Burning Time (8 page)

He sat heavily, opposite Newt, not smiling now.

“Well?” Newt demanded.

Out there where they found her, Newt and Ray and Jesse had gone over as much ground as they could, looking for some clue as to what happened. A track in the dirt, a scrap of cloth, a weapon, anything. But the girl had no clothes on, and there did not appear to be any disturbance of anything in the area around her. In some other part of the world, they might call in a botanist to examine the plant life under the body to determine, by the changes in the plants, how long the body had been there. But here there was no plant life under her. Milt had initially speculated that whatever happened to her happened somewhere else.

“It looks like she had some injuries, but she didn’t die of them,” he said now.

“What do you mean?” Newt frowned.

“Sometimes it’s hard to tell what happened antemortem, and what might be postmortem injuries,” Milt said.

“Yeah?” Newt said. He knew that.

“She could have died, and then two ribs and an arm were broken when somebody moved her. You know that sometimes happens when ambulance drivers aren’t careful. It can mess up an autopsy report.” Milt shook his bald head.

“But you don’t think that’s what happened?”

“No.”

There was a long pause.

“So, what did she die of?” Newt said impatiently.

“Exposure,” Milt said.

“No kidding.”

“The color and condition of her skin—looks like she was thoroughly burned by the sun. Not just her front, but her back, too. That means she could have been walked around out there. Low temperatures at night. Looks like she starved, fried, and froze.”

“Raped?” Newt asked soberly.

Milt shook his head. “After twenty-four hours with really first-rate samples from a living person, intercourse would be pretty hard to establish, unless there were injuries. Postmortem,” he shook his head again, “not a chance. I do think she was tortured, though.”

“The wounds in her groin?”

“No, that’s postmortem change. That’s what happens in mummification. The skin shrinks. The resulting split sometimes looks like an antemortem knife wound.”

“Mummification?” Newt played with a pencil on his desk. It said
Pell’s Apothecary
on the side. “Then she must have been there for a while.”

“Nuh-uh.” Milt shook his head again.

“Why so sure?”

“The birds just started. The coyotes hadn’t even gotten there yet. A few days, and there’d only be bones left. In a way we’re lucky.”

“Oh, yeah?” Newt said. “How so?”

“We might still be able to get some prints.”

Milt had finished and didn’t make any going motions.

“What’s bothering you? In particular, I mean?”

“You know that blackened part on her chest?”

“Postmortem artifact?” Newt was proud he knew the word. When he was a rookie years ago, he had seen the blackened patterns on the chest of a person who had died several days before, and thought some madman had murdered him and put them there. It didn’t take long to learn the horrible truth. Humans don’t fare as well as animals in the looks department after death. All kinds of colors and patterns and wounds appear on dead bodies as they go through their many postmortem changes. Sometimes, in three days if the conditions are just right, a human can swell to three times its normal size with gases and putrefaction.

“No, a man-made burn.”

Milt was silent for a long time.

Newt twirled the pencil in his fingers. So, she might have been tortured and left out there. He had a mental picture of her hair, already shrinking away from her scalp, and her nails. The hair was silky and looked like it had been expertly colored; the nails were painted a delicate pink. This was no biker’s girl with crudely bleached hair, roots an inch thick, and black nail polish.

“The thing is,” Milt went on. “You know how ME’s are when we get together. We talk about unusual cases. I have a friend down in Twentynine Palms. A few months ago he had a similar case, a girl burned in the chest with something
like a brand and left in the desert. Nobody took too much notice. It was a Mexican.”

“Christ.” Newt groaned.

“I know he photographed the burn for the pattern. In case another one came up. I’ll have to get his report. Now I’m not saying two burns make a trend, but it looks like another one may have come up—” His voice trailed off.

Slowly he got to his feet.

“When can you have the data for me?” Newt asked. He wanted to get the data into the surrounding jurisdictions as soon as possible. They had to identify her before they could start investigating what happened to her.

“Soon,” Milt promised. “They’re working on the X rays and dentals now.”

“Good.” Newt was so distressed by the thought of his California desert getting littered with the bodies of tortured young women that he followed Milt out of the building and watched him drive away.

Troland felt bad. He didn’t think he had ever felt so bad. He couldn’t even go to work because of what she did to him. She had been the prettiest, nicest girl in the whole world, the only girl he ever really liked, and he had saved her. He couldn’t stop thinking about how he saved her. He, Troland Grebs, saved her. And now she made a fool of him like it didn’t matter to her at all that he held her in his heart all these years. He hated her.

She was the only girl who was so perfect he had to make special rules just for her. He remembered every one: He could look at her, but not when she was on the beach. He could write letters to her, but not send them. He could draw pictures of her, but not let anybody see them. The most important thing was he couldn’t touch her no matter what. And he never did. He had been good all these years, and she had to humiliate him, curse him, break every rule like the worst whore that ever was.

He lay on the sofa in his apartment two, three days; drinking, staggering to the bathroom, vomiting, passing
out—drinking some more. He couldn’t go to work. When he finally got up and cleaned the apartment, he didn’t know why it smelled, why there was vomit on the floor. He just knew he was going to take back all the things he had ever done for Emma Chapman, one at a time.

It took Detective Woo three days to find Connie Shagan at a friend of a friend’s house in Florida. It wasn’t easy to locate her with no one in the dorm or the administration office to give her names and numbers. She didn’t work the case on Monday. This week Monday was her day off. She spent it studying for a psych test that evening. She had to take the subway both ways from Queens, since she was without a car, but she thought she did all right on the test.

On Tuesday April had a chance to go back to the dorm and get into the girls’ room. She took Ellen’s photograph with her and held it in her hand as she looked around. She had done this with another missing girl two years before. Lily Dong was twelve, and disappeared from her kitchen in Chinatown when she was home from school having lunch. The whole precinct looked for her. It was the kind of thing that got in the newspapers. A kidnapper called once. Then when he didn’t call again, the family called the police. Three days after the child disappeared, April found a pile of junk in a courtyard across the street. Underneath was a dirty sleeping bag. April hated thinking about unzipping
that bag, and seeing the sneakers. She didn’t have to see anything else but the two sneakers to know. The girl was wearing them when she disappeared and was wearing them when she was found. She had been strangled in a panic. It took April a long time to look at any kind of sneakers without feeling terrible about Lily Dong. Very rare for an Asian to kill someone. It was the guy across the hall, Burmese.

Ellen Roane’s dorm room was small, just big enough for two twin beds with plastic cartons between them, two small wooden desks, two chairs, two reading lights, two chests of drawers. The bathroom was shared with the room on the other side. The girls seemed to have made an effort to leave the place neat when they left. Or maybe they were just like that. There were no piles of little things—hair things, makeup, trinkets—either on the surfaces or in the drawers. No nail polish, lipsticks. The drawers were stuffed with clothes. Much of it seemed to be blue jeans and sweaters. Must be very serious girls. April’s own room was messier. She liked small colorful things, had a lot of cosmetics.

She found Connie’s home address and telephone number in a small book in the girl’s desk. Then she turned her attention to Ellen’s side of the room. Ellen Roane had a CD player and many discs. She had put her name on it with one of those plastic guns that shoots out letters. She also had a computer to write her papers on, and many books. All the books she seemed to be working in were in neat stacks on the floor by her desk, and on her bed. Both beds had the same comforters on them. April wondered if the university gave out flower-printed comforters, or if the girls had bought them together. Probably bought them so the room would look coordinated. There was also a small rug of a matching color in the middle of the floor.

April tried to imagine what it might be like to have such expensive toys at seventeen, and no responsibilities but to read the books and know what was in them. She couldn’t resist sitting down at Ellen’s tiny school-issue desk with the computer on it and turning it on. A list of files popped on the screen. French, Biology, Psychology. Hah, something familiar. April was taking psychology. She punched Psychology and a list of papers came up.

April didn’t see anything she recognized. At John Jay they taught her class psychology along with history. So she got the Napoleon complex in conjunction with the conquest of Russia. She didn’t know too much about Freud, but she knew Napoleon was exiled to Elba in 1814 and came back to Paris to rule a hundred days before his final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. And she had a pretty good idea what the complex was all about.

There were no short stories or diary notes in the computer, and there was absolutely no indication that the girl didn’t plan to come back. It looked like she left her best stuff.

When April got back to the precinct, she called Connie’s parents. They knew where their daughter was. It took three calls to Florida to get Connie on the phone.

“No, I don’t know where Ellie went. Is something wrong?” a very young-sounding voice said when April identified herself.

“We’re just trying to locate her,” April said vaguely.

“I don’t know where Ellie went,” the girl repeated solemnly. “She said she wanted to go someplace warm.”

“Florida?” April asked. “I get the feeling she’s running away from family troubles. Is she with you?”

“No. We asked her but she didn’t want to come,” the girl said quickly.

“You could get in trouble if you’re not telling the truth,”
April pressed. “You don’t want to hamper an investigation, do you?”

There was a pause. “She’s not that good a friend.”

“Oh.” April waited for more. She glanced down at the picture on her desk. The parents had given her several. The one on her desk was a color photo of a girl in shorts with a tennis racket in both hands. Ellen Roane was a pretty girl. Lot of hair, like her mother. Only hers was much lighter. Blue eyes, big smile that showed nice even white teeth.

“Why not?” April asked after a minute.

“I don’t know. She’s nice …” The voice trailed off.

The girl couldn’t say why they weren’t good friends. Fair enough.

“What about a boyfriend?” April asked. “Did she have a boyfriend she might have gone away with?”

“She had one for a while, but he dumped her.”

“Recently?”

“Yeah, Ellie was pretty upset. That’s why she didn’t want to go with anybody. She wanted to be alone.”

“When did you see her last?”

“I saw her when she left for the airport.”

“The airport. Which airport?”

“I don’t know. LaGuardia, I think. I don’t remember which airline.”

“What time was it?”

“It was afternoon.”

Connie told April what Ellen was wearing when she left, and they hung up. Someplace warm. That left a lot of places. Mexico, the Caribbean, Florida. California. She checked the flights going out of LaGuardia to sunny places on Thursday afternoon a week before. There were a lot of them. The airlines didn’t keep passenger lists for this long. And if Ellen were running away, she might not have
used her own name anyway. Checking airlines was not a useful path to pursue. It was exactly a week since Ellen had left the city. She was due back in school the following Monday. April was quite certain she would be there.

She handed in her report. This was more detailed than the initial one. Now she knew what Ellen had been wearing, and the fact that she had most probably left the city of her own volition, probably by air, during a school vacation. The assignment notebook and calendar on her desk had corresponding stars in red ink to show when papers were due and test dates. Ellen was a conscientious and methodical student. The following Thursday was starred for a test with a note to “Study hard for this one.” Nothing about her room indicated a girl who didn’t intend to come back.

The case was not closed, however. Sergeant Joyce had received several calls from the parents—both parents, at different times—demanding a stepped-up investigation. Joyce assured the Roanes they were doing everything they could to locate the girl and told April to stay with it.

April called Jennifer Roane with another approach. “Does Ellen have a credit card?” she asked.

“Why? Has it turned up?” Jennifer started to cry.

“No. But if she used it, it’s a way of finding where she went. Her roommate says she left last Thursday for the airport.”

“What?” Jennifer said, appalled. “You mean, she went somewhere?”

“It looks like it. Do you have the credit card number?”

“Just a minute.”

Jennifer Roane was away for several minutes. Finally she came back with the credit card number. It was a MasterCard.

“Anybody else use this card?”

“Uh, her father. I have my own.”

“Thanks.”

April called MasterCard. “This is Detective Woo, NYPD. I need some information on recent charges to card number 956-1900-9424-1992.”