weren’t able to make that confirmation for me?” The tape and the tape machine were still on the table.
“What’s taking so long?” Dr. Frank looked at his watch.
April shook her head. She didn’t know why it was taking so long. “Why don’t you go home for a while? I’ll call you as soon as I know.”
“I can’t go home,” he said miserably.
“Well, you can stay here, but when I go out, you can’t come with me. Look, if I learn something, I’ll call you.”
“I want to be there when you find her.”
It wasn’t so easy. It didn’t work like that. April stared at him. They might find Emma Chapman soon. They might not find her for days. By then the press would be involved. Dr. Frank would be on TV. The precinct chief would be making statements. Emma Chapman would probably be dead, and there’d be a media free-for-all. She didn’t want to say any of that.
“Look,” she said, “you’ve done a lot. You broke the case. Don’t tell anybody I said it, but it’s the truth. Now you have to let me do my job.”
“Please, April. She needs me.” Jason was pleading with her. “I have to be there.”
So, now they were friends. He was calling her by her first name. She shook her head. “I have no choice. This isn’t my call. You can’t come in the car with me. It could endanger you. It could endanger me or your wife. You have to go home. As soon as I have something, I’ll call you. As soon as we locate her, you’ll be there. I promise.”
“No. That isn’t good enough.”
“Dr. Frank, I understand how you feel.
“But this is different—”
“Dr. Frank, would you send a civilian out on a battle-field?”
“Look, here you’re an untrained civilian. Do you want to get in the way of the investigation and waste time?”
“No, but—”
“Then go home and take a shower. Call me in an hour, okay?”
“Do I smell that bad?”
April didn’t smile. “You look like you’d feel a lot better, Doctor, if you stood under the shower for a while.”
“Twenty minutes,” he said, looking at his watch again.
April went back upstairs. Everybody was out in the field. The squad room was nearly empty, and Sanchez wasn’t back. She beeped him. He called in a few minutes later.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“I’m not exactly sure. Either there are other priorities ahead of us, or the machine that does voice matches is down, or the person who runs the machine left early. I could try another lab,” he suggested. “Too bad she didn’t say a few more words. Then we’d be able to tell it was Chapman’s voice calling from Queens and wouldn’t have to be going through all this. Any luck with the husband?”
“About the voice match? I played it for him five times.”
“What did he say?”
“The only recognizable word on the tape is ‘help.’ He said the woman sounded drugged. He wasn’t sure it was his wife. He got really upset because he couldn’t be sure.”
“Should I try another lab?”
“Look, the husband’s panicked about time, and so am I. He seems sure the guy isn’t going to keep her around for long. He thinks if he hasn’t killed her already, he’ll do it soon. I’m going to go out to Queens with the pictures.”
“You’re not going to wait for confirmation on the nine-one-one?”
“I can’t sit here waiting.… Anyway, I think it’s Queens,” April said.
“Any particular reason?”
April thought for a second. She trusted the shrink. That was the reason. “It fits the profile,” she said finally.
“Okay, I’ll leave now and meet you. Where are you going?”
She told him, picked up her bag and the stack of photos, and went to tell Joyce what she and Sanchez were doing.
Joyce gave her a sour look. “Okay, but keep it quiet. You heard what the chief said about leaking the story.”
Actually April hadn’t heard what he said. Sergeant Joyce reported what he said. The chief hadn’t spoken to April in the nine months she had been there, and probably had no idea who she was. But all the same April knew what he’d have to say to her now. Detective Woo and Sergeant Sanchez were on their way out to Queens, fine. He wouldn’t limit their investigation to the neighborhood. But if the missing woman turned up in Queens, it better be those detectives from the Two-O in Manhattan who located her. And they better do it without alerting the whole world.
“You want me to call in?” April asked.
Joyce looked at April as if she were some kind of moron.
“Yes, call in. Just be cryptic. You know what cryptic means?”
A flush of outrage at the insult spread across April’s face as she nodded that she knew what the word meant. Sure, her supervisor had put a lot of other people on April Woo’s case without reassigning it away from her. But that wouldn’t stop April from hating Joyce anyway.
66
“Hey, April Woo. What the hell are you doing out here?”
April stared in surprise at the large red-faced desk sergeant. She had just stepped into the Astoria precinct near where she lived and was startled to hear her name. She didn’t think she knew anyone here.
“I don’t believe this. We go to school together, through the Academy together, and you don’t remember me,” the sergeant said, throwing up his hands. “I’m really hurt.”
She struggled for a second, trying to fit the familiar voice into the chubby form in front of her. The guy was fat. Nobody in the Academy was fat. Nobody she ever knew was that fat.
“Come on, April, it’s—”
“Oh, my God, it’s
“Yeah,” he said sheepishly. “It happens.”
“What are you doing sitting at a desk in Queens? Last time I saw you you were on foot patrol in Little Italy.”
“Yeah, you got out of that faster than I did. Weren’t you in a car in Brooklyn?”
“Oh, God, has it been that long? I was a detective in the Fifth for four and a half years after that,” she said proudly.
“The old neighborhood. Hey, that’s great. I’ve been here for three years.” He shrugged. “Can’t complain.”
“Better not,” she said with a smile. “I live around here.”
“No kidding? You never stop in. Where are you working now?”
April made a face. “Upper West Side, the Two-O.”
He whistled. “Manhattan. You have all the luck.”
April ducked her head. She had known he would say that. There were over thirty-five thousand cops in NYPD.
