Hanging Time (41 page)

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.

M
ax 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 rest 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.

During his career he had hospitalized and cared for very sick people. He had seen many kinds of tragedy. But dealing with many troubled people over the years, Jason had never felt personally touched by evil. Now he knew firsthand what it was like to have the most sadistic kind of madness directed right at someone he loved. He touched his hand to his forehead, as if to blot out the images in the photographs.

Sometimes the mysterious connectedness of disparate events overwhelmed him. Until last spring, the last thing he thought he’d ever do was to work with the police on a homicide case. Yet he had discovered over and over in his life that it was not possible to walk away from extraordinary events unchanged. Everything that happened opened a new door, a path to another dimension. He was not surprised that this kind of horror had found its way back to his door again, and unknowingly he had let it in.

“How is Camille’s boyfriend doing?” Jason asked.

“He’s in intensive care,” Sanchez answered. “It doesn’t look like he’ll be able to contribute much for a long time.”

“And you think a dog was at the murder scene?”

“We have evidence a dog was there,” April answered.

“Can you determine which dog it was by the hair sample you have?”

Sanchez shook his head. “No, but teeth are like fingerprints. No two sets are the same, even in animals. If the bite mark on Rachel Stark’s ankle matches the teeth of one of the dogs, we’ll have something.”

“But you don’t have both dogs yet.”

“No. We have Camille’s. She’ll have to give us permission to make a mold of the dog’s teeth.”

Jason kept shaking his head. He wasn’t sure of the ethics of this situation. Milicia was his patient. When he called Charles to put off their meeting, Charles indicated to him Milicia felt betrayed and would not speak to Jason again under any circumstances.

At the moment she was upstairs, refusing to say anything and demanding to see a lawyer. Camille and her dog had been brought in and were waiting in another room to see him.

Without thinking, Jason swallowed some of the cold, oversweetened coffee, trying to digest the situation. They had found the possessions of one of the murdered girls in Bouck’s basement. They had to establish whether or not Bouck ever dressed in Camille’s clothes, whether he took the dog out on his own. If he had any other hiding places, like for shoes and maybe a red wig. They needed to know if anybody else, like Milicia, had a key to Bouck’s building. They needed samples of Milicia’s and Camille’s handwriting to test against the guest book. They were looking for a blouse missing from The Last Mango.

The police needed Camille to answer all these questions for them, and they weren’t able to get anywhere with her asking her themselves. Great. Was he violating a patient’s confidentiality by interviewing her sister about the sister’s possible involvement in a couple of homicides? He looked at the crime-scene photos again, one by one. Again he thought it was a fine line, but he wouldn’t be crossing it.

He swallowed down the rest of the coffee. It was almost all milk and hardly tasted of coffee at all. Somehow being there he felt he was in the middle of a war. It occurred to him that it was always like this in a police station. A state of emergency every day. He pushed the pictures away.

April, seeing that he was finished, collected the pictures and all the material.

“How do you think she’d respond to a video camera?” she asked.

“I think it would be a terrible distraction. Do you really
need it?” Jason was alarmed by the prospect of himself with a murder suspect on tape. “Isn’t the recorder enough?”

“She may not be competent to give her permission anyway,” Mike pointed out.

“Fine, we’ll go with the recorder. Are you ready?”

Jason tossed the coffee cup in the wastebasket. He noted that the basket had been emptied since the night before. Yes, he guessed he was ready.

C
amille let the woman blue wall pet Puppy’s head on her second trip to the police station. The policewoman sat in the back seat with her. The other officer drove the car.

“That’s a cute dog,” the policewoman said.