Burning Time

43

Jason broke the connection, then dialed the number Detective Woo had given him. Her advice not to look for Grebs came too late. He had already gone to the address the aunt gave him. He had driven all the way up the coast to Queen Palm Way, off Crown Avenue. It wasn’t easy to find. He had to cross the small bridge over a dry gully twice before he located Queen Palm Way, so well was it hidden behind a short street of slightly dowdy stores and restaurants, not too far from the beach. When he got to Grebs’s apartment building, the manager told Jason he hadn’t seen Grebs for nearly a week. There were no lights in the place, no sounds of running water. No Harley-Davidson.

Jason was in his room at the Meridien, puzzled now. He had called Emma a dozen times all afternoon, and she still wasn’t home. It wasn’t like her. Six hours had gone by since she left a message for him to call her right away.

He had his notes spread out on the desk. In the mirror he could see out the window behind him to the bay and the docks on the other side of the water. Funny city. The skyline was dominated by the view of navy shipyards and warships of various sizes. He had no idea which were which.

The fact that he didn’t know which ship was which suddenly pierced him with sadness for Emma. He felt a lot of sadness out here. Emma had spent her childhood watching these ships, drawing pictures of them when she was little, counting the days she was allowed to visit on them as the most exciting of her life. All she ever wanted was to be the one to get on a ship and sail away from those faraway places she didn’t choose to be. He reached for the phone.

“Missing Persons, Sergeant Beasly.”

“Uh, I think I’ve got the wrong department. I’m calling for Sergeant Grove,” Jason said.

“Who’s calling?”

“It’s Dr. Jason Frank from New York.” He added, “Detective April Woo of the New York Police gave me his name.”

“I’ll see if Grove’s here.”

Missing Persons. Why did she give him the name of someone from Missing Persons? Jason tapped his pen against the table nervously. Where was Emma? Emma waited for him. That was what she did when she wasn’t working. She waited for him to come home, or call. Occasionally she went to the theater with a friend, but she didn’t go out alone at night.

He wanted to kick himself. He always assumed Emma was all right because she never complained and whined the way Nancy had. Acid roiled around in his empty stomach. The corn muffin was long gone, replaced with burning guilt for neglecting his wife and insisting all was well in their world because all was well in his.

What if Grove wasn’t there? What if he was wrong and it wasn’t this Grebs person? What if it was somebody else and he was wasting his time? What the hell did he think he was doing? Was he altogether crazy to be out here?

He shook his head, ran his hand through his hair. Had to be this guy. But where was he?

“Grebs takes off for days sometimes,” the manager at Grebs’s apartment building had told him. It wasn’t at all unusual.

“Takes off? Where does he go?”

“I think he likes to go down to Mexico.” The manager was a small freckled person with a red nose and thinning red hair.

“Why?” Jason asked.

“Who knows?” The man looked off into the middle distance. “I just get that feeling. Strange fella.”

“Strange in what way?” Jason’s anxiety escalated, but he kept his features neutral.

“You know, those eyes, like marbles. See right through you. Pays on time, though. And he’s a terrific mechanic, always out there working on that bike. Hell of a bike, ain’t it?”

Yeah. Jason nodded. He’d heard it was a hell of a bike. He wondered where it was. And where was Grebs, with the eyes like marbles.

“Sergeant Grove speaking.”

“Hi, this is Jason Frank. April Woo told me to get in touch with you. I have a name of someone who needs to be checked out.”

“You want to fill out a Missing Person report?”

Great. Another frosty, unresponsive voice.

“Uh, no, not exactly. I need somebody checked out for a criminal record. Arrests, convictions.” Jason’s tongue felt thick with the words he wasn’t used to saying.

“We’re not an information service. We don’t do that.”

It was a definite, cold dismissal.

In hospitals people did whatever the doctors told them to. “I have a reason,” Jason said, getting very frustrated now.

“I’m sure you do, but this is Missing Persons. You want to make a complaint about somebody, you’ll have to come in and talk to a detective.”

“Are you a detective?”

“Yes, but I’m a detective in Missing Persons. If you have a Missing Person, you come to me. Otherwise, you go to someone else.”

“So, Detective Grove, how do you know April Woo?”

“Detective-Sergeant Grove,” Grove corrected. “April had a Missing Person. We found her.”

“Well, Detective Woo told me to call you about this. She said you could help me.” Jason wondered if Detective Woo was also Sergeant, and if her missing person was found alive.

“Okay, well, April must be quite the girl. What’s the problem?”

Jason told him succinctly.

“Oh, you’re the guy with the nutcase letters. I know about you, Dr. Frank. Look, I asked around. Came up with zip on this one. What makes you think there’s anything to it?” The voice warmed up, but only a little.

“I talked to this guy’s aunt, and she implied he had a record. If so, he poses a threat to my wife. All I want to do is find out what there is on him.”

“All right, I’ll pull the sheet,” Grove said reluctantly. “But you’ll have to come in.”

“When?”

“Now. I’m supposed to be out of here at four.”

Jason looked at his watch. It was after six. “Tell me where and I’m on my way.”

A few minutes later he was loping through the lobby of the Meridien again. The place was very luxurious, very quiet. He didn’t think it was meant to feel like a mausoleum, though. There wasn’t anybody around.

After telling him to hurry, Detective-Sergeant Grove, or whatever he was, kept Jason waiting for nearly twenty minutes. He sat in a metal chair and looked around. The police station was not so different from the one he had gone to in New York. Both looked like public schools. There were a lot of signs in Spanish here, too. In fact it looked like there were more instructions up on the wall in Spanish than there were in English.

“Dr. Frank?”

Finally Grove stood in front of him. He was a very tall man with blond hair, not in uniform. He looked like many years ago he might have been a surfer.

“Yes.” Jason was glad to escape from the hard chair he had taken next to a woman with an infant who needed to be changed.

“Sorry, it took some time.” Grove led the way to a corner of a big room. On the wall was a sign that said “Missing Persons, Sergeant Robert Grove.”

His desk was a lot messier than April Woo’s. Thick files were stacked on both sides. In the middle half a dozen partially filled Styrofoam coffee cups were surrounded by a snowfall of empty sugar packets. Grove sank down into an ancient swivel chair clearly left over from an earlier incarnation, pointed Jason to the wooden chair opposite, and sat back.

“Okay, exactly what do you want to know?”

Jason had chewed up a couple of Maalox tablets on the way over. But the pain came back with the skepticism in Grove’s framing of the question. He felt around in his pocket to see if he had any more. He didn’t. He could see the package on the dashboard of the car. Shit. He let it go.

“I talked with Troland Grebs’s aunt,” he said, pulling himself together. “And she described the kind of family background and personality problems that suggest to me he had some encounters with the authorities.”

“Like what?” Grove shifted in his seat so he wasn’t sitting on his gun. He seemed to be arranging his defenses against unwanted, outside influences. One hand reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a paper. He angled it in such a way that Jason couldn’t see it.

“Like he set fires.” Jason knew he didn’t want to challenge the man, but the pressure was building to get up and snatch the damn paper.

“Yep,” Grove said, glancing down. “Quite a few. They put him away with some other nice boys for a while. It seemed to do the trick on arson. That’s going back some, though.” He sounded bored, as if the man’s record was old, old news and had no bearing on his current activities.

“What else is there?” Jason leaned over. Grove leaned back.

“Like I said. What are you looking for?”

Jason’s stomach churned. “Why can’t you let me see the damn thing?” he asked, trying to keep calm. “All I need is a minute or two and then I’ll be out of here.”

Grove’s expression did not change.

“What do you want the information for? Are you making a complaint? Let’s get this out in the open.”

Jason spoke slowly, biting off his words. “I’m trying to establish if the person with this criminal record on your desk that you won’t let me see is a violent person capable of harming my wife.”

Why else would he want the information? He needed to protect his wife. No one else would. It wasn’t a hard one.

“Will you be making a complaint?”

Jason snapped. “I don’t fucking know. Is he a psychopath? Has he been hospitalized? Has he been in prison for any violent crimes? Come on, Sergeant Grove. If my wife is in danger and it turns out you withheld information from me, I’ll have your fucking ass—”

“All right, I’m with you,” Grove said coldly. “But let’s get one thing straight. We don’t do things this way, Doctor. We don’t make people’s records available just because someone thinks a guy could be dangerous. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Are you telling me all you do is bag bodies? Is that how it works?”

“I’m in Missing Persons. I try to match unidentified bodies with people who have been reported missing.”

“Fine.” It occurred to Jason that Detective Woo would give him what he needed. Fuck this. He got up to go.

Grove looked down at the paper he’d been guarding so carefully from view.

“Well, there’s no record of any hospitalizations,” he said casually, “but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t had any. There are a couple of real old arrests for assault and battery. No convictions.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means Grebs here used to get a little carried away with ladies of the night. Whores.”

Jason was silent. Then he asked, “What did he do to them?”

Grove looked at him. For several long moments Jason was afraid Grove would stonewall all the way. Then he looked down at the paper again as if whatever he had in the way of a brain just clicked into gear.

“Jesus H. Christ,” he muttered.

“Tell me,” Jason insisted.

Another brief silence. Grove’s hand came down on the paper, protecting it from any onslaught.

“For God’s sake!” Jason exploded.

“You want to know? Okay, he burned them with cigarettes, Doctor.” Grove got a little defensive. “But that was a long time ago, and the charges were dropped. You know, sometimes they just grow out of it.”

He was saying one thing, but his face said something else.

“Yeah?” Jason said. “They grow out of it?” The bile rose in his throat. “The guy set fires, and then moved on to burning people. Prostitutes. You’re right. Sometimes they learn how to control it, or cover it up. A lot of things can happen with sick people. Sometimes they move on to new kinds of acting out. Sometimes something can trigger them into violence. Or they can get disorganized with stress—trouble at work, a loss of some kind—and just break down. But they don’t just grow out of it, Sergeant. They’re sick—It’s not a bad habit.”

The deep tan receded from Sergeant Grove’s face as he listened.

“The girl from New York April was looking for was burned,” he said when Jason was finished. He didn’t look bored or disinterested now.

“Burned? Is she—?” The acid from Jason’s stomach bubbled up into his mouth. He swallowed.

“Oh, yeah, she’s dead. But she wasn’t a whore. She was a college girl on vacation.”

The two men looked at each other. Then Grove handed over the sheet. Jason reached for it with a tremor in his hand. Well, now they had a suspect with a history of burning people that went back to third grade, and a dead girl from New York. The guy they should be looking very hard for was a draftsman in a defense company, rode a motorcycle. He knew Emma from high school, and hadn’t been seen for over a week. Emma needed immediate protection.

“Can I use your phone?” Jason asked.