And then when she got there, it was too late. No one would tell her anything except that neither Bouck nor Camille was inside. Her head hurt worse. A huge generator was heating things up inside so her blood boiled, and she could hardly breathe. Milicia stood on the corner across the street for a long time, watching the police bring things out of the house in paper bags. Finally, she turned to the phone, called Charles and Brenda.
She reviewed all this in her mind as she tried to put her anxiety in another place. Her sister was a maniac who could kill salesgirls and get away with it. She had no choice but to walk up to the door of the house and deal with the situation.
Before she could insert her key in the lock, however, the policeman was out of the car, telling her it was a crime scene and she couldn’t go inside.
67
April left Block’s apartment and stopped at a pay phone on the street to try Milicia Honiger-Stanton’s number again. At least the woman had gone home at some point. Her answering machine was back on. The voice on the machine told April this call was important to Milicia: “Please leave the day, date, time, and purpose of your call, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.”
It did not sound promising, but she left a message anyway.
The woman who answered the phone at Milicia’s office told April Ms. Honiger-Stanton wasn’t coming in. She had called in sick that morning. April figured Milicia was home and just not picking up. Her apartment was not far away. April decided it was worth going over there to find out.
The building was right near John Jay College, behind Lincoln Center. It was big and plush, with marble floors and carpeted hallways. The surly-looking man behind the desk said Miss Stanton wasn’t there. The name on his uniform was Harold.
“Do you know when she went out?”
“Are you a friend?”
April flashed her shield.
Harold examined it skeptically.
“Cop?”
“That’s what it says.” April smiled. “So, about what time did she leave?”
“Uh, she walked the dog at about eight o’clock. Then maybe half an hour later she went out.”
“She has a dog?” April started to sweat again.
“Yeah, cute little thing. Poodle, I think it is. What’s this all about? She not picking up its poop, or something?”
“Yeah, something like that.” April paused for a new thought. “Does she ever wear big loose blouses, long skirts, and big floppy hats?”
“Nah, not her. She’s got it, she flaunts it. Never seen her in pants neither.”
“Thanks.” April turned to go.
“You wanna leave a message?”
“No, I’ll come back later.” She looked at her watch and wondered if Mike was back from his hospital visit.
68
April had one of the older cars. It needed to go in for repairs. She could feel a vibration in the drive shaft. She tried not to think about that as she raced up Tenth, then cut over to Amsterdam.
“Sergeant Joyce’s not at her desk right now,” Gina had told her when she had stopped to call in.
“What about Sanchez?”
“He came in a few minutes ago, but he’s not here right now. You want to leave a message?”
“Yeah, tell them to keep the Honiger-Stanton sisters separated until we’ve had a chance to question them. It’s very important, Gina. I’m on Sixty-third Street. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Then, at a red light on Seventy-ninth Street, she considered turning left to Riverside Drive and stopping by Jason’s building. That would be her third tangent of the morning. She was supposed to be getting the damn dog. But everything had gotten more complicated. She needed Jason to come and question Camille right away.
The light changed; April wavered. The problem with Jason was she couldn’t just go over there and knock on his door. He wasn’t the kind of doctor who’d drop everything and let her in. She’d have to leave a message on his machine and wait for him to call her back. She stepped on the gas, wishing she had a phone in the car, turned right on Eighty-second Street, and started looking for a place to park. Finally, she left the car double-parked in front of the precinct, the third in a line of three.
Upstairs, it was quiet in the squad room. Half the squad was working the case, canvassing the neighborhood with photos of Bouck and Camille, asking questions, looking for witnesses who saw either one of them on the Saturday night Maggie Wheeler was strangled.
They were deep into the second week of the case and already way backed up on their other cases. People called in, left messages, got mad. There were about a dozen messages on April’s desk, in addition to the ones she hadn’t been able to return the day before. The stack of pink slips next to the files of unresolved cases she hadn’t had time to work on was the kind of thing that gave her a headache. She hadn’t been able to study for her exam either.
Her whole body pulsed with anxiety. Even though she’d told the assistant D.A. she’d bring Camille and the dog back in, she’d put them on hold on the off chance Albert Block could identify the killer.
She didn’t want to mess up on this one. She’d checked in with the surveillance team at Bouck’s building three times to make sure Camille and the dog had stayed put and were all right. And still she worried. Penelope Dunham hadn’t seen Camille. She didn’t know how hard it would be to make a case against her. Right now they didn’t have enough physical evidence to make a case stick against anybody.
Gina pointed in the direction of Sergeant Joyce’s office.
“They’re in there.”
“Thanks.” April smelled pizza or something coming from the locker room. She realized that even after a large meal of crab and ginger dumplings late last night to celebrate the continued interest of George Dong, she was hungry. She had to go to the bathroom, too, wanted to splash water on her face and calm down. She didn’t have time to think about romance or anything else. She put her physical needs out of her mind as she headed toward Sergeant Joyce’s office.
The door was closed, but from the other side she could hear an angry voice. “I want to see my sister. You can’t stop me. This isn’t some Latin-American dictatorship. You can’t keep people under house arrest here.…”
April knocked on the door.
“Yeah, come in.” Sergeant Joyce’s voice.
April pushed the door open. Joyce nodded at her. Her face was a model of reason and grace under fire. Sanchez was in his usual place, leaning against the back wall. He smiled.
Milicia Honiger-Stanton sat in one of the visitors’ chairs. She was wearing a severe gray suit, not unlike the A.D.A.’s but with a much shorter skirt. Her pose revealed the considerable length of her legs and most of her thighs. She didn’t seem to be aware of her thighs at the moment though. Her face was redder than her hair, and her tirade continued on uninterrupted as the door opened.
“It’s my sister, and I demand to know what’s going on.”
Sergeant Joyce raised her eyebrow at April. April cocked her head at the hall.
“Excuse us for a moment.” Joyce crooked her finger at Sanchez, and the two of them followed April into the locker room. No one was in there, but a pizza box sat on the table. April touched it. It was still warm.
“So?” Joyce demanded.
“I went to see Albert Block. He says he was waiting for Maggie in the bookstore, watching from the window.”
“No shit.” Mike’s nostrils twitched at the enticing smell of pizza.
“Albert says he saw a woman come out of The Last Mango. He waited for Maggie to close up and come out—or for her boyfriend to show up. He knew about the boyfriend. When she didn’t come out, he went in looking for her.”
“Huh? How’d he get in?”
“He’d taken the key from the counter earlier in the day.”
Joyce sniffed at the pizza box, scowled, and turned her back on it. “He used the key, and he went in, and he found Maggie dead, is that it?”
“That’s what he said.
”
“He saw the murderer, and he didn’t call us?” Mike was incredulous.
April shook her head. “He saw a woman come out. He didn’t think homicide. He thought Maggie committed suicide.”
Sergeant Joyce’s face also wrinkled with puzzlement. “He thought she’d committed suicide, then confessed to killing her?”
“I know he doesn’t make a lot of sense,” April muttered. “But I think he’s telling the truth about this.”
“How does he know it was a woman?”
“She was wearing flats.”
Sergeant Joyce thought it over.
“Uh-huh,” she said finally.
“He says transvestites always wear heels.”
“Uh-huh. Sure, I knew that. Whose damn pizza is this?” Sergeant Joyce finally acknowledged the pizza.
Mike shrugged.
“Don’t look at me,” April said. “I don’t have time to eat.”
Like a lightbulb, Joyce switched off the pizza again. “Okay, so where are we?”
“Block remembers the red hair and a long skirt,” April said.
“What about the dog?”
“He didn’t say anything about the dog.”
“Can he identify her?”
“Maybe.”
“Our forensic dentist took a look at Rachel Stark’s ankle. He says it looks like an animal bite to him. He wants to make a mold of the dog’s teeth to see if there’s a match.”
Sergeant Joyce shook her head. “Do you have the dog?”
“No. Something else came up. The Honiger-Stanton sister you’ve got in your office also has a poodle. I went by her building. She wasn’t there, but I talked to the doorman.”
“She wasn’t there because she went over to see her sister,” Mike threw in.
“So it appears,” April said, still upset because she hadn’t taken the time to get Camille’s dog on the way over.
“But they wouldn’t let her in. So she came over here.”
Aspirante charged into the locker room. “You didn’t touch my pizza, did you?”
“Yeah, we got hungry. We ate it,” Mike said.
“Shit, you didn’t!” Aspirante punched a locker. It made a nice metallic bang.
“It didn’t have your name on it,” Mike said, deadpan.
“It was mine.” Aspirante pushed by him and opened the box. Three congealing slices with pepperoni and mush-rooms were neatly arranged in the middle.
Aspirante turned away from Sergeant Joyce and mouthed the words “fuck you” at Sanchez.
Mike nodded.
“Cut the shit,” Joyce said sharply. “We just left a suspect in the office.”
Where the case file was. Very smart.
They trooped to the office. By the time they got there, they had a plan.
April turned to Mike before they went in. “How’s Braun?”
Mike shook his head. “He’ll probably limp for life—and get a citation. He said he missed you, wanted to know why you weren’t there at the hospital, paying your respects.”
“Nice. What did you tell him?”
“I said you were busy, but you were planning to come by first minute you got.”
“Oh, wonderful. I’ll remember that.”
Sergeant Joyce opened the door quickly. Milicia sat there with her legs crossed the other way, drumming her fingers on the arm of the chair, trying to look as if she hadn’t made a move since they left. The Maggie Wheeler file was where Sergeant Joyce had put it, under a stack of color-coded forms with her empty coffee cup that said LIFE IS A BEACH on top.
“Would you like a cup of coffee, Miss Stanton?” Sergeant Joyce sat down at her desk.
“I want to see my sister. I’m extremely worried about her.”
“I understand, but we need your help first. Can you tell us a little about your dogs?”
Milicia stared. “What?”
“Your dogs. You and your sister have little poodles. We’re going to need to know all about those dogs.”
A muscle jumped in Milicia’s cheek. She didn’t speak for a long time. It didn’t take a genius to see she wasn’t prepared for any dog questions.
April glanced at Mike. His mustache twitched with the ghost of a smile. The ghost struck her in the heart. She left the room to make a call.
69
Max was having his first session since he got back from his vacation in Paris.
“Bonjour,” he said with a long face as he walked in the door. “It’s shit to be back.”
“Thanks very much, and the same to you,” Jason replied.
Although Jason was several years older than Max, they had attended the same medical school and shared some of the same professors. Max was a surgeon who had been referred to Jason about five years ago when he plunged into a deep depression after losing a patient during a complicated breast reconstruction. His treatment with Jason had gone well. They’d terminated three years later.
The reason for his return to therapy, Max reported, was that his second wife, Lydia, wanted to get a divorce and take their three-year-old daughter, the only child he had, to another state to live. Max was bitter and didn’t understand what was wrong with Lydia.
Since their last meeting, Max’s hair had turned white. He’d gained about forty pounds, and was grossly overweight now. His face was round and full and looked like a bowl of vanilla pudding. Jason had been shocked. And that wasn’t the only change. When Jason knew him he was married to a lovely woman called Alison who had worked in a bank to support him through his many years of training. The last Jason heard, Max was doing well, and Alison was quitting work so they could have a family.
Instead, he divorced Alison to marry the secretary he was sharing with his two partners in the practice. Now he was furious with Lydia for leaving him. And for insisting he purchase a big house for her in Virginia.
“So what went wrong?” Jason asked after he had heard the whole story.
All right, Max admitted, so he was fucking his surgical nurse. What was the big deal? Why did Lydia have to make this whole big thing about it? Why couldn’t she just move into a modest apartment nearby where he could see his daughter every day? Why did she have to be a bitch about everything? Why couldn’t she shut her mouth and just be nice? That had been the crux of his complaint for the past several months. He had to get to his complaint. He never started with it. And it would be a very long time before he could get past his complaints to the issue of his behavior.
True to form, Max lay down on the couch and started describing in minute detail the surgical procedure he had performed earlier that morning. Then he talked about Paris. Pamela, the surgical nurse, got some kind of bug and threw up the whole time. Max had found it all pretty disgusting.
Jason stifled a yawn. It was his birthday, and he wasn’t feeling sympathetic. He looked at the clock on his desk and wondered when Emma would call. As he was wondering, the phone rang.
“I have to take this,” Jason said. “I’m screening my calls this morning.” He picked up before the second ring.
“Hi, it’s April. Is this a good time?”
Jason glanced at Max’s highly polished loafers at the foot of his analyst’s couch. One was crossed over the other. The one on top jiggled impatiently. “I have a minute.”
“We have a problem. Our only witness thinks the murderer was a woman. Is there any way you could come over and question Camille again?”
Jason’s adrenaline kicked in. He didn’t have time to be so deeply involved in this. He was supposed to meet Charles in two hours, and he had another patient before that. He looked at the clock again. Max’s foot continued to jiggle. “It’s not convenient,” he murmured.
He didn’t leave his office unless it was a medical emergency, a question of life or death. That was his rule. He never broke it.
“Murder isn’t convenient for anybody. Look, I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t urgent.”
“I know.” Jason hesitated. He owed her. He’d probably be paying for the res
t of his life.
“Please, just this once,” April pressed.
It wasn’t exactly a question of life, but he figured it was a question of death. “Okay, all right, I’ll do it. But if you want me in on this, you’ll have to fill me in on everything you have. I can’t work in the dark.”
“Fine.”
They set the time for a meeting in forty minutes and hung up.
“What was that all about?” Max demanded.
“You know I can’t tell you that,” Jason replied mildly. “You were telling me about Pamela.”
Max shook his head. “What do these women want?” he said bitterly. “Whatever you do for them, it’s just never enough.”
Jason watched the bobbing loafer express Max’s frustration. It would take a long time to get anywhere with him. Max had some difficulty with his conscience. He seemed to have no shame. None at all.
An hour later, armed with his notes from the previous night, Jason sat facing Sergeant Sanchez and April Woo in the downstairs questioning room he was getting to know all too well. The tape recorder was on the table.
Even though the wired windows to the outside were open, it was hot in the green room with the cracked plaster ceiling and the dirty linoleum floor. They had gone over the thick Maggie Wheeler file with the autopsy report and dozens of transcribed detective interviews and reports, and the thinner Rachel Stark file. So far that contained only the autopsy and crime-scene reports. Splayed across the table were the crime-scene and autopsy photos of both victims.
On Jason’s side of the table a full cup of cold coffee and the five empty Sweet’n Low packets he’d used in it were all that separated him from the macabre pictures of the dead girls. He couldn’t drink the coffee and kept stirring it with a plastic stick, as if somehow he could mix it enough to get it right.
Until last spring, when Emma was kidnapped and April Woo was the detective on the case, he had known next to nothing about the world of police and perpetrators. He read and wrote scholarly texts about the kinds of pathology that incapacitated people, not made them killers. He didn’t like sadistic films; he never read crime fiction. Now he was at the precinct again, this time studying photographs of what looked like two ritual killings the police wanted him to explain. Once again he felt out of his element.
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