Burning Time

24

The shift was almost over. April studied her watch with the phone in her hand. Jennifer Roane was so upset by the possibility that the girl found in California might be her daughter, she wanted to get on the next plane to San Diego. April had to tell her several times that wasn’t a good idea.

“Why not?” she demanded.

“We have no reason to think it is Ellen, and your going to California won’t help.” The seconds were passing very slowly.

“What do you mean?” the distraught woman cried.

“You might not recognize her,” April said gently.

“How could I not know my own baby?” the woman sobbed.

She’d been outside for a while. There had been distressing postmortem changes. April didn’t say that. She said they needed Ellen’s medical and dental records to make a positive identification. “I’ll call you as soon as I know,” April promised. There, four o’clock.

“I want to go there, I want to see her,” Jennifer sobbed.

“Let’s make sure it’s Ellen before you think about that,” April said. She hung up thinking her own mother would feel the same. One child only, that’s all the Gods saw fit to bless Sai Woo with. She wanted grandchildren to keep her memory alive. If the dead girl in San Diego was Ellen, who would keep Jennifer Roane’s memory alive?

The phone on her desk rang.

April picked it up. “Detective Woo.”

“Hi, this is Mike. I’m on my way out to the range. You haven’t been there all month. Why don’t you come with me? I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.”

Sanchez was somewhere on the street. She could hear the traffic in the background.

“How do you know when I was there last?” she said.

“I’m a Detective First Grade. I don’t miss anything. You want to or not?”

April paused to think it over. It was true she’d hadn’t been to the range in a long time. She didn’t like to take the time to go there and practice. It was true she half believed if she never used her gun she would never have to.

She wasn’t stupid, though. She did practice pulling it out, and taking the stance with the safety catch off. She did it in the second-floor apartment of the two-family house she shared with her parents in Astoria. She had fixed up the apartment herself and paid half the mortgage for the house, but got no privacy. Her mother came up with no warning. If she caught April with the gun out, it made her crazy.

It was true she had to qualify every month. April debated taking the ride to Randall’s Island.

“Yeah,” she said. “Thanks, Sergeant, I would, if nothing comes up.”

She called him Sergeant because she didn’t want to call him Mike and have him think this might be a date or something. She was practically engaged to Jimmy Wong, and Sanchez knew it.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said.

April glanced at Sergeant Joyce’s door. It was closed. Better hurry. Sometimes Joyce liked to come out at the end of the day and assign a new case to April just as she was leaving. It was always something that wouldn’t lead to a promotion. Something like the Ellen Roane case that she didn’t expect April to do anything with. Well, surprise, maybe she had located Ellen Roane.

April picked up her bag. The door to Sergeant Joyce’s office opened as if by magic. Sergeant Joyce had her garish green plaid coat on, Irish as always. Her lipstick was fresh. She handed April a complaint as she left.

“This is one for you,” she said. “He’s waiting.”

April looked at the complaint and frowned. A doctor getting annoying letters. That was a good one. Sanchez would probably leave without her. Just as well.

She went out to the bench just inside the detectives’ room, suddenly a little nervous.

“Dr. Frank?” she said.

“Yes.” He stood up.

“I’m Detective Woo,” she said.

He surprised her by holding out his hand. “How do you do?”

She shook it briefly, further unnerved by the questioning way he looked at her. Yes, yes, she was a real detective, had years of training, knew what she was doing. He was tall, light-haired, medium build. Attractive look about him. Intense. She knew his tweed jacket was a good one, and wondered what kind of doctor he was as she led the way back to her desk. The room was pretty empty, the way it gets at change-of-shift time. There weren’t any suspects in the pen.

Everybody who came into the precinct with a problem was different. Some people were hostile, some defensive. Most of them were shaken up and frightened. She had noticed up here that the Spanish, Caucasians, and Afro-Americans were often aggressive and demanding, wanting instant service, as if the precinct were a restaurant and the cops waiters.

The doctor with the heather tweed jacket she admired didn’t show his face. He examined the room without actually appearing to, exactly the way she did when she went to new places. He settled himself in her metal chair before saying anything.

She knew by the way Sergeant Joyce told her to take care of it that this was a public relations thing. April was always the public relations detective. Downtown she had enjoyed translating the system, because she felt like a social worker with a gun. Often, when she couldn’t do something for people herself, she could point them to someone who could do something. Now she had a chance to explain the system to the kind of person her mother wished she would marry.

“What can I do for you?” she asked.

He smiled, as if that were his line.

“Have you been in this precinct a long time, Detective?” he asked, surprising her a second time by accepting her authority and answering her question with a question.

“Eight months,” she said. Six days and seven and a half hours.

“That’s not a long time.” The doctor’s eyebrows furrowed.

Was that furrow a frown that meant he took back her authority only seconds after giving it to her? Did he think she wasn’t up to his problem? Well, she was up to it. She had arrested very large and angry people. She could handle any situation.

“No, it isn’t.” She rustled the complaint sheet. In a few minutes Sergeant Sanchez would be there to get her. She suddenly wanted to get this over with.

“What kind of cases do you get here?”

What was this, a delaying tactic? He certainly was taking his time getting to the point. Maybe he didn’t really want or expect her to do anything for him. He stretched out his long legs. The gray flannel trousers he wore still had a pretty good crease at the end of the day. Didn’t he have patients waiting for him?

“All kinds of things, but mostly robbery, assault. Break-ins. There are a few homicides here, but not as many as in other parts of the city. You probably know that.”

She looked down at the complaint sheet. “You’re getting some letters,” she prompted.

He corrected her. “My wife is getting letters.”

“Is Mrs. Frank the complainant?” April said, turning her head a little, as if looking for her.

Dr. Frank colored slightly. “Yes. I’m making the inquiry for her.”

April looked down. She had done the same thing earlier that day when a man loudly told his three- or four-year-old son in a store not to whine like a woman.

“Women don’t whine,” the boy retorted. “You mean, don’t whine like you, Daddy.”

The doctor seemed very nice, but his wife’s not being there about her own complaint made April wonder. Her mother, Sai Woo, said she was suspicious. “Must have smelled something bad when baby. Always asking questions, not believe answers,” Sai Woo liked to say.

April closed her face to her thought that a big part of her didn’t like doctors. Her mother wanted her to marry a doctor. This one was clearly rich and looked like a Kennedy. Kennedys seemed to prey on women. He opened his leather briefcase and took out some envelopes.

“My wife and I are concerned. What can you do to stop this?” he asked, handing them over.

She took the pile and examined it. There were sixteen envelopes in all, each containing a letter. She pulled them out and quickly glanced through them. The first few had only a few lines on them, after that they got longer. The last four were several pages. All were typed on the same plain paper with black ink from a very old ribbon. On the top right-hand corner of each there was a neatly penciled number and date.

“You numbered and dated them?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She studied the paper. Plain white bond. She felt its thickness with her fingers. Not bad paper, but the typewriter was very old and hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. Some of the letters were filled up. The whole thing looked kind of funny to her. Why did he number the letters? She could feel him watching her as she worked her way through them.

“When did you start numbering the letters?” she asked.

“After the third one,” he answered.

April read the third one carefully. What makes a good woman go bad? Breaks a man’s heart like a wheel. She looked up at the furrowed brow and saw that he was more than watching her read the letters. He was studying her.

“Why this one?” she asked.

“After this one I knew they wouldn’t stop.”

She could smell Sergeant Sanchez before she saw him, did not turn her head. He had come back exactly on time. For a second she was aware of the gun at her waist. Why did the doctor think they wouldn’t stop after the third letter?

“Why?” she asked.

“The person writing these letters has a grievance. He’ll keep at it until he’s satisfied.”

She read on. They were kind of strange, but she didn’t see a threat in them. Each one had the same drawing on it that looked like a Chinese symbol but wasn’t—a semicircle with jagged edges and maybe spokes, or maybe it was swords on fire coming out of a sun going down. The last ones had other drawings on them. The letters rambled on about missiles in the Persian Gulf War and soldiers blowing things away, motorcycles with missiles on them and other weird stuff. They were all signed The One Who Saved You.

She paused, shuffling the letters back into order. “Do you know who it is?”

He shook his head.

“Well, do you know what the writer’s grievance is?”

“My wife’s an actress. She was in a film.”

April looked around sharply. Sergeant Sanchez had assumed his favorite position at his desk which was no longer his because the shift was over, and Dr. Frank was blushing again. That was the way he showed his face. What kind of film would make his face red? So some loon didn’t like the movie.

She squinted at the top postmark. It was illegible, as if the machine had canceled improperly, or run out of ink. She couldn’t read it at all. Each of the other fifteen envelopes had a smeared postmark. The letters were addressed to Emma Chapman with the same typewriter.

“Emma Chapman?”

“My wife’s maiden name.”

“Does she always use it?”

“Yes.”

April nodded. Okay. “Well, Dr. Frank, the thing is, there’s nothing illegal about sending people letters unless there’s a threat in them. It’s really a postal matter.”

“I see a threat in them,” Dr. Frank said.

“Where?” April asked.

“All the way through. His tone is threatening, the talk about missiles and revenge, about a woman going bad. You know about the cases of disturbed people becoming obsessed with actresses and trying to kill them, or kill somebody else to get their attention?” He spoke with great intensity, but his folded hands rested calmly on the desk between them.

“If you remember the Hinckley case, you’ll understand this is a potentially very dangerous situation.” He lifted his hands for a second, then let them drop.

She nodded. Everybody remembered the case. So it was more than a public relations thing. Still, how did he know the letter writer was a man, and where exactly was the danger? She couldn’t start investigating a potential crime, the nature of which was completely unspecified.

She pushed the letters, now ordered and back in their envelopes, to the empty space between them. “What do you want me to do, Dr. Frank?”

“I’m concerned. I want it to stop,” he said, not actually asking her to do anything.

There was no return address on the envelopes. The complaint on the sheet did not justify sending the material to the lab. She looked up. Sergeant Sanchez had his head slightly cocked to one side. He didn’t say a thing, but she got a message from him anyway. That was disconcerting. She couldn’t read Jimmy Wong’s mind; how come she could read Sergeant Sanchez’s mind? The message was for her to take the letters.

“Okay,” she said. “Leave them with me.”

The doctor looked both doubtful and relieved. April could understand doubtful. There was no reason for people to think the police could solve anything. Truth was, most everything was needle in house-stack, as her mother would say. She gave him a receipt for the letters and took his business card. She looked at it briefly, but it didn’t reveal what kind of doctor he was.