sweater. Possibly the girl on the phone, April thought.
By all appearances the doctor had gone out to run in the park, met a girl, maybe changed his mind about
Jason-or forgot about him-and gone to her place for the night. That was a nice clean possibility. A nastier one would be, he'd been mugged. The mugger wouldn't have gotten much of anything, though; Maslow had left his wallet at home. April made a quick connection with the 911 she and Woody had responded to last night. She frowned, thinking about it. They had to call the local emergency rooms and the other precincts to see if anybody had anything on it. She and Woody had reached the entrance to the park and went in.
Above April, the sun filtered through the trees, dappling the light and warming her face. The temperature must be up to seventy-eight already, and the heat felt good.
She unbuttoned her light jacket and inhaled. After the rain of yesterday, the park smelled fresh and green. Nannies and mothers wheeled strollers piled high with park toys toward the playground. She prayed some more to the Chinese gods.
This was the famous Frederick Law Olmsted triumph, the park he designed more than a hundred years ago that was still so wild in places that if one ignored the skyline at its perimeter, a city person could imagine the country. Just over a mile to the south, Midtown North waited for their return. The park ended at Fifty-ninth Street, where her own precinct boundary began, and the stunning city skyline spread out on the southern horizon. They were looking for signs of a disturbance, but they didn't see any.
They were silent as they retraced their steps to the place near Seventy-seventh Street, where they'd entered the park last night. The tire prints of the 4x4 and hoofprints of the mounted officer's horse were still there, embedded in the grass, telling the story of their convocation. April slid down the bank to the water's edge, wetting her feet in the marshy ground.
'Damn.'
'Something?' Woody asked, sticking to dry ground.
Stuck on a branch, the tail of a condom snaked gently with the current. Next to it, nestled in the mud, was a brown beer bottle bottom, showing the jagged edges of a broken neck. Half the label turned out giving the name, New Amsterdam. At a couple of dollars a bottle, it would hardly be the first choice of a vagrant.
'Just my new shoes.'
'Whatchu looking for, Detective Woo?'
April was startled by the sound of a gravelly voice. 'Who's there?' she called.
A balding man dressed in khaki pants and a blue parka who smelled of human waste crawled out of a space between two boulders. April recognized him immediately from the old days when she'd worked the Two-O.
'Pee Wee, what are you doing here? I thought you'd cleaned up your act and joined the Doe people.'
'I tried it, didn't like them blue suits. All those rules.'
He looked drunk and dazed, not fit for any kind of structure, certainly not the Doe Fund that put homeless men to work cleaning the streets, gave them food, a salary, and a place to live, but also required them to wear bright blue jumpsuits, not so different from the ones worn by prison inmates.
'And my people out here missed me too much. I help out here, keep the peace, you know that, Detective.' Pee Wee tried to focus his swimming eyes. 'Ain't seen you around for a while. You been on vacation or something?'
'I've been promoted. I'm a sergeant now, and I don't work in this area.'
'Whatchu doin' here, then?'
'Got a 911 call last night, Pee Wee; know anything about it?'
'Yeah, I saw you,' he said, nodding.
'You saw me?' She gave him a surprised look.
'Yeah and him, and 'nother cop on a horse, and two in a jeep.'
'No kidding.' Now Woody was interested.
'Yeah. A guy got whacked. Too bad.' Pee Wee shook his head. 'One of those running guys. You here about that?'
'Where?' The news was like a punch in the belly. April's blood beat in her temple.
Pee Wee scratched his whiskers. 'I'm real hungry,' he said.
'I'll get you some breakfast. Where's the dead guy?'
Pee Wee looked down at them from where he stood higher up on the lake bank. He scratched his beard some more. 'I don't know. Dincha see him?'
'Where?' Woody demanded. 'Where?'
'Right here, I don't know.' Pee Wee's voice slurred.
'What kind of bullshit is this?' Woody barked.
Pee Wee looked hurt. 'Do I do bullshit, Detective? The detective here knows me. I keep the peace, I'm the one stops the fights, don't I? I tell you what's up, don't I?'
'It's sergeant now,' April said automatically. 'Why didn't you say something when you saw us here last night?'
He stood there, shaking his head as if he had a palsy.
'Looks like you're an accessory.'
'No way.' Pee Wee a.k.a. John Jasper James, an ex-sergeant in the U.S. Army and a Vietnam veteran, protested. 'I didn't have nothing to do with it. I thought I saw a guy go down. Maybe I'm wrong. Who's gonna believe an old drunk's story anyway?'
April could have called the detective squad commander of the Park Precinct to come and get Pee Wee James and take him in for questioning. She might have been instantly off the hook in the case and gone quietly on with her day. Any sane detective would have done that. But April wanted to clear up the mystery herself. Whatever mishap to Maslow Atkins occurred, it happened on her watch. And the missing man was Jason's student.
This time April swerved off the straight and narrow and sealed her fate in the matter. She decided to take Pee Wee James into her own house for questioning, then make arrangements to get some uniforms and search dogs out to look for a body. She was on another commander's turf. She thought about calling Mike to discuss the matter before she went any further, but she was in a hurry and figured her notifications could wait.
Nine
Maslow's first awareness was the pain behind his eyes. His head swam, and so did the room. He was lying flat on his back, drenched. His fingers were in a puddle. He moved three fingers, as if over piano keys, and figured out they were in water. He didn't know how his fingers could be in water, too. And the back of his neck. What the-? The world was dark.
His head hurt, he was blind and confused.
'Chloe, open the door.' His voice came out a croak. He was a seven-year-old locked in the linen closet the day the pipe from the bathroom cracked open.
The family had been on Cape Cod. Outside a storm was raging. It was one of those terrible northeasters that rocked the coast for days, scaring him to death because it always seemed as if the rain would never end. His twin sister, Chloe, had been the one to discover the drying racks in the linen closet during a game of hide and seek.
On the day of the storm, he'd gone in there to hide. He'd climbed up on one of the racks. Chloe had come by and closed the door hard, locking him in the closet. Then a pipe cracked open, splashing water on his face. The space was so tight he couldn't even get down off the rack to open the door. Now, over twenty years later, he
