described it. She didn't need any more nightmares, but neither did he. She tried to divert him.
'He must have used a light rifle, something that can easily be broken down,' she suggested.
'Yeah. Maybe a nine-shot with a short barrel,' Mike agreed.
'Not so easy to hide in a space like that. Anybody could have seen him at any moment.'
'Maybe somebody did see him but doesn't know
it.'
April nodded. Sometimes you don't see what you're not expecting to see.
'If this had happened at a church, right now I'd be thinking the shooter might have been somebody wearing a liturgical robe, maybe disguised as a nun, a priest, an altar boy. That would play. But I saw only two people wearing robes, the rabbi and the cantor,' Mike went on.
April remembered them. One big and fat, one small and thin.
'Or it could have been a woman. There were a lot of women in long gowns,' he added.
April considered the idea of a female sniper in an evening gown shooting a bride down in a synagogue full of people. 'Gee, I don't know about that.' It wasn't exactly a female kind of crime.
'It could have been a man dressed as a woman. Lot of wigs there, too.'
She nodded, liking that better. 'There you go.'
She put her face out the car window into the wind and breathed the spring air. It wasn't good that both of them were so spooked by this homicide. Maybe Mike was troubled because it occurred near his old home, a section of the Bronx that crime-wise had always been quiet. In his day it had been staunchly middle- and upper-middle- class. Now a lot of newcomers to the city lived there. The neighborhood had changed from white-collar to blue- collar. Even Mike's mother, Maria Sanchez, who'd been a newcomer herself thirty years ago, complained about the immigrants who flocked to the buildings on Broadway. But still, the Five-oh was one of the safest precincts in the city. Crime-wise, it was sleepy.
The Deegan cut through the Bronx to Westchester. Apartment buildings were rooted in the hills on the east and west sides of the highway. The older ones were ten stories high, square, unrelieved red brick, one after another laddered in the hills. The newer ones were twenty, thirty stories high, towering on the bluffs.
April turned her thoughts to the funeral. They'd go. They'd see who was there saying good-bye.
Killers frequently went to the funerals of their victims. If the funeral was at one, they'd go over to the house and talk with Tovah's family in the late afternoon, around five. She didn't relish the prospect of interviewing the family. This was going to be a long day, but what day wasn't? Mike interrupted her timing calculations.
'I think we should get married. What do you say,
? How about we finally set a date?' he asked suddenly.
'Let's not compete with Ching's wedding.'
she thought.
'How is that competing?' He put his foot on the gas, reacting to the evasion.
'There's just a lot going on right now, that's all.' April shook her head; he'd driven right out of her comfort zone. And now he was speeding.
'There's always a lot going on,' he countered.
'What's the sudden hurry,
she said softly.
'The hurry is, I have a bad feeling.'
'About what?' Her heart spiked as he changed lanes too fast. He was definitely pissed at her. She hated that, too.
'About this bride shooting. About being together but not married. Not being married feels wrong now, like bad luck. That's it. It feels like bad luck.' He turned to look at her as he said it, and his expression was fierce, showing that he really meant it.
April felt the kick of those two highly charged words. Right in the gut where she was most vulnerable. Only yesterday he'd been content being together on any basis. Now he was thinking it was bad luck. That hurt, because April's constant nagging worry was that worse luck would result from their marrying. So far she'd been able to avert really bad luck by nonaction. Now he was suggesting nonaction itself was dangerous.
'1 think you're in a funky mood/' she said.
'And I think you have a problem, April.'
Oh , now she had a problem. This cold reading sent her feelings careening from hurt, to anger, to anxiety about truth and untruth and what she had to do about it. The feelings vied for supremacy.
had a problem! He didn't understand the complexities of her life.
was her problem.
She wanted to lash out at him but had to contain herself. It wouldn't be fair to make a scene in his home territory. From the second he exited the highway and crossed the overpass to Broadway he always got funny, thinking his childhood was looking him in the eye. There, the skating rink from his vouth. It was now a Loehmann's. There, where it used to be the Dale movie theater, now a bank. There, the Stella D'oro factory with the air still percolating with baking anisette and almond cookies. And Pauline's was still a grungy bar down the block from the precinct. McDonald's was still next door. Stop and Shop was across Broadway. Van Cortlandt Park a few blocks down. Two hundred thirty-eighth Street, still the end of the line for the Broadway El. And his mother within hailing distance. She couldn't say a word with his mother's ghost so close by.
April simmered on low as Mike parked outside the Five-oh, not a bad house, as precincts went. The blue building was three stories high and had been built within the last twenty years. But it was far from her home base back in Manhattan.
Mike got out arid stretched.
he asked, as if he didn't know perfectly well that he'd ruined her day and she couldn't do a thing about it.
'Oh, yeah, everything's just hunky.' April didn't lash out. She pulled herself out of the car, smoothed the wrinkles out of her blue skirt, adjusted her gun, her jacket, her brains. And she jerked herself back into line. There was no place for private feelings in police work. Anyway, she always got butterflies in a house not her own where she didn't know the personalities and no one wanted them there. She was far from hunky right now, but what else was new?
Cool as could be after laying his cards squarely on the table, Mike clipped on his ID and headed for the detective squad. It was in the usual spot on the second floor, had the usual components of holding cell, locker room with table for eating, a TV. Six desks that were home for twelve detectives, now scrambling because they hadn't had a homicide in quite a while. Suddenly smiling broadly as a man coming home, Mike raised his hand in salute to the worried-looking sergeant on command, and the guy dipped his head in acknowledgment.
'Hey, Sanchez, look at the big shot now. A lieutenant, hogging all the good cases. How ya doin'?' Sergeant Hollis held out his hand, oozing friendship.
'Hey, shut up. Let me think here,' Hollis barked at the crowd in the room. No one shut up or moved out of the way, so he had to push through them.
Hollis was a man just over forty, five-ten, medium build, thinning ginger hair, light dusting of freckles across his nose and cheeks, blue eyes, a mustache almost as lush as Mike's own. A man in a quiet house, used to an easy life. He was wearing jeans and a Mickey Mouse tie.
'Jimmy, good to see you.' Mike clasped the hand and made quick introductions. 'This is Sergeant April Woo. Jimmy was my boss when I came in. April worked with me in the Two-oh.'
Hollis nodded. 'I know. Another hotshot. I've seen your picture, both you guys. How's Dev, see much of him these days?'
