Burning Time

4

The expensively dressed woman in the short fur coat examined the seat of the metal chair dragged over for her from the desk next door. There were some crumbs on it. She brushed at them, but the surface was sticky, and they didn’t all come off. She sat down looking even more unhappy than before.

Another fish out of water, April thought.

The man took the chair that was already there and sat without looking at it.

“You’re Chinese,” the woman said. It came out halfway between a question and a statement.

“Yes, ma’am,” April agreed. She was Chinese yesterday, she was Chinese today, and would undoubtedly remain Chinese for the rest of her days.

Now that she worked here on the upper West Side, however, sometimes April looked in the mirror and was surprised to discover it all over again. She didn’t feel Chinese unless she was with one. And she didn’t think about it unless someone reminded her. It was the hard part of working Uptown. Whenever she wasn’t thinking about being Chinese, someone reminded her.

“Were you born in this country?” the woman asked. She stared at April belligerently.

“Jennifer!” The husband shook his head. Not relevant.

“Yes, ma’am, were you?” April replied, unabashed.

The woman flushed slightly. “I’m sorry. I’ve just never seen a Chinese cop before.” She looked at April’s well-cut navy blazer and slacks and the red, white, and blue silk blouse with a big soft bow tied at the neck, and blushed again.

April had a beautiful, round, delicate face, neither too fleshy nor too pointy in the jaw, and an extremely good haircut, short, expertly layered. She was wearing a little eye makeup and lipstick. She knew the woman was thinking maybe she wasn’t even a cop. Maybe she was another secretary like the surly black girl at the desk downstairs who took the complaint.

Then the woman’s eyes filled with tears. She blew her nose. “You are a police—woman.”

Bang on the button. April could read people’s minds. She nodded solemnly. “Yes, ma’am.” A police rule was always be courteous.

“Jesus.” Stephen Roane put his hand on his wife’s arm.

She pulled her arm away. “Don’t try to censor me,” she snapped. “I needed to know.”

“What would be the point?” he muttered.

April made a note of the man’s hostility. She decided to reassure Mrs. Roane that Detective April Woo could do the job. She leaned back slightly in her desk chair and unbuttoned her jacket so that the Smith and Wesson .38 strapped on her waist could be seen clearly.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said for the third time. “I am a cop and a detective.” She took the gold shield out of her pocket. The promotion to detective had come after only two years on the force. That was how good they thought she was. Down there, anyway, in the 5th.

“You don’t look like a cop,” Jennifer Roane said.

“For God’s sake, stop embarrassing the officer and let’s move on …”

“Detective,” April corrected. “It’s all right. People say it all the time.”

She never knew if she didn’t look like a cop because she was a woman, or because she didn’t wear a uniform except in parades, or because she was Asian.

“Our daughter disappeared,” the man said. “What do we do?” He wasn’t going to yell because this young Chinese person had kept him waiting for an hour when she clearly didn’t have anything to do. He just wanted to get it over with.

“When did you see her last?” April asked gently.

“Four or five days ago. Saturday, I think,” the man said.

The woman nodded. “Yeah, Saturday.”

April made a note. She always more or less ignored the forms and started over. The forms didn’t tell much of a story. And often what people said downstairs were not the same things that they said upstairs.

“You haven’t seen your daughter in more than a week?”

“Well, she doesn’t live with us,” the father said defensively. He looked at the woman. “Either of us.”

“Oh.” So none of them lived together. April made a note and starred it.

“So, um, Ellen disappeared from where she lives on the twenty-first. Where is that?”

“Well, she didn’t disappear the twenty-first. She disappeared the twenty-fifth,” the woman said, tearing up again.

“And today is the twenty-seventh,” April murmured.

“We thought you had to wait forty-eight hours,” she said quickly. She dabbed at her eyes.

“We thought we’d hear from her,” the husband corrected.

“Well, there is no rule about that. How old is she and where does she live?” April asked.

Maybe this Ellen Roane didn’t fit into any of the categories they could investigate. People didn’t understand not everyone who disappeared was missing. Over eighteen, people could go where they wanted, without fear of being looked for, harassed, picked up somewhere by the FBI. Married people who had just had enough took off all the time. They couldn’t go looking for every missing spouse.

There had to be some mitigating evidence: The person was over sixty-five or had a handicap of some sort, or had a history of mental illness; or else some indication the person was endangered.

The mother chewed on her upper lip to control herself. April felt her panic and sympathized. This didn’t look like too happy a scene. The daughter might just have run away. It was bad luck for the parents, but it happened.

“Seventeen,” the mother said after a second of hesitation.

April nodded. Okay, anybody missing under eighteen had to be investigated, punched into the system. “Okay, where does she live?”

“She goes to Columbia. She lives in a dorm there.”

“That’s not in this precinct. She has to be a resident of this precinct,” April said slowly.

“We’re residents of this precinct,” the man said angrily. “We can’t start this all over again. We’ve already been here two hours.”

April thought it over. Could she send them Uptown and wiggle out of this? Probably not. Sergeant Joyce had told her to handle it, and not just because she was the only one available.

“You’re sensitive,” Joyce had said with a smile that made it sound like sensitive was not such a good thing to be.

“Your daughter is under eighteen. That means we can put her in the system. I can do that for you. But do you have any reason to believe Ellen’s in danger?” April asked.

“Oh, God. What does that mean?” the woman cried.

The man turned to her angrily. “It means the FBI and every police headquarters in the country will be looking out for her. Is that what you want?”

“She wouldn’t go anywhere without telling me,” the woman insisted. “We’re very close. Very, very close. Yes, I know she’s in danger.”

“What makes you think so?” April asked gently. “Does she have a boyfriend who threatened her? Was anyone bothering her? Girls sometimes go off with a friend for a few days. Most people turn up.”

It was Saturday. College girls went away for the weekend. Tough life.

“She might have gone away for the weekend,” April said.

Jennifer Roane shook her head. “I feel it. I just know. I know her. She wouldn’t do this to me.”

“Is she having any problems at school, any reason to want to get away?”

Both parents shook their heads.

“She is an excellent student. A sweet, beautiful girl, never been in any trouble,” the father said firmly. “She’s never caused us a moment’s worry.”

He shrugged as if to say they were probably making too much of it.

April darted a look at him. “What about family problems?” she asked.

“We’re separated, if that’s what you mean.” He looked at one of his highly polished loafers. “But I don’t think that has anything to do with it. Ellen’s taking it very well.”

The woman started to cry again. “I don’t believe for a minute Ellen is taking it well. I hardly got a word out of her the last time we spoke. How can she take it well when everything she was told her whole childhood turned out to be a lie?”

“Shut up,” the man said coldly.

“I’ll need a picture of her,” April said, “and the phone numbers of her friends.” She looked at her watch. She wasn’t impressed by the case, didn’t for a minute think this girl was in trouble. But she couldn’t take a chance. They couldn’t ever, ever take a chance and let it go. She told the Roanes she’d start working on it right away.

She had three days to file a report, and seven days to keep the case. If they hadn’t located the girl by then, Joyce could get rid of the case, send it Downtown where it would be filed against the day something came up that fit the description.

All this went through April’s head automatically as the Roanes left the squad room. At the start of every case she always made lists of what she had to do. Sometimes at night she went over and over them, terrified that she might have left something out that would cost somebody their life.

First stop Columbia, a hell of a way to get to college.

Before April took off, she called the nephew of the DOA she and Sanchez found that morning. The Medical Examiner’s office were always impatient to get rid of them. If she didn’t find someone to claim the old guy soon, they’d bury him in Potter’s Field. No answer at the nephew’s. She packed up for the night, certain she’d have a lead on the girl to tell the parents by morning.