Stealing Time (6 page)

"Is this a test?" Baum was a preppy-looking guy; he wore a blue blazer and kept a second gun strapped to his ankle. His brown hair was so short it was hard to tell whether it curled. He rubbed at it with a free hand, as if trying to make it grow.

"Everything in this life is a test," she told him.

He walked along, chafing the stubble till they reached the elevator, where he punched the Down button. "The beating happened in the kitchen," he said finally. "This looks like a domestic case to me. Maybe they'll find some of the husband's blood in or around one of the puddles on the floor. Then we could nail him for beating his wife." He looked hopeful.

"What about the baby?"

Baum frowned at the second part of the equation.

"If he battered the wife, what do you think he did with the baby?" she elaborated.

"He didn't seem to know where the baby was."

"He could be lying, though. What else?"

"Isn't it your turn yet?" Baum hit the elevator button again.

"Are you some kind of smart aleck, Detective?" April wasn't amused.

"Nah, just a Jew," he cracked.

"Well, keep it in check, will you?"

"Yes, ma'am." Baum saluted.

"You have a problem with a supervisor who's going to run you over hot coals every day to teach you something?"
The way my supervisor did to me,
she didn't add.

"No, ma'am. It's just what my mother does."

"Good. So what about the baby?"

"The doc said it's not hers."

"So what do we do about that, Woody?"

"We question Popescu."

"Right. Now you just saw a crime scene where all the violence occurred in the kitchen. Was there blood on the back door?"

"No."

"Blood on the back doorknob?"

"No."

"Blood on the outside of the back door, or on the walls in the back hall, on the fire-stairs door, or on the fire stairs?"

Baum shook his head.

"There was blood in the front of the apartment. So what does that tell us?"

"The perp didn't go out the back way."

"What if he washed up first?" April demanded.

"He didn't wash up in the kitchen sink. There's a duck in a bowl of water in the sink, and there's no blood in or around the bowl of water. How long does it take to defrost a duck?" Baum wondered.

"Where I come from we buy the duck already

roasted. Would a frozen duck begin to soften in about two hours? It's fully defrosted now. We'll have to ask CSU how hard it was when they got here at what, four-fifteen? Might help with the time frame."

The elevator door slid silently open. They got in with a woman in a pink halter and purple pedal pushers who had a toddler in a stroller. The toddler was busy gnawing on a bagel.

"They talked to me already. The detective said it was okay to go out now," she said, looking at the badges on April and Baum's jackets. "Terrible thing. Terrible." She put her hand on her blond baby's head.

"Cute baby," April murmured.

On the main floor, the woman pushed ahead of them and exited the elevator first, pushing the stroller out into the lobby, then on out into the crush of cameras.

April wondered where the woman was taking her baby at this hour. Then it occurred to her that anybody could wheel a baby out, and no one would ask if it was hers. Everyone assumed that babies belonged to the people they were with. She turned to Baum. "You notice anything missing from that apartment?"

Baum watched the woman wheel the baby outside, then stop to talk to the reporters. "Wouldn't they have had a stroller?'-' he said.

"Yes. What else?"

"What, more twenty questions?"

"More like twenty thousand questions. What's the answer?" April clicked her tongue at his silence. "All right: when my cousins have babies, they have showers."

"So where's the stuff, right?"

"Exactly." She watched McMan signing off on the first of the teams. There was no sniper on the roof, no baby in the garbage, the incinerator, the elevator shaft. EMS was cutting out.

"So there was remarkably little baby stuff in there. Almost nothing in fact," Baum said.

"Right. Either Heather wasn't expecting a baby, or she didn't intend to keep it long."

They watched the young woman in the halter finish talking to the press and turn toward the park.

By 8:35
P.M
., there was press activity at the precinct, too. The reporters were spreading like bacteria, and April didn't want to catch anything. When she arrived at Fifty-fourth Street and got out of the car, a woman in a pale purple suit, carrying a mike torch with the letters
ABC
on it, ran across the sidewalk to talk to her. The woman thrust the microphone in April's face before she reached the cover of the precinct.

"Hey, look, it's Sergeant Woo. How are you, Sergeant? I'm Grace Faye. I was on the Liberty case. Great job you did there. I hear you were in the hospital for two months."

April grimaced at the exaggeration. "I was in the hospital overnight." Well, for a few nights. "Excuse me.

"Hey, wait, what's your hurry?"

A second woman reporter April didn't know tried to push in front of Faye. "What can you tell us about the missing baby? What about the baby's mother? We had a tip she died on the way to the hospital. Is that true?" Faye pushed the other reporter back, and they had a bit of a shoving match.

April cocked her head for Baum to walk in front of her. "You're supposed to walk behind me except in instances where you have to clear the way for me," she muttered in his ear when he edged ahead.

Baum opened his mouth. "Clear the way," he said, using his elbows. "A spokesman will talk to you as soon as we have something."

"And I'll remember you at Christmas," the first reporter promised, cynically.

April didn't look at them as she went inside. What were they thinking? They knew she couldn't talk to them. She gave the desk lieutenant a little smile, then climbed the stairs to the detective squad room. Inside was the mob scene she'd expected. The phones were hogged by strangers, and the limited space was crammed with easels and flip charts. The noise and tension levels were high, and the room was filled with smoke. Lieutenant Iriarte was in his office with his three ugly henchmen. He gestured for her, but not Baum, to come in. April saw Baum flush with anger as he turned away to find someone else sitting at his desk.

She opened the door of the office. Creaker, Hage-dorn, and Skye filed out. Iriarte pointed at a chair.

"Baum's not a bad guy. Who knows, he may even turn out to have some talent," she murmured, not wanting to let the insult go.

Iriarte had a really skinny mustache that came nowhere near his mouth. He squeezed his thin lips into a moue, then made them into a line. Working his mouth was how he thought. "I wouldn't bet on it," he muttered. "Why'd you pick him?"

"Baum's new. He could use some breaking in," April replied, neutral. And he didn't have any loyalties yet. She needed someone like that on her team.

"Look, April, don't take this opportunity to make a flaming mess of things." Iriarte blew air out of his mouth. April could tell he was unhappy.

"No sir, I won't," she promised him.

"I want our best people on this." He punched the air with his pen. "We got to stay in it all the way, you hear what I'm saying?"

"I hear you, sir. Do you have Hagedorn on the background stuff?"

"Yes, but four guys from Major Cases are on it, too. Let's see who scores first," he said fiercely. He stopped, shook his head at the intruders, then turned to his second whip. "And I want you out there until something breaks. All night, all day, as long as it takes."

"Yes sir, and Baum can drive me," she said after a moment. It was suicide. She didn't know why she'd said it. But without Mike she had no one. Creaker and Skye were Iriarte's boys; she didn't trust them. Baum was no detective, that was clear, but he was no worse than anybody else.

"Jesus, April, are you telling me you want
him?"
Iriarte exploded. Face turned red, the whole bit. He looked as if he were about to keel over on the spot. April hated getting him into such a state when he was already so upset.

Did she want Baum? Of course she didn't want him. The guy had no legs. He was a tadpole, but maybe he'd turn out all right.

"Getting the new ones up to speed is part of my job, as I understand it." She kept her face impassive. Even in bad times, when the pressure was on. Like this.

Iriarte smacked his desk with the palm of his hand. "Look here, I'm getting calls, a lot of calls about this."

"Yes, sir."

"So what do you have that I don't know already?"

"Baum and I talked to the doorman. He said Mrs. Popescu had a dicey pregnancy and wasn't seen very much before the birth of the baby."

Iriarte rolled his tongue around in his mouth. "Is that significant?"

"It sure is. At the hospital the doctor told us Heather Popescu had not given birth to a baby."

"What?
But there is a baby, right?"

"Oh, yeah, there's a baby. Doorman said Mr.

Popescu left at eight-thirty
A.M
., as usual; the man's like clockwork. Mrs. Popescu took the baby out soon after that, a little after nine—"

"Did he see the baby?"

"No. He said he heard the baby crying. He knew it was the baby because newborns sound like kittens."

Iriarte rolled his eyes. "So—either the baby was alive this morning, or the baby was dead and the woman went out with a kitten. And, by the way, it wasn't her baby."

"Yes," April said.

"What about when she returned? Was there a baby or a kitten with her then?"

"No one remembers seeing her return."

"Did you talk to the relief doorman?"

"Yes. He didn't see her."

"What about the service entrance?"

"Security in the building is pretty tight. What I'm wondering about is the stroller. The doorman says it was more like a carriage, not one of those little fold-up jobs. She went out with it. It wasn't in the apartment when we got there. Where is it?"

Iriarte sat back and made a steeple with his fingers. "This whole thing sounds fishy to me. Let me see a picture of the baby." He held out his hand, wiggling his fingers as if he knew she had one.

Indeed, April had gotten a photo from Popescu before she left his apartment. She dug around in her purse and pulled it out. She glanced at it before handing it over to Iriarte. Baby Paul had a full head of dark hair and blue eyes. He was wrapped up in a blue blanket, caught by the camera with a serious expression.

Iriarte shook his head. "Cute. This baby doesn't look Chinese. The so-called mother, who is also the last person seen with it, is Chinese." He gave April a piercing look. "You're the primary on this case and I want you to clear it tonight."

April kept her face calm, but inside, panic rose like a flood tide. How could she do that?

"You hear me? I talked with Popescu. He neglected to mention the fact that the baby isn't theirs. You talk to him. Get a birth certificate. Find the birth parents. Maybe they have him."

"Yes, sir."

Scowling, Iriarte looked at the photo again. "They've got all the specialists in on this. And the baby may be out with a sitter, with a friend of the family, or with its real parents." He fixed his eyes on her as if she weren't paying enough attention. "You hear me?"

"Yes, sir. I'll get on it."

He dropped the photo on the desk, turned his palms up, and changed tack suddenly. "So who beat up the woman? Could she have gotten beaten fighting to keep the baby?"

"Anything is possible." April looked down at her hands.

"What do you think of the husband?" Iriarte gave a small whistle. "What's his problem? Is he the beater?"

"Anything is possible," she said again.

He handed her back the photo. If Paul Popescu had been a two-year-old or a five-year-old he'd have told her to blow up the photo and send it out on the streets.
Have you seen me?
But that was impossible with an infant.

Iriarte stared at the ceiling, musing.

"The doorman said she walked toward the park."

The special units were already headed there with their sniffers.

"Keep on the husband, and don't let anyone in to see the mother. You know." He shook his head. The last thing they wanted was for her to wake up and have her lawyer husband there to help her with her story. He swiveled away from her. That was it. He'd finished.

"Who's the ADA on this?" April asked.

"I don't know. Mayers, Meyers, something like that. Someone we don't know. Check out the legal aspects of this one." He consulted his watch and sighed deeply. "Find the baby alive and get a straight story. Otherwise you're out of here." Iriarte's color improved after he threatened to fire her.