Burning Time

“That doesn’t mean he’s here.”

April shrugged. “It could mean he’s here.”

“This isn’t his MO,” Joyce said flatly.

“Maybe not,” April agreed. “But sometimes they do it differently each time. And he knew her. Of course it could be a coincidence that he knew her.…”

“You know it isn’t a coincidence.” Joyce glanced down at the two lovely, golden-haired girls. “But we don’t have a desert here for him to leave her in.”

Talk about lack of imagination. Didn’t have a desert. April suddenly remembered her first case in this precinct. Sergeant Joyce had sent her into a townhouse where the worried owner had been afraid the Chinese cook might have murdered the Chinese maid and hidden the body somewhere in the house. There was a horrendous smell in the place, unbearable, and the maid had disappeared under suspicious circumstances several days before, leaving all her possessions behind. The owner couldn’t find the source of the smell. It seemed to be coming from the very core of the house.

It was a big house, four stories high, with a huge basement kitchen and laundry room. The place had marble stairways and marble bathrooms with gold faucets in the shape of dolphins. April had talked to the Chinese cook for a long time. He confessed he hated the maid. He had a lot of grievances. The maid had turned down his advances. It made him mad. She was eating their employer’s leftovers. That was no good. No one gave her permission to eat the leftover food.

Then she got hungry, but he wouldn’t let her into the kitchen to make her own food. It was his kitchen. So she took food into her room to dry it like in China.

“What kind of food?” April asked him.

“Fish,” he had replied with disgust.

“She tried to dry the fish in her room?”

Yes, that was it. “Only this New York, not Hong Kong. Fish no dry.”

When he talked to the maid about getting rid of the fish, they had a screaming fight, and she lost face, wouldn’t come back, not even for her things.

“Not many things,” the cook had said scornfully about her possessions.

April located the result of their feud in one of the heating vents in the basement. The smell of rotting fish was being pumped everywhere. She found the woman in New Jersey with a friend. She refused to come back.

This New York, not Hong Kong: Fish no dry. It made April think Grebs had something else in mind for Emma Chapman. He meant to kill her and hide her somewhere.

“Maybe he plans to change his MO on this one,” April told her lack-of-imagination supervisor.

“Maybe.” Joyce had taken her jacket off and was sweating in her green blouse. April noted that it was too dark a color for her. Joyce looked sallow, and the sweat rings under her arms revealed that she was worried, too. It made April feel better.

“I have a dozen people out there with his picture. Better get it to every precinct in the city,” she said.

April nodded. Yes, Sergeant. Right away, Sergeant.

“Do you have a voice match yet on that nine-one-one to Queens?” Joyce switched focus.

“They’re working on it.” April tapped her fingers on the desk. She was in a hurry to get away.

“Where’s Sanchez?”

“He went down to the lab to sit on them.” April still stood in front of Joyce’s desk. She didn’t like to sit down in there. “I want to talk to the husband again,” she said after a minute.

“Oh, what does he know?”

“He’s a shrink. He found the guy in the first place.”

“Yeah, you told me.”

“He knows where he works. He’s seen where the guy lives, where he grew up, even talked to his aunt. He knows Grebs’s background.”

“So?”

“He’s a shrink. He’s done a workup on Grebs, a profile of his habits that might help us find him.”

“So talk to him again.”

Sergeant Joyce’s phone rang. She picked it up and began to speak. April stood there. After a minute Joyce put her hand over the receiver.

“What?” she demanded.

“He wants to go for a drive,” April said.

Joyce shook her head. “What are you, crazy?”

“Just checking.”

April left the office.

Dr. Frank was waiting for her downstairs.

64

Claudia Bartello felt uncomfortable. She had a feeling there was another vibration in the house, something more than the traffic at the height of the rush hour on the bridge. Sometimes it sounded like a hum. Sometimes it sounded like weeping. Twice she thought she heard screams. She moved around the house, upstairs and downstairs, looking for the source of the noise, as if it were an odor she could ferret out and purge.

Since Arturo died a year ago, there had been times when the lights had been funny. They made a crackling kind of noise, or flashed on and off for no reason. She did not question the possibility of there being a ghost in the house. He died there. Right on the front steps while she was in the kitchen making dinner. Without a sound or anything. He just fell over on the way up the stairs and died on her. Maybe he was still mad at her for not knowing, for letting a neighbor find him almost a whole hour later. That would be something he’d be mad about.

But more likely it wasn’t a ghost. It was that man in the garage with his naked girlfriend. The woman hadn’t left yet. Claudia was pretty sure of that. No one had been outside of that garage door. She considered going in and complaining. She considered calling that Irish policeman and telling him something funny was going on. What was his name?

The problem was she didn’t know how to call the police, what number to dial. It wasn’t the number they flashed on the TV screen for emergencies. Arturo tried that once when the car got bumped from behind. After he told them no one was hurt, they promised to send someone over. But no one ever came.

How to get the right number? Her eyes were not good enough to struggle with the phone book. She wouldn’t know where to look in it anyway. And he didn’t seem like he was very interested. She wanted another policeman. An Italian she could talk to, explain about Arturo and the man in the garage. Sometimes the hum seemed like voices arguing.

Claudia could have a whopper of an argument with Arturo right now. What did he mean building a little apartment upstairs that you couldn’t get to without going through the garage and up the stairs at the back? It didn’t make sense. But Arturo never had any sense. He said he wanted to make it hard for people to bother him. Nice.

One thing she could say about herself. She might be old, but there was nothing wrong with her hearing. Claudia could hear dirty things happening on the other side of her wall. She’d heard things like that before. She just hadn’t heard it at eleven in the morning. At twelve.

At one o’clock she decided to do something about it. She shuffled to the front door, remembering first to put her sweater on because it still felt chilly to her. She didn’t put her heavy shoes on because she wasn’t going far, and her feet were swollen. The soft slippers were easier to walk in.

She left the front door unlocked. She didn’t want to have to struggle with the key, and she was coming right back. Finally, for the second time that day, she grabbed the railing and carefully maneuvered the steps that killed Arturo. There were only three of them, and they were not very steep, but Claudia was afraid of falling and did not like them.

When she was on level ground at last, she shuffled down the path to the sidewalk in front of the house. She