Burning Time

63

Sergeant Joyce studied the photographs of the burns on the two dead girls in California and an enlarged version of the drawing on the bottom of each of the sixteen letters Emma Chapman had received. The pictures were inconclusive. There had been such discoloration of the skin in one case, she found it surprising the coroner could even tell the wound had been a burn. The other one was clearly a shape, a similar sort of shape, certainly, but as far as she could tell, not the shape of the drawing in the letters.

Joyce threw them on the desk in her office, where April had assembled all the documents and photos that represented her case against Grebs, and shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t see anything to help us in these.”

“I just got a call from that sheriff in California,” April said. “They have a witness who says he saw Ellen with Grebs the afternoon she disappeared.”

“We still don’t have anything that helps us with this,” Joyce replied coldly.

April had placed Emma Chapman’s yearbook picture next to the photo of Ellen Roane in her tennis shorts. The two young women both had long blond hair and classically beautiful features. They could almost be sisters. April had a connection in the looks of the women. She had a connection in the guy’s obsession with burning. She had a suspect with a sheet that fit. And still, Joyce didn’t want to connect the two cases. April wondered if her supervisor just didn’t want to acknowledge her work.

She pushed aside the gruesome photos of the corpses found in the desert, so the two smiling girls were on top again. “Don’t you see a resemblance here?”

Joyce didn’t reply.

“Look, he knew the Chapman woman from high school, and he’s taken off.” What else did the woman want?

“That doesn’t mean he’s here.”

April shrugged. “It could mean he’s here.”

“This isn’t his MO,” Joyce said flatly.

“Maybe not,” April agreed. “But sometimes they do it differently each time. And he knew her. Of course it could be a coincidence that he knew her.…”

“You know it isn’t a coincidence.” Joyce glanced down at the two lovely, golden-haired girls. “But we don’t have a desert here for him to leave her in.”

Talk about lack of imagination. Didn’t have a desert. April suddenly remembered her first case in this precinct. Sergeant Joyce had sent her into a townhouse where the worried owner had been afraid the Chinese cook might have murdered the Chinese maid and hidden the body somewhere in the house. There was a horrendous smell in the place, unbearable, and the maid had disappeared under suspicious circumstances several days before, leaving all her possessions behind. The owner couldn’t find the source of the smell. It seemed to be coming from the very core of the house.

It was a big house, four stories high, with a huge basement kitchen and laundry room. The place had marble stairways and marble bathrooms with gold faucets in the shape of dolphins. April had talked to the Chinese cook for a long time. He confessed he hated the maid. He had a lot of grievances. The maid had turned down his advances. It made him mad. She was eating their employer’s leftovers. That was no good. No one gave her permission to eat the leftover food.

Then she got hungry, but he wouldn’t let her into the kitchen to make her own food. It was his kitchen. So she took food into her room to dry it like in China.

“What kind of food?” April asked him.

“Fish,” he had replied with disgust.

“She tried to dry the fish in her room?”

Yes, that was it. “Only this New York, not Hong Kong. Fish no dry.”

When he talked to the maid about getting rid of the fish, they had a screaming fight, and she lost face, wouldn’t come back, not even for her things.

“Not many things,” the cook had said scornfully about her possessions.

April located the result of their feud in one of the heating vents in the basement. The smell of rotting fish was being pumped everywhere. She found the woman in New Jersey with a friend. She refused to come back.

This New York, not Hong Kong: Fish no dry. It made April think Grebs had something else in mind for Emma Chapman. He meant to kill her and hide her somewhere.

“Maybe he plans to change his MO on this one,” April told her lack-of-imagination supervisor.

“Maybe.” Joyce had taken her jacket off and was sweating in her green blouse. April noted that it was too dark a color for her. Joyce looked sallow, and the sweat rings under her arms revealed that she was worried, too. It made April feel better.

“I have a dozen people out there with his picture. Better get it to every precinct in the city,” she said.

April nodded. Yes, Sergeant. Right away, Sergeant.

“Do you have a voice match yet on that nine-one-one to Queens?” Joyce switched focus.

“They’re working on it.” April tapped her fingers on the desk. She was in a hurry to get away.

“Where’s Sanchez?”

“He went down to the lab to sit on them.” April still stood in front of Joyce’s desk. She didn’t like to sit down in there. “I want to talk to the husband again,” she said after a minute.

“Oh, what does he know?”

“He’s a shrink. He found the guy in the first place.”

“Yeah, you told me.”

“He knows where he works. He’s seen where the guy lives, where he grew up, even talked to his aunt. He knows Grebs’s background.”

“So?”

“He’s a shrink. He’s done a workup on Grebs, a profile of his habits that might help us find him.”

“So talk to him again.”

Sergeant Joyce’s phone rang. She picked it up and began to speak. April stood there. After a minute Joyce put her hand over the receiver.

“What?” she demanded.

“He wants to go for a drive,” April said.

Joyce shook her head. “What are you, crazy?”

“Just checking.”

April left the office.

Dr. Frank was waiting for her downstairs.