thunder in his ears. He felt almost sick with desire as he waited for her.
But April didn’t follow him into her room. He waited and waited, but she didn’t come for his embrace. Why didn’t she come in? He began to pace, unwilling to leave the bedroom but uneasy about forcing the issue. Finally he poked his head out the door. Steam was beginning to pulse out of the archway into the kitchen. The steam was not April’s desire. The water in the kettle had begun to boil. In a second the kettle whistled, sending his heart into shocked awareness that she had not invited him in for love.
“Mike.”
She summoned him. There was nothing he could do but leave the place of his dreams. As he emerged painfully from her room, she handed him the drink she’d been so busily preparing in the kitchen. He regarded the steaming cup of green liquid with deep distrust. It had a bitter smell.
“Maybe some other time,” he muttered.
“Drink it,” she commanded. “It’ll make you feel better.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine,” he lied.
“No, you don’t.” She clamped a hand on his forehead. “You’re all clammy, you’re sweating. You have a fever. Drink it, you’ll get better.”
That was how April allowed Mike Sanchez close enough to die for her but not close enough to touch. He had to drink the foul herbal tea to get out of there. And only after he drank the tea and told her he felt better would she agree to get in his car.
Then he told her where they were going. At one on Sunday, every Sunday without fail, his
April talked about the missing Boudreau file and how that bothered her, but she did not ask any questions. She glanced at him two, three times as they drove to the Bronx, as they parked on Broadway, then again as they waited for the elevator in the low brick building where he lived. He didn’t want to talk about work. She could see how nervous he was.
“Don’t worry, it’s not a big deal,” he kept saying. “I saw yours, you see mine. That’s all. Not a big thing.”
He kept saying it was no big thing, but his heart was going crazy again.
The aromas that greeted them as they stepped out of the elevator on his floor were almost unbearably delicious. Clearly his mother had outdone herself. He could smell onions and peppers, chicken mole, beans and melting cheese. He glanced surreptitiously at April. She didn’t like cheese. He wanted her to like it.
“Smells good,” she murmured as he turned the key in the lock.
“Yeah, my father taught her everything.” Mike opened the door into a room warm with cooking and filled with heavy wooden furniture piled with bright pillows covered in coarsely woven fabrics with bold geometric patterns. He smiled encouragingly, then turned to the table by the window, where his mother sat bathed in the midday sun.
Maria Sanchez had her long hair down her back. She was wearing a purple taffeta dress, with a ruffle around the neckline low enough to reveal the tops of her plump, round breasts. When the door opened, one of her arms was outstretched and her hand was pressed to the lips of a dapper little man with a high pompadour and a bright green shirt.
Mike froze as if confronted by a couple of Uzis. Equally stunned, his mother gaped at him, then at the beautiful dark-haired woman in the red sweater and black jacket beside him, then back at him. Finally her surprised face relaxed into a wreath of smiles.
“
fifty-five
Bobbie Boudreau did not need to send the Treadwell bitch any more messages. The old woman was right. Treadwell had called in the FBI. She knew he was out there now, and she was running scared. He liked that. A suit was guarding her building, an FBI agent, not a cop. He knew a cop would look like a homeless person or a delivery man from Pizza Hut. The suit you could pick out from two blocks away, right down to the device in his ear so somebody could talk to him from another planet. Just like they did for the President of the United States. Bobbie had to be pretty important if they had to call in the FBI to keep him out of Treadwell’s office. He guessed by now there was another suit standing outside the executive suite on the twentieth floor. It made him want to laugh. Did they think he was stupid?
He could stand out in plain view and they wouldn’t see him. They didn’t know jackshit. Let the police come, let the FBI come, let the whole fucking Army come. What would they find? Nothing. The whole thing made him want to laugh. How long did they think they could secure the area? A week, two weeks, a month?
They could hang around a whole year, for all he cared. This was his territory. He’d been here for fifteen years. He wasn’t going anywhere. He stayed underground most of the time he wasn’t working. Let them worry about where he was and what he was doing. Let them think whoever was bothering the bitch was gone now, far away. He wasn’t showing up for any party with the feds. This wasn’t Waco. This wasn’t Oklahoma. This wasn’t big-time stuff so they could hang out there for weeks just waiting for him to make a move. This was a fucking shrink who killed her patients with words. Whispered nasty little somethings in their ears and down they fell like bowling pins. Bobbie had heard the gossip about the patient who committed suicide because of her. Probably wasn’t the first. These doctors could do anything. They were licensed to kill. Nobody could stop them. She was no better than the bastard back in ’Nam, practicing open-heart surgery on healthy hearts because he wanted to do bypass surgery when he got out. Nobody would say anything. Nobody tried to stop him.
So now it was proven. Words in the mouths of shrinks could kill. Same as guns. Same as explosives, same as poison. Shit—they were carrying concealed weapons that could maim and kill. And nobody had the power to stop them. Only God had the power, and He was taking care of them in His own sweet time.
It was no sin to be on God’s side in this. It was necessary, like war. Sooner or later the FBI was going to be finished bugging and wiring the place. They’d get tired of watching and listening and waiting for him to do something they could nail him for. And then they’d go back to wherever they came from and he’d come out of the basement.
fifty-six
April didn’t sleep well after the lunch with Mike’s mother and the boyfriend he hadn’t known anything about, and after she saw the place he wanted to rent in Queens. Her insomnia didn’t have anything to do with the food, which had been impressive even to her. The apartment was all right, too. It had a terrace and was higher up than either April or Mike had ever lived. Judy was trying to get Mike a special deal on the rent because the landlord wanted a nice quiet cop in the building.
There were a lot of problems with change. April tossed around, worrying about why she was driven to push so hard for advancement when advancement would only take her away from the Two-O, where at least she knew who her enemies were. She had no idea where she was headed or what would happen to her and Mike if they messed up on the Dickey case. Nothing was exactly crystal-clear in this case except that there were a number of songs playing simultaneously and all they had picked up so far were the tunes of the dead men.
The easy homicides are the boyfriend/girlfriend cases. There’s no mystery there. You can see them coming a mile away. Ten miles away. Was Dickey’s death a boyfriend/girlfriend thing? Or was it a revenge thing by a guy who’d poisoned a patient with an antidepressant, harassed the head of the hospital—who conveniently neglected to tell anybody about it for a full six months—and then spiked a doctor’s scotch bottle with the same drug that made the crazy patient a flier a year ago? It was pure speculation, right down to the spiking of the scotch bottle, because the bottle, if there had ever actually been one, had disappeared. April made a mental note to check the building’s garbage even though it would be some job to find a bottle tossed out a week before.
And what was the story with this guy from the FBI? Daveys seemed pretty hot on Boudreau as the killer. But if Dickey’s death was really connected with the Cowles suicide, then how did Boudreau fit into that scenario? Was he really the perfect suspect?
April rolled around in her single bed worrying about the case, trying not to think about sex with Mike in his
