with unguarded, curious blue eyes.
“Thanks for seeing me. I’m Frank Miln. I’m doing a story on Emma Chapman.”
Patterson nodded and scratched his chin. His expression didn’t change.
Jason looked around. The walls of the room were covered with prints of airplanes. The man was pure middle management. He was wearing loafers. On his desk were pictures of a sailboat, two golden children in bathing suits, and a smiling woman. Jason got a sinking feeling.
Patterson moved his scratching on to his temple, worked on that for a moment. “Who is she?” he asked finally.
“She’s an actress in New York. She was in your class in high school.”
“Oh. Emma Chapman.” He paused, as if doing a computer search of his memory. Then he shook his head. “I’m not sure I remember her.”
“That’s very surprising, because when I was talking to her, she mentioned a guy with a motorcycle who works for General Defense.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, she specifically wanted me to say hello.”
“Gee, I haven’t been on a bike in years,” Patterson said nostalgically, He pointed at the photos of his family. “Well, say hello right back, but it must be some other guy. I didn’t know her.”
Jason nodded and got up slowly. Before he got to the door, Patterson stopped him.
“Hey, wait a minute. There is a guy who works for us. But he wasn’t in our class. He was a year behind us. Matter of fact he still rides a bike. I see him in the field lot sometimes.”
Jason’s throat constricted. “What’s his name?” he said carefully.
Patterson scratched his face some more. “Funny name.” He reached for the company directory and started flipping the pages. “Here it is. Grebs, Troland.”
Jason leaned forward to look at the page. Grebs, Troland was in Technical Drafting, Building 4. The guy drew. It sounded right. For the second time that day Jason felt a surge of adrenaline shoot through him. He checked his watch. If he hurried, he might still be able to get home to Emma that night.
37
Sanchez had a hit-and-run on Amsterdam. In broad daylight a van running the light hit a woman with a dog and a baby carriage. Mother and child were squash flat, as Sai Woo put it when April told her about it. The dog, which had been tied to the carriage, managed to escape injury. Sai liked hearing stories like that. Happen to other people, not happen to her.
“I had a dog once, long time ago in China.” She reached for the story, offering it up to April as favor for favor.
April nodded seriously, accepting the gift she’d already received a hundred thousand times.
“One day dog gone. I very sad,” Sai said. “Look for it and look for it. Ask everybody.” When she paused to shake her head, April knew she was thinking about how everybody said they didn’t see a thing. Didn’t remember ever seeing any dog. And that was how Sai learned she couldn’t trust anybody.
“Neighbors ate it,” she said now, playing it for all it was worth.
“Serve dog right,” she added, “for going outside without me.” She looked at April slyly out of the corner of her eye. She was eating melon seeds, cracking the shells open delicately with her teeth at the kitchen table after dinner. The TV was on, but neither of them was watching. Sometimes Sai left the picture on and the sound off, just for company when Ja Fa Woo and her daughter were both at work. Now it was on for show. To show April she didn’t have to be there and could go home whenever she wanted.
“Probably dog’s fault. Why he tied to carriage anyway?” she asked. She couldn’t stand the sight of a dog now, didn’t like her neighbors either. She brushed an errant shell off her lap impatiently.
She had given April perfectly good story. Very good story about her life. And now April’s turn to tell something. Dead baby and mother not enough. Sai wanted to know important things, like what happened to red Camaro, and why white Baron was back with no sign of Jimmy Wong.
April was writing something and wouldn’t say. Sai leaned over to see what it was, but couldn’t see a thing without her glasses. She never liked Jimmy Wong. Not so good as a doctor or dentist. Jimmy Wong wore a gun in a shoulder holster and walked like gangster. Had no good future.
April nodded without looking up.
“Main thing is, lose innocence but not hope,” Sai said pointedly.
“Okay, Mom.” April rolled her eyes because she had no idea what that meant and her mother still called her “you.” Like, hey you, you listening to me? How could she avoid it?
April looked her mother over critically. Desperate to be “new style” right up-to-date, Sai Woo always wore extravagantly colored blouses which she tucked into matching tailored pants. Her hair was still black as patent leather, and though she swore up and down she didn’t touch it, April knew she dyed it promptly at the beginning of every fifth week.
In spite of these details, she was “old style” in her soul. No getting around it. She ate melon seeds, cracking the shells with her teeth, gossiped like an old woman, and sometimes hunkered all the way down on her heels without warning. Just the way they did in China, because not so many chairs there. Nobody who was born in America would dream of doing that. No one could. Well, cowboys maybe. But there weren’t many of those in Queens.
“You should be the detective,” April said.
“Not so good detective, not find out much,” Sai replied disgustedly, ending the discussion as usual on a sour note.
By the time Sanchez found the van, it had been sold. But he didn’t have too much trouble getting to it. The person who bought it lived only a few blocks away from the suspect, and hadn’t had time to get the bumper or the broken headlight fixed. It was after four when he came back from the indictment.
The squad room was always pretty empty between four and four-thirty. Day shift going or gone, night shift coming in.
“I was afraid I’d miss you,” he said.
April was sitting at her desk, tying up a few loose ends. Sergeant Riley was already there and hassling her to get out so he could have her desk. She looked up at Sanchez. It was nowhere in her thoughts that she might be waiting for him.
“Why?” she asked. Then lowered her head with some confusion because he seemed tired and discouraged.
“Why what?” Sanchez asked.
“Why were you afraid of missing me? Did something come up?”
“No. Just wanted to know what was going on, uh, with you. Bad day.” He said it as fact, not a question.
“Had a DOA on Broadway. Homeless. Poor guy sat there on the bench for nearly thirty hours before the neighbors were willing to admit he hadn’t moved in a long time.”
They didn’t look at him when he was alive, but a crowd had gathered to watch him bagged and taken away. But that wasn’t what Sanchez was asking about.
“The positive ID came in on Ellen Roane,” she said at last.
“I heard.”
“I had to talk to the mother.”
“Rough.”
“Very rough.” April looked away. That was the worst part of the job. That and collecting more pictures and information about Ellen to send to Sheriff Regis. She would have liked to follow up on this case herself, go out to San Diego and follow Ellen’s tracks all the way to Potoway Village in the hills to see if she could come up with anything resembling a suspect. Now Sheriff Regis would have to do it. She’d found her Missing Person. For her, the
