The Silent Bride

Jorge as he made for the exit. "Jorge, just walk around the block and come back, okay? This will only take a few minutes, I promise." They argued at the door for a moment. Louis's voice was pleading.

Then he came back into the room angry as a hornet. "What's the matter with you? Are you nuts? He didn't do anything."

"Let's impress upon you the seriousness of this matter, Louis. Two girls are dead, and none of us are sleeping until we find out who killed them. So lef s not cha-cha around this anymore." April said it as nicely as she could.

"Believe me, I haven't forgotten. I did their weddings, their fucking wakes. I may go broke over this. It's hard enough to get paid when they

live."

He tossed his head, acting.

"Still joking," Mike said, annoyed enough for both of them. "Cut the crap; we don't have the patience."

"Humor is my crutch, okay? Doesn't mean I don't have feelings." Louis sank down on the sofa with a loving pat to the dent left there by his friend. "Quite aside from the personal, there's a financial component. I'm hurting here. This is going to cost me, maybe ruin me." He held both hands over his heart. "I'm not involved in any crimes."

"Oh, you're involved. You're right there at the top of the list."

This elicited a laugh. "Why? I've been written up everywhere. Didn't he tell you?" Louis pointed at Mike, still on his feet.

April was still on her feet, too. She didn't want to sink into that soft sofa and have trouble getting up down the road. "The killer is right here in your little group, Louis. It's one of you, or all of you. Lefs face it. You know it's one of you."

He patted his pompadour, anxious. "I know. I know. I

know

you think that. I told the lieutenant here where I came from, about my parents. He knows. And poor Ubu, this has sent him over the edge. It's a fucking tragedy." He pointed at Mike. "Sit down, will you? You're making me nervous."

Mike obliged. April didn't.

"I told you. I have nothing to hide. I had a shitty past, okay? I took a new name and found a new life. And now I feel bad for kids who suffered like I did. I'm giving something back. You want to sue me because I help them, sue me." He was emoting all over the place, but dead serious and right on the nerve center of his life. April yawned.

"You think we're different, huh? Well, nobody escapes violence in this life, okay? I know that. Ask the shrinkers, they'll tell you. Everybody's been brutalized one way or another."

Pat pat

at the pompadour.

"I may be an aging queen, but I know a thing or two about this. Take Tito. Both his brothers disappeared in Argentina, just disappeared. Politics. The police didn't care, claimed they didn't know anything. Tito was the baby, the faggot the family beat up, and suddenly the sole male survivor. Now he's just a loony bedbug, positive those brothers aren't really dead. The/re around every corner, coming back soon so he can go home again."

April watched his eyes and yawned again. How did this pertain? Louis shot her a bitter look.

"People don't talk about this stuff. They get nervous if you tell them that growing up you got fucked over every single day. People just plain don't like to hear it. Doesn't mean we turn out killers."

April yawned a third time.

"Fuck it, you don't give a shit," Louis grunted at her.

"Tell me about Wendy," she said.

"Huh. Do you have a year? She's a very complicated person."

"No, Louis, I have an hour. Come on, tell me something I need to know. Did you see her this morning?"

Louis dropped his head into his hands. "We spoke on the phone. You probably have all the phone records. You know we spoke. Where is she?"

"What did you talk about?" April asked.

"Nothing. Details. She was upset about the rain. She wanted to make sure we didn't line the red carpet with flower trees as we'd planned."

"Any particular reason?"

"Wendy is particular about everything. The winds were high. She knew the flowers would be spoiled. She was concerned the image of decay would give a bad impression."

"The image of decay?" April said, not believing a word of this.

"She always wanted her brides to have happy memories. It's ironic." He sniffed angrily.

"Because she knew Prudence would die? Were you the final say on the flowers, Louis?"

"No, no. Of course not. Mrs. Hay ordered them. I couldn't just not deliver them. I spoke to Mr. Hay about it. He was only too happy to cut them out. We donated all twenty-six flower trees. I'm praying they'll pay me. Maybe I should sue the city." He got up to move his glass, then sat again, eyes moving from one to the other.

"Did Wendy have anything else on her mind?" April asked.

"No, not that I remember." Louis's face was flushed almost purple from emotion, or drink. He looked about ready to have a stroke. "I already told him all this."

"Well, here comes something new. You're very close. You know her state of mind. So far, she's the key to the killings, and you're the key to her."

"No. I said this before. Wendy has her weaknesses, but she's not a killer."

April lifted a shoulder. "Nonetheless. You're the key to her."

Louis raised his hand. "I'm not the key to her. We do business. I wouldn't say we're close."

"Hey, don't play with me!" she said sharply. "I have the party list going back years. You've had your problems in the past. We know about that, too. So cut the cha-cha. You do a lot of business with Wendy."

"Okay, a lot. So what?" Louis's face went through a number of expressions: pissed, nervous, impatient.

'You did a wedding together on Martha's Vineyard a month ago?"

"Yes ... ?" Now he was wary.

"How did you get there?"

"We took the van." Very surprised.

"Your van?"

"Of course my van."

"Who went?" April asked.

Louis pursed his hps. "Uto and me." He raised his shoulders.

"What about Wendy?"

"Wendy went in her own car."

"Did anybody go with Wendy?"

"I don't know, why?" "Did you know Wendy was a marksman?"

"Of course."

"Did she brag about it?"

"Brag, no. It was a fact of life, like being left-handed."

"Is she left-handed?"

"No."

"What did her being a shooter mean to you?"

Up went that shoulder. "I don't know, nothing. Wendy's good at her job. That's all I think about."

"You're a smart man, Louis. Don't give me that. Did she ever talk about taking somebody out?" April kept pushing.

"Never."

"What about Tito?"

"I told you he's a bedbug, afraid of his own shadow."

"Like Ubu?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Did you shoot the guns, Louis?" April demanded.

"Me, are you crazy?" His eyes bulged out.

"Oh, come on, it's fun. You know it's fun. Why not?" she prodded. "Everybody likes to shoot."

"I still don't know what you're talking about." He looked pained.

"I'm talking about the guns on the Vineyard. Wendy told me all about it. She said you all shot the guns."

Up went the shoulder.

'You remember it now?"

He shook his head. "I'm not sure. I don't remember. Maybe some of the others did." His face was draining now.

"Did you all stay at the house while you were there?" "Wendy's house?"

April nodded, holding her breath.

"Yeah, we stayed at Wendy's house."

"Ubu, too?"

"Yeah."

April exhaled, and so did Mike. "You may go away for the rest of your life for not telling us about the guns sooner, Louis. You certainly could have saved Prudence. I don't know. Maybe you didn't want to save Prudence. I don't know, Mike, does this look like a conspiracy to you?"

"Could be. We'll have to see how the DA takes it."

"I never touched those guns."

"How many guns, Louis? One, two? An arsenal?"

"I don't know, a few," he said vaguely. "I don't like guns. I wasn't paying attention."

"Maybe you didn't touch them, but transported them."

He shook his head. "They never left the island. I'm sure of it."

"How can you be sure of it if you weren't paying attention?"

Silence.

"You took a big chance, Louis, and you're going to pay for it."

"The bigger chance was talking to you," he muttered.

"We're going to take a look around, that okay with you? If it isn't okay with you, we'll get a warrant. Which do you prefer?"

He shook his head. "You have my permission. Look away," he said.

Forty-four

M

ike blew air out of his mouth. In big puffs like someone practicing Lamaze. He was tired and wanted April to come home with him. "You okay?"

"Oh, yeah, just thinking." April was writing quickly in her notebook. Her to-do list. Go to Martha's Vineyard Island. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.

He could see her thoughts churning. In a few hours they'd covered a lot of bases. This time they'd gone through Wendy's place themselves, and not looking just for guns. They were after an address and found one in a file with tax and electric and phone and water bills for a house located at Chappaquon-sett, Vineyard Haven, Mass. Bingo.

They also found the garage bill and located her car in a garage on Third Avenue. It was a tomato BMW 538i. In the BMW, a bunch of empty Coke cans, a couple of Steamship Authority ferry schedules—one for winter and the latest, spring/summer, just out this week. Also used ticket stubs for Tuesday, May eleventh. After Tovah's killing and before Prudence's. Killers were dumb. Nearly always. They never thought their tracks could be followed. Why hadn't they followed this track sooner? They guessed that the gun used to shoot Tovah was back on Martha's Vineyard and possibly a different gun had been used to kill Prudence. Why? People who loved guns—people who shot them regularly—usually had more than one. Some had dozens; collectors had hundreds. They were betting that Weridy, of the tomato red BMW and many pairs of candlesticks and stemware with the stickers still on them, had many guns.

The Vineyard Haven sheriff said he'd meet them at the airport in the A.M. Barring fog at either end, they'd be there before ten. They'd already placed their bets on what they'd find in her house. Mike wanted his sweetheart home with him.

"Querida?"

"Hmmm?" She didn't look up.

"You want to eat?"

"The pizza was fine." Still writing.

"You didn't touch it."

"I ate the crust."

Cheese, she still wouldn't eat cheese. He blew out more air, remembering his perpetual warning to himself:

Women. You risk your life if you fall in love with one.

These Chinese girls were tough. Ching had warned him that he'd better be prepared for a long battle if he wanted to win.

April put the notebook down and looked up. "Tired?" she asked.

"No, I'm cool." They were now in the shiny Crown Vic headed down Second Avenue to Twenty-third Street, where his battered Camaro was parked. April's car was in the garage at One PP, all the way downtown. He'd have to take her down there to get her car; then they'd both head home in different cars on the BQE. Toughness was tough on logistics. He knew he was going to pick her up in the morning for the drive to La Guardia, but he didn't want to be separated from her for what remained of the night.

"I wish they'd held on to Wendy. I don't want to get yanked out of bed when she takes off in an hour." April yawned.

"Exactly what I was thinking," Mike said.

They'd held on to her for nearly ten hours. Some of that time she'd cooled her heels all alone in an interview room. They had her on video, chewing her nails, tapping her feet, twisting around in her chair, taking insignificant bites of three sandwiches then discarding them, and drinking more than a dozen Cokes. There was a saying in the cops that if you put three suspects in a cell for the night only the guilty one would sleep. The innocent ones would be scared shitless; the guilty one could relax because he knew who did it. Wendy was worried and pretty much hopping out of her skin. Without her guns connected to the homicides, though, they didn't have enough to arrest her. They needed the guns to connect the dots.

Mike left the Crown Vic at Twenty-third Street, and they both got in the Camaro. "You want to leave your car and come home with me tonight?" he asked. So much for toughness.

Forty-five

S

kinny Dragon was waiting for April when she drove up at one-thirty-three A.M. April could see her fried-seaweed hair framed in the light of the living room window. Before April had even switched the headlights off, Skinny was out the front door in her pajamas, screaming as if there were no such thing as sleeping neighbors.

"Where you been,

nil"

she cried. "So late. Thoughtless, thoughtless." Loud. Something April didn't catch, softer in Chinese. About a party she was supposed to go to, didn't get to. It wasn't clear which one of them Skinny meant.

April grabbed her purse and Ching's custom dress in its see-through plastic, then jumped wearily out of the car. "Hi, Ma. Sorry. I didn't know it would take so long."

"No good. Worry all day. Sorry not good enough," she scolded in Chinese.

Of course not. What could be good enough to appease a suffering mother? A hundred years of apology would not be enough.

"Where you been?" Skinny asked softer now, clearly relieved her only child was not dead, as she had feared. "What's that? You go shopping?"

As soon as Skinny struck a more normal furious tone, April didn't feel the need to run anymore. Her exhausted body crawled up the walk, acting like the worm her mother thought she was. She wished she could hide the dress. No such luck.

"How much you spend for that?" Skinny demanded.

"Nothing, it was free," April said.

"Free? What kind of dress is free?" Skinny moved closer for a better look. "You do monkey business for that dress,

nil"

She peered at the dress, giving her daughter a poke in the ribs.

"Maaa!" April dodged her, dove through the front door.

Home sweet home.

But she didn't make it to the stairs leading to her apartment.

Skinny hurried in right behind her, now screaming with a worse idea. "You get that dress from ghost?" she demanded, poking the air with her finger, appalled that April could even consider taking an article of clothing from a dead person. But where else would such a thing come free? The Dragon was not a sophisticated thinker.

"Ma, relax. It was a gift," April assured her.

"Ha." That meant monkey business for sure. Skinny drew close to her daughter to sniff out the truth. She grabbed April's arm and held her in the old iron grip.

It was late and April longed to permanently wrench herself away from her difficult mother with the one-track mind. The problem was, Skinny had a nose worthy of one of those fake doctors in Chinatown who smelled their patients for symptoms. In fact, if Skinny had become a fake doctor, she'd have made a fortune and wouldn't need a daughter to torture and take care of her.

But April was too tired to wrench right now, and there Skinny went. Sniff, sniff, sniff at April's neck, her hair, the palms of her hands, sniffing for sex and murder. And April happened to have been exposed to both that day, the sex most recently. Where and how she would never tell. Mike had been hot; she had been hot. The long week without was more than either could take a second longer. Okay, they'd done it in a car. Okay, in both cars.

April tried to disengage so her mother wouldn't know, but it was too late.

"Aiyeeei," Skinny screamed.

"Ma, come on, I'll make you some tea. We'll talk," she said. "Look at my dress. Here, isn't it beautiful?"

Skinny staggered into the kitchen, too traumatized to think about the origins of a dress. Sex made her absolutely nuts. She was nuts for ten minutes; then the kitchen restored her to what passed in her for sanity. Like a windup toy she went directly to the refrigerator and started taking out the food, which was a good thing because April was really, really hungiy.

Skinny's angry muttering while she cooked, however, soon drove April upstairs, where she threw her offending clothes on the floor, showered, and changed into a clean T-shirt and a pair of NYPD shorts. When she returned to the kitchen to mollify the Dragon with stories of Ching's kindness, the ham-and-scrambled-egg fried rice, pickled baby bok choy, and red-cook chicken was on the table. Relieved, April collapsed in one of three battered kitchen chairs and reached for her chopsticks.

"Eat," Skinny demanded, as if she weren't about

to.

"Thanks, Ma. I'm starved." April snagged a bite of succulent wing meat, perfectly simmered in gingered soy and saki and still warm. Her favorite.

"Bad luck," Skinny said.

"Yum." April savored that first bite, then attacked the mound of hacked chicken on the plate. For a few seconds Prudence's murder pushed back just a few inches and her mother's comfort food made life as poignantly sweet as it had been in April's youngest years. Her body tingled with the afterglow of Mike's love and the excitement of leaving the city for her first on-the-job flight out of town.

"Bad luck," Skinny announced again, pouring tea.

April stopped gobbling long enough to swallow some. Delicious. She didn't want to ask what in particular was bad luck, since practically anything from the Dragon's point of view could be. She tried distraction.

"The dress came from Ching, Ma. Isn't it beautiful?"

"She gave it to you, why?" Skinny looked suspicious.

"She wants me to give a speech at her wedding."

"Why!" Skinny was flabbergasted.

April lifted a shoulder. A little break with tradition. Skinny didn't wait for an answer.

"Ching called five times," she announced. "Bad luck."

"Okay, Ma, what's the bad luck?"

"Tang Ling on TV. Big interview. You see?"

No, April did not have time to watch TV today, or any other day "Is that what Ching called about?"

"Tang made Ching's dress."

"I know."

Skinny leaned over the table and took a bite off April's plate. "They're friends. She was invited to the wedding. You didn't know?"

"I know." April flashed to her garish Chinatown cheongsam. Too bad she didn't get a Tang Ling dress.

"Ching can't wear bad-luck dress! Tang very mad. Call her now," Skinny commanded.

April checked the kitchen clock. "It's almost two in the morning, Ma. I can't call her now."

"Tang very famous,

ni."

"I know." April put her chopsticks down, her shortlived feeling of well-being totally gone. Had Prudence been wearing a Tang dress? That was something she hadn't asked.

Five minutes with her mother and the fog was back. She remembered that she could have stayed at Mike's place and avoided this complication. She should have stayed at Mike's. But her makeup case was here. Her clean clothes were here, and she hadn't wanted to leave town even for a few hours unequipped. Tang Ling wanted to talk to her, or maybe it was Ching who wanted Tang to talk to her. That meant Prudence's dress was a Tang. Another thread to follow.

"You solve case?"

"I hope so, Ma," April said wearily.

"Good girl. You solve," Skinny said, nodding with approval for the first time April could remember.

Forty-six

T

oo soon it was morning. Birds called outside April's window. She heard them before the click of her alarm, almost as soon as the sun had dragged itself out of the ocean and made its presence known in Queens. The chirping and chattering heightened as light slowly suffused her little room. She'd had a deep and dreamless night, thanks to the feeding philosophy of Skinny. Fill the belly to cease all functioning of the brain.

It worked for only a little while, though. The new day always kicked April's thinking back into gear. Yesterday, storms and catastrophe. Today, birdsong and optimism. Two young women were dead, and nature didn't give a shit. Groaning, she punched the pillow to find a cooler place for her face. That kept her calm for exactly fifteen seconds. After that, all possibility of sleep was gone. She rolled over to stretch her spine and muscles. She hadn't run yesterday or the day before. No martial arts for weeks. Last night, love in a hurry, hardly the sustained hard exercise her legs and spirit required. Today she didn't have time to give it to them, either.

Exactly a week ago Tovah Schoenfeld died. Yesterday Prudence Hay followed her into an uncertain afterlife. But peaceful afterlife wasn't her business. Fully alert now, she jumped out of bed and into the shower. No dme for food or further thinking.

A few minutes before seven Mike pulled up in the Camaro. The second she heard the car begin to cough its way into her block, she charged down the stairs and out the door before her mother could ask her where she was going so early on a Sunday morning. The fact that she still had the habit of sneaking in and out at thirty-one years old would have filled her with her usual disgust if Mike hadn't been out of his car, standing by the passenger door. With his ample mustache, dark sunglasses, open-collared amber shirt, buff jacket, and cowboy boots he looked like a drug lord from Miami or

Miami Vice,

one or the other. One who'd been in a fight. But his open arms sent her heart sailing.

Seventy-one degrees, cerulean, nearly cloudless sky, and she was dressed for travel in all-American Gap. Navy polished-cotton trousers, matching blazerlike jacket, and underneath a lucky-red camp shirt, short-sleeved in case it got really hot later. On the job like Mike, she was wearing a Glock on her hip and dark shades. They kissed by the car. Mike's mustache prickled as his tongue nudged into her mouth. She sucked it in deeper, swaying a little in the embrace. Death and hunting: It always made them edgy and hot. She could have kept at the necking for some time, but they had a plane to catch. Reluctantly, she stepped back. Just in time to see her mother's face with its sour expression in the window. Freedom hit her like a drug, and she smiled.

"You're late. Will we make it?" she asked.

"Sure. It's only ten minutes from here." He closed the door gently and paused just long enough to wave gallantly at the Dragon. Then he got in, revved up the noisy car, and peeled out into the quiet street. Fresh spring air blew in from the open windows, bringing the thrill of escape. Mike raced through the back streets of Queens, avoiding the highway. He pulled into the short-term parking lot at La Guardia nine minutes later.

All was quiet there on May sixteenth for the American Eagle seven-fifty A.M. flight to Martha's Vineyard until they arrived—the couple on the job with four guns, one on the hip, one in a shoulder holster, one in the shoulder bag, and one in a cowboy boot. April and Mike had their boarding passes in hand, but before they'd pulled their gold and authorization to fly armed, the new, beefed-up security teams converged on them like birds to bread crumbs.

"Police," Mike announced, quickly producing the paperwork.

A uniformed officer and the four security persons manning the two metal detectors and conveyor belts each checked out Bellaqua's letter before falling away. The other passengers had backed away for the confrontation.

April's heavy shoulder bag with the .38 and extra ammunition never hit the belt. She kept her sunglasses on, trying to act cool when actually she felt as excited as a kid. City cops rarely traveled out of state on the job, and on those occasions it was usually to escort a prisoner or a suspect back. This trip was also a quickie. They were booked on a three o'clock flight back.

"Chico,

ever travel on business before?" April asked as they walked out on the tarmac into a stiffening breeze toward the tiny propeller job that was their conveyance.

He nodded. "Wasn't fun like this, though. I had to go down to South Carolina to pick up a guy who'd hacked up his wife. We had to sedate him pretty heavy to get him on the plane."

April had no comeback for that. "You want the window?" she asked as she ducked her head to climb aboard. Oh, it was small.

"No, you take it." Mike slid in next to her, scrunching into the narrow space with zero legroom. "Isn't this fun?"

"Oh, yeah, this is great." She checked her watch. It was getting late. Nobody came to close the door. The other passengers had been smart enough to bring their coffee and bagels with them. They'd been too cool to think of food.

Mike's cell rang and he reached into his pocket for it. "Yeah? Oh, yeah, hi. Uh-huh, we're there. Yeah, looks like we'll be on time, maybe a minute or two late. Weather's good. Little bit of a breeze. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Okay" He hung up and gave April's arm a pat. "How ya doin',

querida?"

"Who was that?" April asked, as if she didn't know.

"Bellaqua. Wendy hasn't moved or called anyone since last night. Ditto Louis. Tito's in the hot seat downtown. They'll work on him all day. She wants us to keep in touch and get with her later this afternoon at One PP."

April peered out the little window. Martha's Vineyard was about two hundred and forty miles, not that far, but ahead of her she could see a line of jets assembling for their eight o'clocks to wherever.

Let's go, let's go.

They didn't have all day. Yesterday, she'd taken a chance in the interview room and kept her questioning real general because she hadn't wanted to alert Wendy. Sometimes they talked around and around a subject, never hitting the nail on the head. In this case Wendy was holding out on them big-time. April didn't want her calling her mystery assistant, or getting on the road in the BMW herself. She hoped she knew what she was doing.

She turned to Mike with a little smile, remembering their search of Louis's place. They'd come up with a few fancy sex toys, but nothing of a more sinister nature than that. The detectives who tossed Tito's rented room in a small house found

Soldier of Fortune

magazines, but no guns. He said he liked to look at the pictures.

Let's go. Let's go.

The nineteen seats filled up. Affluent people with a certain look. Expensive khaki clothes, expensive casual carry-on bags. Buff people, Wendy's kind of people, fit and secure. And used to the drill. Only April and Mike were tapping their watches.

"Jesus, look at that. We're never getting out of here." April pointed out the planes lining up on the runway.

"We'll be fine." Mike squeezed her hand, always the optimist.

Finally, the door was closed. The two propeller engines sputtered to life, and the Tinkertoy plane taxied out sounding like something from World War II. Not too many minutes later, the copilot rattled off safety instructions and the little commuter took its place on the runway between jumbo giants off to faraway places.

Taking off, the plane teetered from side to side, fighting rising winds. At a hundred feet it hung there, engines throbbing. April watched the jets ahead of them soar up and away. Then the plane bounced a few times like a jeep off-road, losing altitude before it began to fight its way higher. Her empty stomach lurched. She clutched the arm of her seat and concentrated on the changing views: Rikers Island, the new Manhattan skyline, the George Washington Bridge receding behind them. Long Island and the coast opening out ahead.

Forty-seven

F

or forty-five minutes the little commuter bounced around in bumpy air. Then a patch of green appeared ahead in choppy, whitecapped water and grew larger undl it reached the size of Manhattan. The turbulence increased as they went inland and down. The plane seesawed as it came down and connected hard with the ground twice before finally settling into a jerky taxi toward a toy-sized airport.

"Welcome to Martha's Vineyard, and thanks for flying American Eagle," the pilot announced.

April saw the police cruiser parked on the runway and unhooked her seat belt with a little sigh of relief. The local sheriff was waiting for them as he had promised. As soon as she and Mike broke away from the other disembarking passengers and headed his way, he stuck out a paw. If he felt any surprise by the New York team, he didn't show it.

"You got here right on schedule. Bert Whitmore, at your service." The sheriff was five-ten, heavy build, wearing a khaki uniform with a considerable belly protruding over his belt, bristly gray hair growing out well past the crew-cut stage, sharp blue eyes.

"Lieutenant Sanchez and Sergeant Woo. Thanks for coming out for us," Mike said.

"No trouble at all. We don't get too many requests from Nu Yawk. We have a lot of respect for you folks, what you did last fall. Anything to help." Whitmore smiled at April. "You the one who called me last night?"

"Yes, sir."

"You didn't tell me much." He waved his hand at the new-looking cruiser with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts seal on the front doors. It was real clean and neat, had a cage separating the front and back seats, and all the modern technology. "What's your time line?" he asked.

"We're going back out at fifteen hundred. You okay with that?" Mike asked.

"Anything you want is okay with me. I'm here to help." Whitmore glanced back at the wind socks on the runway, snapping hard in a rising wind and deepening haze. He shrugged big shoulders, then climbed stiffly into the car. "You'll be fine getting out if the weather holds."

"What if the weather doesn't hold?" Mike asked, checking his watch, then opening the front passenger door for April.

"Ferry to Woods Hole. Bus to Baaston or Hyannis. Or you can wait it out."

Cold, wet air gusted at them. April shivered and shook her head. Spring was several weeks behind here; maybe they wouldn't get home as easily as they got here. She chose the backseat, happy to let Mike do the talking for the moment. His hand grazed hers as she climbed into the back.

"You're here about those wedding shootings down there, huh? Terrible thing. One of you want to fill me in?" The sheriff started the engine and drove around a fortune in private planes parked in a grid next to the runway like cars in a big lot.

"How long have you been on the job, Sheriff?" Mike asked.

"Call me Bert. Going on nineteen years now," he said.

"You know a family up here called Lotte?"

"Oh, sure. Over on Lake Tashmoo. The little lady told me you wanted to go out there and take a look."

"You had a shooting incident there back about seventeen years. Do you remember anything about that?"

"Sure, I do. I went to grammar school with Barry Wood. We looked into it pretty carefully because of the sticky situation." The cruiser bumped off the field onto the service road and threaded through a bunch of buildings that looked like army barracks. At the entrance to the airport, he turned left onto a road that was empty but for cars leaving the airport.

"What kind of situation?"

"Missus Lotte took up with Barry's father, and there was a lot of bad feeling between the families over the divorce. Barry and Wendy went away to school. Then in college during the summers the two were running around the island together, getting into trouble."

"Oh, what kind of trouble?"

"Oh, you know, the usual kind of thing for here. Vineyard Haven is a dry town. They'd run into Oak Bluffs and get beer, drink out on the beach, light firecrackers. Once they set off a rocket across the cut. It set the beach grass on fire and burned out a couple acres." He thought about it for a few moments.

"They weren't malicious, though. They alerted the fire department right away. Otherwise we could have lost a couple of houses out there. Everything's shingle on the beach, and pretty much everywhere else, too." He let out a chortle. "And they grew Mary Jane out in the vegetable garden. Those two were pretty wild for here, and their families, too."

He turned left again at a four-way intersection with a blinking yellow light. The weather was deteriorating fast. Fog rolled in at around a hundred feet April could see it move forward like a wall. Unlike New York, where it just thickened the air until you couldn't see the tops of the buildings.

"What about the shooting?" Mike asked.

They passed a farm with fields just planted, houses, all gray shingle with shutters. Now they were on a main road with fancy SUVs and only white people driving them. April tried to imagine Wendy's life here as a kid growing up. A few miles on they turned left again, passed a cemetery, a grocery store, a couple of small strip malls. Then a sudden deep curve in the road brought them to a grassy hill overlooking a cove with bobbing sailboats below and they were in picture-postcard land.

"This here is the inland side of the lake."

They passed a horse farm with barns and an elegant white clapboard house, and soon turned onto a dirt road. Bert resumed his story.

"Wendy cleaned up pretty good after she went to college. No more trouble before the shooting. They had a twenty-eight-acre place and did trapshooting out there, target shooting. Harry Lotte had always been an enthusiastic sport shooter, and somebody was always complaining about him and the kids shooting out there in the dunes. Wendy was into it pretty big. Did you know she almost went to the Olympics her senior year of college?"

"Yeah, we heard something about it."

"Why did she shoot Barry?" April asked.

"The way they told it, Wendy was target shooting, didn't see Barry behind it. Bullet went through the target and hit him in the shoulder."

"What kind of target?" April asked.

"Old fashioned bull's-eye target," he replied. "Like for archery. Not much to it. It could have happened that way." He shrugged.

But that wasn't the way Wendy told it.

"Humph. Is shooting like that legal out here?" April asked.

"Nope, but as I told you, they did it."

"Did you compare the heights of the target and the victim to see if it could have been an accident?" April asked.

"I was pretty new on the job. I wasn't an investigator back then. That's what they said, and that's what they stuck to. It got in the paper, but it wasn't a real big deal, except those two broke up afterward, and the families moved away."

"What about the gun?" April, still asking from the backseat.

"AR-7."

"Takedown," Mike finished.

"Yep."

The classic survival rifle used first by the military and then on countless RVs, boats, and planes for the last forty years. Not much in favor on the market anymore, but hundreds of thousands of them were out there. It was a good gun for the wilderness, for shooting small game, and for plinking tin cans.

"Pretty neat little thing. The barrel, action, and eight-round magazine each have a compartment in the stock."

"Caliber .22," April said from the back.

"Yes, ma'am."

That's what they were looking for.

"Was the gun confiscated?" Mike asked.

"It was registered." Bert turned to Mike briefly. Up went his shoulder.

"Any complaints about shooting out there this season?" April asked.

"We have strict gun laws here in Massachusetts. We don't let anybody get away with any reckless shooting now." Tins he was sure about. "They can own, of course, but they can't just shoot anywhere."

The cruiser traveled down a deeply rutted, bone-jarring dirt road that wound through a dense scrub-oak forest, posted with NO HUNTING signs. Other signs pointed down branching roads to houses named Chateau, Swindle, Osprey Nest. Suddenly a deer with two tiny fawns crashed through the brush and crossed the road ahead of them. April caught her breath at the dazzling sight.

"Troublesome creatures." Bert didn't even slow down.

Mike turned around to smile at April. Nature. Unexpectedly lovely. Then he asked a question April didn't hear. Bert answered with a laugh. He was acting like a tourist guide, still hadn't asked how the old case pertained to the homicides in the big city. At twenty yards a .22 bullet might well travel through a soft target at close range, but it didn't play well to April, and it wasn't the story Wendy had told her. Why tell a different story now? She thought about it as the trees thinned and sand and sea grass filled the ruts that pretended to be road. Maybe Wendy's story changed in her mind over the years. Maybe she just lied all the time. They were almost there.

A tight turnaround with a scrub oak in the center formed a wheel off of which one road led out to beach and open water and two doubled back inland. The cruiser dipped into a pothole a foot deep and followed a crude hand-painted sign for Blueberry Farm, then turned again onto another bumpy road. He stopped in a clearing where the pine forest edged the lake.

"This is it?" April was surprised. The house was hardly more than a cottage.

"The main house is down the road. It was sold off years ago. The barn here, along with a few acres and about a hundred feet of waterfront, was kept, built at the same time. I think Wendy owns it. The water's brackish, so she can't rent."

So what Wendy had told her in the interview room was half truth. Sea grass was high in front of the house. A badly rusting van and a moped were parked there. April's heart spiked as they got out of the cruiser and hiked along a narrow path through the wet grass.

Bert went first and knocked on the door. Wet wind slapped at their clothes and faces as they waited. April shivered in her cotton jacket. It was downright cold up here.

"Open up, police," Bert said.

They waited some more. Bert turned the handle and the door opened. "Anybody home?"

A girl wearing a long flowered skirt and a sweatshirt opened the door. Her hair was messy and her face didn't know it was morning.

"Who is it?" A male voice called from the other room.

"Lori Wilson?" April asked.

"Yes." Lori squinted out at them in sleepy surprise. "Hello. It's the police," over her shoulder. A warning.

"Sheriff Whitmore," Bert said.

April went next. "Sergeant Woo, Lieutenant Sanchez, NYPD."

"Jesus. What's going on?" Lori glanced around the small living room that was as folksy and American-country as Wendy's city apartment was urban-spare. At the moment it was in murky light and a mess. The faded, flowered sofas were littered with take-out food bags, empty beer bottles, and large soda cups. On the wood floor, the multicolored braided rugs were covered with sand. The fireplace was full of charred wood from many fires, and the room had a stale, smoky smell.

"You haven't heard?" Whitmore said, looking around.

"Heard what? We don't have a TV. She hasn't turned the phone on yet." She looked embarrassed when a young man in army fatigues emerged from one of two doors. One side of his face had a row of piercing on the eyebrow and another ringing the ear. Symmetry. A stud in his nose. The other side of his face was randomly pierced. His light hair was a huge nest of dreds. He appeared to be a young person trying to look as messed up as possible and succeeding very well. April guessed he had not reached legal drinking age, and Lori was a few years older.

"Hey, what's going on?" The kid raised his fingers in a peace sign at the sheriff.

"What are you doing here, Rod?"

"Just hanging with, uh, Lori." The kid shook spider webs out of a brain he didn't know how to use. "I was just on my way to work," he added, edging toward the door.

"I don't think so, Rod. It's Sunday."

"Already?" Rod seemed surprised by that and got defensive right away. "Whatever your problem is, I didn't do anything. We just hung out for a couple of days, okay? That's it." He gave the wash sign with his hands. Done. Could he go now?

"I'd like to talk to Lori," April said.

"Okay. You can tell me your life history, Rod." The sheriff moved him out the front door.

Mike moved inside. "Anyone else here?" he asked Lori.

"Uh-uh." She stuck a finger in her mouth.

Mike snorted and moved through the house, checking it for himself. April took out her notebook.

"Is Wendy all right?" Lori brushed the hair from her face and sank down on a sofa.

"How long have you been here, Lori?" April asked.

"About a week, I guess. Can't you tell me what's going on?"

April ignored the question. "Don't guess. Tell me exactly"

"I guess I came last Sunday."

"You guess? How did you get here?" April picked up a greasy Subway sack, then put it down.

"I took the bus to Woods Hole and then the ferry."

"Before or after the Schoenfeld wedding?" April turned on a light.

Lori squinted. "I didn't have to go. Wendy was doing it herself."

"I thought it takes a lot of people to pull off a wedding like that." April turned on some more lights.

"Not when it's only one site. That always keeps the glitches down, and sometimes Wendy likes to do them herself. She's very efficient. Why are you asking?" Lori twisted around to look at her.

April spun around, startling her. "She gave you these two weekends off, why?"

Lori recoiled. April noticed the hickey on her neck. A big one. She saw April looking at her and shifted uneasily; clearly she hadn't seen herself in the mirror.

"Why the two weekends off? Did you have another job Wendy wanted you to do?"

"Like what?" Lori was surprised by the question.

"Did you know Tovah Schoenfeld was murdered at her wedding last Sunday?"

Lori looked down at her hands. "Yes."

"How do you know if you don't have a phone?"

Her voice got very low. "I have a cell phone."

"And what else made you know?"

"She came up on Tuesday night."

Good. That was true. "Did she tell you she was coming?"

"Yes. I had to clean up for her. She would have killed me."

"Wendy's very particular, isn't she?"

Lori put her lips together and nodded.

"She wouldn't like to see her house like this. Why did she come, Lori?"

"She brought some things for the summer."

"In the middle of a busy week? What things?"

"I don't know." "Where did she put them?"

"I don't know. I was asleep when she got here." Lori's eyes traveled up the wall to the ceiling.

"In the attic?" April said.

Silence. The thin girl got smaller, younger-looking. "I said I don't know."

"How old are you, Lori?"

"Twenty-four," she said softly.

'Twenty-four. Where were you yesterday?"

"Here." She frowned. "Why?"

"Lori, have you ever been in any kind of trouble before? Tell me the truth, because I can check it out."

"No," she said in a faint voice.

"You're in a lot of trouble now."

"I didn't know about Tovah until Wendy told me," she said, a plea in her voice.

"What about Prudence, did you know Prudence?"

"Prudence?"

"Prudence Hay. Another one of the weddings you didn't work. Prudence is dead, too."

"What?" Lori looked confused. "I didn't know about that. What happened?"

"Someone shot her on the way into St. Patrick's."

"God, I didn't know that." Her mouth fell open in amazement. "Is Wendy all right?"

"She's fine."

Mike came back into the hving room. "Nothing in the bedrooms or the closets," he said. "There's a deck out back and an outbuilding of some kind, like a tool-shed. What about the kitchen cupboards? Let's do inside first."

"They're in the attic," April told him quietly. "Lori, get your things together. You're going back to New York."

Forty-eight

"Hey, Mike, take some gloves' April said. "Just in case."

She pulled some thin rubber gloves out of the bottom of her purse and handed them over. Mike stuffed them in his jacket pocket. This wasn't a crime scene. He cocked his head at the ceiling panel in the hall over his head. It had a handle at one end just out of his reach. A pole with a hook on the end rested in the corner, and Mike used that to lower the panel. Attached to the panel on the inside was a crude ladder on springs. He turned to the girl in the living room, twisting a handful of skirt in her hands.

"Anybody up there?" he asked.

She shook her tangled hair. "No, of course not."

"You sure?"

"Who'd be hiding? No one expected you. Can I pee?"

"Yeah, you can pee. I'll come with you," April said.

"Jesus," she muttered. "What do you think I'm going to do?"

"Hush the dope."

Mike changed his mind about the gloves. He pulled them on, then climbed the ladder. Upstairs, he pulled the string on the single bare lightbulb. It gave off just enough weak illumination for him to make out a surprisingly large and murky space. First thing he noticed was that it had been swept recently, so there were no footprints for him to disturb.

A pile of dust and mouse droppings filled a corner under the eaves. An ancient-looking broom lay beside it. The house wasn't insulated, so the dampness and smell of mold in exposed wooden beams was intense. Mike cast his eye quickly over the haphazardly placed contents. Closest to the stairs were ten oversize shopping bags filled with bulky tissue- and newspaper-wrapped objects. Beyond that, folded plastic deck chairs, a beach umbrella, two old suitcases, a hot-water heater, a clambake pot, a Weber barbecue, a trap machine and canvas bag filled with clay discs, and an old camp trunk with a broken lock.

Mike moved quickly, checking the shopping bags and suitcases first. While he worked, he could hear the murmur of voices downstairs. April's and the girl's. The sheriff must still be outside with the weirdo. Unwrapping the contents of the shopping bags as fast as he could, he found new candlesticks, crystal objects, glasses, linens, silver, small appliances in the bags. In the suitcases, quilts and pillows and summer clothes. The attic became a flea market, the evidence Wendy was a thief. But this was not what he was looking for.

When he heard the sound of rain falling on the roof above him, he checked his watch. One o'clock already. Over an hour had passed and he didn't hear voices downstairs anymore. Maybe April was outside with the sheriff searching the shed, the space under the deck. Finally he opened the trunk lid and exhaled. The gun cache was in the camp trunk: two revolvers, three shotguns recently cleaned and broken down, smelling of oil, variously emptied boxes of .22-, .38-, and ,45-caliber ammunition, both regular and hollow-point. As well as ammunition for the shotguns and several homemade silencers. If Wendy had been shooting recently, the silencers would be the reason there hadn't been any complaints from the neighbors. He got to his feet, threaded through the mess he'd made, and climbed down the ladder.

While Lori sat sniveling in the cruiser with her duffel bag on her lap, April and Mike brought the trunk downstairs and cataloged its contents. Then they took two umbrellas from the stand by the front door and paced out the grounds in a steady downpour. They found a pile of discharged shell casings, bullet-pocked trees, and clay shards. They gathered some shell casings to see if there was a match with the one they had from the Tovah shooting.

Then paperwork, paperwork. Dealing with the law-enforcement issues surrounding the seizure and shipping of possible evidence of a crime committed in New York from a private residence in Massachusetts took a long time as the DAs and officials in BAFT were consulted. They missed their three P.M. flight.

Most disturbing to Sheriff Whitmore were the silencers, one of the most illegal things in the gun world—unless you had a permit. You could buy a machine gun or an assault weapon, but not even members of organized crime had silencers on their handguns. He'd never seen one for sale, and couldn't believe they might have been constructed in the cottage.

Most disturbing to April and Mike were three things: First, they did not find Wendy's takedown .22-caliber survival rifle or the .38 revolver that went with the ammunition boxes. Second, the next flight to New York was canceled. They finally got out at nine P.M. on a Cape Air flight to Boston in what looked like the smallest plane ever made. They caught the last shuttle back to New York and got into the city at midnight. Third, Lori Wilson was with them all the way so they had no time alone.

Forty-nine

D

own at One PP in the Hate Unit when Lori Wilson finally understood she wasn't going home anytime soon, she broke down and admitted that she'd known about the guns.

"But I never shot one. They scare me shitless; I'm not kidding," Lori insisted.

Lori was bleary-eyed weary, but so was April, and she wasn't letting the girl loose until she gave up everything she had. April and Mike had split up. April was doing the questioning with the tape recorder on, for the record this time. Mike and Inspector Bellaqua were having a preliminary conversation with the Manhattan DA about the recovery of the guns and options vis-a-vis Wendy Lotte. Everything was heating up.

"When were the guns transported to New York?" April asked for the thirtieth time.

"I don't know. I told you. I didn't like them. I stayed away from the whole thing." Lori glanced at the tape recorder. Since the morning, she'd cleaned up. She was wearing jeans and a jacket now. April could see that she was a pretty girl with that WASP look so many Americans aspired to. Straight blond hair, blue eyes, pug nose, high cheekbones. She didn't know which end was up, though. The girl had no street smarts.

"How could you stay away from the guns if they were around all the time?" April tried not to tap her foot.

"I told you. They weren't around all the time. I never saw one in New York. Only on the Vineyard that one time." Lori yawned, then belatedly remembered to put her hand over her mouth.

"When was that?"

"Back in April."

"What were you doing on the Vineyard in April?"

"I told you that, too. We did a wedding there. At the Charlotte Inn."

"Who was

we,

Lori?"

"Wendy, of course. Louis, Tito, that creepy guy, Ubu. They decorated the whole first floor with lilies and roses and hydrangeas. White, red, and purple were the colors. They did the garden, too, and it was freezing even with the heaters on."

"So how many vehicles were involved?"

"I don't know. They had to bring everything in from the city. The Vineyard has nothing."

"How many vehicles traveled up?"

Lori threw her hands up. "I don't know. Ask Louis. I only saw his van. That's it. Maybe they shipped the rest."

"Okay, who else was with you?"

Lori rubbed her nose. "Only Kim."

"Kim?" April said.

"Kim Simone. He makes the dresses."

The new piece punched April in the gut. This late at night it was dead in the squad room, pretty dead in the whole building, in fact. She and Lori were sitting all the way in the back at a detective's desk by a window that overlooked some of the Wall Street area, and, beyond it, the Statue of Liberty.

"The wedding dress?" she said, taking it real slow.

"Uh-huh. It was a Tang Ling dress, but Kim copied it for her. Sometimes he did special orders for us as a favor. He wasn't supposed to knock off the dresses. I told you this already."

April didn't tell Lori that no, she hadn't mentioned this at all. Sometimes they had no idea what was important. Tang Ling. She shook her head. So Wendy stole some of the wedding gifts just to keep her hand in, Louis had the flower concession, and Kim knocked off the dresses for those clients who didn't go directly to Tang. A racket all the way around.

"Okay, but why did Kim go to Martha's Vineyard with you?" she asked.

"Umm." Lori stuck her finger in her mouth and sighed. "Am I supposed to tell you all this? I don't want to get anybody in trouble."

"We're way past that, Lori. What about the dress?"

"Ahh, well, Kim was supposed to make the dress and send it, like, on the Tuesday. The wedding was Friday. He sent it to Boston FedEx, but when the dress got there, it was too small. Kristen couldn't zip it up. By Thursday, of course, it was too late to send it back."

"The bride lives in Boston?"

"No, Kristen lives in New York, but she was in Boston at the time. And two of the bridesmaids' dresses needed work, too; so Kim just called in sick and came with us on Thursday."

"Did Kim make the bridesmaids' dresses, too?"

"No, but he said he'd do the alterations for Wendy."

"Sounds like Kim does a lot of things for Wendy," April remarked.

"Pretty much anything she asks."

"Why?"

Lori shrugged. "He likes her."

"Okay so how did you travel up there?"

"We drove with Wendy. We had to, because Kim needed his sewing machine and all his, like, sewing stuff. It took up the whole trunk."

No one mentioned this before. Kim and his sewing stuff.

"Why did everybody stay at Wendy's?" April asked.

"The bride's father wouldn't pay for a hotel for everybody, and Louis complained it was too expensive for him. So she gave in. Believe me, Wendy wasn't happy about it."

"When did you start shooting the guns?" April moved on.

"I told you I didn't," Lori insisted.

April gave her a cold look. "Come on, Lori, you want to stay here all night?"

"I'm telling you. It was terrifying. That first night Wendy got so mad at Kim she shot a pistol into a pile of pillows right next to where he was sitting. I was never so scared in my life."

"And what did Kim do?"

"You better believe he stopped complaining and got to work. Who wouldn't?" Lori said this as if April were some kind of dummy.

"What had Kim been complaining about, Lori?"

"Oh, a thousand things. Marriage is terrible. His wife is mean to him. His sister is dead. Whatever. He's a real pain in the ass."

"Who else was there when Wendy fired the gun?" The recorder was taping, but April took quick notes. She always thought best with a pen in her hand.

"Ubu. Oh, my God, Tito! Louis. Everybody freaked. I thought Louis would have a stroke. The living room was just filled with these cans of water and all his flowers. And they were, like, leaping around insane, yelling at her to put the gun down."

"What kind of gun was it?"

"I don't know, a pistol gun."

"Did the gun have a silencer on it?"

"Hell no, it made a huge bang." Lori paused for a few moments, remembering that big bang. "And then the next day after the wedding everybody was out shooting in the woods. It started to rain and they put on these gray ponchos and kept shoodng. It was just

weird."

"Everybody except you."

"Yeah. Everybody but me. Wendy told me I better not say anything about it because shooting was illegal, or something."

April gave the time and turned off the tape recorder. She was bone tired and had had enough of Lori for the moment. She went out to confer with Poppy and Mike, and they all agreed that Lori was no flight risk.

"Okay, you can go home now. Here's my number. Call me if you think of anything else."

"I don't have any money," Lori said, tearing up.

"Someone will take you home. Oh, and Lori. Don't go anywhere tonight, okay?"

"Okay."

A uniform took Lori home in a squad car. Then, eighteen hours after they'd set out in the morning, April went home with Mike to his apartment in Forest Hills.

Fifty

O

nce again morning came too soon. Light and the racket of a ringing phone pierced April's sleep long before she'd had enough of it. Her first thought was that one of their suspects was on the move, and she jerked awake.

"Showtime," Mike grumbled and rolled over to pick up. "Sanchez." He listened for a moment; then his voice got sweet. "Hiya, babe, how ya doin'? No, of course not. No one's avoiding you."

Mike handed over the handset. "It's for you."

A babe for her? "Yes?" she said, hoping it wasn't her mother he was calling

babe.

"April, didn't you get my messages?" Ching's frantic voice.

"Oh, Ching! What time is it?"

"Almost six. I didn't wake you, did I?"

"Almost six?" Was she nuts? April groaned. Four hours' sleep, less a half an hour for Latin meltdown.

"Look, I'm sorry to call so early, but I have to talk to you."

"Okay, you're talking to me. Speak." April closed her eyes.

"April, you told me you had him. You told me everything was fine. Oh, God, what happened?"

"You know I can't talk about it. We're working on it. That's all 1 can say."

"Oh, April, this is terrible. Can't you stop these killings?"

As if April were personally in control of the situation. So early in the morning the presumption of her power made April's head ache.

"There's a huge task force working on it," she said in as neutral a tone as she could manage, considering the hour, the amount of sleep she'd had, and the gravity of the situation.

She opened her eyes, lifted her head a little, and glanced over at her lover He was out cold again with his face buried in the pillow.

"I thought this was your case," Ching said, accusing.

"It's never only one person; you know that. Hundreds of people are working on this." Okay, she was up.

"Well, look, I'm really worried. Tang called me a dozen times. I told her you were the head of it. Why didn't you call me back?"

"I've been working round the clock. I'm not the head of it; you know that." April didn't want to scold, but this was too much.

"April, Tang is a very important person! She's being hurt by this. Why didn't you talk to her? You're making me look bad."

"I'm going to talk to her today, I promise."

"Well, turn on the TV. She's on right now, offering a reward for the killer."

"Really?" That was news. April nudged Mike with her knee. Time to get up. He didn't stir.

"Chico!" No response.

"Everybody is terrified. No one knows who's going to be next. April, the city is going wild over this!"

"I know."

"Are you watching the news?"

April yawned. "Not yet."

"Hurry up! Oh, it's over. You missed it."

"I'm sure they'll show it again." April nudged Mike a second time. It was just as well that Ching called. They had to get going.

Ching sounded a little better. "April, my fitting is today. Ten o'clock. Should I still do it? Tang said I should come."

"Yeah, okay. I'll meet you there. And I'll talk to her then. Tell Tang I'll be there at ten, okay?"

"Thanks, April. I knew you could help."

April said her good-byes and hung up with a shiver of excitement. She'd never met Tang Ling before. She nudged Mike again.

"Mi amor. Vamos."

He rolled over the other way to avoid her.

Fifty-one

L

ate Saturday afternoon, the PC had officially named a Bride Homicide Task Force to link up the investigations of the two wedding homicides— virtually the same cast of characters. But the commissioner did not move the Tovah case from the Five-oh in the Bronx at that time.

By Monday morning, however, Sergeant Hollis had lost points for not having followed through on the Martha's Vineyard angle. And in the same war for detective supremacy Sergeant Woo and Lieutenant Sanchez had gained points for traveling up there and locating Wendy Lotte's gun cache.

Monday morning headquarters for the Tovah case was moved into the city, and the investigation had its focus. Wendy's trunk was in transit to the police lab in Jamaica, the movements of all the key players were being watched, and a search warrant for the residence of Clio Alma and Kim Simone was in process. Definitely they were material witnesses, if nothing else. Kim had to be questioned about his whereabouts Saturday. Clio as well. They were narrowing it down. Ubu was off the hook because he'd been in Bellevue when Prudence was killed.

April had already requested the first set of DD-5s of Kim and his wife Clio Alma from the file up in the Bronx as well as the second set after Calvin Hill and his partner, Detective Moulder, went back to talk to them again. All the DD-5s were in the Hate Unit being studied by Mike and Inspector Bellaqua over coffee and doughnuts in Bellaqua's office. April had seen them all before.

The gist of it: Kim Simone, with his wife translating, told the two detectives that last-minute alterations on the wedding gown of Tovah Schoenfeld ordered by her mother meant he had to work overtime on the dress. It wasn't finished until late Saturday afternoon. Tang Ling had been out of town for the weekend. Since the shop was closed Sunday, Kim had taken the gown home with him on Saturday night, then personally delivered it to the synagogue on Sunday afternoon.

When asked if this kind of personal service was unusual, he said no, he had flown to France, to Hawaii, to Miami, and other places on the whim of wealthy clients. He said that he did not receive compensation for this and had to work extra hours to make up for his absences when he returned.

Clio Alma stated that she had driven him and the gown to Riverdale in her Saturn and waited for him while he fitted the dress. Kim Simone further stated that he had had to wait an hour before he could dress Tovah, but when he was finished, he immediately left the synagogue via the downstairs staff door and rejoined his wife in their car that was parked around the corner.

April chewed on her bottom hp as the other two read and reread both sets of statements. She was in a hurry. She had to get to Tang's shop by ten. Always do everything yourself, she was chastising herself. Kim and his wife were the only players in the Wendy game whom she and Mike had not interviewed personally. And the only one Iriarte hadn't checked out for her. Not good. She'd feel better if she'd cleared them herself.

The task force was putdng together its case against Wendy, who was either the killer or the organizer. It wasn't clear yet which. But no one was making a move on her until every question was answered. Wendy would keep until the Kim piece was resolved. April clicked her tongue, causing Mike and the inspector to pause in their discussion.

April arched an eyebrow. "I have to talk to Tang Ling," she said. "And somebody has to go out to Queens and dnd Clio Alma, search their car and house. If Kim is at work, I'll bring him back with me and we all can have a go at him."

"I'm on it. I'll take the house and car," Mike said.

"Do you mind if I get someone from Midtown North to do a deep background on Kim and his wife?" April asked Bellaqua.

"We have enough computer whizzes right here, but if it makes you happy." Bellaqua lifted a shoulder.

"Yeah, it would make me happy." It wasn't good politics. But if there was anything to find, Hagedorn would find it.

"It's okay by me." Mike smiled.

"Mike, you're with me. We have DAs to do before you go anywhere," Bellaqua said.

"Fine." He rolled his eyes.

April nodded and grabbed her purse. She needed a car and driver. "Who can you give me? I need a car and a couple of bodies."

"Call in my people, will you? I'll let you know." Bellaqua took her second doughnut of the morning. In the stress of the situation she'd forgotten they were just for the company.

Fifty-two

A

pril's first thought when she went through the door to the famous Tang Ling shop was that she didn't want to alarm Ching in any way, but she didn't want her around today She'd made a mistake involving her at all. She definitely wanted Ching way gone before she took Kim in the car with her. Her unmarked Ford was out front. She'd told the two detectives to watch all the entrances before she went inside.

"Is Ching Ma Dong here yet?" she asked the blond receptionist sitting at a desk on the first floor.

"No, she hasn't come in yet. Are you Sergeant Woo?"

"Yes."

"Miss Ling is expecting you in her office. Fourth floor."

"Thanks." April took a mirrored elevator and was immediately admitted to Tang's office. April had been expecting a bigger-than-life woman and was surprised to find that Tang Ling herself was a small, angry dragon wearing a fog-colored Armani suit with a pink silk blouse.

Tang was five-one, maybe five-one-and-a-half on a good day, probably not a hundred pounds. Still, she swept out from behind a huge glass-topped desk covered with sketches and swatches of fabric like a model taking a runway. "April Woo. You're Ching's sister. She's not here yet," she said, appraising April's figure and outfit. The first very good, the second only so-so.

"We're sister-cousins," April said, nodding. "Our mothers are friends." She tried not to be too awed by Ching's college acquaintance who was suddenly now such a close friend. She hated that Ching had told this superstar she was in charge of the case. So embarrassing and untrue.

"From the same town?"

"Ah, same borough. We all live in Queens." April knew that Tang Ling meant the same town in China, but no one cared to remember anymore what that town had been. April also knew that Tang Ling lived in several places, including Paris, Park Avenue, and L.A. And she did not come from the same planet that April and Ching did no matter how nice Ching said she was. That was pretty clear.

Tang Ling wore a circle of pearls around her neck the size of walnuts. The pearls were rare colors strung together—warm gold, cool silver, ink black, the pearl gray of her suit, lipstick pink, and the snowiest white. April had never seen a golden pearl before. On Tang's finger was a dazzling square-cut diamond, huge, next to a plain gold wedding band. On her right wrist was a fun watch with a pink plastic strap and diamond-studded face. The show of wealth reminded April of Rabbi Levi's remark about exciting envy.

"I have spoken to your boss," Tang said loftily, giving April the distinct feeling she meant the police commissioner, not Lieutenant Iriarte.

April nodded politely.

"This is a terrible thing. I feel so keenly the loss of these girls. Both of them my clients. My lawyer is on the way."

Ah, did Tang know something? April felt a surge of excitement as Tang moved to a thronelike chair and sat, gesturing for April to sit on the bisque sofa opposite. April couldn't help noticing how the small woman moved in her suit, carrying her clothes, not wearing them. She crossed her legs, showing off shoes with no backs and long pointed toes made of exquisite gray-toned reptile skins. Slides so costly that even the copies had to be expensive, and these weren't copies. On a Monday morning Tang Ling was dressed to intimidate. Why?

"Did you see the newspapers all last week?" The woman's broad face flushed angry red, marring her perfect makeup, a lighter color than her own medium-dark skin.

"Photos of Tovah everywhere, all identifying my gown. And now Prudence! Same thing. Second bride murdered in a Tang Ling gown. I can't let this stand. I was on

Good Morning

today; did you see me?" she demanded.

"No, I'm sorry. I missed it. I understand you offered a reward," April said slowly.

"Yes, of course." Tang looked furious. "I couldn't just ignore it. This is a terrible thing for a special-occasion business. I had to do something to show my concern."

From the look on Tang's face April suspected a publicity angle. "Has anyone threatened you, either directly or indirectly, recently?"

Tang gave her a blank look. "I don't know what you mean."

"An employee, for example, a customer, a vendor? Can you think of anybody who has a reason to be angry at you, to want to hurt you by putting you in the spotlight like this?"

"What? You're not suggesting this has something to do with me?" Tang looked stunned.

"Two of your clients have been murdered," April murmured.

"But—"

"And possibly a third a few months ago. Did you know Andrea Straka?"

"Oh, no. Oh, my God. Oh, don't bring this to my door." Tang clapped a manicured hand to her forehead. "This is outrageous. Yes, she was a client. But that was a subway accident, wasn't it? She fell."

"We're taking another look at the case."

"Oh, my." Tang's eyes widened in horror. "But this has nothing to do with me. I just make wedding gowns. You can't possibly think that someone... that someone I know—could possibly have

.. .7"

"We're looking for patterns, similarities. The two murdered girls and Andrea—their families are so different. We're looking for common threads that bring them together. Your gowns are one link. Even the press has picked it up."

"But there must be other links," Tang said angrily.

"Oh, yes, and we're following those, too. Is Kim Simone here today?" April suddenly shifted gears.

"Of course. He's upstairs in the sewing room."

Beads of perspiration sprouted on her forehead. "Why?"

"Tell me about him."

"Oh, well..." Tang opened her mouth. "He's my best fitter, my most loyal employee. Why?"

"I heard he has problems."

"Oh, well, he may have problems, but he's a very gentle person. He sent me flowers when Tovah was killed."

"Why?"

"Why did he send dowers? It was a thoughtful gesture. He knew I was upset. He wanted me to know he was thinking of me. He's that loyal. He's really unusually good. He would never do anything to hurt me." She tossed her head.

"What about his wife?"

"I've never liked the wife. She's another story." Tang rolled her eyes. "She's older than he. She's taken advantage of Kim in so many ways. Honestly, you know how it is. He needed to be legal; she wanted a slave. A lot of bad feeling there."

"Enough for her to want to hurt you?"

"To hurt me, yes, absolutely. But to murder two innocent young women ... I would be very shocked. Do you suspect her?"

"It's a shocking case," April murmured, noncommittal.

Tang's buzzer sounded. "Yes?"

"Ching is here."

"Tell her to go to the second door. I'll get her gown myself." Tang gave April a distracted smile. "We need to talk more, of course. But right now, would you meet Ching on the second floor? I'll be with you in a moment."

April hesitated. Ching first, or Kim first? She had the detectives outside, and the receptionist Melody downstairs at the front desk. Kim couldn't get away. She chose Ching. "All right. But please alert your security staff not to let Kim out of the building. I want to talk to him in a few minutes."

Tang nodded, and seconds later April was in the elevator.

Fifty-three

C

hing was sitting on a pink silk slipper chair when April got off the elevator. All excited, she gave April a big hug.

"You won't believe this. Tang asked me to have dinner with her tonight. Her husband is in Hong Kong, and she canceled her dinner plans because of the publicity. Did you talk to her?"

"Yes, sweetie, where's your cell phone?" April was not interested in Tang's dinner plans. She was interested only in getting Ching out of the building.

"I left it home, why?"

"I tried to reach you. Let's go downstairs." April took Ching's arm and started moving her toward the stairs.

"What's the matter?" Ching was alarmed.

"Nothing. I just want to talk to you outside for a second."

"But what about my fitting?"

"Let's just leave the building. We can do it another time."

"What do you mean, another time? The wedding is this week!" Ching was moving her feet down the stairs, but hanging back. Almost a deadweight. "What's the matter, April?"

"Nothing, honey. Let's go. Stay with me on this."

"What the hell are you doing? You're treating me like a retard. Hi, Melody." She waved at the girl at the desk.

Melody waved back. "'Bye, Ching."

They moved through the doors out into the light.

"What was that about? April. . . April.. . talk to me."

"Just come outside and cool it a minute, okay?"

Fifty-four

K

im was working at his place in the workroom, in front of his sewing machine. He was doing the hem of a slippery silk jersey gown that had to be finished and sent out today. He wasn't feeling good, but he had come in to get away from his wife and because of his loyalty to Tang. He wanted to be with her in her time of trouble and show his respect. To give her flowers. He was wearing a white shirt and black pants, the uniform she required of all the sewers. The bright blue Hawaiian shirt he'd worn on the subway was in his carryall, along with his shoes and some leftover food from last night.

He was working on the gown, trying not to think about anything but keeping that stretchy silk from slipping through his fingers. He knew Tang was in the building. He knew she was upstairs in her office talking to a Chinese woman, a cop, the same one who was harassing Wendy. He didn't like that, but he wasn't thinking about the cop. He was thinking about Tang.

He hoped to have a chance to see her later. Sometimes the businesspeople and the telephone kept Tang so busy that she didn't come into the workroom for days at a time, even for a moment.

He was thinking about talking to Tang, telhng her how sorry he was about Prudence, mouthing the same words over and over. He was sdtching by hand when suddenly she came in. He looked up and was surprised to see her there, shaking all over. Her face was red, the way it got when she was really angry. What happened?

"You! Go upstairs to my office," she told the two other sewers, her voice crackling with anger. Their mouths dropped open at her tone, and they fumbled, trying to get out of their seats fast enough to please her.

"Right now. Hurry." She waved her hands, shooing them out.

Kim got up to go with them, his heart beating fast. Tang had a temper. He didn't want her to explode in his face like a hand grenade that blew apart everything that was near it. But he didn't move fast enough. She stepped in front of his table, her hand raised in a fist.

"Not you."

What? He cringed away from the hand darting out at him, but not far enough. She grabbed his ear as the other two scurried out, closing the door behind them. He'd wished that he and Tang could be alone, and now they were alone. He tried to find his voice to talk to her, but she pulled his ear hard, the way his mother used to when he was httle, dragging tears out of his eyes and the sound from his voice. Tang took his voice away. He swallowed it in fear.

A grunt of pain was all he could manage. He couldn't tell her how sad he was for her troubles. How he planned to give her a plant, one of her favorites. She didn't give him time.

"Scandal," she hissed, shaking him the way Clio's dog shook his toy sock with the knot in it, to kill it and kill it again.

"You brought this scandal on me with that terrible wife of yours," she cried. "I could kill you with these two hands." She pushed him, knocking him against the corner of the table. The hard edge bit into the backs of his thighs. Tang was little, but she was strong. Kim's brain felt thick. What was she talking about?

"You wicked toad!" she cried, pushing, pushing.

He wasn't a toad. Not wicked. Everything he did was for her. He loved her, wanted her to protect him and love him like his mother used to. "What did I do?"

Her hot breath was in his face as she pushed him, hurting the bruises where the broom hit him yesterday. He could smell her perfume in her clothes, stale coffee and garlic in her mouth.

"Get out of here now. You have one minute. If you aren't out of this room in one minute, I'll throw you out that window. Don't think I can't. I'm so angry I could kill you. I hope you die a terrible death!"

He looked at her blankly. Throw him out the window? After all the things he'd done for her?

"And don't leave anything of yours behind. Do you hear me? Just get your things and get out now. There is a police detective here to talk to you."

He couldn't figure out what she was saying. His feelings were too hurt by the tone of her voice. He was just a sewer, but he had feelings. Get out! How could he get out? He had gowns to finish. He had things to do. People counted on him. No one could fit a gown the way he could; Tang said so herself.

"I have to fit Ching Ma Dong's gown. She's waiting for me."

"She is not waiting for you. The police are waiting for you. You don't belong here." Suddenly a funny look came over Tang's face and she slapped him hard.

Kim had seen Tang do that once before to a young saleswoman who'd made a mistake and given someone a fifty-percent discount on a dress that hadn't been on sale. The customer walked out with it, and later when Tang heard about the incident, she slapped the girl's face, then fired her on the spot. That's how he knew Tang really wanted him to go. His cheek stung with the insult. But his heart was where he really took the blow. He'd been so kind to her. He'd worked so hard and been so loyal, he didn't expect it.

"Meet the police

outside the building.

Do you hear me! And don't ever come anywhere near me again." She turned her back on him and walked out of the room.

He stood there alone in the workroom for a second, stunned and almost expecting Tang to come back and tell him she was sorry. Then he felt ashamed that Tang had treated him like a girl and trembled with the thought of telling Clio he'd lost his job.

Clio would just yell at him and tell him how much he owed her even though he'd paid for the wedding, the ring, and the party. And he'd made her dress. But she thought he owed her thousands and thousands more. It made him sick to think of her screeching at him now for losing his job.

Kim did not want to meet the detective outside the building. He wanted to run away. He took the elevator to the basement, thinking that maybe he shouldn't go back to Clio's house in Queens. He got off the elevator and slipped up the back stairs to street level and exited the building from the back door. There, a narrow common area was shared by several buildings. He entered the building two doors down. It was a gallery with a back patio. The back door was open, and no one stopped him as he walked through. On Madison Avenue the sun was shining. He put on his sunglasses and quickly looked both ways. He froze, terrified for a second. A limo with a driver leaning against it. The driver was watching the shop door. April Woo, the cop he'd seen several times before, was talking with Ching, Tang's friend. The policewoman was pointing at a man standing on the roof of the building. Kim turned quickly and walked the other way.

Fifty-five

April, I am not going anywhere until you tell me what's going on." Ching had planted herself on the curb by the car. Ever since she was a little girl she got upset when plans were changed.

"Okay, see that guy on the roof?" April pointed up.

"Uh-huh. So?"

"He's a cop. Just get out of the way. We're going to take someone in for questioning."

"Really?" Ching's eyes opened wide. Now she was going to see April be a cop. Her face told April this was something new and excidng. "Somebody from here?" she asked.

"Yes, and it's going to take a while. So you might as well head back to your office."

"Hey, why is Kim running down there?" Ching pointed at a man sprinting around the corner.

April spun around. "Where?"

"He was there a minute ago. I'm sure it was Kim."

"Looked like a girl to me," Detecdve Fray said.

"Go after him," April told him angrily. "I'll check inside."

Shit!

She didn't like losing both the suspect and face in front of Ching.

Fray took off at a run, and April radioed Grant on the roof to come down and go through the building with her. "I thought I told you to watch the back," she accused Grant, who was hanging over the roof, gawking.

His voice crackled back. "I'm on my way."

April's face burned. Shit. "Don't say anything," she warned Ching. "Just don't say a word."

Ching raised her hands. She wasn't going to say anything.

Face still burning, April disappeared into the building and went through all six floors thoroughly She didn't come out for a long time. When she did, Ching was still waiting there, leaning against the Ford with her face soaking up the sun.

"Hi," she said. "Any luck?"

April shook her head, disgusted with herself. She'd been too busy trying to be polite to Tang, trying to be a big shot to Ching. And couldn't even hang on to her witness. Stupid. This was what happened when friends were involved. Shit. "There's a back way. He must have used it."

"I don't think Kim is a killer," Ching said, as if she thought April's whole operation was nuts.

"Asking people what they know is not assuming they're killers." Shit, her sister-cousin thought she was an asshole. And maybe she was. She stopped to call in a BOLO from the radio in the car. Be-on-the-lookout-for. She gave a description of Kim: Asian male, five-one. Wearing a white shirt and black trousers.

"Sorry, Ching. You can go now."

"Thanks for everything," Ching said dryly.

Preoccupied, April and her two detectives got in their cruiser and drove around for an hour, looking for Kim in the hope that he was still in the area. When they didn't find him, they figured he'd gone down into the subway. And for all they knew, by now he could be anywhere.

Mike caught up with April at one o'clock on Madison and Fifty-ninth. She left the two detectives in their Ford, and got into Mike's Crown Vic. He handed over a wedding photo of Kim and Clio, and April studied it, cursing in Chinese because she didn't want to let her mood out in English.

"Don't say anything," she warned.

"How about I fill you in?"

"Okay, fill me in." She was pretty dejected, but as usual, he was not one for casting blame.

"FAS has confirmed a .22 rifle was used in both shootings. In Tovah's, the killer used both hollow-points and regular bullets. Both were found on the scene. For Prudence only the lighter load."

"Same gun?" April asked.

"Same for the light load."

Hollow-points could rarely be matched, since they exploded on impact. "Why the two kinds of bullets?"

"Maybe the gun was already loaded with hollow-points," Mike speculated. "And the shooter just added bullets, didn't know the difference."

"If the gun was stolen, that could explain Wendy's print on the casing," April said. "You said you found something interesting at Kim's place."

"Yes, a manual for making homemade silencers. It was Wendy's. Her name was in the flyleaf."

"Aw, jeez. She's in deep. What are we thinking? Wendy's gun. Wendy's print. Wendy's silencer. Wendy is the shooter. No?"

"Unclear. Wendy's at home, hasn't moved. The squirrel took off when you cornered him. What does that tell you?"

April didn't want to speculate. Tang had been completely surprised that Kim left without talking to them. Everyone said he was a gentle guy. Gentle and sweet. It was time to bring in the wife. Get Clio on the screen, see what she had to say.

"What did the DAs say? We can get Wendy on felony murder no matter what, right?" she said.

Mike was heading over to Lexington. "We'll have to see how much she'll squeal. Wendy's still the center of the wheel."

"We're going to Wendy's, I take it?" April was hungry, didn't want to admit it. Lunchtime. Guess they didn't have time to stop for lunch.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Right." She turned her attention to the wedding photo of Kim and Clio.

The first thing she noticed about the photo was the quality of Clio's dress. It was a stunner, as elaborate as one might expect from a groom who could copy a Tang Ling. And Clio herself was a beautiful woman. Slightly taller than her husband, with almond eyes like a cat's, she seemed very pleased with her catch.

Kim, on the other hand, looked very young, and handsome in a soft kind of way In the photo, taken three years ago, he had punky gelled hair and was wearing a white suit. His sweet face was turned toward the bride, and he seemed to be smiling at the bouquet of pink roses clutched to her bosom. The half profile gave April a view of a child-sized ear, and she cursed some more.

Fifty-six

W

endy Lotte didn't answer her door when April and Mike rang her bell at one-twenty. The officers in charge of surveilling her maintained that she had not left the building since she'd arrived home early Sunday morning, but April was badly shaken after losing Kim Simone and didn't trust anybody's certainty about anything. There wasn't an elevator to a garage in this building, but maybe there were other ways out.

Sdll, Wendy had to have been exhausted. She could just be sleeping it off. April was wound tight as they stood there in the hallway waiting for her to rouse herself and come to the door. Five minutes passed. Mike tried her phone. Only voice mail answered. A gentle

ding-dong

sounded over and over. April felt the stillness inside the apartment as she kept her finger on the bell.

When a person was at home and the place was this quiet, something could be wrong. She glanced at Mike. The deep furrow between his eyes meant his thoughts were running on the same track. Saturday night, the last time they'd seen Wendy, she'd been feisty as hell, strangely unconcerned about her print on the spent cartridge that killed Tovah Schoenfeld.

Neither Mike nor April had pegged her for a suicide risk at that time. She could have crashed and done something stupid when she got home, or she could be a heavy sleeper.

Let it be that,

April prayed. Drunks were hard to rouse.

Let it be that.

"Shit," Mike muttered.

"You want me to get the super?" she asked.

He nodded tensely. He could have tried his hand at the locks, but there were two of them, one a Medeco. It would take him a while. April was the one who'd lost Kim, so he gave her something useful to do.

A few minutes later, she returned with a worried young man who didn't speak much English but knew enough to unlock the door and get out of the way. The smell alone was chilling. It was clear that Wendy had been doing some pretty heavy drinking in the last thirty-eight hours. The lights were on, and even from the front door several empty large bottles of Gordon's vodka could be seen in the living room. One was upended on the sofa; one sat on the cocktail table.

A third bottle lay on its side on the rug. Quite a bit must have spilled out when it went over, because the room smelled as if a lit match would send it up. A loop in an electrical cord beside the sofa suggested that someone might have tripped over it. The lamp attached was shattered. Other things had been destroyed, too. Shards from many pieces of broken china made a blue and white abstract on the kitchen floor. The whole apartment was torn apart.

"Jesus." The super moved farther from the door.

April went in first, stepping over a broken teacup whose pattern she'd recognized a week ago as the famous Chinese Willow. Mike followed in her footsteps. The quiet after what must have been quite a storm was eerie and sad. It was the kind of scene where one expected to find the worst and found it. There was blood in Wendy's office. It was smeared on the walls and stained the carpet. There was blood on her pink quilt and on her pillow. A lot of blood on the floor of her closet, along with piles of her clothes, as if she had tried to get dressed before she died. They found her lying on the floor of her bathroom awash in a pool of vile-smelling vomit and clotting blood. They immediately called 911.

Three hours later they were sitting with Inspector Bellaqua at a table for four in the back of the Metropolitan, across the street from the puzzle palace. At five P.M. the day tour was over and the place was filling up with off-duty cops. Bellaqua was nursing a diet Coke, her eyes punchy with dismay at all the things that had gone wrong in a single day and the fact that two of her detectives had played a part in the worst of it.

"He did what?" she said of Mike Fray, who hadn't been able to tell the difference between a boy's back and fanny and a girl's.

"Kim's small. He's good-looking," April murmured.

Bellaqua studied the wedding photo. "Fray said he walks with a wiggle. Jesus. What about that silencer book you found, Mike?"

"It has Wendy's name in it," he said, noncommittal. They were all noncommittal as hell.

"How about Wendy?"

"She's lost a lot of blood. The place looked like a slaughterhouse. Ever seen an alcoholic hemorrhage? It's not a pretty sight. In her case everything went at the same time: esophagus, stomach lining. Just burned out by the booze. She had blood pouring out from everywhere. And she was so out of it she probably didn't even know how sick she was. She could have died if we hadn't come along," Mike said.

"Is she talking?"

"Uh-uh." April felt bad. They'd stayed in the ER at Lenox Hill Hospital for several hours waiting for word to come in. None had come. Finally they'd had to leave before finding out if she'd been stabilized. A uniform was posted at the hospital now, watching out for her.

Bellaqua sighed at the day gone bad. Then she picked up the wedding photo of Kim and Clio.

"I'll get this made up and we'll get Kim's face out there, all over TV. We'll get him."

"Good." Mike slapped the table and got up. He and April were heading out to Queens in case Kim had gone home.

Fifty-seven

S

oon after Kim left Tang's shop, he put on his blue Hawaiian shirt in the men's room of a coffee shop near the Lexington Avenue subway. He put on his baseball hat and his sunglasses. He felt bad and needed to make a new friend. The empty place inside of him filled up when he made friends. He wanted to tell someone how Tang Ling had mistreated and misunderstood him, how she'd thrown him out like a stupid salesgirl.

Around Hunter College he looked over the students. Nobody gave him a second glance. The empty place inside him hurt as he got on the subway and traveled one stop south to Fifty-ninth Street. He had a handgun, but it made a lot of noise and wasn't one he could use for anything. The one he liked was in the Dumpster a block over on Fiftieth Street. He approached the street with high hopes because he could see that the Dumpster was still there. The only problem was that now it was piled much higher with rubble from a renovation going on there. A construction crew was dumping more stuff in it, raising a cloud of dust from crumbling chunks of old plaster. He couldn't get anywhere near where he'd dropped the black garbage bag on Saturday. He walked back and forth a few times but didn't get any attention from the men on the crew. He was hoping someone would talk to him, help him recover that garbage bag, but gave up after a little while when no one did.

With his glasses on and his shirt dapping around his hips, he started walking downtown on Lexington. The bar where he danced somedmes and picked up men was on Broadway in the Forties. He didn't get that far. At Fifty-sixth Street through the window of the Shamrock Inn, he saw Tang Ling on a big TV screen over the bar.

Immediately he knew that Tang had gone on TV as a way to speak to him. He knew her temper, knew that she was sorry about the way she had treated him. Kim was sure Tang Ling had a special feeling for him and was not really mad. He did not think he'd done anything bad. What happened happened, like the rain falling, like the water rising, like bad feeling and killing everywhere. People were killed all the time. Six thousand people at once. Bodies were everywhere. Two, three, four little angels were nothing.

Excited to see Tang on TV, Kim went into the bar and sat down on an empty stool to look at her and to hear what she had to say. Tang was not a beautiful woman, not like Clio. But she was so famous. She could be on TV whenever she wanted. On TV she was wearing the gray suit and her magnificent pearls she'd been wearing when she hit him. He studied her hair. It was no longer black like it used to be. It was getting redder every month. Now it was almost the color of red wine. On TV Tang had her glasses on. She looked serious, reading from a piece of paper.

"The viciousness of these murders of young women at the very start of their lives has personally touched and horrified me," she was saying.

The sound was low, so Kim had to lean forward to hear her.

"At Tang Ling, we feel we can't stand by without offering our support. It is for this reason that I personally have set up a fund of ten thousand dollars for information leading to the arrest of the coward responsible for these unspeakably cruel crimes. Thank you." She put the paper down.

The person interviewing her started asking questions, but Kim couldn't understand what Tang was saying. All he could see was the sign in front of her. A sign in the shape of a check with the words on it: TANG LING, LTD., OFFERS $10,000 REWARD FOR ARREST OF THE BRIDE KILLER.

"I won't rest until I see the coward punished," she said.

The bartender finally came over. "What'll you

have?"

Feeling all alone in the world and sadly misunderstood, Kim hugged his carryall and shook his head.

Fifty-eight

C

lio's car was in the driveway. A yellow Saturn.

Mike pulled in behind it, and April felt a warning jab from the ghost, Trouble, that sometimes burrowed in her stomach. She was still queasy from Wendy's thirty-six-hour crisis—the sick and threatened woman all alone and drinking herself to death. Maybe on purpose, but maybe not. Now this innocent-looking two-family house with the dog inside barking its head off. Trouble everywhere.

Mike killed the engine. April was doing her calculations. There were two of them in the car with four guns between them and no wish to die. There were possibly two people in the house and no telling how many guns. If Kim was there, she didn't want him either to shoot or run again.

"Plan?" she said.

Before Mike could answer, the front door opened, and the woman from the wedding photo stepped outside alone. Clio Alma had long, straight hair, all one length, red lips. She was wearing a beige linen dress that showed off her well-rounded figure. Her lovely face was annoyed, not frightened or anxious.

"You can't park there," she said. Matter-of-fact.

Mike and April got out of the car at the same time, holding up their gold shields. "Clio Alma?" Mike took the lead.

"Yes?"

"I'm Lieutenant Sanchez. This is Sergeant Woo from the police department. We'd like to ask you a few questions."

"Is this about my husband?" she asked with a tense smile.

The two cops walked up the cement path. She stood in front of the door. "I can tell you he's all mixed up sometimes and doesn't always know what he's doing, but I'm fine. Everything's fine now. Nothing to worry about." She didn't want them to come in.

"Is your husband here now, Mrs. Alma?" April asked.

Clio gave her a sharp look. "I told you, everything's fine. We don't need you here." She tried to get back inside and close the door, but Mike's foot got in the way.

"We'd like to come in for a few minutes. It won't take long."

"Who called you, my tenant?" she demanded. "She's a liar; you can't believe anything she says."

"No, your tenant didn't call us. We're investigating two homicides. We're here to talk about that."

"Homicides!" Clio's fine eyebrows shot up. The distress in her voice caused the dog at her feet to start barking frantically. "I don't know anything about that. I told them before."

"Who did you tell?"

"The policeman who came here last week."

"Did you know there was another murder since then?"

"No .. . Maybe I heard something. I don't know."

She put her hand to her forehead as if trying to remember.

"Let me help you. Two young women, clients of Tang Ling, have been shot and killed," April told her.

"He's not here," she said quickly. "He's not here. Look for yourself." She shook her head, opened the door wider, and retreated into the living room, where she picked up her barking dog. "Shh," she told it. Unlike Dim Sum, the dog quieted instantly.

April entered the house, thinking fast in case Kim was really was there and she had to deck him. Stairs to the left. Click. Living room to the right. Click. In the back the kitchen, linoleum surfaces all clean and tidy. Wall-to-wall carpet, commercial grade. Sofa and recliner, stack of glossy magazines on the coffee table in the living room. Click. Nothing much on the walls. Home sweet home to Kim Simone. She prayed he was there and made a fast tour of the downstairs. Mike took the stairs two at a time and came down two minutes later shaking his head. April flipped the light switch for the basement, and they went down together. Nothing there either. When they returned to the living room, Clio was sitting on the sofa with the dog on her lap. Her pretty mouth sulked. "Too much trouble," she said.

"Your husband?" April went to the front window and looked out. Two officers were in a Con Ed van opposite. It was still light, and the street was quiet, except for some young roller boarders practicing on a curb.

"Yes. He's like a child. Sometimes he disappears. I don't know where he is." She heaved a sigh.

"On May ninth, Sunday a week ago, he delivered a gown to Riverdale and dressed Tovah Schoenfeld just before she was shot to death." April left the window and stood in front of her.

After the letdown of no Kim where she'd wanted him to be, her heartbeat finally began to slow. All the way out in the car, she'd been so full of hope that he'd be there. She'd prayed that he'd be there and more than half expected him to fall out of a closet, like a ghost in a funhouse.

Clio nodded. He'd delivered Tovah's gown and dressed her.

"You drove him there in your car?"

"He doesn't have a driver's license," she said, putting her face in the dog's soft fur.

"Did you drive him there and wait for him?" April asked.

Clio stroked the dog, hiding her lips in the dog's black fur, lowering her eyes.

"Did you use your car to drive to work?" April asked.

"No," she said softly.

"But you went to work that day, Mrs. Alma."

"No."

'Yes, you did. I spoke to your employer a few minutes ago. She told me they had a family party on May ninth. And you were there all morning, cooking." April struck a chord.

"I don't remember what day." Clio's eyes were in the dog's fur. "Maybe. I cook many parties for them."

"I understand. I get confused by dates, too. But we can straighten all this out. Did you know that Kim was driving your car to Riverdale?"

"No."

"Did you know when he returned?"

"No. I told you. As far as I know he didn't take the car."

"Why did you tell the detective that you drove him?" April asked softly.

"He doesn't have a license. I didn't want him to get in trouble." Clio spoke with a flat voice, then turned around to look at Mike. He was standing behind her by the front door, letting April talk. "He wouldn't hurt anybody, I know."

"Did you know he had a gun?"

"He doesn't have a gun," she said scornfully. "Where would he get a gun?"

April didn't answer. "Did he ever talk about any of the young women whose gowns he worked on?"

"He talks all the dme. He has some crazy ideas," she said softly.

"What crazy ideas?"

"I don't know. I don't listen." She started rocking back and forth with the dog. "And he doesn't come home sometimes. It scares me."

"What scares you, Mrs. Alma?"

"The men he meets. He's doesn't understand anything about bad people."

April glanced at Mike. "What do you mean?"

"He's too trusting. He could get hurt."

"Does he have any particular friends he visits?" April asked. Maybe they could find him with a friend.

"Someone in a bar gives him money...." Clio lifted her shoulders. "I told him to stay away from men who offer him money. He doesn't listen."

"What kind of crazy things does he say about brides?" April asked, back on the brides.

Relieved to be off the subject of Kim's friends, Cho said, "He talks about angels. He loves angels," she said, smiling a little.

"Angels?" Click. April got a sick feeling. Hadn't Ching said something about an angel being embroidered in her gown?

"Yes, like that show on TV. He thinks when people die they become happy angels, like on TV."

Oh, shit!

Ching a happy angel. April glanced at Mike. She needed to call the lab and check something about Prudence's gown. Tovah's. Andrea Straka's. Ching's. Her stomach churned.

"Did you ever hear him mention Tovah Schoen-feld?" April asked, just wanting to get this straight.

"I don't listen."

"How about Prudence Hay?"

"I told you. I don't know."

"Andrea Straka."

"Oh, yes, Andrea. That girl who died in the subway. He was very sad about that. Something's wrong with the lawn mower," Clio said suddenly.

"What's wrong with the lawn mower?" April asked, still horrified by that angel in Ching's wedding gown. Had Tang requested it, or was this Kim acting on his own? She didn't remember what Ching had told her.

"I don't know. Maybe somebody came in the gate and did something to it."

Mike went outside to take a look. Clio had a small patches of lawn in the front and back. The lawn mower was chained to the fence in the back.

April stayed in the living room. Her heart thudding over Ching. "What about Tang Ling?" she asked. "Do she and Kim get along?"

Clio's cat eyes narrowed down to slivers. "She's a bad woman/' she said. "Bad for Kim. You looking for him, he's probably hiding under her skirt."

"Thanks. Here's my card. If you get scared you can call me anytime."

April found Mike in the back puzzling over the small motor in the lawn mower. It looked all right to April until he stood up and brushed off his hand. Then she realized that Clio was right. Something was wrong with it. The muffler had been removed.

Fifty-nine

A

pril was in a panic as they hurried back into Manhattan from Queens. Not since the attack on the World Trade Center had murder been something that could only happen to someone else. After thousands of people died in just a few minutes, everybody in New York felt close to death. For April, every murder since was personal. But the killings of Tang's brides brought death too close, way too close to home.

Clio's knowledge of Andrea Straka, Kim's driving the car for which he didn't have a license to Tovah's wedding. The missing guns still out there. The presence in Kim's house of the comic book for crooks that explained the items in his basement—the PVC pipe, the bottle caps, copper sponges, tennis balls, copper screen, metal washers, rubber stoppers. The muffler from the lawn mower. Kim had been making his own crude silencers from crude household materials to take the sonic boom of a heavy load down to subsonic whimper. Kim's past reliance on Tang when he was in trouble. The angel on Ching's gown. Ching's plan to have dinner with Tang that night. It was coming together way too close to her.

Ching had left her cell phone home. She'd already left work. April wanted her safe and sound, somewhere far away from Tang. Her heart hammered in her chest. Her stomach churned. Why had Kim marked Ching? She wasn't a client of Wendy's or Louis's. She was just a girl, a plain girl! And the closest thing April had to a sister. It didn't matter why.

Her cell phone rang. She grabbed it.

Private

came up on caller ID. "Sergeant Woo."

"Where are you?" came the irritated voice of her boss.

"Lieutenant, thank God. Do you have something for me?"

"What's up with this guy Kim Simone?"

It was amazing from how many places in Queens you could see the skyline of Manhattan. You could be on the road, out in the borough, everything all quiet and low, on a highway or a back street, and all of a sudden you'd go up a little rise and there it was, Citicorp, Empire State Building, and everything in between, all spread out. The towers were gone, but New York was still there. At night the halo of lights still brightened the dark sky. It happened then just as the sky was fading to navy. The city loomed up ahead, and she was scared.

"We think he's the one," she said faintly. "What do you have?"

"Guy has a sheet. Joined a cruise ship as a steward some five years back. Jumped off at Cancun three and a half years ago. He was picked up on a local bus in El Paso, soliciting. Spent two months in an INS camp. His now wife, Clio Alma, helped him out with a lawyer."

The phone crackled for a moment as they hit a dead zone.

"April?"

"Okay now?"

"Yeah." He went on. "Simone's position at his deportation hearing was that he'd be in danger in the Philippines if he returned."

"Uh-huh, any particular danger?"

"His mother was denounced as a witch and stoned to death by neighbors when he was twelve. He and his sister were badly beaten and left for dead."

"True story?" April asked. Nothing surprised her anymore, but this was a new one. Witches now.

"True story."

"What about the sister?"

"She married a general or something. They had a dispute over a girlfriend. He shot her."

"Oh, God."

"There's more. Clio Alma paid his fine, and the two got married soon after he arrived in New York. And get this. He's been arrested several times since then."

"Let me guess," April said.

"You don't have to guess. I'm going to tell you. Indecent exposure, soliciting. And right here in Midtown North."

"No kidding. Does he have a favorite spot?"

"Forty-second Street, theater row, near the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. He's a repeater, so I've got people out there now."

"Any drug angle?"

"No, no, this guy is strictly sex, and no history of violence that we know of until now."

"What about the Straka case?"

"Okay. That occurred in the Nineteenth. At the

Hunter College subway station. Happened during rush hour, around seventeen hundred. Very crowded platform. A lot of people left right away."

It was the closest subway stop to Tang's shop. Another piece.

"You owe me," Iriarte growled.

"Yes, sir, I always owe you. One more question. How did Simone get his job at Tang Ling's?"

"Your florist met his bail twice. My guess is he and Kim first met up in the bars, or on the street. The florist definitely had him working in the shop for a while. After a dispute, he set Kim up with Tang because Kim knew how to sew. I'm going out now, and I'm staying out until we get him. I don't want him on my turf."

"Yes, sir. Be careful. He's A and D."

"Okay, are you with Sanchez?"

"Yes. We're coming in from Kim's home."

"You got someone watching out there?" he asked as if they were total dummies and he the one in charge.

"Yes, sir. Two."

"See you, then," were his last words.

Monday evening the traffic was still heavy getting onto the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. April had plenty of time to tell Mike Kim's story. After she finished, he smacked the wheel angrily.

"We had him all along," Mike said. "We had his ear."

"A little ear, perfect seashell. I noticed it right away in the wedding photo, but I didn't want to jump on it until we knew it was him."

"Shit. We had him on day one. We could have put

this together in twenty-four if everyone around him hadn't covered for him. Wendy, Louis. His wife."

"They made it hard," April agreed.

"So he had a chance to kill somebody else. And still Wendy didn't say anything." He was furious.

"It was her gun," April said slowly. "She's a thief. She can't restrain herself. It's a sickness. That first day I questioned her I hit her with her weakness. She didn't want to get branded as a thief so she drove up to the Vineyard to get some of the stuff out of her apartment. But she also wanted to check out her guns. She wasn't absolutely certain one of her crew hadn't taken one. Remember when I asked her how many guns she had? She said she didn't know. She said they'd been stolen years ago. But after Prudence was killed, she knew she couldn't wiggle out. She just hit the bottle. Whether or not she wanted to die only she can say."

Traffic slowed almost to a stop on the bridge, and Mike hit the siren to open it up. "Bleeding to death like that is a hell of a way to die," he muttered.

"Maybe she didn't know what was happening." April didn't want to think about Wendy's lethal binge while they were on Martha's Vineyard.

"Yeah, Prudence Hay went that way, too. Wendy had that on her conscience." April's thoughts shifted to another member of the team, Louis the Sun King, not exactly an expert in pain management. He'd been Kim's first friend—after Kim had married Clio for citizenship. Maybe he was the man Clio was talking about, still Kim's special friend. Someone should check.

Mike hit the siren again, more insistently this time, and a little frantic maneuvering of the cars around them got them moving toward the off-ramp.

April punched some numbers in her phone. Mike glanced over at her.

"Who are you calling?"

"Tang. I'm worried about Ching."

"Why?"

"Mike. This thing has just been bothering me all day. Why is Kim doing this? How does he choose the girls? And then I realized Louis and Wendy have nothing to do with it. It's about the girls and their dresses. He's turning the girls into angels, dressing them in their white dresses, and marrying them to God so they don't have to marry men."

Mike whistled. "But what does Ching have to do with it?"

"Ching told me Saturday that Tang put an angel on her gown. But she must have been mistaken. My guess is that Kim did it on his own."

Sixty

A

fter leaving the bar, Kim went back to the Dumpster on Fiftieth Street. Seeing Tang on TV offering so much money for the chance to punish him made him feel terrible. He was wandering around, dazed and wounded. When he got back to the Dumpster, there were policemen around it, and he left right away.

He didn't know what to do. Tang was his closest friend. He'd been so proud to have a friend, a boss, who was so famous and so rich. He told everybody about her house. He went out of his way to pass the fine brownstone just so he could show off and tell his friends, "This is where my boss lives."

Even when Tang wasn't home, Kim took every opportunity to deliver things and help out there. He knew how the alarm system worked and what her housekeeper looked like, much prettier and younger than Tang. He knew a lot of things about Tang. He knew that she did not get up early because she was out late every night. He knew that she did not like lunch or exercise, but at the end of every day she enjoyed an hour of relaxation in her beautiful pool. The maid told him Tang's pool had lavender oil in it and was kept very hot for her, almost as hot as a bathtub.

The pool was in a glass room on the roof. The room was full of plants and palm trees, and the pool was so heavy the ceiling of the floor above had to be reinforced with steel beams to support it. He'd seen the room on the top floor himself, that's how close to her he was.

Because Tang liked him, Kim thought of himself as a protector of hers. He'd pass her street in the evening before he went cruising just to see if she was home, to look through the windows into her rooms. He didn't want her as an enemy.

Kim felt sick and lonely and needed a friend to help him. Wendy wasn't answering her phone, so he went to see the old man, Bill, who bailed him out whenever he got in trouble. Bill was at home in his penthouse apartment, but he was busy and didn't want to be bothered. Bill Krauterman was his name. Bill buzzed Kim up, but as soon as he opened the door, he told Kim to go away.

"I don't have time for trouble now," he said with an angry face.

Kim started crying out in the hall. "Clio hit me."

"Well, I'm sorry she hit you. I told you not to stay with her."

"She hits me too much. I can't go back there."

"Okay, so leave her." Bill was big, very big. Over six feet tall, and he weighed too much. He had trouble getting in and out of bed, and sometimes he got very mad at Kim for nothing at all.

"I did leave." Kim was desperate and cried some more, letting his tears run down his face so Bill would feel sorry for him. He should have been an actor. "Tang fired me." He was pleading while the fat old man was trying to make up his mind.

"Kim, did anybody ever tell you you're too much trouble?"

"But you like me, Billy We're friends, right? I need one thousand five hundred dollars for a new place. Then I won't bother you." Kim said the words quickly, working hard to get the order right in English.

Bill's angry face looked back inside his apartment as if someone were in there waiting for him. He wasn't letting Kim in.

"I'll pay it right back," Kim promised.

Bill snorted and pulled on his gray ponytail. "How are you going to pay it back if you've lost your job? Oh, never mind. Take it and get lost." He reached into his pocket, fanned out a fat roll of hundreds and gave Kim fifteen, then closed the door without saying anything more.

Kim's heart felt full. It made him so happy to get such easy money and be loved by a rich friend. Right away he went shopping. He wandered from store to store on Lexington and Third, looking for new clothes to look good for his friend. He spent all his shopping time thinking about the rest of the money in the old man's pocket and how he would get it later.

He was surprised when all his money was gone. He was wearing a green silk shirt and a fine suede jacket, new white pants, and Italian slip-on shoes. But he had nowhere to go, no plan. He felt poor and lonely again, and his memory flashed back to long ago. He thought of the village good-time girl who was so horribly burned when angry wives held her down and threw acid on her face for stealing their husbands. He could still hear the girl's screams in his head and see clearly the way she looked afterward.

Her body was sdll alive but she was dead. She called herself a living dead person.

Living dead person. Kim's sister, too. Kim thought of his sister, who was an angel now. He thought of Tang and the acid-throwing wives. Tang Ling was very vain; she liked to have her picture taken and see herself in the magazines. If acid spoiled her face, she would be ugly. She could never go on TV or hurt him again.

Kim was walking around Lexington Avenue, thinking about throwing acid on Tang for hurdng him so much. He walked around for a long time, down to Forty-second Street and Grand Central Station. He was thinking how easy it would be to make Tang a living dead person. She would scream and roll around on the ground. Her husband wouldn't want her anymore. No more late nights in restaurants. Kim knew where acid was, but not here in Manhattan. He had to go back to Queens to get it. That would take a long time. Anyway, even if he was mad at Tang, he would never hurt her.

Kim thought of another dead person. A girl, only thirteen. He didn't know her when she was alive. But when the men pulled her naked body out of the river, his mother turned to him.

"Maybe someone raped her and she struggled too hard," she told him.

He was little then and didn't know what she meant. But he remembered later not to struggle too much when people hurt him. The girl in the river made him think of Tang drowning in her pool. A strong person could hold her under the water until she stopped struggling like the girl so long ago. Kim started walking to Tang's house. His feet in the handsome shoes were taking the familiar route back uptown. He wasn't thinking of taking the gun out and shooting Tang. That was the furthest thing from his thoughts. Wendy told him you couldn't shoot a gun without fixing the bang first because people were so afraid of guns. They got upset when they heard the noise and called the police. He hated the police, who always made trouble for him and tried to lock him up.

He had no plan to shoot anybody right then. The gun with the muffler on it was buried in the garbage. Because he was a forgiving person, he pushed his bad thoughts about Tang away. He knew he would never in a million years hurt Tang. He just wanted to be near her and change her mind. He was good at changing people's minds, never stayed in trouble for long. He'd changed Billy's mind, hadn't he? The closer Kim got to Tang's house the stronger was his idea that if he had a chance to talk to Tang, she'd change her mind. He'd get his job back and they'd still be friends. That was all he wanted.

Sixty-one

A

pril dialed Tang's private line at her office and was not surprised to hear her assistant say, "She's gone for the day."

"When did she leave?" April asked, relieved that anybody was there so late.

"Who's calling?"

"Sergeant Woo, police department. I was there this morning."

"Oh, yes, Miss Woo. Is there anything I can help you with?"

"I need to reach Miss Ling; it's very urgent." She had to find Ching and send her out of harm's way.

"Um. Miss Ling left the building a few minutes ago.

"In a car?"

"No, no, it's only a few blocks. She always walks home."

"What route does she take?"

The woman hesitated. "Oh, I'm sure you can reach her at home in half an hour."

"Well, that might be too late. Are you sure she's on her way home?" April asked.

"Well, I think so. Is something wrong? You could call on her cell phone." The woman gave her the number.

"Okay, good. Thanks." April jotted it down.

"You know where the house is?" she asked, suddenly helpful.

"Yes. I know where the house is." April ended the call. "Tang is walking home," she told Mike.

Then she dialed Tang's cell number. It was turned off, so she left a message. Didn't important people like Tang Ling always keep their cell phones on? she wondered. Where was Ching? She was getting panicked.

"Shit." Mike had taken the Sixty-sixth Street cross-town, and now they were caught in the Lincoln Center traffic. He hit the siren and waited only a second before barreling through a red light at Lexington and bucking the oncoming traffic. A bus almost hit them, and the female driver gave them a horrified look as she jammed on the brakes.

April's stomach lurched as he kept going. She was in the death seat, her window open, perspiring heavily into the suit she'd worn for her visit to Tang Ling. Now she wished she'd never heard the woman's name. The cooling wind hit her in the face. Finally the temperature was dropping. April braced herself, thinking about Tang's town house on Seventy-first Street. Between Park and Madison Avenues, had a garage and a swimming pool.

She tried Tang's home number. Voice mail picked up on the first ring. April left another message. "The line's busy. She may be home already," she said.

"Hold on." Mike plowed through all six lanes of Park and turned up Madison. There was still a lot of life on the avenue. The ritzy crowd that lived there was walking home, walking out to dinner. Walking and turning to see what the noise was about.

"Let's not scare the horses," April murmured.

Mike turned the siren off, and she scanned the street, searching the pedestrians for a solo walker, a good-looking Filipino with a sweet face, just in case....

They passed Tang's shop. At quarter to nine everything was shut tight. The lights on Madison illuminated dazzling clothes and accessories in boutiques only the very wealthy could afford. Once again April wanted out of the car. She wanted to run. For days she'd been wanting to run. Run and catch the killer. Knock him into hell. She didn't see Tang striding along in her Armani suit.

Mike cruised slowly past Seventy-first Street. Yves Saint Laurent was on the southeast corner. On the far side of the street was St. James. As they passed it, April saw that several homeless were camping on the front steps. No sign of Tang or Kim. Mike turned on Seventy-second Street. Ralph Lauren one corner. Around the block on Park he ran a light. April held her breath. Still nothing. They cruised down Park, then turned on Seventy-first Street with the light. It was a quiet street. As they headed back toward Madison, April could see the AA sign out on the side church door, indicating a meeting in progress. No one was outside.

Opposite the church, the town houses were grand. Tang's house was the grandest and widest of all. April detached her seat belt and scanned the area around the church. The west side of Madison on Seventy-first Street had its shady patches. Click. She scanned the dark areas back to the church where homeless were allowed to sleep on the steps and dozens of people were inside at an eight P.M. AA meedng. This was a perfect spot for a stranger. April's eyes went back to Tang's house, then ran east to Park Avenue. Two doormen, one on each side of the street, came out of their doors. One lit a cigarette. She had no sense of Kim's presence there. Maybe Clio, who knew Kim best, was wrong about him. Maybe he wasn't going to hide under Tang's skirt.

"I don't think he's out here," she murmured, trying to calm down. Mike slowed to a crawl.

"Cuidado,"

he warned as he pulled into the space in front of the garage door where the yellow sign said NO PARKING ANYTIME.

Upstairs on the second door of Tang's house the lights were on. April opened her door. Mike put a hand on her arm. "I'm going," he said.

"She doesn't know you," April protested. She knew what he was thinking. She wasn't wearing a vest; her powder blue suit made her a perfect target. Too bad. She was going anyway. They were out of the car and moving at the same dme.

April was troubled by the dark public spaces in the church behind her directly across the narrow side street. Homeless on the corner. What to check drst, the house or the church?

But okay. Fine, they'd go in together. Mike nodded and chose the house. April moved first; he took a position behind her. There was no stoop. The front door was at street level. A security camera hung from above. April rang the bell. Almost instantly someone spoke through the intercom.

"Yes?"

"Lieutenant Sanchez, Sergeant Woo to see Miss Tang."

"She's out to dinner." "Where?"

"May I see your ID?"

April showed her gold shield to the camera. "She's at Willow Restaurant, on Lexington Avenue." She gulped. Okay, that's where Ching was. "Let's

go"

Sixty-two

K

im walked up Lexington Avenue. He walked so slowly it got dark outside long before he reached Seventy-first Street. At first he started looking in windows, jewelry store windows especially, moving his feet along in their new Italian shoes. He thought of the ring he'd bought Clio when they got married, the bracelets and the earrings. A real diamond and real gold to make her happy. He was good to her. But she was not good to him. Angry all the time. He didn't like that.

After a while he lost interest in stores and studied his shoes. Kim's new shoes had soles that were so thin he could feel every bump on the sidewalk. They were beautiful, but thin. His head drooped and he started feeling bad about the shoes and all the things he did for other people and the poor way they repaid him for his kindness.

It was not so far from Forty-second Street to Seventy-first Street, but Kim was not just walking up Lexington; he was walking through his whole life. By the time he reached Seventieth Street he was feeling so uncomfortable in his skin he wanted to break right out of it. Burst open and do something. Nothing he'd done yet had worked to make his life okay. Nothing was enough. Everything felt too tight inside him, and he didn't know what to do to make his skin fit again. He had no home, no job. His heart hurt and he thought it wasn't fair that people did so many bad things and only he should suffer, only he be singled out for punishment.

He was at Seventy-third Street before he realized he'd passed Seventy-first Street. He lifted his head. He saw the street sign and realized he'd gone too far. He turned to go across Seventy-third Street. There was a restaurant on the corner. He hesitated, suddenly alert to a familiar place. He knew this was a restaurant where Tang sometimes went with her husband, with important people he recognized.

Tables were set, and people were sitting outside. He stopped to look through the window, and there Tang was! But tonight she was not with an important person. His whole body felt the shock of seeing Tang with a customer. And it was not just any customer. Tang was sitting at a table inside the restaurant with the girl who was supposed to be his next angel. Ching Ma Dong!

Kim stared at them, horribly upset that Tang was taking the time to eat with a customer. She never did that. And the worst thing was that the two women— his boss and his next angel—were smiling and laughing as if he'd never existed. They looked completely happy, as if they didn't care about all the bad things that happened to him.

Sixty-three

M

ike hurried back to the car, but April hesitated on the sidewalk, studying the street. Maybe they shouldn't move so fast. There were other choices here. That church, for one thing. Homeless on the front steps. The street was really quiet, a good place for action no one was expecting. April shivered and pulled out her phone to try Tang's cell number again. Still no answer.

"Let's go,

querida."

Mike was already back in the car.

"Right, let's be where she is."

He called for an address while she crossed the sidewalk.

"Hurry up. Get in the car. Ifs on Seventy-third Street."

Okay, okay.

Back in the car April didn't attach her seat belt. Cops had special dispensation on the job. Some cops never wore seat belts. A macho thing. Right now Mike didn't do his either. He pulled out fast, and her heartbeat accelerated with the car. Upper East Side was about as high end as New York City got, and Mike was pushing it in a part of town he didn't know. Nineteenth Precinct. The radio crackled as he wove around one-way streets. Nothing was going down. It was a quiet Monday night.

He sped north on Madison. Up on Seventy-third was another church. Homeless were gathered there, too. At Seventh-fourth the brakes squealed as he took the turn too fast and raced down the block, only to grind to a halt at Park, where four of the six lanes were moving fast.

A radio call came in. It was a nothing. Mike turned off the radio and neither said anything as they waited for the light to change. Ten thousand times every single day cops just got in cars and cruised around. Sometimes they were looking for something that hadn't even been thought of yet. Sometimes they were looking for a certain person, or a certain kind of person. Or certain activities in highly predictable locations. Sometimes you found what you were looking for, and sometimes you didn't.

April read the scene. At first there didn't seem to be much in the way of unpredictable on Lexington and Seventy-third Street. The restaurant they were looking for was a building that had once been a private house. A few tables covered with snowy tablecloths were set out on the sidewalk for spring dining, just a few for brave diners. They were decorated with candles and sweetheart roses. Five of the tables were filled.

Ching and Tang Ling were not sitting at one them. In the navy sky above the stars were coming out. It was a pleasant scene. Only one thing was out of place: Kim Simone was against the wall at the restaurant window. Mike and April both saw him at the same moment, saw the carryall over his shoulder.

"There he is. No fast moves," Mike said as he slid to a stop, double-parking on Lex before the intersection.

As if April didn't know. Adrenaline kicked in as they took a moment to observe him. Kim didn't seem to be doing anything except standing there. That was good. No one was paying him any attention. That was good, too. He wasn't nervous. The canvas carryall was hanging by its straps over his left shoulder. His back was to them, so his hands were not in view. Mike called Dispatch to give their location and to request backup.

They would take this real slow. The suspect didn't look jumpy, didn't appear to have a gun in his hand. Certainly not a rifle. They exchanged looks. Best case, they would get out of the car. They would cross the street. They would move across the sidewalk. There would be no sirens. They would not say, "Police, freeze." They would distress no diners. There would be no scene. They would get to Kim and each take a side of him. Then they would walk him quietly away from the restaurant, the diners—Tang Ling and Ching.

Mike broke the tense silence. "Did he see you today?" he asked.

"Don't know."

"Lef s take it real easy."

Okay.

Her vote was for easy. April nodded and popped open her door. Mike opened his. Then, as if he could read their minds, Kim started moving. He slowly slid down the side of the building in that narrow space between diners and building. He was walking, not a bit nervous. He didn't see them coming. He was completely cool, heading toward the door of the restaurant as if it were an everyday thing, but nothing about it was everyday to Mike and April. Kim's hand was in the bag, and he was going inside, where Ching was. April wanted to scream, but no sound came out of her mouth.

She was out of the car. She was running across the street into traffic. Horns honked as they dodged cars. People at the tables outside were startled. Kim disappeared through the door. Mike swore as April was the first to follow him in. Her hand was on her Glock. She did not want to unholster it. She did not want to have to shoot it in a crowded place. She wanted to grab the suspect and take him out quietly.

It didn't happen.

Lucky for her the light was the same inside and outside. She could see Kim moving into the restaurant. Then she saw where he was going. Tang Ling was in the back at a table for four. Ching was sitting beside her. They were drinking champagne. Between herself and Tang, the restaurant was filled with people. Diners, servers, people drinking at the bar. Lots of people. Mike was at her elbow. Kim was moving through the human traffic. Nothing stealthy about the way he was moving. April didn't see a gun. She still didn't see a gun. She thought they were all right. They were going to be all right. Mike was now ahead of her. She knew the plan.

"Excuse me, sir." Mike moved quickly toward Kim. He wanted Kim to turn around and focus away from Ching. He wanted to see if there was a gun. He wanted to take Kim's arm.

Kim turned around, surprised. "Me?"

"Do you have a reservation?" Mike asked.

Kim shook his head. "I have a friend here."

"Excuse me, watch your back." A waiter with a full tray got between them.

Kim turned away from Mike and started walking again. April was parallel to him, hurrying down the aisle between two rows of tables to get between him and Ching. She saw his hand go into the bag. She saw it come out with the gun.

"Police, freeze," she barked.

Tang Ling put her hand to her mouth and stood up. "Kim!" Ching stood up, too. She looked confused. Her body blocked Tang, but nobody blocked her.

"Get down! Down on the floor!" April screamed. She charged Kim. He raised the gun and fired at her. She felt the burn of the bullet and hit the floor, rolling between tables toward his feet. He lowered the gun to shoot her again.

Mike pushed the waiter to one side and the tray crashed to the ground. People were screaming, rising from their chairs, trying to get away. They blocked the area so Mike couldn't get through. Tang stood there, frozen with her mouth open. Then she found her voice.

"No. No," she screamed. "No, Kim, don't."

Kim spun around. April rolled again closer to him. Blood poured from her forehead, she felt the searing burn. Her heart knocked in her chest and her breath came hard. Blood ran into her eyes. She wiped it away with her sleeve.

"Police! Freeze!" Then, "Get down," April screamed. But no one was obeying her.

"No, Kim. Please." Tang stood there screaming and shaking her head at Kim as he raised the gun, aiming at Ching.

"Don't!" she shrieked.

But he was beyond noticing her, the people, the noise, the cop at his feet. His eyes, his whole concentration was right in front of him, his last angel.

April rolled one last time, aiming for his knees. She chopped him hard, then pulled him down. Kim was already toppling as he squeezed the trigger, firing off two more shots. Mike hurled himself on the two of them, reaching for the .38 as Kim tried to fire again.

"Get out of the way," Mike barked at April.

But she wasn't going anywhere. The three grappled on the slippery floor, fighting like dogs. April panted, kicked, and slipped in somebody's dinner. Ice scuttled through puddles of wine and blood. She kicked again, aiming for a sensitive place. Kim was twisting, twisting away from them like a practiced mud-wrestler, grunting as he fought to keep his weapon. Mike had him down. Kim twisted out, lashing out with a handful of spaghetti. He threw the long hot strings in Mike's eyes. Mike swiped at his face and sprang to his feet, holding on to Kim's silk shirt.

Then Kim was up, still waving the gun, kicking back. Mike grabbed his arm and hauled it behind Kim's back. Kim howled but didn't drop the gun. It was aimed now at the back of his head. People were screaming, and now the sirens were wailing, too. Blood was all over April's face. She was soaked with it. She'd lost her sight and was losing her grip. But she fought on. She didn't want Kim firing the gun again. He twisted one last time, almost into her arms. As he turned, she punched him in the gut and the gun dropped out of his hand. April and Mike landed in a tangle on the floor, pinning their man just as a dozen officers from the Nineteenth Precinct arrived on the scene, responding to a second call, a third one, everyone with a cell phone calling in. Man with a gun, woman with a gun, officer down. They came.

Sixty-four

O

ne A.M. again. Tuesday, May eighteenth. Lenox Hill ER. Inventory. One brand-new powder blue pantsuit covered with blood and torn in five places. In other words, shot to hell. Likewise, one white blouse, not silk though, just linen blend. One well-loved leather jacket and contents of pockets, including several Rosario notebooks and cell phone. One pair of snakeskin cowboy boots. Trousers, formerly gray. Tie, indecipherable. Shirt, good, but bought on sale over two years ago. Still viable, two 9mm Glocks, one shoulder holster. One wallet with credit cards and driver's license. Two gold shields. One cop shot in the head who'd been removed from the scene in an ambulance at nine-thirty-seven P.M.

The nurses cleaned April up before a team of doctors came to look at her. That meant washing the blood out of her face and hair while not messing with the four-inch swath that oozed from her temple and the side of her head. She was awake enough to know that she was being handled by a lot of people, -her clothes were removed, and she had a headache worse than any migraine. She wanted Mike and Ching to know that she was all right. She wanted to go home, but she was seeing funny and she wasn't

going anywhere until everything was checked out. That was what they told her at eleven.

At midnight the hospital was alerted that the mayor was en route. After that, no way she was going to be released until they were through with her. If the mayor wanted a photo op with a fallen cop in a hospital gown, with some major hair loss and a huge bandage on her head, he would get it.

Night from hell. TV cameras don't roll anymore; the red light comes on and they record. The mayor was recorded with the police commissioner standing behind him as usual. Sergeant April Woo looked dazed in her hospital gown as she and Lieutenant Mike Sanchez received the city's official thanks. It wouldn't be aired tonight, but by morning the whole world would know that wedding guru Tang Ling, targeted by a deranged member of her own staff, had been saved by two of New York's finest.

At one-thirty-five April and Mike departed from the hospital wearing sweatsuits with the Lenox Hill logo. April's top was the zip-up kind with a hood, because nothing would go over her head. Somebody had driven the unmarked vehicle with her purse in it to the hospital. She was moved from the wheelchair into the backseat of it. She and Mike were being driven home. Mike got in beside her and cradled her in his arms.

"Querida, que tal?"

he whispered as soon as they got under way.

Que tal?

What's new? Ha.

The good side of April's head lolled against his chest.

Que tal,

that was Spanish, right?

"I almost lost you," he murmured, kissing her bandage, her hand, whatever he could reach.

"Nah, bad shot," she mumbled. She loved him so much it almost took her past the pain. Almost.

"Oh, baby.

Te amo."

"Uh-uh. No, you

te amo. Mi te amo,"

she said, as if they were arguing about it.

Oh, God. She didn't feel good. She'd missed lunch and dinner. Again. Nausea rolled over her. Her head hurt. Her vision was impaired. Would he love her if she couldn't see? "Where's Ching?" she mumbled.

"Matthew took her home."

"She okay?" she asked five minutes later.

"Yeah, she's fine. How about you?"

She nodded off.

"Did they check the other gowns?" she asked, reviving for a second when they hit the bridge.

"For angels? Yeah, the lab picked it up right

away."

"Could have told us sooner," she muttered. Then, "I love Ching."

"I know you do,

querida."

He stroked her arm, her cheek. "I love her, too."

"I love my mom," some minutes after that.

"I know you do."

"You guys okay back there? The temp okay?" the driver asked. Somebody from the Nineteenth.

"Oh, yeah, everything's fine." Mike gazed out the window. They were on the LIE. They'd already passed Astoria. He'd ordered some food and planned to take April home to his place. She was used to eating late at night. But he'd figured if she was too tired to eat, he'd just put her to bed. Now he wondered if

he ought to take her home to her mom, who must be worried sick.

"But I love you most,

chico.

You're my only home. I want to be with you forever." She interrupted his thought. Her arms were around him. She was holding on dght. Her eyes were closed, but maybe she wasn't asleep.

"Is that a proposal?" Mike was surprised. They'd been through a lot, but he hadn't expected the gunshot wound to unscramble her brains.

"Uh-uh, that's your job. You have to get on your knees and give me a ring. That's the way it has to be."

"Okay. I was saving up for a new car, but I can get a ring instead. What kind do you want?" He thought he'd better get it tomorrow before she changed her mind. But she didn't answer. She slept the rest of the way home.

Epilogue

After an intense family debate about her wedding gown, Ching Ma Dong finally decided to be married in a traditional Chinese suit of lucky red and gold, with a huge dragon on it. Her wedding to Matthew Tan at the Crystal Palace in Chinatown had nearly three hundred guests and went off without a hitch. Ching and Matthew said their vows over a microphone so everyone could hear them. Then the food and music began. By the fourth of twelve courses the guests, many of whom had flown in from California, were pie-eyed with happiness and too much drink.

Ching wore her hair up and looked like a movie star in each of the jade, gold, and pink-and-gold cheongsams she changed into. But the real star of the show was wearing a startling purple-and-red cheongsam, a large bandage on her head, and a diamond engagement ring on her finger. Her birthstone.

April Woo was only a little drunk and grinning from ear to ear when she gave her loving-sister speech and was royally toasted for her own engagement in return. As the glasses were raised April called Mike Sanchez, her intended, up to the microphone to be introduced to the crowd. Wearing a tuxedo, a red scar on his hairline with his bruises yellowing, Mike said a few hastily learned words of congratulation to Matthew and Ching in Chinese, ending in English with his deep appreciation for April Woo, the love of his life. It was very touching and the applause was thunderous.

The one abstainer was Skinny Dragon. Even at this magical moment, April's mother could not stop talking. How could she, when she was aloft with pride for her daughter? April the immortal was so powerful that she could be shot in the head and survive with just a scratch. Her daughter, April Woo, was so important in the police department that no crime could be solved without her. Skinny happened to be seated at a huge table that included Matthew Tan's Mexican-American and Caucasian sisters and brothers-in-law from California and their many children. Skinny was so happy that she nodded and smiled at them constantly, as if she'd known them all her life. Her husband, Ja Fa Woo, was seated next to Gao Wan, the chef from Hong Kong. The two chefs drank and laughed and talked China and cooking until they couldn't see straight.

April Woo returns!

Turn the page for a special preview of the next Leslie Glass crime novel,

A KILLING GIFT,

a thrilling homicide investigation coming soon from NAL.

"Well, I've had about all the nostalgia I can take." Lieutenant Alfredo Bernardino's retirement party was still going strong when he abruptly pushed away from the bar at Bad and called it a night. "I'm outta here."

"Hey, what's the rush?" Sergeant Marcus Beame, his second whip in the detective unit of the Fifth Precinct, protested. "The night's young."

"Not for me." Bernardino raised two fingers at his famous protege, Sergeant April Woo. Woo had her eye on him while she sipped tea with Poppy Bel-laqua, another girl star. It made him sad. He was going. The girls were taking over. He snorted ruefully to himself about the way things were changing and how he wouldn't be there to gripe about it anymore.

Poppy didn't look up, but April nodded at him.

Coming in a second.

Her body language told him she wasn't walking away from an inspector for nobody. Bernardino snorted again. He hated this girl ganging-up thing. They were getting to be a pack. Then he smiled and let up on the resentment.

Even if April didn't jump for him now, he knew she was a good girl. She'd planned the event tonight, had chosen his favorite restaurant, had made sure that the invite was up all over the puzzle palace so everybody knew. Made sure enough brass was there.

It was a nice party, and she hadn't even worked for him in dve years! Yeah, April was a good girl, and she had a good guy now, too.

Bernardino glanced over at Lieutenant Mike Sanchez, April's fiance. The good-looking CO of the Homicide Task Force was having his third espresso with Chief Avise, commander of the Department's six thousand detectives who never hung around anywhere for more than a minute or two.

Bernardino was aware that a lot of important people were there to give him a nice send-off, but he was feeling drunk and more than a little sorry for himself. He couldn't help feeling that it was all over for him— not just the job to which he'd devoted his whole life, but his life itself.

What does a man think about when he has a premonition that he's on the very last page of his story? Bernardino was a tough guy, a bruiser of a man. Not more than a hair or so over five nine, he was barrel chested. Always an enthusiastic feeder, he had quite a corporation going around his midsection. He still had a brush of gray hair on top, but his mug was a mess. His large nose had been broken a bunch of times by the time he was'thirty; and his face, deeply pitted from teenage acne, was creased and pouchy with age. He was sixty-two, not really old in the scheme of things. His father had lived past ninety, after all. Bernardino wasn't as old as he felt.

"Thank you guys for everything. That's about all I can say," he muttered to the detectives nearest him. Charm was not exactly Bernardino's middle name. He was done. He was goin' home. That was that. No pretty good-byes for him. He took a quick survey. The dark Greenwich Village hole-in-the-wall where he'd spent so many happy hours was so full of old friends that he actually had to blink back his emotions.

Thirty-eight years on the job could make a man a lot of buddies who wouldn't want to call it a day or a lot of enemies who'd barely stop in for a free feed. Bernie had been surprised to see that he'd collected the former. At eleven forty-five on a Wednesday night, the speeches were long over. His awards were sitting on the bar, and the buffet of heavy Italian favorites—the lasagne and ziti, the baked clams and calamari fritti, the eggplant parmigiana—had been picked clean and cleared away.

A lot of the guys had gone to work, or gone home, but the pulse of the party was still beating away. More than two dozen cronies—bosses and detectives and officers with whom Bernardino had worked over the years—were eating cannohs and drinking the specialty coffees, vino, beer, and free sambuca. They were hanging in there as if there were no tomorrow, telling those stories that went back, way back to when Kathy and Bill were just kids and Lorna had been a beautiful young woman.

Bernardino shook his head at what time had done to him. Now Kathy was an FBI special agent, working Homeland Security out in Seattle. She couldn't make the party. Bill was a prosecutor in the Brooklyn DA's office. He'd come and gone without either stuffing himself too much or drinking more than half a beer. With Becky and the two kids at home and court tomorrow, Bill was out the door in less than an hour. A real straight arrow. But what could he expect? Bernie couldn't blame his son for turning out to be a grind just like him. He'd wanted to take off with his son. The party was like a wake—everyone reminiscing over his life as if he were already dead or gone to Florida.

"Hey, congratulations, pally. You watch yourself in West Palm." His successor, Bob Estrada, patted him on the back on his way. "Lucky bastard," Estrada muttered.

Bernardino snorted again. Yeah, real lucky. His wife, Lorna, had won the lottery, literally, then died of cancer only a few weeks later. You couldn't get any luckier than that. Lorna had finally gotten the millions she'd prayed for for all those years so they could retire in the sunshine and finally spend time together. Then she had to go and die and leave him to do it alone. What was Florida to him without her? What was anything?

He slipped out the door, thinking about all the others who'd passed before they should have. In thirty-eight years he'd seen quite a parade of dead.. Each human who'd passed away too soon had been a little personal injury to him that he'd covered with macho humor.

The worst of all were the bodies of cops and civilians all over the place in the World Trade Center attack. Smashed fire trucks and police cars. And the fire that had gone on and on. In Chinatown, you couldn't get the smell of smoke and dead out of your nose for months. Refrigerators in apartments down there had had to be replaced. Thousands of them. The smell wouldn't fade. And that was the least of it.

When the unthinkable happened, Bernardino had been CO of the detective unit in the Fifth Precinct on Elizabeth Street in Chinatown for over a decade. Too close to ground zero for comfort. Everyone in the precinct worked around the clock because nobody wanted to go home, or be anywhere else. They'd stayed on the job twenty-four/seven for weeks longer than they had to. People who'd retired years ago came back on the job to help. And they came from other agencies, too. Retired FBI or CIA agents manned the phones, directed traffic. Whatever had to be done. He shook his head, thinking about it.

All through those long, long days, the cops who worked the front lines were waiting with the rest of the world for the second shoe to drop. They'd responded to hundreds of bomb threats a day, telling themselves they were fine. Doin' okay. But the truth was none of them was okay. The worst for Bernardino was that he'd let Lorna down. He'd been out fighting a war on New York and hadn't been home for her.

Amazing how one thing could tip a person over. He hadn't been there for Lorna before she'd gotten the cancer. That was what ate away at him. He hadn't been there where she was well. Then as soon as things were back to "normal," people were out the door. Retiring left and right. And now he was out the door.

Bernardino was a retired cop on a familiar street on a warm spring night, immediately enveloped by a deep warm fog. He looked around and was startled by it. You didn't see real pea soup in New York that often anymore. The thickness of it was like something in a movie. Downright dreamy. While he'd been inside, the haze had droppped low over the Washington Square area, blurring figures, lights, and time. Maybe that was what got to him. Bernardino dipped his head, acknowledging to himself the spookiness of the night. But maybe he was just drunk.

He shuffled his feet a little as he headed north on a side stree he knew as well as his own home. On the other side of Washington Square was his car. He walked slowly, muttering his regrets to himself. Lively, funny, rock-solid Lorna had faded in a few short months. He remembered a social worker's warning to him at the time. "Denial isn't a river in Egypt, Bernie." But he just hadn't believed she would die.

The smell of Italian cooking followed him down the block. He was a warhorse, a cop who'd always looked over his shoulder especially on really quiet nights. But tonight he wasn't a cop anymore. He was done. His thoughts were far away. He was feeling sluggish, old, abandoned. All evening his buddies had punched and hugged him, told him they'd visit. Told him he'd find a new honey in Florida. He'd be done. But he didn't think he'd ever be fine.

Out of the fog came an unexpected voice. "You made your million, asshole. What about your promise to me?"

Like a blind dog, Bernardino turned his big head toward the sound. Who the hell—? Instantly his guilt about the money was triggered. Someone hit the nail right on the head. But who did he owe? He puzzled over it only for a nanosecond. Then he burst out laughing. Harry was pranking him. Ha ha. His old partner from years ago following him to his car to say good-bye.

"Harry, you old devil!" Bernardino had been unnerved for a moment but now felt a surge of relief. "Come out here where I can see you." He spun around to where he thought the sound originated.

"Nopey nope. Ain't going to happen." An arm snaked around Bernardino's neck from behind and jerked hard.

Bernardino didn't even have time to lean forward and flip the guy before the grip was set. Despite Bernardino's size and heft, he was positioned for death with little effort. After only a very few panicked heartbeats, his neck was broken and he was gone.

LESLIE GLASS grew up in New York City, where she worked in the book publishing industry and at New York magazine before turning to writing full-time. She is the author of nine previous novels, the last six of which have featured NYPD detective April Woo. Leslie Glass has two grown children and lives in Long Island and New York City. Visit her Web site at

www.aprilwoo.com

.