Loving Time

seventy-three

April and Mike stayed in Gunn’s apartment until there was a response to their call for help. It took less than six minutes to secure the area and explain the situation to the uniforms who arrived on the scene.

Mike phoned the squad room three times to see if Daveys had called in with his location, but there was no message from him. At eleven-ten, there was a call from Andy Mason. Daveys left a message at the station that Bobbie had gone into the Stone Pavilion and disappeared in the basement. So had Daveys.

Four blue-and-whites were on the street with their lights flashing when Mike and April left Gunn’s building at eleven-twenty-five. The snow had stopped, but the temperature was still dropping.

Mike checked his watch and sighed. “How many Feebs you figure Daveys has in the hospital by now?”

April shook her head and tossed him the keys to her car. He took the driver’s seat, turned on the engine and the lights without comment.

“I don’t think any,” she said to Mike after the heat started to come up.

“No other Feebs. How do you figure that?”

April shivered, thinking of Daveys’s interview with Boudreau. “Some of what he said was the usual bullshit. But some of it was personal.” April studied Mike’s profile. “Like what you did was personal with you, know what I mean?”

Mike pulled away from the curb. “No,” he said curtly.

“Daveys kept talking about his family with us, remember? His big brother died in ’Nam. His little brother is a cop. He’s a big family man, an all-American racist.”

“So?”

“So he hates guys like Boudreau, really hates them. It wasn’t just a line to get the guy to squawk when he said he’d get him. It was personal.”

April studied the side of Mike’s face. She’d seen his profile a thousand times. His right ear was scarred from the burns he’d received in the fire. She, too, had some scars that would never go away. They were connected by those scars, by the ghosts of the victims whose deaths they’d investigated, by the cases they’d cleared together.

“It was personal when you lost it, Mike. But afterward it was over. You didn’t want to kill the guy. Daveys wants to kill him, and he can’t have a bunch of buddies with him. I’d guess there won’t be any team. He’ll be alone.”

Mike sneaked a look at her. “Is this your way of telling me you love me, querida?”

April stared out the window. “I’m telling you Daveys went alone. We have the advantage here.”

“Oh, yeah, what’s that?” Mike ran the red light at Riverside, headed south to the hospital.

“We know where Boudreau went.”

“No, he wouldn’t go back to that room in the basement. He knows we know about it.”

“That’s right. So where would he go?”

“The Medical Center is a big place. He could go anywhere. If he really wanted to get lost in there, we’d need an army to find him.”

“Uh-uh. Think about it. Guy worked in the Psychiatric Centre for a lot of years. He’d go there.”

“Thanks, querida, that’s a big help.” Mike passed the Stone Pavilion. The Centre was on the next block.

“Oh, come on, amigo, you’ve been staring at his file all day. What did it tell you?”

“It said they tried to move him to another unit several times because of his hostility to the community-service patients … but he——refused to——leave——the——sixth——floor.”

Mike braked in the white lines outside the door of the twenty-story building. The car skidded sideways on a patch of ice, then stopped. They jumped out into the freezing night and headed for the revolving front door. It was locked. They went in through the wheelchair-access side door, their shields already out for the guard. But no one was around to challenge them, so they traded glances and headed for the elevators. It was eleven-forty-five.