Burning Time

feeling about him. He was wiry and not much taller than she was. She thought if he wasn’t grateful or generous- minded before he asked her to marry him, she’d have plenty of trouble pleasing him after.

April gazed at Sanchez’s arms as she waited for Sergeant Grove to come on the line. The heat was too high in the building again, and Sanchez had rolled up his sleeves. She could not help noticing the fine black hairs he had right down to the backs of his hands. This led April to speculate he probably had hair on his chest, too; somehow she did not find this as unattractive and barbarian in a man as her mother and aunts did.

Sanchez also had a mustache, which tried but did not succeed in making him look fierce. The mustache was irritating because, well, she wasn’t sure why. Another thing was he smiled often, letting people know when he was friendly and in a good mood. The Chinese laughed or frowned, but rarely smiled. Everybody knew a smiling Chinese was a troublemaker, probably a cheat and a liar. Sanchez’s smiles were confusing.

Two other items on the list were his physical type and his eyes. April was disapproving of both Chinese body types—chubby with undefined musculature, and thin with undefined musculature. She disliked her own flatness so much she exercised with free weights every night to encourage her shoulders and buttocks to become more rounded. Nothing short of surgery could change her eyes, though.

Sanchez had well-formed eyes and a well-proportioned body large enough to carry someone much bigger than herself from a burning building, if the need ever arose. There had been more than one burning building in April’s childhood, so it was the sort of thing she thought about.

She did not like being attracted to Sanchez. And the thing she disliked about him the most was the fact that he was a fish in water. He belonged where he was. He spoke Spanish on the phone. He spoke Spanish to people on the street. He had cases that involved his people. His eyes danced with his happiness at being where he was. April wanted her fins back in her own water. She did not want to have to study him with interest. He was Hispanic, she was Chinese. They were structurally different, and not bilingual in the same languages.

Her thoughts about Sanchez were cut off by the San Diego P.D. They had finally managed to locate Sergeant Grove.

“Missing Persons, Sergeant Grove,” he said.

“Yes, Sergeant Grove, thank you for coming to the phone. This is Detective Woo in New York. I’m calling about the Ellen Roane case. Have you found anything?”

“How are you doing, Detective? Nope. I told you, we’ve got eight Jane Does here. Had five of them around before your girl disappeared. And none of them is a match. Three Mexican, two black. We have three Caucasians, but they’re all older women.”

“Is there any chance you could take her picture around in the neighborhood where she put the charges on the credit card, and see if you can locate her?” April wasn’t exactly looking for the girl’s body, and had counted on Grove’s not coming up with it. Ellen Roane would probably be back in her dorm room in two days, mad at her parents for making such a fuss. April had seen it a hundred times before. Still …

“Hey, I can check out the hospitals and the ME’s office. I’ve already done that, but you know as well as I do that our job is to match names with bodies. We want to get the dead ones buried. We can’t go looking for every kid that takes off on a lark.”

“Is there anybody who can go out in the field for a few hours?” April said patiently.

There was a short pause. “Look, I only tried the city. Do you want me to try the surrounding jurisdictions?”

“Yes, might as well,” April said, discouraged.

“Detective?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“How’s the weather in New York?”

“It’s forty-six degrees and raining.”

“It’s seventy-eight and real sunny here.”

“Thank you for sharing that with me, Sergeant.”

They said their good-byes and hung up.

“He hit on you?” Sanchez asked.

April shook her head. “I don’t have a good feeling about this.”

It was Friday, more than a week since Ellen had left for San Diego and used her MasterCard to buy food and clothes. There had been no new charges on the credit card in three days. Where was she eating? Where was she staying? April had checked with American Airlines on Ellen’s return ticket, and found out that Ellen did not show up for the flight she was booked on. College had started up again, and she was not back. Something was wrong.

And what was wrong with the system was that the San Diego P.D. would not send someone out with her picture to find out what happened to her unless they had good reason to believe a crime involving her had been committed. Ellen had to commit a crime herself, or be abducted with a number of witnesses looking on. That was on the SDPD side. NYPD would not send someone out there to look for her under any circumstances.

It was not easy to tell parents that the network of police departments and the FBI did not actually investigate missing persons. What they did was try to match descriptions with unidentified bodies. It was terrible, but if the Roanes wanted to find their daughter, they would probably have to hire a private detective to look for her. April reached for the phone to tell them if she wasn’t able to come up with something soon, a private detective was their best option.

16

Troland took the girl to the crummy house he grew up in. Back then, the streets around it had been quiet. When he and his brothers drove by, their bikes blaring a continual fart, people used to come out on their porches to see what was going on. Not anymore. The houses had gone down. Some of the porches were about falling off, and whole families were living on them, lying out there in hammocks with the Latino music blasting. Laughing, smoking, arguing in loud voices. Everywhere there was the smell of beans and frying foods. Broken-down cars were parked on the street, in the short weedy drives. Shit. His mother died seven years ago, and his aunt Lela had been living there ever since. He’d given her a trip to Disneyland to get rid of her for a few days, and offered to look after her house for her. She’d handed over the keys and taken off.

Troland unlocked the door and the girl followed him in.

“This your place, Willy?” she asked.

He was a foot or two away from her. Suddenly his hand whipped out, caught her arm, and wheeled her around to look at him.

“Hey, that hurts. What’s the matter?” Tears sprouted in her eyes.

“Don’t call me Willy,” he snapped. Willy’s voice thundered in his ear. Only Willy is the real Willy.

“I thought that was your name.” She sniffed, trying to hold back a sob.

“Don’t cry. I don’t like crying.”

“What’s the matter?” She gulped a little, pulling on her arm to get him to release her.

“Nothing. Just do it right.” He looked at her so intensely, she turned her head away from his eyes.

“You’re not going to be weird, are you?” she said faintly. “Weird scares me.”

Troland snorted. “What’s weird?”

“Uh, I don’t know.” Her eyes were on the coke.

He had pulled some cellophane packages out of his pocket. He put one package down on the table and went to check the doors. Front door locked. Back door locked. Windows locked. He made some patterns with his foot around each entrance, to seal it from the outside. He went around the house three times, first to check the doors and windows, then to pull down the discolored old blinds. Finally he came back to the table and laid out a large piece of paper to put the lines of powder on.

“Hey, what’s that?”

“What does it look like?”