Once people got posted in the hinterlands, it was like they were filed away in a drawer and forgotten. It was real hard to get into Manhattan after a few years in Queens or the Bronx. Only way was to be in some special unit. April spent a second of spiteful satisfaction thinking of Jimmy Wong, not ever likely to come out of Night Watch in Brooklyn. Ha. She was going to be sergeant before him. Make him lose face twice. Double stupid Jimmy Wong.
This was amazing. She had been standing there talking to Tony for almost three full minutes without a single interruption. Boy, this place was really quiet. She’d probably shoot herself if she had to work out here. She had left the car double-parked outside. There was hardly any traffic, and nothing much going on outside the precinct on the street. Really quiet.
The building was more like the 5th in appearance than the Two-O. The Two-O was big, a blue brick building that looked like a school. This was made of sandstone that was dark with age. It was low and squat, old and shabby.
“So, if you didn’t know I was here, to what do we owe the honor of your visit?” Tony said, attempting gallantry.
April had a quick vision of the captured noblewoman in the cave and shook her head. “Have you had a complaint last night, or maybe today? A woman, thirty-three, white, name of Emma Chapman?”
He shook his head. “What about her?”
“She disappeared from the street last night in Manhattan.”
“What makes you think she’s out here?” Tony looked unimpressed.
“It’s a long story. There was an incomplete nine-one-one from Queens last night. Might have been her. There are a few other indications.”
“Look, April, you better go upstairs. There’s a shift change in a few minutes. I’ll ask around when the guys come in, see if anybody knows anything.”
April pulled the sheets with the photos of Emma Chapman and Troland Grebs out of her bag and handed some over. The face of Emma Chapman jumped out at her again. The high cheekbones, the generous mouth, Caucasian eyes, blue as the sky on a sunny day. The colors of the woman that didn’t show in the black-and-white repro were summer colors. She had white skin and hair the color of sand, pale sand, red lips. April wore red lipstick, too, sometimes; but her colors were winter. She had black hair and black eyes tucked deep in Mongolian folds, brown skin. The kind of beauty Emma Chapman had was not just in the eye of the beholder. She was beautiful to anybody who looked at her. In the picture Emma had a wedding ring on her finger and a gold chain around her neck. April had no good jewelry except some pearl earrings, and a jade ring for good luck. It wasn’t a very good piece of jade. It was too dark a green, and it didn’t give much luck.
“These are the people we’re looking for,” she told Tony.
“Who’s the guy?”
“He’s the suspect in her abduction.”
She turned and headed up the stairs to the detectives’ room. They were always on the second floor and looked pretty much the same. A lot of desks, filing cabinets, a questioning room with a big table where the detectives sometimes had lunch. The obligatory lockers in the back. The only difference was this one had a wet patch in the ceiling from which a steady drip was falling into a half-filled pail on the floor. The room was empty. As April studied the drip in the bucket, a voice came out of nowhere.
“If they don’t come and fix that soon, the whole ceiling will come down on us. I hope it happens after eleven. I’m Detective Bergman. What can I do for you?”
April took two steps further into the room before she realized that Bergman’s desk was hidden behind a bank of filing cabinets. Very clever. He could see her, but she couldn’t see him. She crossed the room toward the voice.
“Detective April Woo, from the Two-O,” she said, showing her ID. She tried not to be startled when she finally got a look at Bergman. He was a burly man with intense dark eyes that seemed to jump right out of his briar patch of a beard.
“We need some help with a search,” she added.
“Who you looking for, Detective?”
April pulled out her copies of the two tapes and the photo sheets and settled into the hard metal chair by his desk.
“You have a tape machine?” she asked.
Bergman with all the hair on his face nodded curiously. Yeah, he had a tape machine. It was just after four. April hoped Sanchez would hurry up and get over the bridge before the traffic got worse.
67
Claudia Bartello looked up in surprise at her tenant in the leather jacket, the jeans, and the motorcycle boots.
“I thought you weren’t dressed,” she said accusingly, looking sharply around the room.
Troland glared at her. He couldn’t believe it. Her head seemed to come out of her neck at a funny angle that he hadn’t noticed before. There was something wrong with her. Maybe that was why she stood inside the door the whole time that first day when he came and didn’t even ask him in.
Now she looked like a joke to him. She looked like some kind of enraged comic book crone with a lumpy body, swollen ankles, and a mouth that seemed to be shaking a stick at him.
“Where is she?” she demanded, turning toward the closed bedroom door. “I want to see her.”
What should he do? Troland didn’t feel like moving his mouth to talk to her. She was an ugly thing that was upsetting him. He had work to do, a whole lot of work, and he hadn’t slept the night before. He could feel the muscles cramping in his neck and hands and shoulders. He was so deeply into it he hadn’t felt any fatigue until now.
He wanted to punch her in the mouth for interrupting him. His face was impassive, but his hand closed tightly around the lighter in his pocket.
“Why don’t you answer me? You never answer me.”
Suddenly the old lady launched into a full-blown tirade with a whole list of complaints that made no sense. She was screaming and carrying on like the crazy woman who had upset him so much in the subway. He had walked out of the car, and she had followed him, hitching up her filthy skirt and urinating between cars as he tried to get away.
“I want you out of here. I want you
The finger kept jabbing at him. He backed a few inches away from it, trying to decide what to do. He couldn’t believe this. She was hardly four and a half feet tall and didn’t seem to get that it wasn’t a good idea to scream at him. He couldn’t hear when somebody started screaming at him. The pressure to do something about it was building up.
His gaze shifted uneasily to the bedroom. He’d left all his stuff there. He didn’t want to leave the witch alone in there with his stuff too long. She was tricky. Sometimes she seemed to be fainting and she really wasn’t. She just went somewhere else for a while and wouldn’t talk to him or listen or groan or anything. He didn’t like that.
He had a feeling she got some kind of power when she passed out. Like she was charging up from some outside evil source he didn’t know about. It was clear to him now that coming to her here was an even more important thing than he had thought. She was more than a fallen angel who had betrayed him. She was actually a witch he had been sent to burn. He couldn’t leave her for a second. The last time he left her she got the ropes untied. No one he ever tied up got out before, which more than proved she was a witch. He had to get back to her right away.
He was trying to figure it out, how he was going to get it all done. And the old woman was still shrieking at him, distracting him from what was important.
“Get your stuff and get out now,” she was screaming.
“Shhh,” he said, opening his mouth for the first time.
There was just no way he was ready to get out. He had stenciled the whole body, thighs, crotch, breasts,
