well? How about her level of patience? Did she get impatient easily? Was she happy in New York? Did she ever set a fire when she was a little girl, ever hurt an animal? Did she ever get burned, or burn anybody?
'What kind of questions are these?' the mother demanded.
Routine, April assured her. She couldn't completely abandon the possibility that Heather might have found out her baby was her husband's with another woman and killed him in revenge. Such things were not completely unknown in history.
Mrs. Kwan knew what April was getting at, but insisted Heather wasn't that kind of child. Good child. Too independent, maybe, but good.
'How many months ago did your daughter tell you she was having a baby?'
Silence.
'Was she excited about it?'
'She's a good girl.'
'When you talked to her after she got the baby, what did she say? How did those weeks go? Did she enjoy having a baby?'
'What kind of questions are these?' Mrs. Kwan asked again but this time in a way that indicated she knew very well what kind of questions they were. 'Heather Rose good girl,' she assured April again. 'Best daughter in whole world. She call me every week. Never complain. Never.' But Soo Ling Kwan must have heard something in her daughter's voice during those weekly calls.
She insisted Heather Rose had suffered no injuries, no accidents, had never hurt or starved herself. But she had also immediately jumped to the conclusion that any call from the police had to mean her daughter was dead. It might not be an unusual reaction, but still April wondered if a part of Mrs. Kwan had been expecting such an end for her daughter. She learned nothing else.
If it had been a quiet night, April would have been heading out about now. But this was the kind of case that made everybody nuts. Even if Iriarte hadn't told her to keep on it, she wouldn't have been in a hurry to leave. Nobody liked abuse and missing babies. They weren't the kind of thing you could go home and forget: have a nice night. Losing a kid was the worst. It was more than a career maker or breaker. It was personal. She glanced at the stack of pink message slips on her desk. Then her phone rang.
'Midtown North detective squad, Sergeant Woo,' she said in nice even tones.
She smiled into the receiver. 'Hey, Mike.'
'Miss me?'
'Yeah,' she admitted in spite of herself. Then she wanted to bite her tongue for revealing her feelings.
'How's the case going?' she asked, playing with a pencil. Mike had gotten a homicide two days ago, a real mess in a hotel on Lexington Avenue. All she'd heard were rumors that State Department, intelligence, and Israeli consulate people were working on it. For some reason he'd been holding out on giving her the details. Now he grunted.
'Victim was an Israeli. His business partner claims he had ten thousand dollars in cash and a sack of diamonds worth a quarter of a million when he was iced. ME's report says he was tortured and his crown jewels were hacked off while he was still alive. Poor bastard bled to death.'
She knew Mike had attended the autopsy; now she knew the reason for his silence. Ugly, ugly case. She made a sympathetic noise, didn't envy him.
His voice brightened. 'I hear you caught a big one, too.'
'What do you hear?'
'Nothing—just you caught a big one. Need help?'
'No, thanks. You didn't ask for mine.' April bristled; she wasn't good at inequality.
'You don't want to know about this one.'
'Sure I do. And you just hate being left out of anything.'
'Give me a break. Is it a sin to be supportive? I thought that's what every woman wants.'
'Sorry. I'm a little touchy about this one. It's weird.'
'Not as weird as mine,' he shot back.
'Fine, it's not as weird as yours, but still it's weird.' She gave him the gist of it, relieved to get it off her chest.
'Ransom note or call?'
'No.'
'Anything on the phone tap?'
'Nothing yet, but I'd be real surprised if we get a ransom demand on this one,' she said. 'It's not her baby. But don't pass that around.'
'No kidding.'
'Get this: the husband of the victim says his mistress is the mother of the baby. She's married to someone in the military and has taken off for parts unknown.—Oh, and the victim is Chinese,' she added suddenly. 'The father's white. The whole thing makes me queasy.'
'It has nothing to do with us,' Mike said quickly, catching the subtext even before it came into focus in April's mind. Then he moved on. 'I had a case once, man faked an abduction of his own baby. His motive was he didn't want a custody battle when he divorced his wife. Poor woman went around the bend when her baby disappeared. That's when he filed for divorce.'
'What did he do with the baby?'
'Oh, he'd given it to his girlfriend in New Jersey the first day. He'd set up an apartment for her, everything. They wanted to get married and have a family right away.'
Another girlfriend. And Heather Rose had no idea, her husband had said. April thought of the duck defrosting in the sink. People were out looking for a dead infant. She wanted to clear Heather Rose of any suspicion that she'd killed her rival's baby. 'You voting for the husband as the kidnapper, then?' she murmured.
'Not yet. Remember those girls in New Jersey? One gave birth in the girls' bathroom during her high school prom, suffocated the baby, then went back to the dance. The other gave birth in a motel, killed her baby, and was back in her college dorm in time for her next class. Then there's the girl in Ohio gave birth and killed the baby while her mother was out to dinner. When the mother got back, they sat and watched TV for the rest of the evening —'
There went the duck-proves-innocence theory. 'Those were young, unmarried teenagers, terrified of their parents. This is a mature—'
'Hell hath no fury . . .' he reminded her.
April had a stomachache. It had been bothering her for hours. She wanted baby Paul found alive and well, didn't want Heather Rose to be a killer or the father to be a kidnapper with a girlfriend in New Jersey.
Mike changed the subject. 'You want to come over to my place? I'll make it worth your while.'
'Can't, I'm staying with it,' she said, and felt a guilty pang. Skinny was going to freak if she didn't come home two nights in a row—even if she had a good excuse. Then she thought if things quieted down, she might go home for a few hours, after all.
'Call me when you can.'
'Sure.' April hung up. Depression settled on her as she cleaned up her desk, picked up her jacket, and headed out into the field to see if the baby had turned up in the last fifteen minutes. He hadn't.
Three hours later, with no break in the case, April parked in front of the brick house she shared with her parents in Astoria, Queens, not far from Hoyt Avenue and the entrance to the Triborough Bridge. She got out of the car, locked up slowly, then stretched, feeling the space around her like a blind person picking out obstacles in the dark. All she wanted was to see her mom and have a quick nap before changing her clothes and heading back to work.
The street was quiet, but cop habits made her check for signs of trouble. Only a few lights in the surrounding houses were on this late. Some of the people who lived around here were old and had trouble sleeping. April knew everybody's routine. On this block all the houses were attached, single-family homes. A lot of Greeks and Italians, Brazilians and Indians, not that many Chinese. April's father, Ja Fa Woo, had chosen the place with the help of an almost-relative, the owner of Chen Realty in Long Island City. He'd chosen the location in spite of the ethnic makeup
