Stealing Time

by Glass, Leslie

  When Lin heard the women muttering about the bad luck that would come to them from keeping her, she wanted to say something to stop it. But her head was separated from her. She was in a place where speaking made no sense. In the end, she didn't have the energy, and she didn't care.

  She had been in this place with Mr. and Mrs. Wang and the two aunties for ten months and had never let Nanci visit once. Other people lived there on and off—two people, three people, whole families. They went to work, came back, cooked over a hot plate in the living room because the Wangs did not allow them to use their two-burner stove. They shared a toilet and sink in a dirty cubbyhole, and a tub by the refrigerator. For two months of her stay there had been three young children in the place, bringing the number of occupants in the two-room apartment to ten. That had been the worst. The children had cried often and been scolded. The scolding reminded Lin of her mother, who had died in a country hospital in China almost two years ago. The memories of her mother made Lin want to leave the apartment and go to Nanci, but the aunties said she owed them after all they had done for her. Lin had stayed, and later when she didn't feel well, she was afraid to go to a hospital where she was sure to die, just like her mother.

  Lin faded in and out. There was no doubt she felt worse than ever before. Right now she felt worse than she had on the crowded buses traveling across China a year ago, worse than when she'd nearly starved on the tossing ship crossing the ocean. On both buses and ship she'd vomited so many times from the motion that she could not hold down even a sip of water.

  Last year the two Lao women from her home village who'd been traveling with her for many months, the women who insisted they were her aunties, had several times thought she would die. Every time they thought she was about to pass on, they would take for themselves her few possessions and her little supply of money, sent by her rich cousin Nanci Hua in New York. They did this so no one else could rob her when the last breath of life finally left her wasted body. In the end Lin always surprised them by showing a strength no one expected she had. She always recovered. Of course, the fact that she lived on meant they had to return to her what they had taken, but each time she survived, they gave back a little less. Some of her money was always retained by them as payment for the care they had given her and their kindness in keeping her alive.

  For them, it was natural that Lin stay with the old auntie and young auntie when they moved into an apartment with the Wang family and the three other people who had been there at the time. They argued that she owed them much more than she owed her cousin whom she didn't know at all, and who had waited all these years to bring her to the golden shores and never cared for her when she was sick. The two aunties told her this so often that Lin believed them. She believed them because the fear that haunted her dreams was not of dying, but of living on and on in a foreign place where no one understood or knew her and where the cousin who was so different from her scolded and disliked her and would certainly have abandoned her altogether if she had known the truth about her.

  The two aunties had been friends with her dead mother. So Lin believed the things they said about their kindness and stayed close to them, sleeping on the floor on old blankets in the worst place in the fifth-floor apartment, under the window where the cold air came in around the frame and gnawed at her all winter.

  Now she could hear the aunties whispering to each other about the blood she sometimes spat up. "Too much blood."

  She also heard them arguing the case for letting her stay where she was so they could care for her themselves. They said her mother had been their friend. She was like their own daughter. They had a responsibility to their dead friend to help her daughter and look after her. She'd always been a sickly girl, they explained, sick all the time. But she was a good worker. Once she'd brought home a whole ham, already cooked. At other times, she gave them expensive food. She paid the rent, and sick as she seemed, this daughter of their friend always got better in the end. Lin believed she was safe.

  CHAPTER 3

  When Detective Sergeant April Woo, New York Police Department, reported for work at the Mid-town North precinct at four P.M., the last thing she expected was to catch a kidnapping case. But then nothing about that Tuesday had been routine.

  At five A.M., she'd seen the glow of morning spread from the living room, down the hall, and into the bedroom of the twenty-second-floor Queens apartment where her boyfriend had lived for six months and where no curtains concealed the drop-dead view of the Manhattan skyline. Punched out and highlighted by the dawn, the jumble of building shapes hung as if etched in the sky, a monument to the ingenuity of man, that great magician who used the raw power of steel and concrete in bridges and glass towers to dwarf nature and hide himself. Another day, and the city beckoned even before the cop was fully conscious.

  April Woo was second whip in the detective squad of the West Side precinct between Fifty-ninth and Forty-second streets, from Fifth Avenue to the Hudson River. She was a boss who supervised other detectives and was in charge of the squad when her superior, Lieutenant Iriarte, was not around. She was also a person used to sleeping in her own bed. Having grown up in a Chinatown walk-up and living at the moment in a two-story house in Astoria, Queens, April was now in the highest place she'd ever spent the night. She yawned, stretched and let the soft drone of the news perpetually playing on 1010 WINS filter into her consciousness. A sharp detective listened for disaster twenty-four hours a day. Hearing a radio report of a crime in her precinct could get her out of bed even if she wasn't aware of hearing it. Now, April urgently needed a catastrophe story for her mother so she could claim she'd been working around-the-clock. She needed the story if she wanted to go home in peace.

  Only three weeks ago, on April 25, April Woo had celebrated her thirtieth birthday, but you'd never know it by the way her parents treated her. It was particularly humiliating that instead of bringing her the respect she deserved, her rank in the department and the ripeness of her age served only to pick up the pace of her mother's tirades on the subject of her low-life job and lousy marriage prospects.

  In the Chinese culture dragons can be both good and evil, can appear at any moment, and have the power to make or break every human endeavor. April called Sai Yuan Woo "Skinny Dragon Mother" because her mother, too, had the ability to change shape before her eyes and had a tongue that spat real fire. April was fully armed now, carried two guns on her person at all times, but she was still as afraid of her mother as she had been as a small and defenseless child.

  Lately, Skinny Dragon Mother had upped the ante in her disapproval of her only child, calling April the very worst kind of old maid, a worm old maid with an undesirable suitor. The undesirable suitor in question, Mike Sanchez, was a Mexican-American sergeant, a colleague in the Detective Bureau. Unlike her, he was now assigned to the Homicide Task Force. Carefully,

  April turned her head to look at him, lying on his stomach beside her, sound asleep. One arm was curved over his head; the other cradled the pillow that hid his face. The sheet covered his calves and feet. The rest of him was naked.

  The clutch hit her above the heart and below the throat, somewhere around the clavicle. His legs and butt, the muscles in his back and shoulders, the fine tracing of curly black hair on the backs of his arms, more on his legs, seemed exactly right. His waist, though no longer exactly slender and boyish, was proportionately correct for his age and stature. He had smooth skin—in places it was as soft as a baby's—and the hard muscles of a trained fighter. His body was an interesting blend of hard and soft, dotted with a collection of scars from various battles. April knew the origins of only a few.

  The tightness in her chest rose to her throat as she thought of his welcome last night. When she'd gotten there at half past one, he'd given her food and wine. Then, in the flickering light of a dozen candles, they'd made love for much of the night. The candles, she'd thought, were an unusually nice touch for a man. She shivered as the dawn slowly infused the room. The idea of
her former supervisor as a thoughtful and compelling lover was so alarming that part of her wanted to get off the slippery slope and slide right out of there with the morning, never to return. Another part told her to relax and go back to sleep. She was wrestling with the conflict when Mike spoke.

  "Want some coffee, queridal" The question came from the depths of the pillow. Not a muscle in his body had moved, but the sound of his voice told her he'd been awake for a while, knew where his gun was, and could roll over, hit the floor, and fire at the door or window in less than five seconds. She grabbed at the sheet to cover herself.

  "No thanks, I've got to get going."

  "Why? You don't have to be at work until four this afternoon." He rolled over, stretched his arms above his head, and arched his back, showing off his chest and stomach and the rest of the merchandise, which was fully restored after very little sleep.

  April busied herself tucking the sheet around her neck, looking everywhere but at the goods. "You know my mother," she mumbled.

  Mike laughed softly. "We're already acquainted, querida. It's okay to be naked."

  "Not where I come from."

  "Don't you like to look at me?" He nudged her with his knee.

  "Yeah, sure." She mumbled some more, wimping out.

  "So come on, take that thing off. We can look at each other in the light. Make my day." He reached out to tickle her, but she turned around to study the clock and didn't see the digits coming.

  "Oh my God, it's almost six. Gotta go." She jumped when he touched her. "No, no, really."

  He withdrew the offending fingers. "Aw, don't pull the guilty number on me. You know you don't have to go home anymore. You can stay here with me. We could have coffee, sleep a little more. If you don't want, I won't bother you." He lifted an edge of the sheet that covered her and pulled it over himself. The action got him closer to her. They were side by side now, touching from shoulder to knee, and the sheet did not succeed in hiding his intent.

  She shook her head and laughed.

  "What?" he demanded, his lush mustache twitching innocently.

  "You know."

  He rose up on one elbow to look at her. "Lucky me, you are one pretty woman in the morning, quer-ida. Give me a hug."

  "Yeah, sure, I bet you say that to all the girls." By her calculation, Mike was the good-looking one—and he had a rep. He was like Sara Lee to the opposite sex: no one didn't like him.

  "You're the only girl in my life." He said this with just the right amount of huskiness in his voice, not too hokey.

  April swallowed the hook and believed him, but didn't want to get all teary about it. She scrunched down, put her arms around him, and laid her head on his chest. She was trying to go with the flow, but wasn't finding it so easy. From the things Mike said and did in bed, she was aware that her own erotic repertoire was somewhat lacking. It made her afraid that regardless of what he told her right now, he'd be tired of her before the week was out.

  He was able to distract her from this pessimistic speculation for a while by kissing her all over and encouraging her to return the favor, which didn't turn out to be so very difficult. Then he got up, made coffee, and scrambled some eggs for breakfast. She was impressed by his domesticity. At nine he showered and dressed for the day, collected his gun and his keys from the table, and took off without saying anything about the case that was bedeviling him. April decided to put off going home. What difference could a few hours make, she asked herself.

  Time made a big difference in everything, though. If she had gone home either sometime during the night or early in the morning, she might have avoided a whole lot of trouble with her parents. If she had been a few minutes earlier or later in to work that day, or if she hadn't started the evening tour on radio call, cruising around with her driver, Woody Baum, she might never have been involved in the Popescu case.

  As it was she didn't go home. And when she reported for work, her boss, Lieutenant Iriarte, immediately sent her out on radio call. She and Woody had hardly settled into their gray unmarked unit when she got a call from the dispatcher to 10-85 the Midtown North patrol supervisor forthwith.

  "Possible kidnapping, K," the dispatcher squawked. "Be advised the Midtown North patrol supervisor has also requested Crime Scene and Emergency Service units, K."

  "10-4, Manhattan North detective supervisor on the way, K." April turned to Woody. "That's that fancy building at Seventh and Central Park South. Turn around."

  Woody threw the bubble on the roof, hit the sirens, and made a gut-wrenching U-turn on Fifty-seventh Street, leaving tire marks on the pavement.

  The address of the requested investigation was a glass tower that curved around the corner of Central Park South and Seventh Avenue, sweeping up as much view as it could along the way. A driveway to the building entrance curved out through the sidewalk. In front of the driveway was a tiny garden consisting of a burbling fountain, a Japanese maple full of red leaves, and a thickly painted patch of gold and purple pansies. The building was already locked down. Yellow crime scene tape was stretched across the entrance. Vehicles jammed the area. Uniforms swarmed everywhere. Three minutes from the 911 call, and the operation was already in full swing. The area was sealed off. The curious were clumped together outside police lines, talking, staring. The media was gathering. Traffic was stopped. Horns were honking. Drivers were screaming. The usual pandemonium.

  "Park as close as you can and meet me inside." Adrenaline kicked in, and April was all nerves. It looked like something really big.

  As Woody tried to pull into the driveway, a tall uniform with a mustache waved them to a stop. Woody jerked to a halt to talk to him as April took out her shield and clipped it to her jacket breast pocket. Before the uniform had a chance to wave them on, she jumped out of the car and joined the fray. She hurried toward the building, briefly looking up at two detectives on the roof. They were wearing vests, had double-barreled shotguns cradled in their arms, and were peering over the edge from above at ledges and anything else that protruded from the building.

  Then she caught sight of a familiar face in the crowd of blue in the lobby and went to talk to the precinct patrol supervisor, Lieutenant McMan, a steely type with startling green eyes and no lips at all. He had called the special units in after receiving the call from the 911 dispatcher.

  "Hey, Lieutenant. What's the story?" she asked.

  "Hey, Woo. Woman's name is Popescu. It appears she was assaulted in her apartment. Her baby is missing."

  "She still here?"

  "No, she's in the ER at Roosevelt."

  "Anybody go with her?"

  "Her husband claims he found her." McMan shrugged. "I have two uniforms on him."

  "Upstairs?"

  "Four detectives trying to get the phones tapped in case there's a ransom demand. ESU's canvassing the basement, roof, elevator shafts, tops of the elevators, trash, trash compactors." He smiled grimly. "The building superintendent freaked out at the heavy tools and the floodlights. He didn't want them breaking down any walls or doors."

  "Any sign of the baby?"

  McMan shook his head. "Nothing yet."

  "What about CSU? Wasn't the crime scene secured for their first shot?"

  "Yeah, yeah, they're up there, too. Apartment 9E. You going up?"

  "Just for a quick look-see. I want to go over to the ER to Q-and-A the victim right away. What's her status?"

  "She was unconscious when she was taken out."

  "Hey, boss." Woody bounded up.

  "We're going up," she told him, nodding toward the front elevators, two pink marble-fronted horrors.

  "Not those, we got people in the shafts. You'll have to go up the back elevator," McMan told her.

  Uniforms were swarming on the back stairs as April walked through. One was also guarding the back elevator. The elevator operators and doormen were being questioned by detectives. Tenants unable to get home stood in a clot, having fits. April and Woody commandeered the elevator, stopped at the ninth floo
r, and tried to enter the apartment through the kitchen.

  "Forget about it, I'm not even started here. You can look in and that's it," came a voice from behind the door. The unseen criminologist added, "I don't give a shit who you are," in case somebody planned to put up a fight.

  "Sergeant Woo. We just want to take a look," April said.

  "This is where it happened. One look, don't touch," came the warning.

  "Fine."

  The door opened a little and April and Woody got a partial view for all of three seconds of some bloodstains on a marble floor. Somewhere in the front of the apartment another feisty crime-scene investigator and more detectives were locked in a noisy conflict over preservation of the scene versus the need to get the phones up right away so they could tape all incoming calls. She'd have to come back later.

  April glanced at the garbage can by the back door and repressed a strong urge to go through it. Victim first.

  "Okay," she said to Woody. She turned to leave and realized he'd frozen the elevator on the floor so she wouldn't have to wait when she was ready to go. Good man, he was taking care of her.

  Roosevelt Hospital was only a short distance away, on Ninth Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street, just a block down from the Manhattan branch of Fordham University. Woody negotiated the car through the streets and April was lost in her own thoughts. Her antennae were up, and she was bristling all over. By now there would already be detectives from the Major Cases Unit. They would move in and take over the precinct squad room, maybe even her own desk. They'd be setting up their easels and starting the clocks ticking on their chronological time sheets. It rankled that no one thought precinct detectives could handle important investigations. From now, until this missing baby was found dead or alive, the precinct squad would be doing the scut work. No precinct squad detective liked it one bit.