Hanging Time

“Yeah, we got hungry. We ate it,” Mike said.

“Shit, you didn’t!” Aspirante punched a locker. It made a nice metallic bang.

“It didn’t have your name on it,” Mike said, deadpan.

“It was mine.” Aspirante pushed by him and opened the box. Three congealing slices with pepperoni and mush-rooms were neatly arranged in the middle.

Aspirante turned away from Sergeant Joyce and mouthed the words “fuck you” at Sanchez.

Mike nodded.

“Cut the shit,” Joyce said sharply. “We just left a suspect in the office.”

Where the case file was. Very smart.

They trooped to the office. By the time they got there, they had a plan.

April turned to Mike before they went in. “How’s Braun?”

Mike shook his head. “He’ll probably limp for life—and get a citation. He said he missed you, wanted to know why you weren’t there at the hospital, paying your respects.”

“Nice. What did you tell him?”

“I said you were busy, but you were planning to come by first minute you got.”

“Oh, wonderful. I’ll remember that.”

Sergeant Joyce opened the door quickly. Milicia sat there with her legs crossed the other way, drumming her fingers on the arm of the chair, trying to look as if she hadn’t made a move since they left. The Maggie Wheeler file was where Sergeant Joyce had put it, under a stack of color-coded forms with her empty coffee cup that said LIFE IS A BEACH on top.

“Would you like a cup of coffee, Miss Stanton?” Sergeant Joyce sat down at her desk.

“I want to see my sister. I’m extremely worried about her.”

“I understand, but we need your help first. Can you tell us a little about your dogs?”

Milicia stared. “What?”

“Your dogs. You and your sister have little poodles. We’re going to need to know all about those dogs.”

A muscle jumped in Milicia’s cheek. She didn’t speak for a long time. It didn’t take a genius to see she wasn’t prepared for any dog questions.

April glanced at Mike. His mustache twitched with the ghost of a smile. The ghost struck her in the heart. She left the room to make a call.

69

Max was having his first session since he got back from his vacation in Paris.

“Bonjour,” he said with a long face as he walked in the door. “It’s shit to be back.”

“Thanks very much, and the same to you,” Jason replied.

Although Jason was several years older than Max, they had attended the same medical school and shared some of the same professors. Max was a surgeon who had been referred to Jason about five years ago when he plunged into a deep depression after losing a patient during a complicated breast reconstruction. His treatment with Jason had gone well. They’d terminated three years later.

The reason for his return to therapy, Max reported, was that his second wife, Lydia, wanted to get a divorce and take their three-year-old daughter, the only child he had, to another state to live. Max was bitter and didn’t understand what was wrong with Lydia.

Since their last meeting, Max’s hair had turned white. He’d gained about forty pounds, and was grossly overweight now. His face was round and full and looked like a bowl of vanilla pudding. Jason had been shocked. And that wasn’t the only change. When Jason knew him he was married to a lovely woman called Alison who had worked in a bank to support him through his many years of training. The last Jason heard, Max was doing well, and Alison was quitting work so they could have a family.

Instead, he divorced Alison to marry the secretary he was sharing with his two partners in the practice. Now he was furious with Lydia for leaving him. And for insisting he purchase a big house for her in Virginia.

“So what went wrong?” Jason asked after he had heard the whole story.

All right, Max admitted, so he was fucking his surgical nurse. What was the big deal? Why did Lydia have to make this whole big thing about it? Why couldn’t she just move into a modest apartment nearby where he could see his daughter every day? Why did she have to be a bitch about everything? Why couldn’t she shut her mouth and just be nice? That had been the crux of his complaint for the past several months. He had to get to his complaint. He never started with it. And it would be a very long time before he could get past his complaints to the issue of his behavior.

True to form, Max lay down on the couch and started describing in minute detail the surgical procedure he had performed earlier that morning. Then he talked about Paris. Pamela, the surgical nurse, got some kind of bug and threw up the whole time. Max had found it all pretty disgusting.

Jason stifled a yawn. It was his birthday, and he wasn’t feeling sympathetic. He looked at the clock on his desk and wondered when Emma would call. As he was wondering, the phone rang.

“I have to take this,” Jason said. “I’m screening my calls this morning.” He picked up before the second ring.

“Hi, it’s April. Is this a good time?”

Jason glanced at Max’s highly polished loafers at the foot of his analyst’s couch. One was crossed over the other. The one on top jiggled impatiently. “I have a minute.”

“We have a problem. Our only witness thinks the murderer was a woman. Is there any way you could come over and question Camille again?”

Jason’s adrenaline kicked in. He didn’t have time to be so deeply involved in this. He was supposed to meet Charles in two hours, and he had another patient before that. He looked at the clock again. Max’s foot continued to jiggle. “It’s not convenient,” he murmured.

He didn’t leave his office unless it was a medical emergency, a question of life or death. That was his rule. He never broke it.

“Murder isn’t convenient for anybody. Look, I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t urgent.”

“I know.” Jason hesitated. He owed her. He’d probably be paying for the rest of his life.

“Please, just this once,” April pressed.

It wasn’t exactly a question of life, but he figured it was a question of death. “Okay, all right, I’ll do it. But if you want me in on this, you’ll have to fill me in on everything you have. I can’t work in the dark.”

“Fine.”

They set the time for a meeting in forty minutes and hung up.

“What was that all about?” Max demanded.

“You know I can’t tell you that,” Jason replied mildly. “You were telling me about Pamela.”

Max shook his head. “What do these women want?” he said bitterly. “Whatever you do for them, it’s just never enough.”

Jason watched the bobbing loafer express Max’s frustration. It would take a long time to get anywhere with him. Max had some difficulty with his conscience. He seemed to have no shame. None at all.

An hour later, armed with his notes from the previous night, Jason sat facing Sergeant Sanchez and April Woo in the downstairs questioning room he was getting to know all too well. The tape recorder was on the table.

Even though the wired windows to the outside were open, it was hot in the green room with the cracked plaster ceiling and the dirty linoleum floor. They had gone over the thick Maggie Wheeler file with the autopsy report and dozens of transcribed detective interviews and reports, and the thinner Rachel Stark file. So far that contained only the autopsy and crime-scene reports. Splayed across the table were the crime-scene and autopsy photos of both victims.

On Jason’s side of the table a full cup of cold coffee and the five empty Sweet’n Low packets he’d used in it were all that separated him from the macabre pictures of the dead girls. He couldn’t drink the coffee and kept