“Forget the fucking aspirin.”
“If you’re my friend, untie me.” She didn’t dare look at him.
“Oh, Christ.”
He checked the ropes around her wrists. Her hands were white, but they weren’t blue. There was no color in her face at all, but she was a little blue around the lips. Like the flake in California. It worried him. She was so out of it and confused he was afraid she might die.
“Ah, shit. You better not die on me.” He played with the knots, loosening them just a fraction.
A little scream escaped her at his touch. He touched her breast with his finger, then with the tip of his switchblade.
“Shut up,” he cried.
“No circulation, I can’t breathe.”
He started pacing again, his hand in his pants. “Look at what you’re doing. I got a schedule. Don’t mess me up.”
Her heart was hammering so hard she thought it had lost its rhythm and was out of control. She could feel herself dying of fear. She let go. If fakirs could stop their hearts, so could she.
“I’m getting tired of this. Look at me, you stupid bitch. It wasn’t an accident. I offed the guy. It was easy. A little gasoline in a condom. The condom in a toilet paper roll. Fits right in the pocket. You don’t even have to get under the car. Just reach down in the parking lot and put it in the exhaust manifold. Know what kind of heat is generated a few minutes after a car is turned on? Burns the toilet paper tube and starts a nice big fire. Bye-bye, Andy.”
Emma’s mouth fell open; her head lolled to one side.
“Say thank you.” He slapped her face. Nothing happened. She was out of it, again. He didn’t want to do her like the flake who slept through the whole thing. He kicked the sofa again.
“Shit. I got a schedule,” he muttered.
He paced back and forth in front of her, framing her with his hands and mumbling. When she showed no signs of reviving, he grabbed a few things and slammed out the door.
48
There were a few vital inconsistencies in the information Detective Woo, calling him from New York, was giving him. Jason sat in the chair by the bed, looking out at the lights on the navy ships in San Diego Harbor.
“Dr. Frank, from the appearance of your apartment, there is no indication that anything untoward happened to your wife,” she began.
He sensed another message behind her words. “What do you mean by that?” he asked.
“Ah, there are no signs of anything being disturbed,” she said.
There was some crackling in the background. The connection was not a good one. If nothing was wrong, why hadn’t she waited until morning to return his call? Jason looked at his watch. It was way past midnight her time. He had asked Detective Woo to check his apartment, but he more than half expected her not to do it until the next day.
He had pegged her as a bureaucrat from the moment he saw her, from her very first words. There was a lot of tension around her mouth and eyes, a rigidity in the way she held her slender body. Her precisely layered haircut was extremely controlled, and the navy blue blazer and red-and-white blouse she wore buttoned all the way to the neck took no chances. Everything about her indicated a person who walked a straight line in the middle of the path, afraid of risk-taking, or of veering from the rules in the slightest detail. Jason had known a lot of bureaucrats, still did. Bureaucrats were the people who had accidents in hospitals, who let little things by them that resulted in very big consequences. There were times people died because bureaucrats were just doing their jobs. That’s why Jason didn’t trust them.
“But she’s not there, and you tell me the lights and television were on. That’s already very untoward,” he said.
“That depends on your wife,” Detective Woo said.
What did that mean? What was the real story here? Jason shifted the phone from one ear to the other. He didn’t like the vibrations he was getting from the detective’s voice. He could feel how tightly wound she was. Clocks wound too tightly sometimes froze up and stopped working altogether.
“What did you see, Detective?”
“There were wet towels in the bathroom,” April said. “Some lettuce in the sink. The lights were on in the kitchen. She may have started to make herself something to eat and then changed her mind and gone out to visit a friend.”
There was a slight hesitation before her next question that made Jason think the detective didn’t have any faith in that theory.
“Do you think she was likely to do that?” she asked.
“No, she wouldn’t do that. She wanted to talk to me.”
But how badly did Emma want to talk to him if she didn’t pick up all the times he rang? Now it was really late and she was still out somewhere. She couldn’t be out negotiating a movie deal at
“No,” he said again.
“Maybe somebody from business you don’t know.”
He pondered the heretofore unconsidered possibility that Emma was indeed out with some producer or movie star, and that was what she wanted to tell him when she called more than twelve hours ago. Just that she was going out with someone wonderful that night. He walked around in the idea for a minute. Emma didn’t know what he was doing in San Diego, what was going on. She might have gone out in all innocence. Maybe she took the afternoon off and went to the hairdresser first.
None of it worked for him. And it was clear the theory wasn’t working for the detective, either, or there wouldn’t be so much strain in her voice.
“Were you aware her answering machine is on the blink?”
“What?” Jason started. “No, I wasn’t.”
“It picks up, but it doesn’t record.”
So maybe Emma didn’t know he returned her call.
There was another small, telling hesitation on the New York end. Jason was sure the detective was keeping something else from him. What was it?
“I’m coming back,” he said suddenly. “There’s no point in trying to talk like this.”
This time there was no pause on the other end. “That’s probably a good idea, Dr. Frank,” Woo said. “You have to be here to file a Missing Person Report.”
“What?”
“I can’t investigate without a complaint,” she said.
“So you don’t think she’s just out for the evening.” Jason had known it from the beginning.
“Well, she left her purse with her wallet in it on the bed.”
Oh, shit. Oh, no. No. Emma wouldn’t leave the apartment for more than a few minutes without her bag. He knew her habits, knew what she did. She must have gone out to pick something up at the store. And something prevented her from coming back.
Jason swallowed. “I’m leaving now.”
He hung up, and started furiously throwing the few clothes he had brought into his suitcase, gathering his notes on Troland Grebs, all the time reviewing what he knew.
There wasn’t a thing on Grebs’s record that was recent. No hint of hospitalizations, no way to find if there had ever been a psychiatric evaluation of him without calling every in-patient and out-patient facility in the state. Grebs didn’t have a file at North High School, which meant he hadn’t been in trouble there. Jason didn’t even know the name of the school Grebs attended in third grade where the little girl’s hair was set on fire. The aunt didn’t remember it, and she couldn’t remember the name of the technical school he went to after high school, either.
