“Okay. Do you have the name of an officer at the scene I can talk to?” April asked.
“Apparently there wasn’t one.”
“What? Then how did the M.E.’s office get the case?”
“Don’t fucking hock me, Woo. It’s a little hazy, a little unclear, understand? Maybe somebody saw something and said something to somebody. Maybe the attending was nervous about signing the death certificate. How can I fucking know how the M.E. got involved? All I know is they took the case. And now they want to know how the Ami—whatever it is got into the guy.”
April risked one more question. “Did you get the feeling there’s any suspicion of—”
In her frustration, Joyce reached for a clump of hair to pull. “Christ on the Cross, April. It’s just a routine fucking investigation. Could be the guy took the wrong medicine, could be he got too much of the right medicine. Could be an accidental overdose. Could be a suicide. It’s just not a natural.”
April didn’t like having to go to the Psychiatric Centre again so soon. There was something not quite right about those people. The doctors were as creepy as the patients, and now another person was dead. “What about the rapist?” she asked finally.
“We’re getting a profiler from downtown. Mike is talking to the university about warning the girls.” Abruptly, Sergeant Joyce got tired of talking and closed her mouth around the next victim, her left pinky.
April pushed off from the windowsill. So the guy they just put in the pen was not a suspect in the raper case. She opened the office door. Out in the squad room there was a lot of noise and a number of plainclothes she’d never seen before. She stopped at her desk to grab her bag from the bottom drawer. It looked as if a lot of extra people were about to fan out on the streets looking for a squirrel, and she wasn’t going to be one of them.
thirty-seven
At precisely three P.M. April hesitated by the two open doors to Jason Frank’s inner office. She could see Jason sitting at his desk with his back to her. In spite of the number of clocks she knew were in there, none of them happened to be chiming the hour. She wondered if she was early.
He punched a button on his laptop and swiveled around. “Hey, April, you made it.”
“Oh, my.” She tried to keep a straight face. His new beard wasn’t exactly the same length all over his face and wasn’t the same color as his head hair. The beard and mustache were grizzled, made him look older than his thirty-nine years and blunted the good looks April had always admired.
“Smartest detective in New York. How are you?” Piercing through the ragged edges, though, Jason’s dark eyes were as sharp and knowing as ever. He looked the detective over with obvious pleasure.
April was wearing black wool pants, ankle-high black boots, a red turtleneck sweater, and a black pea jacket Her short layered haircut was a little longer and fuller now. She carried the same heavy shoulder bag with an extra gun, the handcuffs, and the Mace in it. She was the only woman Jason knew who carried around such things and never forgot what they were there for … the way he never forgot he was a doctor. The last time he saw April her lipstick was pink. Now it was fire-engine red, apparently to match the sweater. She looked good.
She looked even better when she smiled. “I’m tired, Doc. How about you?”
He nodded, raising his shoulders equivocally, shook the hand that could shoot a gun, let it go reluctantly. “It’s a chronic condition.”
“So?” she murmured. “What’s with the beard? Are you Dr. Freud now?”
“Don’t you like it? I’m taking a survey.”
“It wasn’t a bad face.” April shrugged. “You undercover or something?”
Jason smiled. “Maybe.”
April picked up on the smile. Things were going better for him. Maybe he had a new girlfriend or his wife was back. “And the clocks. What happened to them?”
Jason swung around to check the bookcase. “Nothing. You’re exactly on time.”
“Why aren’t they making a racket?” April pointed to the brass bull with the clock on his back. The minute hand jumped to five past.
“Oh, only the ones at home chime.”
“Ah, silent clocks for patients.” She fell silent herself, didn’t want to ask about Emma, wasn’t sure whether she should sit down. “Sorry I had to cancel out on you twice. You know how it is when something comes up. You had some questions for me?”
“Yes, thanks for coming. You want to sit down, go out for a coffee, or stand there?”
She was starved. “How much time do you have?”
“I have to be back at four-fifteen. I get the feeling you’re hungry.”
“I am,” she admitted. The last thing she had had was scrambled egg fried rice at six, forced on her by her mother as she tried to sneak out of the house without engaging in another conversation about duty and marriage. It was the same breakfast her mother had served when she was a kid. And the same conversation they’d been having for the last nine years. Only now, thanks to Mike’s turning up on Saturday and Alice Chen’s intelligence on what had happened that afternoon, Skinny Dragon Mother had something new to obsess about. Finally getting a marriage but to the wrong kind of guy.
“It’s been a long day.” She didn’t mention her morning with Nicole Amendonde, the rape victim in ER.
Twelve minutes later they were sitting in a coffee shop on Broadway. From where they sat they could see Zabar’s, the site where Dr. Lobrinsky had so very recently lost his much-loved, canary-yellow ride. April didn’t mention that, either.
“So fill me in,” Jason said when she had put away half of her BLT and was working on a huge side of fries.
“I just got another unnatural from your shop. What’s going on there? You got people dropping dead left and right.”
“An inpatient? You going to eat all those?”
“Uh-uh.” April pushed the fries in his direction. “I’ve had it.”
“I’m not supposed to …” he muttered vaguely, tucking into them.
April dabbed her lips delicately with the paper napkin. “No, it’s not a patient, actually. It’s a doctor. Maybe you know him, guy named Dickey.”
Jason’s handful of french fries stopped halfway to his mouth. “Harold Dickey, an unnatural?”
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
“An unnatural, are you sure?”
“Well, the guy supposedly dropped dead of a heart attack, but it turns out he was full of Amitrip-ti- something.”
“Amitriptyline?” Jason frowned and shook his head as the waiter offered him the last inch of muddy coffee in the pot.
“Yeah, what is it?”
Jason raked his beard unhappily. “It’s a tricyclic.”
April looked blank. “What would someone take it for?”
“It’s an antidepressant. It’s given for depressive neurosis, manic depression. Anxiety. You might know it by its trade name. Elavil.”
April nodded. “What would Dickey have been taking it for?”
“I’m not sure. I wasn’t aware that he was depressed.” Jason raised his eyebrow, thinking it over. It was no secret that Harold liked his scotch. Maybe he’d slipped from social drinking to alcoholism, had gone on the wagon, and was taking Elavil to relieve withdrawal depression. Maybe he was self-medicating. A lot of doctors did that.
“What’s the thought?” April asked.
Jason grimaced. “Nothing. It’s complicated, that’s all. Why are the police involved?”
“Yes, it is complicated. More than you might be aware of. Dickey’s name and number were found beside the body of Raymond Cowles.”
“What?”
April nodded. “I interviewed Dickey last week, and he said he didn’t know Cowles and certainly hadn’t spoken to him the night he died.”
