Stealing Time (34 page)

"Why not?

"You don't want to catch anything." The short ME was new to Mike so he wasn't sure if the doctor was serious.

"Like what?"

"I told you before. She's got tuberculosis."

"I thought you said pneumonia."

"She had tuberculosis. It's in my report." Gross was getting huffy. He pointed at the file in Mike's hand. "It's right in there. This is nothing to play around with. This is dangerous stuff. We can't take chances."

Oh, great. Now they had a missing baby, a murder, and a public health problem on their hands. Mike stared at him.

"Hey, you got the pics. You got a prelim. No one gets results like this faster than I do."

Mike nodded. Yeah, this new doc was very fast all right. Maybe too fast. He couldn't seem to get his diseases straight.

"You're gonna have to find everyone she came in contact with and see that they're tested for TB. There are some bad strains now. What about the baby? He might be sick. The baby's doctor will have to be notified right away. The woman had a baby. He might have it, too. You know that, right?"

"Yeah."

"And everybody who came in contact with the mother."

Mike was upset. This was a new twist on the baby. This pointed to there being a possible medical reason for the baby's return to its biological mother. It might not be a healthy baby. He made a mental note to check with pediatricians to see about cases of tuberculosis. There were requirements for reporting TB. This was a new lead.

"You going to get on it?" the ME demanded.

"Absolutely," Mike promised.

"Where'd she come from?" The guy was really involved with the health issues. He didn't want to let Mike go. "Somewhere in Asia. Hong Kong? Taiwan?"

"We're working on it."

"You don't know much, do you?"

"You're my first step on this one, doc. I have a few other things on my plate right now."

"Okay. Keep me informed. We've got more paperwork to do on this. And we've got to follow up in the community."

"Sure thing." Now it wasn't just a homicide. It was also a bug story.

When news of the new homicide came in last night, Mike had decided to put the follow-up of the Abraham case on hold. Mickla had been arrested. Now there was his indictment and subsequent appearance before a grand jury to look forward to. The arresting officer would be present for the indictment; so would the primary detective. But the grand jury might not call them. All the arrest papers were in order. The DA's office and Mickla's lawyers had taken over. No one liked the end game, the paperwork. Mike was glad to move on. He drove downtown, armed with the reports in the new case he'd horned in on.

CHAPTER 39

A
pril slumped on the backseat of the blue-and-white taking them back to the 5th. Oh God, she was going to puke. Never in her life had she puked on the job. Hadn't even seen a dead body or anything, and she was going to puke. The backseat of the car was moving in a different direction from the front seat, was tilting off the edge of the world. God. She could feel it coming.

"Stop," she said suddenly.

Alfie turned around. "What's the matter?"

"Stop the car, for God's sake."

"Stop, you heard the sergeant," Alfie shot out.

The car stopped on Grand. April opened the door and crawled out. The sidewalk came up to meet her as she lowered herself onto the curb. "I can't do this in front of the lieutenant," she mumbled to herself. Can't do it. Can't heave in public, can't wimp out in the middle of a case. I can't.

"Hey, hey. You all right? Want me to call a doctor, huh? An ambulance?"

April concentrated on the water in her mouth.

"Talk to me, April. You don't open your mouth this minute, you're coming out of here on a stretcher. Got it?" Bernardino let her know who was boss. These men. Bullies, all of them. She swallowed.

"Sorry, sir. I have to make a phone call. Get him to pull up a little, will you?"

Alfie gave her a look she'd never forget. "Are you pregnant, sweetheart? Is that what this is all about?"

"Get outta here." April tried a joke, but nausea struck before she could say anything else. She managed to make it to her feet and lean over the back end of the cruiser just as her stomach turned inside out, emptying itself on the street. She had nothing to cover her face or cover her head or kill herself with except one of her own guns. The god of humiliation and losing face was working overtime. Mercy would be to let her die.

Luckily Alfie had seen a lot worse, and he had the manners to turn his back. He got back in the car whistling a little tune, pretending nothing was going on, thinking she was pregnant. April surveyed the shoppers looking for bargains on the Lower East Side. She was glad she wasn't in uniform, because that would have caused a street fair. When she was finished making an ass of herself, she scrabbled around in her shoulder bag for a moist towelette she'd picked up in a restaurant about two years ago. She finally found it and tore it open with her teeth. It was still moist. She mopped her face and hands, took a deep breath. Felt better and got back in the car.

"Everything all right now?" Alfie asked.

"Yeah, just had to make a quick call."

"Uh-huh."

They resumed the trip. No one said a word. April breathed in and out, trying to be Zen about this, clutching her cell phone as if it were a lifeline. When the car stopped, Alfie got out of the front seat and opened the back door for her. Another first. Behind gluey eyes, April tried to regain her tattered dignity. She took a second to count accessories. Shoulder bag? On her shoulder. Gun? One at her waist, one in the bag. Scarf? Hanging askew around her neck. Moist towelette, still in her hand. She used it to dab at her forehead. Cell phone? Still in her pocket. She was not about to call her mother to find out what was going to happen to her next.

Inside the precinct, it took a second for her eyes to adjust. In that second a handsome Chinese in uniform came out of the commander's office. It took April a moment to figure out that this was Chew, the commander she'd been wanting to meet for a year. She was confused. He looked too young to be an inspector.

Alfie introduced them.

"It's a privilege to meet you, sir," April said, bowing in spite of herself.

"The privilege is all mine." One whiff of her, though, and Inspector Chew took a step back. He said a few things behind his hand to Lieutenant Bernardino, then retreated to his office and closed the door.

April put her hand to her head, trying to brush away the devil. Oh, God, she was truly being punished.

Upstairs in the squad room, the gray-haired woman she knew as Annie Lee sat in the visitor's chair by her old desk. The woman was about the size and age of April's mother but the opposite in all other ways. Skinny Dragon was fieshless and dry, about as nourishing as last year's cornhusk. Her dyed black hair was crimped and curled. Annie Lee, on the other hand, was plump, soft, and damp-looking. Her thick gray hair was blunt-cut, in a bowl shape. She was dressed in black pants and a gray padded jacket. Underneath the jacket, begging to be seen, was a shirt of shiny material printed in a riot of colors. The outfit, face, and expression told April a lot. The woman was shrewd, greedy, and a sweet eater. She did not appear either frightened or nervous as she talked earnestly in Chinese to Madison Young. Like a good Chinese son or grandson, Detective Young was busy taking her seriously, nodding and writing down everything she said. When April came in, the self-proclaimed witness turned her head toward the door and saw her. Suddenly her mouth closed.

"How about your office?" April asked Alfie when she saw the reaction of the Chinese grandmother to the female Chinese detective she'd met before. "Mind if I sit at your desk?"

"Go ahead, just don't touch anything," Alfie said.

"There's nothing the matter with me. I'll be fine."

"Don't touch anyway."

Insulted, April marched into the glass office and sat at Alfie's desk. On another occasion this might have given her pleasure. Now it did not. Between her puking and fainting spells, she'd been wondering whether interrogating Annie Lee in the precinct was the right way to handle this. There was always a variety of ways to go. Sometimes it worked really well to take a frightened person out of the bosom of his family with all the neighbors watching, parade him down the street to a blue-and-white parked a hundred yards away so everyone had an excellent opportunity to see him. Then they'd parade him through the station house, let him visit the holding cell in the squad room and wait there for a while behind bars to think about what might happen if he never got out.

This didn't work with everyone. Sometimes the sight of the bars, the front desk, and so many officers in uniform made people angry and resistant. Sometimes just the experience of arriving at the precinct in a cruiser, before a detective even said a word, set them off. The nearness of the officers suggested the threat of a beating (which was strictly forbidden but happened sometimes anyway) and was enough to provoke resistance.

With every person there was always a choice to make: Be tough or be nice. The god of messing up made sure the cops didn't always make the right choice. Take Anton Popescu. A number of detectives had "spoken" with him. They'd investigated and sur-veilled him, canvassed his building, done a background check on his life, right from his date of birth. They knew he'd flunked his bar examination the first time he took it. They knew his wife "fell down a lot." They knew what his partners thought of him. But they hadn't gone far enough. Numbers of detectives were still wandering around in the fog of mystery. The result was that Anton had never gotten a proper taste of the enforcement side of the law. He hadn't taken the cops seriously enough. Error on their part. So many errors. April motioned Madison Young to bring the old woman to her. He did so with a great show of deference. This made the old woman's face wary and appeased April only slightly.

Annie Lee moved her dense body into the glass room and sat down in front of the lieutenant's desk. Her face was empty, so April knew she'd decided to go with stubborn. Suddenly the woman made some sniffing noises as if something smelled bad. April knew the bad smell was her. She ignored it. She plunked a black tape recorder on the desk between them, punched the button, and started speaking in Chinese. She gave her name, the date, the time of day, the location, and who was in the room with her. Then, with a sense of amusement at the annoyance this would cause the lieutenant, she conducted her interview with Annie Lee in Chinese.

"Would you state your name and your address for the record," April asked.

Annie stared resentfully at the black box, then looked around for Madison Young. He wasn't available to offer the support she craved.

"Didn't someone take your statement at the scene last night?" April asked her.

"Not with one of these. Why do we need this?"

"It's for your protection. So no one can ever claim you said something you didn't say." April gave her a fish-eye stare.

The woman stared back.

"I'm Sergeant April Woo." April took out her notebook and turned to a clean page.

"I Annie Lee," the grandmother conceded and gave her address.

"Where are you employed, Annie?"

Annie Lee let her face reveal how much she did not like a much younger woman (especially a ranking one) calling her by her first name. "Work at Golden Bobbin. You know that already."

"We need to hear it in words. How long have you worked there?"

"Twenty years."

"Twenty years. That's a long time. What are your duties?"

"I'm a supervisor." Annie sat up a little straighter as she said this.

April didn't look up from her note-taking. "How long have you been a supervisor?"

"What does this have to do with the accident?"

April's stomach started to churn again. "I don't know yet. Are you in some kind of hurry?"

April was counting the silent communications. Now she got silence number 14:
You are inconveniencing me by taking up my important time, but I will accept it without complaint.

"How long have you been a supervisor?"

"Twelve years."

"And the eight years before that?"

"I worked on a sewing machine."

"What are your duties as a supervisor?"

"I'm charge of time clock. I open up. I count number of garments of each girl. I watch the girls. I watch the door."

"You watch the door. What do you watch the door for?"

Silence number 3:
You already know the answer to that question.

"You have to answer me in words, Annie. Why do you have to watch the door?"