Burning Time

62

Jason dialed Detective Woo’s number for the tenth time. For the tenth time a woman’s voice answered the phone and informed him Detective Woo was busy. Would he like to leave a message? No, he would not. He had something to say all right, but it couldn’t be said in a message. He wanted to get Woo’s attention, get her so involved she’d let him tell her what to do.

He’d been studying a map of New York City and his notes, but he needed more information. He needed the kind of information a person could only get from the police, and he needed a police car to take him around so he could see what different neighborhoods looked like. He was certain that if he could look around, he could find the right one.

It didn’t occur to him that New York was a very big place, and his thinking might be unrealistic. N.Y.P.D. was not going to give him a car and driver to make his own investigations; and even if it did, he was not likely to find what he was looking for.

He wasn’t thinking about the odds. He was counting on Woo’s doing what he asked because the alternative was unbearable. He had no way of knowing if any of them were doing the right things, going to the right places, asking the right questions.

Apparently Woo had been sitting there on the phone for hours. How could she find Emma if she hadn’t left her desk all day? And what were the other detectives doing? Probably nothing.

Sitting there in his office waiting for someone to get back to him was unbearable. Jason had canceled all his patients, but the phone kept ringing. There were still eight unreturned messages on his answering machine, three of them from Charles, wanting to know what was going on. Jason had spoken to Ronnie, Emma’s agent, three times already. Ronnie had been contacted by the police. Now she was hysterical. She wanted to come over and be with him, wanted to call in the army and the FBI. She had other suggestions, too. Jason couldn’t face calling Charles back and hearing more advice.

There were a whole lot of things bothering him. One of them was that the phone kept ringing and none of the voices on his machine was Emma’s trying him again. What did that mean? Did that mean she was already dead, or that the guy caught her making the call and—And what? What would Grebs do?

Jason knew what the trigger was to coming after Emma, but he simply didn’t have enough personal data about Troland Grebs to know what he planned to do to her once he had her. He had threatened to kill her, but as of midnight last night he hadn’t done it yet.

Even though he tried to avoid checking the clocks every few minutes, the ticking went on. There was no relief from them. The clocks were driving him crazy.

What was Grebs likely to do? Without a detailed history of his illness, it was impossible to predict. And there was no way to get a history of his illness. His parents were dead. According to his aunt, one brother, Willy, died in Vietnam. The other brother dropped out of sight years ago. She didn’t remember Grebs ever having counseling, and his company had no record of insurance claims for therapy. That much Jason had been able to find out.

Troland Grebs had grown up on Twenty-eighth Street in downtown San Diego. Not far from the Gas Lamp district, the old red-light district where Grebs had once picked up prostitutes. Twenty-eighth Street was not far from the airport. Grebs liked familiar things, Jason knew. He worked at an airport. There were planes overhead all the time. Where he lived now, on Queen Palm Way, just off Crown Avenue, he had to cross a small bridge to get home every night. He probably ate in the fifties-style diner at the end of his block. These were the elements they had to look for here in New York, Jason was certain of it. The number, the names. The layout of the neighborhood. All these things would have special meaning for Grebs, and he would need them around him to feel safe.

Grebs might never have been treated. But even if he had been hospitalized numerous times, it would take too long to find out where. There was no sheet for the mentally ill that listed how many times a person sought help for what symptoms, the way there was for felons and their arrests. Mental illness was a private thing. No central place stored information. A person could be hospitalized a dozen times, in a dozen different places. Each hospital kept only its own records, and none could tap into the records of the others just by hitting the right computer button.

The danger of bureaucracy reminded Jason of Margret. He hadn’t thought about Margret in a long time. Margret was an out-patient of his at the Center when he was in training. He worked with her for a year, then she was assigned to someone else when he was rotated out. He took only two patients with him. That was two more than most people, but Margret was not one of them.

He wouldn’t have kept her as a patient even though she didn’t want to work with anyone else. It was not surprising that she was assigned to someone who was not right for her, someone with no sympathy for her, a bureaucrat who did therapy by the book. Few people got better with therapy by the book. What made people get better couldn’t really be taught.

It wasn’t surprising, either, that Margret didn’t get better. Margret was a difficult case, not because she was so very sick, but because she was an awful person. It was uncomfortable to be with her. Margret was fifty-seven years old when Jason met her. A badly aged former beauty, she had been married for thirty-two years and had no children. Her problem was her inability to deal with growing old. Her husband had only recently left her for another woman, even though she had been cruel to him for years and told him countless times that she never loved him.

Margret couldn’t stand losing her looks and the status and attention that went with them. How many male doctors of any age could relate to a woman who was deeply depressed because she lost her one weapon, the considerable sexual power that she had always used to control and humiliate the men in her life? She had attempted suicide more than once. It was all documented in her records. Jason had carefully briefed his replacement. He warned him that although Margret appeared stable at times, she was deeply depressed and very much at risk. But the young man, now practising on Fifth Avenue, was a bureaucrat, a man without imagination. One evening, Margret called him at five o’clock and left a message saying she had to talk to him. She didn’t say she was desperate or suicidal, so the young doctor interpreted her call as another attempt to control him. He heard only what she said, and didn’t take her seriously. He had seen her earlier that day. She had seemed fine. He didn’t check on her that evening, and she slit her wrists and bled to death sometime in the night.

Jason kept thinking about Margret because he knew the young doctor never felt he had done anything wrong. He still believed he had an unblemished record. He didn’t count Margret as a personal failure.

It was when Margret killed herself that Jason realized he could never leave anything, not the smallest detail, to anybody else. Nobody under his direct care had ever died of anything but natural causes. Margret had been somebody else’s responsibility at the time of her death. But Jason couldn’t help seeing a connection between her and his situation with Detective Woo and the police. He had no hope of finding Emma without them. But police were bureaucrats. They did the minimum. He couldn’t let it go at that. Emma’s life depended on very fast action. Jason didn’t care how many times Detective Woo put him off. He would keep banging on her door until she let him in.

In the deep quiet of his office, where the only sound was the ticking of his clocks, Jason decided that enough time passed since his last call. He allowed himself to check the clock. Twenty minutes was close enough. He dialed Detective Woo’s number again.

April picked up. “Detective Woo.”

“It’s Jason Frank.”

“Hello, Dr. Frank,” she said cautiously.

“Call me Jason.”

April Woo did not respond to the invitation.

“I want you to think of me as a colleague,” Jason said in his warmest voice. “We can work together. I can help you.”

“You are helping,” April replied in her own warm and reassuring voice.

He knew that voice. He had one just like it, professional and distance-making. He was the doctor. He didn’t let patients tell him what to do—unless they were right. He was flexible that way. He had to make her flexible. Emma’s life depended on it.

“Look, I’ve been thinking about the tape. I can help you pinpoint places where he might have taken her, landmarks to look for. I’ve worked up a psychological profile of him.”

“Okay,” April said. “I’ll take anything you’ve got. What do you want to tell me?”

“Before I get into that, is there anything new?”

Again she paused before answering, as if trying to decide whether or not to tell him. His heart jumped. There was news.

“You can tell me. I’m a professional. Whatever it is, I can take it.”

“It might be nothing.”

“What is it?”

“I had the nine-one-ones checked out.”

“Emma called?”

“No, but there was an incomplete.”

“What does that mean?” Jason cried.

“It means someone called in and asked for help but didn’t give a name or location before hanging up.”

“Oh, God …”

“Sometimes they’re potential suicides. Sometimes they’re pranks. We get a lot of pranking, you know. It may be nothing.”

“What are you doing about it?”

“We’re having the voices on the tapes compared to see if it’s your wife’s.”

“Do you know where the call was from?”

There was another long hesitation before she finally told him. “Yeah,” she said with a note of triumph. “Queens.”

Queen Palm Way. Queens. Jason’s heart leapt. “Look, Detective, I’m coming over. I need to talk to you right away.” He hung up before she could protest.