“We don’t have a confirmation on that. We’re trying to locate her.”
“You want me to run them all?”
“Yes,” April said.
“Any particular time?”
“Yes, we’d like it right now.”
“I mean any particular time last night?”
“Oh.” April thought for a minute.
“Where do you want us to start, Detective?” The operator sounded impatient.
April didn’t let it bother her. Emma had called her husband at just before midnight. Would she call her husband first, or the police first?
“Start at eleven-thirty,” April said, just to be safe.
“All five?”
“Yes.”
“Manhattan, too?”
“I want them all,” April said. How many times did she have to say it? Yes, she wanted five, all five boroughs, from eleven-thirty on. She sat back in her swivel chair.
“It’s going to take some time.”
“Why?” April asked.
“You want last night. That isn’t even twenty-four hours ago.”
So? What did that mean? Didn’t they have some kind of printout of who called on what complaint? April tried to imagine what it looked like down there at One Police Plaza where all 911 calls in the city came in. She’d certainly been sent out on enough calls to know they were dispatched through the closest precinct.
But the calls were organized by borough. Did they have one huge room in the basement of Headquarters with dozens of operators answering the phones? Or did they have a different unit for each borough? She had never been there. She had no idea what the setup was. Probably a different unit for each borough, she guessed.
“How long will it take?” she asked, careful not to sound impatient herself.
“A while. There’s no one to do it right now.”
April looked at her watch. Maybe she should go down there and do it herself. Then she looked up. She saw Sergeant Joyce in a new green-and-black plaid suit that was ugly in the extreme, talking rapidly to Bell, Davis, and Aspiranti. Even from here, she knew they were discussing the case.
Bell had located the afternoon doorman of the building and gone to talk with him. The doorman was able to set the time of Chapman’s disappearance at just about six P.M. He had watched the actress walk to the end of the block. She crossed the street and he didn’t see her again after that. Now they had a description of the clothes she was wearing: jeans and a gray sweatshirt. She sure wasn’t going out to dinner dressed like that.
For a second, Joyce turned and looked in her direction. April didn’t like the look at all. “I’d like to talk to your supervisor,” April said, to irritate the voice on the phone.
She always hated it when people did that to her.
“Certainly. What was your name again?” the operator said sweetly.
“Woo,” April said. “Detective Woo, from the Two-O. You already have my ID.”
Ginora waved at her. “Dr. Frank on the line,” she called. “Want him to wait?”
“Tell him I’ll call him back.”
April sighed. Frank called every thirty minutes. He just wouldn’t let up. She repeated her request to the 911 supervisor. The supervisor said the calls from last night hadn’t been printed out yet. That meant someone would have to listen to every single tape for calls that came in during the time frame in question. Problem was, at the moment no one was available to get the tapes together and run them.
“Look, this is an emergency—” April pressed. “Can I come there and do it myself?”
“No—but … I’ll get someone on it—What’s your name again?”
“Woo, Detective April Woo, and thanks.” April hung up.
A few feet away at Aspiranti’s desk, Sergeant Joyce was waving at April to come join the discussion.
62
Jason dialed Detective Woo’s number for the tenth time. For the tenth time a woman’s voice answered the phone and informed him Detective Woo was busy. Would he like to leave a message? No, he would not. He had something to say all right, but it couldn’t be said in a message. He wanted to get Woo’s attention, get her so involved she’d let him tell her what to do.
He’d been studying a map of New York City and his notes, but he needed more information. He needed the kind of information a person could only get from the police, and he needed a police car to take him around so he could see what different neighborhoods looked like. He was certain that if he could look around, he could find the right one.
It didn’t occur to him that New York was a very big place, and his thinking might be unrealistic. N.Y.P.D. was not going to give him a car and driver to make his own investigations; and even if it did, he was not likely to find what he was looking for.
He wasn’t thinking about the odds. He was counting on Woo’s doing what he asked because the alternative was unbearable. He had no way of knowing if any of them were doing the right things, going to the right places, asking the right questions.
Apparently Woo had been sitting there on the phone for hours. How could she find Emma if she hadn’t left her desk all day? And what were the other detectives doing? Probably nothing.
Sitting there in his office waiting for someone to get back to him was unbearable. Jason had canceled all his patients, but the phone kept ringing. There were still eight unreturned messages on his answering machine, three of them from Charles, wanting to know what was going on. Jason had spoken to Ronnie, Emma’s agent, three times already. Ronnie had been contacted by the police. Now she was hysterical. She wanted to come over and be with him, wanted to call in the army and the FBI. She had other suggestions, too. Jason couldn’t face calling Charles back and hearing more advice.
There were a whole lot of things bothering him. One of them was that the phone kept ringing and none of the voices on his machine was Emma’s trying him again. What did that mean? Did that mean she was already dead, or that the guy caught her making the call and—And what? What would Grebs
Jason knew what the trigger was to coming after Emma, but he simply didn’t have enough personal data about Troland Grebs to know what he planned to do to her once he had her. He had threatened to kill her, but as of midnight last night he hadn’t done it yet.
Even though he tried to avoid checking the clocks every few minutes, the ticking went on. There was no relief from them. The clocks were driving him crazy.
What was Grebs likely to do? Without a detailed history of his illness, it was impossible to predict. And there was no way to get a history of his illness. His parents were dead. According to his aunt, one brother, Willy, died in Vietnam. The other brother dropped out of sight years ago. She didn’t remember Grebs ever having counseling, and his company had no record of insurance claims for therapy. That much Jason had been able to find out.
Troland Grebs had grown up on Twenty-eighth Street in downtown San Diego. Not far from the Gas Lamp district, the old red-light district where Grebs had once picked up prostitutes. Twenty-eighth Street was not far from the airport. Grebs liked familiar things, Jason knew. He worked at an airport. There were planes overhead all the time. Where he lived now, on Queen Palm Way, just off Crown Avenue, he had to cross a small bridge to get home every night. He probably ate in the fifties-style diner at the end of his block. These were the elements they had to look for here in New York, Jason was certain of it. The number, the names. The layout of the neighborhood. All these things would have special meaning for Grebs, and he would need them around him to feel safe.
Grebs might never have been treated. But even if he had been hospitalized numerous times, it would take too long to find out where. There was no sheet for the mentally ill that listed how many times a person sought help for what symptoms, the way there was for felons and their arrests. Mental illness was a private thing. No central place stored information. A person could be hospitalized a dozen times, in a dozen different places. Each hospital kept
