Burning Time

“Me?” He shook his head. “I don’t know a thing. Look, I’m sorry. I just wanted to help, that’s all. It’s better when you work with someone you like.”

April was silent, thinking it over. He was clearly checking on her, and possibly checking on Jimmy. But then, she’d done some checking on him, too. She knew he’d been married and it didn’t work out, knew he lived with his widowed mother in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Having to check everything out seemed to come with the territory. She couldn’t exactly blame him for it. And suddenly he was making her wonder why she hadn’t bothered to do a little investigating herself into what Jimmy was so busy doing that he couldn’t return her car or even call her in over two weeks. And she knew that was what Sanchez wanted, because she could read his mind.

“Okay, so what could you find out about the letters, then?” she demanded, finally turning her head to look at him.

“I have a friend at a lab. You never know. He might be able to tell you where they’re from.”

April hesitated for a long time. “There’s probably nothing to it. But thank you.”

They rode in silence.

“It isn’t all tacos and burritos, you know.”

“What?” April looked straight ahead.

“Mexico. It isn’t some little island in the Caribbean like Puerto Rico. Mexico has thousands of years of history. A whole culture. Art, literature, everything. I mean, does Puerto Rico have a whole wing in the Metropolitan Museum?”

April didn’t know. “It’s not the food. My mother expects me,” she said softly. “Anyway, Puerto Rico’s okay. What’s the problem?”

“Everybody thinks I’m Puerto Rican. Does Puerto Rico have Carlos Fuentes? Diego Rivera? Huh?”

April didn’t reply. She had no idea who Fuentes and Rivera were. “I don’t have anything against anybody,” she said finally.

“I’m Mexican-American. My father fought in the Second War. I have a proud history.” She could see he felt strongly about it.

He turned the corner, and headed down her street. She had planned to tell him to stop on the corner, but his speech about Mexico made that impossible. The red Camaro stopped in front of her parents’ house where she lived in the upstairs apartment, and where her mother expected her to live one day with the long-dreamed-of Chinese husband and children. Shit. Now she had insulted him, and her mother was probably standing at the window watching her arrive with a Mexican. It was all very difficult.

“I’ll tell you about the postmarks tomorrow,” Sanchez said, holding out his hand for the letters.

“Thanks,” April said. She opened her bag and gave him the first five. She didn’t know what she thought about it all, as she headed up the steps to where her mother had already opened the door to the smell of Chinese food and a thousand questions.

27

Jason called Charles as soon as he returned to his office. Charles got back to him in twenty minutes.

“I spoke to the police,” he said gloomily, “and I think I’m going to have to handle this myself.”

“How are you going to do that?” Charles asked. “You don’t know who the guy is or where he is.”

“I’ll do a profile. I’ll find him,” Jason said.

“So?” Charles said worriedly. “Then what?”

“I’ll go talk to him.”

“I don’t know, Jason,” Charles muttered. “That doesn’t sound like a good idea. Why don’t you do the profile, give it to the police, and let them take care of it? I’ll even help you.”

“We’ll see,” Jason said.

“Come on, it’ll be like the old days. Remember the old days?” Charles pressed.

“Yeah, I remember them.”

Jason wasn’t quite as nostalgic about the past as Charles was. He’d been unhappily married during their training when they were part of a team and worked long hours at the Psychiatric Center. He remembered the stints they did in different parts of the hospital, meeting every day for endless evaluations and reports on the psychotics and potential suicides that came in to the ER every day.

Charles remembered it enthusiastically because he had been wealthy then as now, and none of his patients these days were very sick people. If he was so interested in this, he must not have a whole lot to worry about, Jason thought.

“We’ll work on the letters together,” Charles said. “Maybe we can get Emma to help us. She must have some idea who it is.”

“I told you she thinks it’s me,” Jason said.

“Do you want me to talk with her?” Charles asked.

“Maybe later.”

“You want to start in the morning?”

Jason looked at his watch. Did he want Charles involved? Yeah, he guessed he did. “Okay,” he agreed.

At six-thirty the next morning Charles leaned back against the leather sofa in his office and stretched. His jacket was on a chair and his sleeves were rolled up.

Jason looked up from the chart he was making.

“Tired?”

“No, no, I’m fine,” Charles said, yawning.

They had been working since Jason’s arrival forty-five minutes earlier.

“When do you think the police will have something to tell you?” Charles asked.

“I don’t know if they’ll ever have anything to tell me. I told you the detective wasn’t very impressed with the case.” Jason checked his watch. He had a seven o’clock appointment.

Charles took a sip of his cold coffee.

“Breaks a man’s heart like a wheel. Was that a movie or something?” he asked after a minute.

“I don’t know.” Jason shook his head. He wasn’t sure they were getting anywhere with this. They had never had to put together a profile based on written material alone. The kind of writing samples they got always came from people they knew, who were desperate to explain, to clarify what they felt, who they were, what was wrong. These letters were from someone who didn’t want them to know who he was and what he intended to do. They were in code. The signature drawing showed that the writer liked to decorate things, had some artistic outlet. Others, added to the last few letters, were illustrations of his fascination with power and motion and fire.

“Yeah, with Sally Field. Wasn’t that the one where they lose the farm?” Charles persisted with the line.

“I don’t know,” Jason repeated. He didn’t go much to the movies, probably never would again. He pulled himself together and tried to concentrate.

It looked to him like the guy was becoming more focused, at the same time as he was coming apart. His thinking was confused, but his drawings were precise and painstakingly done. Jason knew there were experts who could predict by letters and past behavior what a psychopath was likely to do next, and even what he would be wearing when he did it. But he and Charles were not experts. Not only that, they had no idea what kind of background this guy had and what kinds of acting out he had done in the past. They were trained for clinical evaluation, for living people in front of them talking their hearts out. They couldn’t do a history with none of the facts.

“I don’t think that’s the tie-in,” Jason said about the movie. “The references to wheels start here.”

“Chariots of Fire. Wheels of fire,” Charles murmured. “Humph, Lear?”

“Jets of Fire?”

“No, King Lear—‘I am bound by a wheel of fire that mine own tears do scald like molten lead.’ ”

Oh, Wheel of Fire, of course. All the psychiatric analyses of King Lear were called