Stealing Time

He locked the office, walked the ten paces down the hall to his apartment, and opened the door to the sound of his home collection of clocks, some still chiming noon at seven minutes past the hour. He didn't pause to look at the mail on the table because he was puzzled by the sound of voices in the living room. Stepping through the open French doors, he saw Emma sprawled awkwardly on the sofa. Her eight-months-pregnant belly protruded so far that the knot of her navel showed through her cotton T-shirt. Opposite her, trying not to look at it, were April Woo and the young detective who was her new partner.

'How long have you been here?' he asked, taken aback by the unexpected visitors.

'Just a few minutes. We were hoping to catch you between sessions.' April stole another look at Emma's belly, and Emma grinned, clearly pleased at the stunned reaction she was getting from the two cops.

'She's pregnant,' April said, clearly shocked. 'So that's why she quit the show.'

'It was getting kind of hard to convince audiences I'd been a sexually repressed and spurned wife for ten years.' Emma laughed, then beamed at her husband, clearly happy at last.

'Thanks for telling me,' April grumbled. She was just crabby enough to make Jason wonder if she was a little jealous. Her eyes slid down to her own stomach, so flat the front of her skirt was undisturbed by it even when she was sitting down.

He smiled shyly. Yes, they were having a baby. His and Emma's lives had changed for the better. Heather Popescu's beating and the missing infant had come at a bad time for him. He glanced at Detective Baum, shifting uneasily in the comfortable club chair, and blew air through his nose in sympathy for the male embarrassment at fertility. Then he sat on the sofa next to Emma and took her hand.

'Here we are again,' she said, squeezing his hand. 'Just when I thought a normal life was possible.'

'There's no such thing as normal life.' Jason nudged her with his elbow because for April, barging in on people at inconvenient times with a lot of cop questions

was

normal life.

'Oh, I'm not mad,' Emma responded, so quickly that Jason got the feeling that the two women, who'd met under the worst possible circumstances, were actually beginning to hit it off.

'Didn't you get my message?' Jason asked April.

'I wanted to talk to you in person. Are you coming home for lunch now that you're going to be a father? It would be a good thing to know.' April was clearly proud that she'd found a way around his office and telephone rules by conspiring with his wife.

Jason couldn't help smiling at Emma. 'You got me over here for them, didn't you? Sneaky.'

'You beat me to the hospital this morning,' April said. 'By the time I got there the patient was out cold again. I talked to her mother and father, but she wouldn't talk to me. Thank you, Jason. Now I have to rely on you for my updates.'

'Look, you asked for my help. You can't have it both ways.'

'The nurse said you two had quite a talk. What did she tell you?'

'The baby is alive and with his mother.'

April leaned forward. 'Where? Who's the mother?'

'Didn't tell me. Heather Rose was very upset about Anton's lies. It's clear he lies, or she lies, or they both lie, about a lot of things.'

'Poor woman,' Emma murmured. She got up and left the room.

'It was when I asked her about the old injuries that she broke down. I still don't know whether they're self- inflicted. Either way, I can see why the husband would want to cover it up.'

'We monitor domestic violence cases now. It's state law. Every time we're called to a domestic dispute we have to make a report on the incident and determine who the primary aggressor is. We have to follow up— a month later, two months later, six months later, depending. We have the computer data on all domestic dispute cases, and we're supposed to keep letting people know we're watching them.'

'So you're telling me there are no priors on this couple.'

April smiled at his use of the cop term. 'Right. No priors. Hospital visits, but no police visits. No

history

of abuse. No follow-ups. That doesn't mean there wasn't abuse.'

'What do you think?'

'A woman like Heather Rose might not yell and scream and call the police, or signal the neighbors to call the police if her husband was hurting her. She might think his violent behavior reflected shameful things about her, like she was no good. He said she couldn't have children. She wouldn't want anybody to know her husband thought she was worthless.'

'Do you think the husband beat her because she gave the baby back?' Jason asked.

'The broomstick that hit her had her hair and traces of her blood on it—and his fingerprints.'

'Could the prints have gotten there on some earlier occasion?'

'What are you, a defense lawyer?' April asked irritably. 'Yes, of course they could have. But Popescu doesn't strike us as the kind of guy who'd sweep up the kitchen after dinner.'

'What's your plan?'

'We're checking birth certificates of babies born in the last three or four weeks to see what we can come up with. We're also checking out the husband's family. They have a factory in Chinatown.'

'What's your thought?'

'In Chinatown people will do some unbelievable things for money,' April said slowly. 'It's no secret that immigrants pay twenty, thirty thousand dollars to get here, and not on fancy cruise ships. They pay big money to be hidden in the holds of the most disgusting—well, never mind. Whole families pitch in to send a relative here. If they really have a lot to spend they can get forged papers and come on an airline. At the airport this precious and lucky relative—who might be the key to a whole family's future—might be met by a 'friend' of the person who arranged the trip. This 'friend' might kidnap the relative. Then a lot more money is extorted from families desperate to protect their investment and save their loved one. Sometimes the victims get a few of their body parts cut off. Sometimes they're kept in slavery even after they're ransomed, so they never get their money back.'

April said all this matter-of-factly, but Jason could tell it was a subject that upset her.

'Greed is one of the seven deadly sins. It's not a uniquely Asian thing,' Jason told her. 'Kidnapping is common in a lot of countries these days.'

'Yeah, but in other places it's the rich who get nailed,' April pointed out. 'The ones who have the money to pay. These people are the poorest of the poor, and they have no one to help them. They're as afraid of the police as they are of the people exploiting them.'

Emma came back into the room with a tray of fancy open-faced sandwiches, a glass of milk, and some cans of Coke. Jason did a double take: the love of his life was serving lunch. Then he got a better look at the two combinations: grilled peppers, eggplant, mozza-rella, and anchovies and blackened chicken, provo-lone, avocado and sprouts. Honey-pepper relish on the side. Very creative. He hoped they wouldn't have the leftovers for dinner.

'So, I'm wondering if someone didn't get the idea of extorting a newborn from some poor woman, then selling it to an uptown couple for a lot of money,' April was saying.

'Oh, my God.' Emma flinched, almost dropping the tray. Baum jumped up to take it from her. April gave him an approving look as he set it down on the coffee table.

'Honey, you okay?' Jason put his arm around her. 'You don't have to listen to this.'

'I'm not an invalid. I made lunch; eat up.'

Jason glanced at the tray of food without seeing it. April was staring at Emma's protruding navel again. 'You sure you're okay? Aren't pregnant women supposed to think only happy thoughts?'

'Eat something. I have to feed people now. I'll get my happy thoughts from that.'

Baum raised his eyebrows at his boss.

Could he take a sandwich?

'Take one,' Emma insisted. 'I need reassurance, really.'

'Take one,' April told him.

Jason took a sandwich and examined it. He knew he was going to have trouble eating it but didn't want to ask where the top of the roll was or when she'd made it. 'Thanks, Emma. This is terrific.'