only its own records, and none could tap into the records of the others just by hitting the right computer button.
The danger of bureaucracy reminded Jason of Margret. He hadn’t thought about Margret in a long time. Margret was an out-patient of his at the Center when he was in training. He worked with her for a year, then she was assigned to someone else when he was rotated out. He took only two patients with him. That was two more than most people, but Margret was not one of them.
He wouldn’t have kept her as a patient even though she didn’t want to work with anyone else. It was not surprising that she was assigned to someone who was not right for her, someone with no sympathy for her, a bureaucrat who did therapy by the book. Few people got better with therapy by the book. What made people get better couldn’t really be taught.
It wasn’t surprising, either, that Margret didn’t get better. Margret was a difficult case, not because she was so very sick, but because she was an awful person. It was uncomfortable to be with her. Margret was fifty-seven years old when Jason met her. A badly aged former beauty, she had been married for thirty-two years and had no children. Her problem was her inability to deal with growing old. Her husband had only recently left her for another woman, even though she had been cruel to him for years and told him countless times that she never loved him.
Margret couldn’t stand losing her looks and the status and attention that went with them. How many male doctors of any age could relate to a woman who was deeply depressed because she lost her one weapon, the considerable sexual power that she had always used to control and humiliate the men in her life? She had attempted suicide more than once. It was all documented in her records. Jason had carefully briefed his replacement. He warned him that although Margret appeared stable at times, she was deeply depressed and very much at risk. But the young man, now practising on Fifth Avenue, was a bureaucrat, a man without imagination. One evening, Margret called him at five o’clock and left a message saying she had to talk to him. She didn’t say she was desperate or suicidal, so the young doctor interpreted her call as another attempt to control him. He heard only what she said, and didn’t take her seriously. He had seen her earlier that day. She had seemed fine. He didn’t check on her that evening, and she slit her wrists and bled to death sometime in the night.
Jason kept thinking about Margret because he knew the young doctor never felt he had done anything wrong. He still believed he had an unblemished record. He didn’t count Margret as a personal failure.
It was when Margret killed herself that Jason realized he could never leave anything, not the smallest detail, to anybody else. Nobody under his direct care had ever died of anything but natural causes. Margret had been somebody else’s responsibility at the time of her death. But Jason couldn’t help seeing a connection between her and his situation with Detective Woo and the police. He had no hope of finding Emma without them. But police were bureaucrats. They did the minimum. He couldn’t let it go at that. Emma’s life depended on very fast action. Jason didn’t care how many times Detective Woo put him off. He would keep banging on her door until she let him in.
In the deep quiet of his office, where the only sound was the ticking of his clocks, Jason decided that enough time passed since his last call. He allowed himself to check the clock. Twenty minutes was close enough. He dialed Detective Woo’s number again.
April picked up. “Detective Woo.”
“It’s Jason Frank.”
“Hello, Dr. Frank,” she said cautiously.
“Call me Jason.”
April Woo did not respond to the invitation.
“I want you to think of me as a colleague,” Jason said in his warmest voice. “We can work together. I can help you.”
“You are helping,” April replied in her own warm and reassuring voice.
He knew that voice. He had one just like it, professional and distance-making. He was the doctor. He didn’t let patients tell him what to do—unless they were right. He was flexible that way. He had to make her flexible. Emma’s life depended on it.
“Look, I’ve been thinking about the tape. I can help you pinpoint places where he might have taken her, landmarks to look for. I’ve worked up a psychological profile of him.”
“Okay,” April said. “I’ll take anything you’ve got. What do you want to tell me?”
“Before I get into that, is there anything new?”
Again she paused before answering, as if trying to decide whether or not to tell him. His heart jumped. There was news.
“You can tell me. I’m a professional. Whatever it is, I can take it.”
“It might be nothing.”
“What is it?”
“I had the nine-one-ones checked out.”
“Emma called?”
“No, but there was an incomplete.”
“What does that mean?” Jason cried.
“It means someone called in and asked for help but didn’t give a name or location before hanging up.”
“Oh, God …”
“Sometimes they’re potential suicides. Sometimes they’re pranks. We get a lot of pranking, you know. It may be nothing.”
“What are you doing about it?”
“We’re having the voices on the tapes compared to see if it’s your wife’s.”
“Do you know where the call was from?”
There was another long hesitation before she finally told him. “Yeah,” she said with a note of triumph. “Queens.”
Queen Palm Way. Queens. Jason’s heart leapt. “Look, Detective, I’m coming over. I need to talk to you right away.” He hung up before she could protest.
63
Sergeant Joyce studied the photographs of the burns on the two dead girls in California and an enlarged version of the drawing on the bottom of each of the sixteen letters Emma Chapman had received. The pictures were inconclusive. There had been such discoloration of the skin in one case, she found it surprising the coroner could even tell the wound had been a burn. The other one was clearly a shape, a similar sort of shape, certainly, but as far as she could tell, not the shape of the drawing in the letters.
Joyce threw them on the desk in her office, where April had assembled all the documents and photos that represented her case against Grebs, and shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t see anything to help us in these.”
“I just got a call from that sheriff in California,” April said. “They have a witness who says he saw Ellen with Grebs the afternoon she disappeared.”
“We still don’t have anything that helps us with
April had placed Emma Chapman’s yearbook picture next to the photo of Ellen Roane in her tennis shorts. The two young women both had long blond hair and classically beautiful features. They could almost be sisters. April had a connection in the looks of the women. She had a connection in the guy’s obsession with burning. She had a suspect with a sheet that fit. And still, Joyce didn’t want to connect the two cases. April wondered if her supervisor just didn’t want to acknowledge her work.
She pushed aside the gruesome photos of the corpses found in the desert, so the two smiling girls were on top again. “Don’t you see a resemblance here?”
Joyce didn’t reply.
“Look, he
