Burning Time

by Glass, Leslie

  He had pegged her as a bureaucrat from the moment he saw her, from her very first words. There was a lot of tension around her mouth and eyes, a rigidity in the way she held her slender body. Her precisely layered haircut was extremely controlled, and the navy blue blazer and red-and-white blouse she wore buttoned all the way to the neck took no chances. Everything about her indicated a person who walked a straight line in the middle of the path, afraid of risk-taking, or of veering from the rules in the slightest detail. Jason had known a lot of bureaucrats, still did. Bureaucrats were the people who had accidents in hospitals, who let little things by them that resulted in very big consequences. There were times people died because bureaucrats were just doing their jobs. That’s why Jason didn’t trust them.

  “But she’s not there, and you tell me the lights and television were on. That’s already very untoward,” he said.

  “That depends on your wife,” Detective Woo said.

  What did that mean? What was the real story here? Jason shifted the phone from one ear to the other. He didn’t like the vibrations he was getting from the detective’s voice. He could feel how tightly wound she was. Clocks wound too tightly sometimes froze up and stopped working altogether.

  “What did you see, Detective?”

  “There were wet towels in the bathroom,” April said. “Some lettuce in the sink. The lights were on in the kitchen. She may have started to make herself something to eat and then changed her mind and gone out to visit a friend.”

  There was a slight hesitation before her next question that made Jason think the detective didn’t have any faith in that theory.

  “Do you think she was likely to do that?” she asked.

  “No, she wouldn’t do that. She wanted to talk to me.”

  But how badly did Emma want to talk to him if she didn’t pick up all the times he rang? Now it was really late and she was still out somewhere. She couldn’t be out negotiating a movie deal at midnight.

  “No,” he said again.

  “Maybe somebody from business you don’t know.”

  He pondered the heretofore unconsidered possibility that Emma was indeed out with some producer or movie star, and that was what she wanted to tell him when she called more than twelve hours ago. Just that she was going out with someone wonderful that night. He walked around in the idea for a minute. Emma didn’t know what he was doing in San Diego, what was going on. She might have gone out in all innocence. Maybe she took the afternoon off and went to the hairdresser first.

  None of it worked for him. And it was clear the theory wasn’t working for the detective, either, or there wouldn’t be so much strain in her voice.

  “Were you aware her answering machine is on the blink?”

  “What?” Jason started. “No, I wasn’t.”

  “It picks up, but it doesn’t record.”

  So maybe Emma didn’t know he returned her call.

  There was another small, telling hesitation on the New York end. Jason was sure the detective was keeping something else from him. What was it?

  “I’m coming back,” he said suddenly. “There’s no point in trying to talk like this.”

  This time there was no pause on the other end. “That’s probably a good idea, Dr. Frank,” Woo said. “You have to be here to file a Missing Person Report.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t investigate without a complaint,” she said.

  “So you don’t think she’s just out for the evening.” Jason had known it from the beginning.

  “Well, she left her purse with her wallet in it on the bed.”

  Oh, shit. Oh, no. No. Emma wouldn’t leave the apartment for more than a few minutes without her bag. He knew her habits, knew what she did. She must have gone out to pick something up at the store. And something prevented her from coming back.

  Jason swallowed. “I’m leaving now.”

  He hung up, and started furiously throwing the few clothes he had brought into his suitcase, gathering his notes on Troland Grebs, all the time reviewing what he knew.

  There wasn’t a thing on Grebs’s record that was recent. No hint of hospitalizations, no way to find if there had ever been a psychiatric evaluation of him without calling every in-patient and out-patient facility in the state. Grebs didn’t have a file at North High School, which meant he hadn’t been in trouble there. Jason didn’t even know the name of the school Grebs attended in third grade where the little girl’s hair was set on fire. The aunt didn’t remember it, and she couldn’t remember the name of the technical school he went to after high school, either.

  What the record confirmed was that Grebs’s obsession with fire went well beyond letter-writing. It confirmed there had been many occasions in his life when he acted out his desire to burn. Another significant thing about the record was the fact that there was nothing recent on it. That meant he had a high degree of intelligence and had learned from his mistakes. Grebs had found ways to avoid being caught. He may have killed the girl in San Diego by burning her and leaving her in the desert. What was he likely to do in New York?

  Jason now had no doubt Grebs was the guy who had written the letters to Emma. Whether or not he killed the college girl was another question. His last letters to Emma indicated he was becoming disorganized. The more disorganized he became, the more unreachable and dangerous he was.

  Fire, the guy was obssessed with fire. Jason shivered. Fire was permanent, the damage it did irreparable. Oh, God, help Emma, he prayed. Then stopped himself short. Fuck praying. There was no God to help her. He took some deep breaths, forcing himself to calm down. He had to think clearly, must not let his panic over Emma get in the way of finding her. He might have some time, but he was certain now that he didn’t have much.

  He slammed the small suitcase shut and looked at his watch. It was a Cartier Tank watch with a brown alligator band that Emma had given him when they got married so he could treasure their time together. The watch told him he could probably make the ten o’clock flight.

  49

  Troland was disgusted with her. She didn’t seem to remember anything, wouldn’t even make an effort to wake up and do it right. It made him mad, reminded him of another girl, a really young one, who just wouldn’t make a sound no matter what he did. And he did a lot. Finally he got tired of it, had to dump her. This one got him so worked up he couldn’t even stay in the place and do what he was supposed to do.

  He pulled the car out of the garage and headed into Manhattan for the third time that day. The traffic going into the city was lighter now, and it didn’t take long. Twenty minutes, by the clock on the dashboard. He got off the bridge and headed downtown. He figured he better stay away from the West Side, even though he’d seen a lot of girls over there and knew that part of town best. Several had talked to him in the bars where he’d stopped for a few beers at night, when he was tracking her and knew she wasn’t coming out again. He didn’t like it when girls tried to pick him up. He was the one who had to choose.

  He cruised down Second, and then headed up First. There was a gang of girls on the corner of Fourteenth Street. They looked Spanish. He passed by, didn’t want a Puerto Rican. On Forty-second Street there were some black girls hanging around a coffee shop. They were too tall, were wearing elaborately braided wigs and had big asses. He didn’t like it when they were heavier than he was.

  In the Fifties he found what he was looking for. One girl on her own, covering the same stretch of block over and over like she was waiting for somebody who was late. She was wearing tights and a rainbow-colored shirt so short it barely covered her ass. There wasn’t much flesh on her body, and she had the kind of fearless strut in her walk and swinging, little-girl blond hair that turned him on.

  He cruised past her two, three times to be sure. He didn’t like to get it wrong. Finally, he parked the car a block away and walked back because he was embarrassed by the navy Ford Tempo. Didn’t want to be seen in it. If he had had his bike with him, he would have just roared u
p to her and told her to get on.

  When she looked him up and down and changed direction to walk his way, he figured she was okay. Pretty much like him, didn’t have much to say. In a few minutes she had already accepted one of the cellophane envelopes left over from the flake, and was taking him someplace he didn’t catch.

  It turned out to be at the end of the block in a run-down brownstone with a shabby shoe repair on the street level and an equally shabby locksmith above.

  He nodded with approval. Yeah, it was right. The steep flight of stairs sagged so badly in places someone could slide right off the steps and tumble all the way down without a thing to get in the way or stop her from breaking her neck. Her two-room dump was in the back on the second floor, behind the locksmith that was closed for the night despite the sign in the window urging customers to “Come In Anytime. We’re Open Twenty-Four Hours A Day.”

  It was grubby and dark. The one window was covered with a piece of faded cloth. A bare light bulb hanging from a socket in the ceiling illuminated the sagging couch in the center of the room. The sofa, though older and in worse condition, was not unlike the one the real girl was lying on in Queens.

  “Take off your clothes,” he said as soon as they were inside. “I want to tie you up.”

  She shrugged. “Whatever turns you on.” She took the coke out of the pocket of her rainbow-colored shirt and waved it at him. “I got to do something first.”

  He looked around coldly. “Hurry up,” he told her. “I’m on a schedule.”

  50

  It came every few minutes, a sound like thunder. The roar, like an undertow, pulled Emma back to the place she didn’t want to be. It was a noise she knew. What was it?

  She opened her eyes cautiously. It roared again and didn’t seem to be in her head, even though a lot of other things were. Terror all the way through, and a fog so dense she couldn’t figure out what had happened, or how long she’d been there. Her throat was dry, and hurt so much she thought he must have tried to strangle her. She couldn’t stop shivering, just couldn’t stop.

  He had left the light on. Now she saw the skylight in the ceiling. It had been covered with garbage bags and carefully taped around the edges so no light could get in. What else could she see? She lifted her head. He wasn’t sitting beside her. He wasn’t pacing around the room with the knife or the gun in his hand. He must really have gone.

  His face was empty and hard, like a robot’s. She shuddered. There was nothing remotely familiar about him. She still didn’t know who he was, or if she had ever known him. North High School was a long time ago. A year in hell with people she had struck from the record of her life, as she had so many times before. Every time they moved to another base, the life they had before was gone. Everyone they knew and saw every day disappeared, and the system was replicated in another setting. Emma grew up believing that people left behind were erased completely, and that she alone had memories of things that happened.

  Her heart wouldn’t slow down. He was going to come back. She was so scared she could hardly breathe. All these years she thought she’d been alone, and she’d never been alone. He had been there all along, following her down the dark school hall that night and watching what happened. He was the only one who knew. And he killed Andy.

  She believed him. She had never thought for a minute that Andy’s death, a few days before graduation, was an accident. But she thought she was the one who murdered him. She had made a wish on a star, asked some almighty power she hardly believed existed to kill the bastard. End his life before he got to college. She hated him so much that when he died, there was no doubt at all in her mind she alone was responsible.

  Her head hurt. Bits of story lines from plays and movies drifted through, along with her own memories, confusing her. She thought of Equus, the play about a troubled boy who blinded horses because they’d seen him making love. Was this that? There was a psychiatrist in that, too.

  It was horrible being naked, unbearable having him look at her and touch her with the gun and the knife point. She tugged desperately on the ropes around her wrists, had to get away. What had Jason said about people who were really crazy, so crazy they couldn’t be reached at all?

  When he was in training, he had a patient who got on all fours and barked at him. For months he got on the floor every day and barked back at her. One day the woman got up and sat in a chair.

  “You have to enter their world,” he said, “but you can’t go in there with them.”

  “Don’t go in there with them,” she muttered. I’m in there with him.

  “Oh, God, help me.” She was afraid to scream.

  When she was little, her bones were so soft she could get out of any ropes, any wrestling hold. The kids practiced all the time, playing military games. “You’re my prisoner, try to get away.”

  “You’re a POW, hung by your wrists with a hundred and twenty rats gnawing at your feet.”

  Emma pushed through the pile of images, trying to find the right one. She saw herself sitting on the floor and sobbing as each hostage hit American soil. This wasn’t that.

  She didn’t know how he got her there, or when. What did she hear? She heard street noises, the growl of traffic, a truck backfiring. But she also heard the sound of a garage door opening and a car pulling out.

  She must be in a house. There it was, the roar again.

  She screamed. “Help!”

  Screamed again.

  “Help me!”

  Silence. She had to get out herself, must find a phone.

  She turned her head. She could see windows on both sides, but the shades were drawn. There was no clock in the room. The stove in the corner next to the sink was an old one, didn’t have a clock. How much time had passed? The table was bare except for a paring knife. She focused on the paring knife. She had to get out of here. How long did she have before he got back? Five minutes, ten?

  Drip, drip, drip.

  She lifted her head. The sound of a dripping faucet reminded her that she needed water. The room spun as if she were drunk, or dying of thirst in a desert. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again she had no idea how much time had passed or what she was doing there. Her throat was very sore. She thought about water, then concentrated on the ropes.

  The ropes were loose, loose, loose. So loose she could pull right out of them if she moved the right way. Her wrists were covered with Vaseline; and she saw her hands, small as a baby’s, slipping out of the loops. She saw Billy Budd hanging by the neck on the mast. They all went to the same schools, played together, but officers’ kids sat on reserved benches at the movies. Movies every night, from Kodiak to Norfolk to Barber’s Point, Hawaii. Only officers’ kids were allowed in Officers’ Mess with the silver and starched napkins. “No, don’t die, Billy Budd,” she had screamed at the big screen outside, making everyone laugh.

  “Slip out.” Before you choke. It’s easy. She folded her left hand in half, squeezing her thumb into her palm and her little fingers together. Her fingers were long and thin. Her hand pulled out. She swallowed back the terror that he would catch her.

  Better to move. The other hand was more difficult. The nylon rope bit into her wrist. Then, after a brief struggle, her right hand was out. She sat up. After all these years, Billy Budd was free.

  51

  The tours of duty were eight in the morning to four in the afternoon, or four in the afternoon to eleven at night. Every week they had two days of one and three days of the other. Periodically the days and hours were switched. April yawned into her napkin. There was a reason the Department organized the duties this way, but she didn’t know what it was.

  It was nearly one-thirty in the morning. She could see the time on a clock that hung between two lurid posters of bullfighters. She had to be back at work in five and a half hours. Her car was a few blocks away, still in the precinct lot. After she picked it up, she figured it would take her half an hour to get back to Astoria. Tomorrow morning it would take a good forty
-five minutes to return over the bridge and make it across town. That left her with four and a quarter hours of sleep only if she didn’t count the time it would take her to shower and dress in the morning.

  Still, she didn’t make a move to close her notebook.

  “Finished?” Sanchez asked, eyeing her plate. Still uneaten was a pile of refried beans, some rice, and at least half of a seafood enchilada with guacamole.

  April picked up a sprig of cilantro and chewed on it, nodding.

  “You liked it?” he asked.

  They were in a tiny restaurant in the neighborhood that April had passed a hundred times. It was dark and quiet, looked to her like it was likely to go out of business soon. The front window had a bead curtain in it and some spearlike sticks with ribbons on the end that Sanchez said they used in Mexico to irritate the bulls at the beginning of bullfights.

  “I liked it,” April said, not entirely certain that she did. There was a heaviness in her mouth that she had a feeling would not go away for a long time.

  In fact her mouth was actually quite sluggish and foul as a result of eating Mexican food. This was probably because of the cream and cheese that the scallops and shrimps were cooked in before being wrapped up in the pancakes. Tortillas. More cheese on top. Humh. Twice-cook pancakes. Every dish in Chinese cooking had a name. April silently named this dish Sluggish Mouth Pancake.

  But it wasn’t only the pancake bathed in cheese that was somewhat unpleasant. The raw onions in the mushy green stuff he called guacamole tasted like soft soap with bite-the-tongue bits of sharpness in it. April couldn’t think of any textures in Chinese food that were similar.

  Refried beans were smooth but tasteless. The Chinese used fermented or sweetened beans for flavorings, but did not eat them alone. Not even the rice was the same. Chinese rice was put into cold water and not stirred or seasoned until it was done. It came out white, and was for mixing with the tastes and textures of all the other dishes on the table. Mexican rice was cooked with oil and spices. Interesting, but heavy in the mouth.