two more than most people, but Margret was not one of them.

  He wouldn’t have kept her as a patient even though she didn’t want to work with anyone else. It was not surprising that she was assigned to someone who was not right for her, someone with no sympathy for her, a bureaucrat who did therapy by the book. Few people got better with therapy by the book. What made people get better couldn’t really be taught.

  It wasn’t surprising, either, that Margret didn’t get better. Margret was a difficult case, not because she was so very sick, but because she was an awful person. It was uncomfortable to be with her. Margret was fifty-seven years old when Jason met her. A badly aged former beauty, she had been married for thirty-two years and had no children. Her problem was her inability to deal with growing old. Her husband had only recently left her for another woman, even though she had been cruel to him for years and told him countless times that she never loved him.

  Margret couldn’t stand losing her looks and the status and attention that went with them. How many male doctors of any age could relate to a woman who was deeply depressed because she lost her one weapon, the considerable sexual power that she had always used to control and humiliate the men in her life? She had attempted suicide more than once. It was all documented in her records. Jason had carefully briefed his replacement. He warned him that although Margret appeared stable at times, she was deeply depressed and very much at risk. But the young man, now practising on Fifth Avenue, was a bureaucrat, a man without imagination. One evening, Margret called him at five o’clock and left a message saying she had to talk to him. She didn’t say she was desperate or suicidal, so the young doctor interpreted her call as another attempt to control him. He heard only what she said, and didn’t take her seriously. He had seen her earlier that day. She had seemed fine. He didn’t check on her that evening, and she slit her wrists and bled to death sometime in the night.

  Jason kept thinking about Margret because he knew the young doctor never felt he had done anything wrong. He still believed he had an unblemished record. He didn�
�t count Margret as a personal failure.

  It was when Margret killed herself that Jason realized he could never leave anything, not the smallest detail, to anybody else. Nobody under his direct care had ever died of anything but natural causes. Margret had been somebody else’s responsibility at the time of her death. But Jason couldn’t help seeing a connection between her and his situation with Detective Woo and the police. He had no hope of finding Emma without them. But police were bureaucrats. They did the minimum. He couldn’t let it go at that. Emma’s life depended on very fast action. Jason didn’t care how many times Detective Woo put him off. He would keep banging on her door until she let him in.

  In the deep quiet of his office, where the only sound was the ticking of his clocks, Jason decided that enough time passed since his last call. He allowed himself to check the clock. Twenty minutes was close enough. He dialed Detective Woo’s number again.

  April picked up. “Detective Woo.”

  “It’s Jason Frank.”

  “Hello, Dr. Frank,” she said cautiously.

  “Call me Jason.”

  April Woo did not respond to the invitation.

  “I want you to think of me as a colleague,” Jason said in his warmest voice. “We can work together. I can help you.”

  “You are helping,” April replied in her own warm and reassuring voice.

  He knew that voice. He had one just like it, professional and distance-making. He was the doctor. He didn’t let patients tell him what to do—unless they were right. He was flexible that way. He had to make her flexible. Emma’s life depended on it.

  “Look, I’ve been thinking about the tape. I can help you pinpoint places where he might have taken her, landmarks to look for. I’ve worked up a psychological profile of him.”

  “Okay,” April said. “I’ll take anything you’ve got. What do you want to tell me?”

  “Before I get into that, is there anything new?”

  Again she paused before answering, as if trying to decide whether or not to tell him. His heart jumped. There was news.

  “You can tell me. I’m a professional. Whatever it is, I can take it.”