A Killing Gift (4 page)

B
y two a.m. Thursday, April had been examined, X-rayed, and admitted for the night. But once she'd returned to life she was too wide-awake to calm down. She'd dozed and thought about Bernardino, how he'd promoted her. She'd thought about the search for the poor little girl who'd been held for ransom by a neighbor, then murdered. Her first kidnaping and homicide. April had been the one to see the little sneakered foot peeking out of a half-zipped sleeping bag in a pile of garbage behind a Chinatown building, years ago. Now Bernardino was gone, efficiently executed by what appeared to be a professional. But why Bernie?

April had been in a lot of fights over the years, but only practice fights. Competition. Nobody had ever tried to kill her. Last night a man had tried to kill her. Now she knew what it felt like, and it didn't feel good. She wouldn't forget that iron forearm pressing into her neck. Her defensive moves kept playing in her head. Pathetic. She'd resisted, but not well enough. A little more pressure and he would have crushed her voice box-and maybe ended her life as well. He could have snapped her neck like a twig, as he'd done to Bernardino, but he hadn't. She was lucky. But she didn't feel lucky; she felt shamed.

All through the night her privacy curtain was pulled all the way around her bed, and the faint glow of the night-light beamed ten thousand questions at her. People didn't usually kill cops on purpose. Sometimes they got in the way when something bad was happening, like a cop walking into a particularly violent domestic dispute and getting knifed while trying to break up a fight. Or someone responding to a radio call for a DUI and ending up shot in the face when he approached the driver's side of the car. Nothing personal. Accidents.

Cops didn't get assassinated after their retirement parties. This was personal. April knew Bernardino. She'd worked with him and known his cases, but that was years ago. She had no idea what he'd been working on lately. She worried about it, drifted off to sleep, was awakened when a new patient was brought in at four-fifteen. She could hear the nurses whispering. It was an old woman with death-rattle breathing. April didn't want her to die right next to her. One death that night was enough. She wanted to go home.

She was up with the light and getting dressed in her torn party dress when her mother appeared suddenly, pulling open her curtain with one yank.

"Ma!" As usual, April was horrified to see her mother.

Ja Fa Woo stuck his bald head in to get a look at her, too. No such thing as privacy.

"Dad!"

Then her replacement, Gao Wan, the substitute son she'd offered Skinny to get her mother off her back about marrying Mike, pushed into her space as well. Gao was the one carrying the bulging plastic shopping bags. April knew they contained the emergency medical supplies, stuff Skinny knew the hospital wouldn't have on hand. Ghastly fake medicine to cure whatever was wrong. Usually April didn't even have to be sick to be treated by her mother. Imaginary illnesses were enough.

She eyed the bags with dismay. She had managed to get her underwear on under the hospital gown (modesty in case someone came in), but the torn silk dress was still over her arm. And she had no shoes. Gao Wan, about her age with no known girlfriend, stared at her excellent legs sticking out of the hospital gown.

"What's wrong with you?" Skinny demanded in Chinese, as if she couldn't see perfectly well that April's jaw and neck were bruised.

Ma! I'm fine.

"Aieeeyeee!" Skinny screamed because no sound came out of her precious daughter's mouth.

Ma, be quiet. People are sleeping.
April's mouth moved, to no avail. Her voice was still gone. She put her finger to her lips. "Shh."

Skinny Dragon didn't care how many sick people were trying to get some rest. She grabbed her daughter by the shoulder and gave her a little shake.

Ja Fa Woo told his wife to be quiet. Couldn't she see that April was on her feet? Almost fine.

Help!

Mike stepped in to regain control.
"Querida,
where do you think you're going?" he demanded.

To work. Did you bring me clothes?
Still trying to get some sound out.

"What?"

"What's wrong with her?" Skinny screamed at Mike in Chinese, unaware that he could not understand her when she lapsed out of English.

"Don't you know you can't come in here at this hour?" A nurse in a pink uniform came to shoo them out. "Visiting hours start at eleven."

Mike flashed his badge.

"I don't care who you are."

"I'm getting out of here." April pulled on the nurse's sleeve to get her attention.

"What do you need, dear?" The nurse turned to her.

Skinny grabbed a shopping bag from Gao and pulled out some clothes. While the nurse's head was turned, she gestured April toward the bathroom.
Go get dressed. We're going home.

O
nly a few hours later Officer Greg Spence gave April his usual line with an encouraging smile. "You don't need to think about this today, but it would help if you could get your impressions out while they're fresh."

Greg was thirty-five, tall and attractive, with a more boyish look than Mike, who was only two years older than him and sitting on the other side of the table. April studied the two cops. Greg had married a few years ago, and his wife, Judy, was pregnant. April knew he'd make a good father. He was patient with witnesses. Patient with uncertainty. She was sorry she couldn't help him out now.

"Okay?" he said, fiddling with his equipment. "You look a little shaky."

Shaky? No, she wasn't shaky. She was angry. The last thing she wanted to do right then was go over the details of her failure. She took a painful breath and tried to calm down. She was a captive of the system just like every other victim of a crime. Like it or not, she had to go through the process.

Actually, she had only herself to blame that she was there with the police artist instead of home in bed. She'd walked right into it. After escaping from Skinny and her father, she and Mike had gone back to the apartment they shared in Forest Hills. He expected her to sack out for the day, and she could have done that. Instead, she'd followed her plan. She'd swallowed three cups of strong green tea and a handful of analgesics. She'd bathed in a hot bubble bath for half an hour and then had to lie down to nap off a heavy case of dizziness from the hot water. She almost lost her day right then.

Mike was just about to leave her and to go to work when she sensed his departure and popped right up again. Well, she didn't exactly pop. She dragged herself out of bed and rummaged around looking for something easy to wear. Mike heard the noise and came into the bedroom to investigate.

"What do you think you're doing?" he demanded, catching her getting dressed for the second time that day.

She couldn't get out an answer and tried some sign language.
Got to go to work.

"What?"

I'm going to work!

Mike shook his head. He could hardly argue with a mute, so he fried up a bunch of eggs and resteamed some of the dim sum left over from the weekend. He was so hungry himself after the long night that he didn't notice the problem she had getting solid food down. Every painful swallow reminded her that she was lucky to be alive and that Bernardino, who'd loved to eat, had had a different fate. Her resolve to get on with it deepened. She knew what she had to do. She had to go to his autopsy even though she dreaded being close to dead bodies. The ghost factor.

Chinese believed that violent deaths led to angry ghosts. And angry ghosts were like invisible devils that caused every misery known to man. Keeping far away from the dead was no insurance against ghost revenge, but it made people feel safer. April, too. Despite the possibility of attracting Bernardino's negative afterlife attention, she needed to be there with him. Maybe it was loyalty. Maybe it was the ghost factor itself that encouraged her to stay with him. If there was the slightest chance that his unsettled spirit was still lingering around him, she wanted that spirit to be assured that she would not abandon him. She would find and punish his killer. She would return his care of her during his lifetime by helping to free his spirit for a happy afterlife with the wife who'd preceded him. She wanted to attend his autopsy.

Her determination to be with Bernardino drove her past Mike's objections and back into the city to follow her own path, but other people had a different agenda for her. Mike took her to headquarters downtown.

First she was questioned by Chief Avise himself, then Poppy Bellaqua. They wanted to know if she had spoken with the man, if he had said anything. She couldn't remember. They'd asked if she'd seen him. She couldn't remember that either. Now the artist who sketched the faces on the wanted posters that the police distributed to the newspapers and TV had the assignment of getting a description from her. And they all used the same words. They were all talking to her the way they talked to civilian victims: as if she'd gone deaf and stupid as well as mute.

She was ensconced in Mike's airless, windowless office in the Homicide Task Force on the second floor of the Thirteenth Precinct on Twenty-second Street, close to the Police Academy, where she'd been trained to remember a lot better than this.

"You up for it?" Greg asked again gently.

April had worked with him many times before, helping witnesses remember details buried deep in their subconscious. It was an iffy business. Nothing these days was proving to be more unreliable than eyewitness testimony. A lot of people over the years had been falsely accused and falsely convicted of crimes they hadn't committed on the basis of what people said they had seen, sometimes just to help the police close the case. That would not happen here. She had not seen the man's face. She hardly saw his shape. She did not remember talking or fighting with him, only the grip around her neck.

"You up for it?" He repeated the question a third time.

She swallowed some cold tea from the bottom of her cup, testing her throat. Then she wrote on the pad in front of her what she had written before. /
didn't see his face.
Then,
Tea?
Stalling.

Mike got up and disappeared out the door to ask someone to get it.

The features Greg used-noses, mouths, eye and eyebrow shapes, foreheads, jawlines, head and hand and limbs and body shapes-could be manipulated in a computer program, but he also could do it manually, creating faces and forms from laminated flip cards that he sketched into his own more lifelike portrait. Naturally, he ignored her denial. "We'll start on the shape of his head and his body type then, okay?"

April closed her eyes, trying to conjure an impression of size from a blocked memory. Why were they bothering with this? They knew she'd gotten hit on the head in her fall. For how many seconds she'd lost consciousness she didn't know. What she did know was that lost consciousness also often meant a loss of memory of precipitating events as well. Sometimes it was a merciful thing that those minutes of actual violence disappeared forever, but it was not good for law enforcement.

What April remembered was her annoyance at Bernardino for leaving without saying good-bye, the wet blanket of fog on the street when she left the restaurant to follow him. She remembered hearing the sound of the metal leash. A man had been walking his dog, some kind of big dog. She didn't remember now what kind. The two had passed her. Now that she thought about it, it seemed odd. How could they have missed Bernardino when she had almost tripped over his body?

As she waited for her tea, she puzzled over this. Somehow she had gotten into Washington Square. She'd been barefoot. She didn't remember either of those things. When she first regained consciousness, Mike had been holding her head, talking to her. She remembered that. She'd assumed that Mike was the one who'd had saved her. But later in the hospital Mike told her a man with a chocolate lab had intervened. If it was the same man and dog, how could they have avoided Bernardino's body?

Dogs were very sensitive to human states: injury, sickness, fear, anger, death. Even if the man hadn't seen Bernardino, the dog would have known. Something was wrong about the story. She had to talk to that guy. That hero who'd saved her. She made a mental note and checked her watch. How long would it take for them to catch on to the fact that she was not going to be any help in identifying the killer? One hour, two? Seventy-two?

Mike came back with a fresh cup of tea. April sipped at hot water that was just beginning to streak with the brown of a tea bag. She read
Lipton
on the tag at the end of the string. Stalling. She had no impression of any body shape. No head shape. No features. And now she didn't even remember how the man had gotten his hands on her. The whole thing was a blank. She wasn't being difficult. She really didn't remember.

She drew breath and coughed experimentally, aware of how investigators felt about this kind of thing. For once the shoe was on the other foot. Usually she was the one trying to help a witness remember. She was the one who felt frustrated because so often they seemed to be holding something back. She drank some tea to warm her throat. It didn't help.

"What about his size, the shape of his body, April?" Greg fiddled with his shapes as if April didn't know the difference between a wiry build, a medium build, and a heavy build.

"There you are!" Bill Bernardino opened the door and pushed into the small space. His suit was a rumpled mess and his face was flushed an angry red. He looked as if he'd been crying. "What the hell happened?" he demanded as if he hadn't spoken to Mike several times last night.

"Bill!" Mike jumped out of his desk chair, offering his hands for condolence.

Bill put his own hands up to reject the gesture. "He was fine when I left. Jesus!" he spit out angrily, as if it were their fault his father was gone, as if it were brand-new news to him.

April's eyes welled up. "Oh, Bill." The words didn't come out loud enough to qualify as a whisper.

He glared at her. A few days before the party April had called him personally. Prosecutors were very busy, and she knew from past experience that Bill would need a reminder to make it to his father's party. She also wanted to be sure that his wife, Becky, knew she had an invitation and that Bernardino wanted her there. Becky hadn't come, and Bill had kept his appearance short. From long habit, April kept her face stripped of her feelings. But her heart hammered out her anger so loudly she was afraid he could hear it across the room. Skinny Dragon Mother would be very vocal indeed about a son like Bill.

What kind of son doesn't stay to the end of his father's retirement party? What kind of son doesn't take his old widowed father home when the party is over?

A busy son? A careless son? No, a bad son. Skinny would say Bill Bernardino was a no-good son.

"I'm sorry for your loss." Now Greg Spence was on his feet. "I'll catch you guys later," he murmured to Mike and April. Then he was gone, right out the door as fast as he could get away.

A real prosecutor, Bill raised his hand a few inches to acknowledge his triumph in getting the floor. Then he went right to the point. "What the hell was going on there, April?" he demanded, singling her out as the focus of his rage even though they'd met only a few times over the years. And he'd heard what happened already!

She blinked back the tears in her eyes, put off by the way he was behaving. No respect. Her tears dried out of her eyes as quickly as they had flooded them. She understood that he was upset. They were all upset. But this was no way to talk to his father's old friend.

"For Christ's sake. The least you can do is talk to me, tell me what you guys were up to. Or are you going to cover this up like everything else?" he went on bitterly.

Oh, that was it. April and Mike locked eyes, and Mike intervened. "Hey, take it easy, Bill."

"Take it easy! My dad is murdered at a Department party where the top brass was skunk drunk, and you expect me to take it easy. How do I know one of them didn't do this? Huh?"

"Oh, no, no, no, no. Don't talk crazy," Mike said softly. "You know that's not right." He glanced quickly at April a second time. She knew he wanted to move to her side of the table to protect her. An almost imperceptible shake of her head told him she was fine.

"I know that she's responsible for this." Bill pointed an angry finger at her. "She was there on the scene. She let this happen! You'd better believe I'm not taking it easy. I'm not letting it go. Someone's going to pay."

"Okay, sure. Fair enough. Why don't you sit down now? You need a cup of coffee, something to eat." Despite her warning, Mike instinctively reached out to April.

She was wondering how Bill knew who was on the scene.

"Don't give me that cop shit! I don't want coffee. My dad is dead. I want some answers." His face was almost purple with rage. April figured he'd had enough time to start feeling guilty and almost felt sorry for him.

But even if she could have found her voice, she would have remained silent throughout the tirade. Bill was threatening them, and it was a little scary. She knew how these things could be tilted and turned around. Police investigations came up with all kinds of explanations and skewed answers to cover up mistakes. It wasn't good, but it happened. Bill was a prosecutor and she could see where he was going.

There had been incidents in the past of cops partying just before they went on duty, then having fatal car crashes as they sped to work. Each time drinking was implicated as a factor in a tragedy involving cops, a lot of people went down. Supervisors were transferred, demoted, or lost their jobs. Now the possibility of scandal because a bunch of high-ranking cops had been drinking at the retirement party of a distinguished lieutenant who was murdered on the way home was not beyond possibility.

Dozens of friends only a few feet away and all too drunk to do anything to save him. Oh, it was so clear where Bill was headed.

"Sit down, Bill. I was there and you weren't. So you listen to me for a minute before you get yourself and everybody else in a flap. Okay?" Mike pointed at the chair. April could see how angry he was but knew that Bill could not.

Bill hesitated.

"I said, 'sit down.' Let's be civilized here," he said softly. "I'm not going to bite you."

"Fine. She was there, too; why doesn't she tell me what happened?" Bill took the chair Greg had vacated and looked to April.

April was not feeling so good. But her hair covered the lump on her head, and her turtleneck hid the bruises on her shoulder and neck. Maybe he didn't know what had happened to her.

"She can't," Mike said, real steel coming through in his voice for the first time. "She went after the guy. The bastard almost killed her. The man who killed your father is some kind of martial-arts expert."

Bill's mouth opened. "A what?" He stared at April, stunned. This bit of news hit a nerve.