A Clean Kill

Sixteen

Swallowing down sixteen cups of China tea a day was a firm requirement for Chinese good health. April got her seventh cup at six p.m., and reviewed her conversation with Mike.

He seemed to think Derek could be the killer, and if the ME set Maddy's time of death to some time between eight and nine a.m., he would certainly have had plenty of time to commit the murder and go out for a Snapple before meeting his next customer half a mile away at nine thirty. But what would be his motive? Even if, in an amazing coincidence, Maddy had told Derek to get lost the same morning as she'd fired Remy, too many things didn't fit. Unlike Remy, he wasn't into butcher knives as toys, and his place was hardly spotless. April believed that cleanliness was a factor here, part of a bigger picture. Call it intuition, whatever.

Outside of her office, the second tour in the unit had replaced the first tour and begun their tasks. Some detectives were at their desks; a few had already gone out. April was aware of Alison's perfume, still lingering in her office, and recognized it as Beautiful. She put her finger to her lips, mulling over everything she'd seen and heard that day.

Every case started in the same fog. Above, the air was thick with possibilities. Below, a swamp of deadly quicksand. Sometimes the fog cleared quickly, and sometimes it didn't. April's mother, Skinny Dragon, was terrified of that journey to the dead and back again. Ghosts didn't always depart their human bodies right away. Sometimes they became attached to the person most interested in them. And ghosts meant bad luck. Each of April's cases brought the possibility that a ghost might make her sterile, give her cancer. Maybe both. Ghosts ruled the world and could do anything they wanted.

Although her mother believed this, April didn't. For nearly fifteen years she'd wanted nothing more than to succeed in the Department. That meant being closer sometimes to dead people than to living ones. She'd never had much faith in the other facets of life. For her there had been no glitter— no sparkling diamonds, no weekend getaways with ardent boyfriends, no bubbling champagne. For pleasure she'd run her legs off around the neighborhood in Astoria, Queens, where she'd lived in her parents' house until she was way over thirty. She'd knocked people down on sparring mats. She'd kept to herself. It was only after she fell in love with Mike and married him that life began to take on a rosier aspect.

Now she liked driving north on the Hutchinson Parkway, home to her brick house with its pleasant leafy trees and backyard barbeque in Westchester County. She'd enjoyed choosing curtains and bathroom accessories and linens. Curling up on the soft sofa with Mike in front of a real fire on all those frigid nights the winter before had been a major highlight of her life. She liked cooking in her almost-new kitchen with its very nice GE appliances, and even a washer and dryer in their own tiny laundry room. She'd never had the best of everything. In the Woo house, there had been only a human dishwasher.

In fact, April Woo had become so intrigued by the unexpected pleasures of her home life that sometimes when she was at work she wished that domesticity would reach out somehow, and intervene to give her a break from death and the other miseries caused by crime. What would happen to her, she asked herself, if she let ambition go for a while?

Sometimes Skinny Dragon was right. A cop could not avoid being touched by evil. Death did get in the way of living. There was no way to wall it off, take a weekend and forget about it. Each time April walked into someone's murder, the killer grabbed hold of her, too, and wouldn't let her go. Even after the puzzle was solved. and the perpetrator was nailed, she played the murders over and over in her head—every single piece, every little fact she uncovered. Every sad particle of chaos that murder created stayed with her. When the cases went to trial, she had to live them again—what she'd done, what she'd seen, what she'd learned. She could write a book.

And the crime scene always told what happened. What had gone wrong, how the perpetrator and the victim had come together, how the victim had responded, whether the body was hidden or flaunted. Even the span of time that passed before the victim was discovered told a story. The killer sent a message whether he meant to or not. The message in the act was more than "I hate you," or "I'm going to annihilate you." The way it went down told a whole narrative in code, each one like a Rosetta stone that had to be interpreted. The story only lacked the who and the why, and sometimes it was simple enough to point right at the who as well.

In any case, Maddy Wilson didn't go out to lunch and disappear, only to be found days later floating in the East River. She wasn't pushed out a window, run over, or shot in the head. She was murdered in her shower and discovered within minutes by a woman who had reason to hate her. Her trainer had been with her just before she was attacked, and maybe her husband, too. But Remy was the one who "discovered" the body and called 911. With all those people so close to the victim in the time frame, it could not be murder by a stranger. The killer knew what Maddy's window of vulnerability had been.

Images from the crime scene kept replaying in April's head. Something had been going on when Maddy was discovered that no police officer had seen. And that might be the most important element of all. No one saw the jets in the shower shooting water at Maddy Wilson's body. Remy said they had been on when she got there. But the shower had been turned off by the time the police arrived. How many jets had been on? Only Remy knew that. Only Remy knew whether the water had been on at all, and although April had asked her those questions, she wasn't yet fully satisfied with the answers. If the shower had kept the body warm for an hour or more, would the ME still be able to ascertain the time of death? She didn't know.

April was not a religious person, not religious in the usual way. She did not go to church, or light incense sticks for her ancestors, or keep a shrine to Buddha. Her parents held deep beliefs and ancient superstitions, but she did not. How could she, in the twenty-first century, still interpret the wishes of people who had died a hundred years ago in a very faraway place, she asked herself. She tried to explain her reluctance to follow the ancient traditions of ancestor worship by the passage of time. But still, she felt guilty for letting the traditions go.

Although sin, as such, was not a part of her own belief system, no one in America could fail to be aware of Christian dogma on sin—original and otherwise—and redemption. She didn't know why, but the thought of baptism and the lamb kept running through her head. The killer washed Maddy's blood down the drain, but maybe there was a message in the water left running after all the blood was gone. Maybe Maddy's sins were being washed away.

She shook her head at the confusing picture. Derek, Remy, Wayne, Alison. They were all closely connected. What bothered her the most was that Maddy's killing looked like a man's murder, but not a man's crime scene. She had some time to brood about that and enter her notes into her laptop before hurrying to meet Mike at the Seventeenth Precinct.