Stealing Time (9 page)

"Hola, querida, que tal?"

She smiled into the receiver. "Hey, Mike."

"Miss me?"

"Yeah," she admitted in spite of herself. Then she wanted to bite her tongue for revealing her feelings.

"Yo tambien."

"How's the case going?" she asked, playing with a pencil. Mike had gotten a homicide two days ago, a real mess in a hotel on Lexington Avenue. All she'd heard were rumors that State Department, intelligence, and Israeli consulate people were working on it. For some reason he'd been holding out on giving her the details. Now he grunted.

"Victim was an Israeli. His business partner claims he had ten thousand dollars in cash and a sack of diamonds worth a quarter of a million when he was iced. ME's report says he was tortured and his crown jewels were hacked off while he was still alive. Poor bastard bled to death."

She knew Mike had attended the autopsy; now she knew the reason for his silence. Ugly, ugly case. She made a sympathetic noise, didn't envy him.

His voice brightened. "I hear you caught a big one, too."

"What do you hear?"

"Nothing—just you caught a big one. Need help?"

"No, thanks. You didn't ask for mine." April bristled; she wasn't good at inequality.

"You don't want to know about this one."

"Sure I do. And you just hate being left out of anything."

"Give me a break. Is it a sin to be supportive? I thought that's what every woman wants."

"Sorry. I'm a little touchy about this one. It's weird."

"Not as weird as mine," he shot back.

"Fine, it's not as weird as yours, but still it's weird." She gave him the gist of it, relieved to get it off her chest.

"Ransom note or call?"

"No."

"Anything on the phone tap?"

"Nothing yet, but I'd be real surprised if we get a ransom demand on this one," she said. "It's not her baby. But don't pass that around."

"No kidding."

"Get this: the husband of the victim says his mistress is the mother of the baby. She's married to someone in the military and has taken off for parts unknown.—Oh, and the victim is Chinese," she added suddenly. "The father's white. The whole thing makes me queasy."

"It has nothing to do with us," Mike said quickly, catching the subtext even before it came into focus in April's mind. Then he moved on. "I had a case once, man faked an abduction of his own baby. His motive was he didn't want a custody battle when he divorced his wife. Poor woman went around the bend when her baby disappeared. That's when he filed for divorce."

"What did he do with the baby?"

"Oh, he'd given it to his girlfriend in New Jersey the first day. He'd set up an apartment for her, everything. They wanted to get married and have a family right away."

Another girlfriend. And Heather Rose had no idea, her husband had said. April thought of the duck defrosting in the sink. People were out looking for a dead infant. She wanted to clear Heather Rose of any suspicion that she'd killed her rival's baby. "You voting for the husband as the kidnapper, then?" she murmured.

"Not yet. Remember those girls in New Jersey? One gave birth in the girls' bathroom during her high school prom, suffocated the baby, then went back to the dance. The other gave birth in a motel, killed her baby, and was back in her college dorm in time for her next class. Then there's the girl in Ohio gave birth and killed the baby while her mother was out to dinner. When the mother got back, they sat and watched TV for the rest of the evening—"

There went the duck-proves-innocence theory. "Those were young, unmarried teenagers, terrified of their parents. This is a mature—"

"Hell hath no fury . . ." he reminded her.

April had a stomachache. It had been bothering her for hours. She wanted baby Paul found alive and well, didn't want Heather Rose to be a killer or the father to be a kidnapper with a girlfriend in New Jersey.

Mike changed the subject. "You want to come over to my place? I'll make it worth your while."

"Can't, I'm staying with it," she said, and felt a guilty pang. Skinny was going to freak if she didn't come home two nights in a row—even if she had a good excuse. Then she thought if things quieted down, she might go home for a few hours, after all.

"Call me when you can."

"Sure." April hung up. Depression settled on her as she cleaned up her desk, picked up her jacket, and headed out into the field to see if the baby had turned up in the last fifteen minutes. He hadn't.

Three hours later, with no break in the case, April parked in front of the brick house she shared with her parents in Astoria, Queens, not far from Hoyt Avenue and the entrance to the Triborough Bridge. She got out of the car, locked up slowly, then stretched, feeling the space around her like a blind person picking out obstacles in the dark. All she wanted was to see her mom and have a quick nap before changing her clothes and heading back to work.

The street was quiet, but cop habits made her check for signs of trouble. Only a few lights in the surrounding houses were on this late. Some of the people who lived around here were old and had trouble sleeping. April knew everybody's routine. On this block all the houses were attached, single-family homes. A lot of Greeks and Italians, Brazilians and Indians, not that many Chinese. April's father, Ja Fa Woo, had chosen the place with the help of an almost-relative, the owner of Chen Realty in Long Island City. He'd chosen the location in spite of the ethnic makeup of the neighborhood because he was a commuter to Manhattan early and late and didn't want to travel too far at night when he was tired.

April's survey finished at her own house, and that was the only place something was wrong. The front light was off. She started up the cement walk. Though it was May, the air was still quite cold at night. Tonight it was in the mid-forties. She shivered in her spring jacket. A three-quarter moon hung in the sky, just above the block of houses, lending them an exotic touch. April figured the bulb must have burned out and her mother didn't have a spare one in the house to change it. She couldn't reach the socket anyway. For the ten thousandth time April told herself it wasn't easy having a mother who couldn't drive and didn't like going to an American store by herself. Sai knew the prices of things but couldn't read labels or signs. She also didn't like being in the dark. April thought it wasn't so easy being her, either.

She put "Get lightbulbs" on her mental list of things to do for her mother, then stood for a moment, drinking in the night, before going into the house. Sometimes she did this as a kind of restorative after getting home from a difficult tour of duty. Out in Queens, with no towering buildings nearby, there was open sky over her head, and the moon and stars felt like close friends. By their light alone she could see the hot-pink flowers on the azalea bushes that her mother had nagged her father so relentlessly to get. She had been right about them, at least. The shrubs lined the walk like runway lights, inviting her in.

April realized something else was wrong. No lights were on inside the house, either. She frowned and suddenly felt afraid. Her mother didn't drive. Her father didn't drive. Skinny always waited up for April no matter how late she was. This was a common cause of complaint, for April's hours were erratic at best. Skinny didn't care that crime didn't punch a time clock—she thought her daughter was inconsiderate. So where were they?

April opened the door with her key and went inside. No light shone from the kitchen where Skinny sat out her days and nights watching TV, waiting for her husband and daughter to return from their jobs. No light was on in the living room or the big bedroom downstairs that her parents had taken for themselves. Their door was closed. All was quiet. April frowned some more. What was this about? She'd never come home before without her mother there to nag her, plague her with ten thousand questions, or try to feed her a Chinese banquet in the middle of the night. The sudden freedom to climb the stairs to her own apartment and go to sleep in peace should have made her happy. Instead she climbed the stairs to her apartment confused and upset.

April's parents had always told her the Chinese treasured their children more than any other kind of people did. Heather Rose's parents had certainly been distraught at the news of their daughter's trouble, but they hadn't known she'd been injured before. They hadn't known she had not given birth. That meant Heather Rose had kept many secrets from them. She must have felt she couldn't turn to them for help. Tonight of all nights, April had wanted to talk with her own mother about her feelings for Mike and why he was a good man. And she'd wanted to ask Skinny Dragon, the authority on all things Chinese, if there was anything in the world that would make a young mother with a rich husband abandon or kill a baby, no matter where it came from.

On the other hand, parents could turn on a dime when they were thwarted. Maybe Heather's parents had turned on her when she married Anton. Maybe her own parents were turning on her because she was spending her nights with Mike. April figured her mother knew about this the way Skinny Dragon knew about all things, and she guessed by her parents' absence that the punishment was going to be severe. She reached the last step and unlocked the door that did not keep her mother out. She prayed that tomorrow Heather Rose would wake up and talk to her and that she'd find the missing baby alive and well in the appropriate maternal arms.

April got undressed and curled up in her single bed, certain she was too wired by Heather's situation and her own to ever fall asleep. She fell asleep within minutes, however, not with any insight into whether a wife might kill the product of her husband's betrayal, but with a certain sympathy for a grown child who might wish to kill its parent.

CHAPTER 9

S
ai Yuan Woo and her husband, Ja Fa Woo, knew that the cycles of heaven affect the cycles of earth, and that imbalances in nature were the cause of all evils that damage and destroy human life. She had known her double-stupid daughter was taking the wrong step the day April decided to become a policeman. And she'd been right about the poor outcome. April had been burned in a fire, crushed nearly to death, thrown out of a window and fallen ten floors (at least), and lived to be promoted. This only child of hers was worse than a cat. When April was growing up, they'd expected her to make them rich, have a top job in a bank like Stan Chan, the boy who used to like her in third grade, or own a dozen restaurants all over the city like Emily, who married the Soong boy, or run an import company like Arthur Feng's daughter, Connie. That Feng girl had been the least promising of them all, Sai repeated often with bitter satisfaction. Connie had been big and fat, and much slower than April in school. Two years older and in the same class; no one had any hopes for her. But look at her now. Feng's parents couldn't stop talking about her. Connie Feng had red hair now and drove a Mercedes. She bought
her
parents a much bigger house than the Woos', and now the Fengs were telling everyone about the important Hong Kong businessman who wanted to marry her.

The Woos thought the least their daughter could do was marry someone rich enough to support them, have children, and be happy. Instead she was a policeman. Bad was having a policeman for a daughter. Beyond bad was betraying the entire Han people, whose history stretched back thousands of years. Sai knew very well her daughter was lying about where she was when she wasn't on duty. They knew she was doing monkey business with someone who smelled too sweet to be a man.

Ja Fa wanted to admonish and scold her out of her foolishness, but Sai knew that scolding had no effect on this bad seed. Something stronger than talk was needed to save her daughter. They went into consultation with Chinese experts, one in Chinatown and one in New Jersey, to find out what intervention would work. The question Sai wanted answered was how April had become vulnerable to possession by a foreigner.

A highly regarded young man in Chinatown, recently arrived from China with much knowledge and hair sticking straight up about three inches from the top of his head, charged them a hundred dollars to tell them about the energy flow in the spring cycle. Spring was the cycle they happened to be in at the moment, and this young homeopathic doctor was certain that energy flow was the cause of April's excessive heat.

In very lofty terms he explained how the heart is the root of life, the seat of both intelligence and the
shen
—spirit. The heart's element is fire, he told them. It is called the
taiyang
of the yang and is considered yang. He explained that the lungs were the root of the body's
qi,
and the storage place of
po
—courage. Sai listened intently, trying to make sense of it.
Po
was yang and yang was masculine. Masculine was assertive. Sai believed April definitely had too much of that. She nodded. Her husband smoked a cigarette and worried about the cost.

"Po," Sai said. Too much boldness, courage.

But the young doctor shook his head. He was not interested in
po.
He told Sai, because her husband had stopped listening, that only the wisest of wise men could diagnose someone who was not present, and he should be charging her more. This brought Ja Fa out of his smoky reverie.