Burning Time (38 page)

“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.”

“It might be nothing.”

“What is it?”

“I had the nine-one-ones checked out.”

“Emma called?”

“No, but there was an incomplete.”

“What does that mean?” Jason cried.

“It means someone called in and asked for help but didn’t give a name or location before hanging up.”

“Oh, God …”

“Sometimes they’re potential suicides. Sometimes they’re pranks. We get a lot of pranking, you know. It may be nothing.”

“What are you doing about it?”

“We’re having the voices on the tapes compared to see if it’s your wife’s.”

“Do you know where the call was from?”

There was another long hesitation before she finally told him. “Yeah,” she said with a note of triumph. “Queens.”

Queen Palm Way. Queens. Jason’s heart leapt. “Look, Detective, I’m coming over. I need to talk to you right away.” He hung up before she could protest.

Sergeant Joyce studied the photographs of the burns on the two dead girls in California and an enlarged version of the drawing on the bottom of each of the sixteen letters Emma Chapman had received. The pictures were inconclusive. There had been such discoloration of the skin in one case, she found it surprising the coroner could even tell the wound had been a burn. The other one was clearly a shape, a similar sort of shape, certainly, but as far as she could tell, not the shape of the drawing in the letters.

Joyce threw them on the desk in her office, where April had assembled all the documents and photos that represented her case against Grebs, and shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t see anything to help us in these.”

“I just got a call from that sheriff in California,” April said. “They have a witness who says he saw Ellen with Grebs the afternoon she disappeared.”

“We still don’t have anything that helps us with
this,”
Joyce replied coldly.

April had placed Emma Chapman’s yearbook picture next to the photo of Ellen Roane in her tennis shorts. The
two young women both had long blond hair and classically beautiful features. They could almost be sisters. April had a connection in the looks of the women. She had a connection in the guy’s obsession with burning. She had a suspect with a sheet that fit. And still, Joyce didn’t want to connect the two cases. April wondered if her supervisor just didn’t want to acknowledge her work.

She pushed aside the gruesome photos of the corpses found in the desert, so the two smiling girls were on top again. “Don’t you see a resemblance here?”

Joyce didn’t reply.

“Look, he
knew
the Chapman woman from high school, and he’s taken off.” What else did the woman want?

“That doesn’t mean he’s
here.”

April shrugged. “It
could
mean he’s here.”

“This isn’t his MO,” Joyce said flatly.

“Maybe not,” April agreed. “But sometimes they do it differently each time. And he
knew
her. Of course it could be a coincidence that he knew her.…”

“You know it isn’t a coincidence.” Joyce glanced down at the two lovely, golden-haired girls. “But we don’t have a desert here for him to leave her in.”

Talk about lack of imagination. Didn’t have a desert. April suddenly remembered her first case in this precinct. Sergeant Joyce had sent her into a townhouse where the worried owner had been afraid the Chinese cook might have murdered the Chinese maid and hidden the body somewhere in the house. There was a horrendous smell in the place, unbearable, and the maid had disappeared under suspicious circumstances several days before, leaving all her possessions behind. The owner couldn’t find the source of the smell. It seemed to be coming from the very core of the house.

It was a big house, four stories high, with a huge basement kitchen and laundry room. The place had marble stairways and marble bathrooms with gold faucets in the shape of dolphins. April had talked to the Chinese cook for a long time. He confessed he hated the maid. He had a lot of grievances. The maid had turned down his advances. It made him mad. She was eating their employer’s leftovers. That was no good. No one gave her permission to eat the leftover food.

Then she got hungry, but he wouldn’t let her into the kitchen to make her own food. It was his kitchen. So she took food into her room to dry it like in China.

“What kind of food?” April asked him.

“Fish,” he had replied with disgust.

“She tried to dry the fish in her room?”

Yes, that was it. “Only this New York, not Hong Kong. Fish no dry.”

When he talked to the maid about getting rid of the fish, they had a screaming fight, and she lost face, wouldn’t come back, not even for her things.

“Not many things,” the cook had said scornfully about her possessions.

April located the result of their feud in one of the heating vents in the basement. The smell of rotting fish was being pumped everywhere. She found the woman in New Jersey with a friend. She refused to come back.

This New York, not Hong Kong: Fish no dry. It made April think Grebs had something else in mind for Emma Chapman. He meant to kill her and hide her somewhere.

“Maybe he plans to change his MO on this one,” April told her lack-of-imagination supervisor.

“Maybe.” Joyce had taken her jacket off and was sweating in her green blouse. April noted that it was too dark a color for her. Joyce looked sallow, and the sweat rings under
her arms revealed that she was worried, too. It made April feel better.

“I have a dozen people out there with his picture. Better get it to every precinct in the city,” she said.

April nodded. Yes, Sergeant. Right away, Sergeant.

“Do you have a voice match yet on that nine-one-one to Queens?” Joyce switched focus.

“They’re working on it.” April tapped her fingers on the desk. She was in a hurry to get away.

“Where’s Sanchez?”

“He went down to the lab to sit on them.” April still stood in front of Joyce’s desk. She didn’t like to sit down in there. “I want to talk to the husband again,” she said after a minute.

“Oh, what does he know?”

“He’s a shrink. He found the guy in the first place.”

“Yeah, you told me.”

“He knows where he works. He’s seen where the guy lives, where he grew up, even talked to his aunt. He knows Grebs’s background.”

“So?”

“He’s a
shrink
. He’s done a workup on Grebs, a profile of his habits that might help us find him.”

“So talk to him again.”

Sergeant Joyce’s phone rang. She picked it up and began to speak. April stood there. After a minute Joyce put her hand over the receiver.

“What?” she demanded.

“He wants to go for a drive,” April said.

Joyce shook her head. “What are you, crazy?”

“Just checking.”

April left the office.

Dr. Frank was waiting for her downstairs.

Claudia Bartello felt uncomfortable. She had a feeling there was another vibration in the house, something more than the traffic at the height of the rush hour on the bridge. Sometimes it sounded like a hum. Sometimes it sounded like weeping. Twice she thought she heard screams. She moved around the house, upstairs and downstairs, looking for the source of the noise, as if it were an odor she could ferret out and purge.

Since Arturo died a year ago, there had been times when the lights had been funny. They made a crackling kind of noise, or flashed on and off for no reason. She did not question the possibility of there being a ghost in the house. He died there. Right on the front steps while she was in the kitchen making dinner. Without a sound or anything. He just fell over on the way up the stairs and died on her. Maybe he was still mad at her for not knowing, for letting a neighbor find him almost a whole hour later. That would be something he’d be mad about.

But more likely it wasn’t a ghost. It was that man in the garage with his naked girlfriend. The woman hadn’t left
yet. Claudia was pretty sure of that. No one had been outside of that garage door. She considered going in and complaining. She considered calling that Irish policeman and telling him something funny was going on. What was his name?

The problem was she didn’t know how to call the police, what number to dial. It wasn’t the number they flashed on the TV screen for emergencies. Arturo tried that once when the car got bumped from behind. After he told them no one was hurt, they promised to send someone over. But no one ever came.

How to get the right number? Her eyes were not good enough to struggle with the phone book. She wouldn’t know where to look in it anyway. And he didn’t seem like he was very interested. She wanted another policeman. An Italian she could talk to, explain about Arturo and the man in the garage. Sometimes the hum seemed like voices arguing.

Claudia could have a whopper of an argument with Arturo right now. What did he mean building a little apartment upstairs that you couldn’t get to without going through the garage and up the stairs at the back? It didn’t make sense. But Arturo never had any sense. He said he wanted to make it hard for people to bother him. Nice.

One thing she could say about herself. She might be old, but there was nothing wrong with her hearing. Claudia could hear dirty things happening on the other side of her wall. She’d heard things like that before. She just hadn’t heard it at eleven in the morning. At twelve.

At one o’clock she decided to do something about it. She shuffled to the front door, remembering first to put her sweater on because it still felt chilly to her. She didn’t put her heavy shoes on because she wasn’t going far, and
her feet were swollen. The soft slippers were easier to walk in.

She left the front door unlocked. She didn’t want to have to struggle with the key, and she was coming right back. Finally, for the second time that day, she grabbed the railing and carefully maneuvered the steps that killed Arturo. There were only three of them, and they were not very steep, but Claudia was afraid of falling and did not like them.

When she was on level ground at last, she shuffled down the path to the sidewalk in front of the house. She couldn’t take a shortcut across the tiny patch of grass Arturo called his lawn because it had grown in. Soon the neighbors would start complaining again.

Claudia contemplated the garage door. One thing she could say about herself. She might have arthritis in her fingers, but there was still some strength in her arms. She leaned over, her old bones creaking, and lifted the garage door. It swung open easier than she expected. The guy living in there must have done something to it, oiled it maybe.

When the door opened, the light came on automatically. Claudia walked inside. For a minute she thought the car was Arturo’s car, that no time had passed, and she was going in there to catch him at it. But then she remembered. This car was a Ford. She was in here to scold somebody else. She almost tripped over Arturo’s lawn mower that was so old it didn’t even have a motor. She climbed the stairs slowly, holding the railing, and when she got to the top, she banged on the door three times. No one answered.

She knocked some more.

“Hey,” she said. “I know you’re in there.”

There was a long silence and then a reply right on the other side of the door. “What do you want?”

“You said you weren’t going to do anything,” Claudia cried peevishly.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“I
know
what you’re doing. You have a woman in there.”

“No way.”

“Yes, there’s a woman in there,” Claudia insisted.

“What makes you think so?”

The voice on the other side of the door sounded reasonable. That sound of reason reminded her of Arturo. It irritated her.

“I’m not stupid. I have eyes and ears. I saw her. I won’t have this.” It was an old argument. “I’m not running a whorehouse. You’ll have to get her out of there.”

“What are you talking about?” The voice was angry.

“I said you’ll have to take that woman and get her out of here. I won’t have no dirty stuff in my house. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“There’s no woman in here, I promise you.”

“Yes,” Claudia cried. “Oh, yes, there is. I saw her.”

“Okay, okay. There was a woman, but she’s gone. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“Open the door. I can’t talk like this.”

“I can’t, I’m not dressed. I was sleeping.”

“This is my house. If she’s gone, I want to see she’s gone.”

“I told you I was sleeping. I got no clothes on.”

“Then put some clothes on.”

There was a pause, and then the voice was soothing again.

“Lady, I think you’re all excited for nothing. So I had somebody here for a while. It’s a free country. I told you she’s gone now. Forget about it.”

“I want to see she’s gone,” Claudia insisted. “It’s my house. Do you want me to call the police? I’ll call the police. I got a friend in the police. You want him to take care of it?”

There was another lengthy silence.

“You hear me?”

“Yeah, I hear you.”

In a second the door opened, and Claudia shuffled in. The door closed after her before she had a chance to protest.