Burning Time (27 page)

“Okay, well, April must be quite the girl. What’s the problem?”

Jason told him succinctly.

“Oh, you’re the guy with the nutcase letters. I know about you, Dr. Frank. Look, I asked around. Came up with zip on this one. What makes you think there’s anything to it?” The voice warmed up, but only a little.

“I talked to this guy’s aunt, and she implied he had a record. If so, he poses a threat to my wife. All I want to do is find out what there is on him.”

“All right, I’ll pull the sheet,” Grove said reluctantly. “But you’ll have to come in.”

“When?”

“Now. I’m supposed to be out of here at four.”

Jason looked at his watch. It was after six. “Tell me where and I’m on my way.”

A few minutes later he was loping through the lobby of the Meridien again. The place was very luxurious, very quiet. He didn’t think it was meant to feel like a mausoleum, though. There wasn’t anybody around.

After telling him to hurry, Detective-Sergeant Grove, or whatever he was, kept Jason waiting for nearly twenty minutes. He sat in a metal chair and looked around. The police station was not so different from the one he had gone to in New York. Both looked like public schools. There were a lot of signs in Spanish here, too. In fact it looked like there were more instructions up on the wall in Spanish than there were in English.

“Dr. Frank?”

Finally Grove stood in front of him. He was a very tall man with blond hair, not in uniform. He looked like many years ago he might have been a surfer.

“Yes.” Jason was glad to escape from the hard chair he had taken next to a woman with an infant who needed to be changed.

“Sorry, it took some time.” Grove led the way to a corner of a big room. On the wall was a sign that said “Missing Persons, Sergeant Robert Grove.”

His desk was a lot messier than April Woo’s. Thick files were stacked on both sides. In the middle half a dozen partially filled Styrofoam coffee cups were surrounded by a snowfall of empty sugar packets. Grove sank down into an ancient swivel chair clearly left over from an earlier incarnation, pointed Jason to the wooden chair opposite, and sat back.

“Okay, exactly what do you want to know?”

Jason had chewed up a couple of Maalox tablets on the way over. But the pain came back with the skepticism in Grove’s framing of the question. He felt around in his
pocket to see if he had any more. He didn’t. He could see the package on the dashboard of the car. Shit. He let it go.

“I talked with Troland Grebs’s aunt,” he said, pulling himself together. “And she described the kind of family background and personality problems that suggest to me he had some encounters with the authorities.”

“Like what?” Grove shifted in his seat so he wasn’t sitting on his gun. He seemed to be arranging his defenses against unwanted, outside influences. One hand reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a paper. He angled it in such a way that Jason couldn’t see it.

“Like he set fires.” Jason knew he didn’t want to challenge the man, but the pressure was building to get up and snatch the damn paper.

“Yep,” Grove said, glancing down. “Quite a few. They put him away with some other nice boys for a while. It seemed to do the trick on arson. That’s going back some, though.” He sounded bored, as if the man’s record was old, old news and had no bearing on his current activities.

“What else is there?” Jason leaned over. Grove leaned back.

“Like I said. What are you looking for?”

Jason’s stomach churned. “Why can’t you let me see the damn thing?” he asked, trying to keep calm. “All I need is a minute or two and then I’ll be out of here.”

Grove’s expression did not change.

“What do you want the information for? Are you making a complaint? Let’s get this out in the open.”

Jason spoke slowly, biting off his words. “I’m trying to establish if the person with this criminal record on your desk that you won’t let me see is a violent person capable of harming my wife.”

Why else would he want the information? He needed to protect his wife. No one else would. It wasn’t a hard one.

“Will you be making a complaint?”

Jason snapped. “I don’t fucking know. Is he a psychopath? Has he been hospitalized? Has he been in prison for any violent crimes? Come on, Sergeant Grove. If my wife is in danger and it turns out you withheld information from me, I’ll have your fucking ass—”

“All right, I’m with you,” Grove said coldly. “But let’s get one thing straight. We don’t do things this way, Doctor. We don’t make people’s records available just because someone
thinks
a guy could be dangerous. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Are you telling me all you do is bag bodies? Is that how it works?”

“I’m in Missing Persons. I try to match unidentified bodies with people who have been reported missing.”

“Fine.” It occurred to Jason that Detective Woo would give him what he needed. Fuck this. He got up to go.

Grove looked down at the paper he’d been guarding so carefully from view.

“Well, there’s no record of any hospitalizations,” he said casually, “but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t had any. There are a couple of real old arrests for assault and battery. No convictions.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means Grebs here used to get a little carried away with ladies of the night. Whores.”

Jason was silent. Then he asked, “What did he do to them?”

Grove looked at him. For several long moments Jason was afraid Grove would stonewall all the way. Then he looked down at the paper again as if whatever he had in the way of a brain just clicked into gear.

“Jesus H. Christ,” he muttered.

“Tell me,” Jason insisted.

Another brief silence. Grove’s hand came down on the paper, protecting it from any onslaught.

“For God’s sake!” Jason exploded.

“You want to know? Okay, he burned them with cigarettes, Doctor.” Grove got a little defensive. “But that was a long time ago, and the charges were dropped. You know, sometimes they just grow out of it.”

He was saying one thing, but his face said something else.

“Yeah?” Jason said. “They grow out of it?” The bile rose in his throat. “The guy set fires, and then moved on to burning people. Prostitutes. You’re right. Sometimes they learn how to control it, or cover it up. A lot of things can happen with sick people. Sometimes they move on to new kinds of acting out. Sometimes something can trigger them into violence. Or they can get disorganized with stress—trouble at work, a loss of some kind—and just break down. But they don’t just grow out of it, Sergeant. They’re
sick
—It’s not a bad habit.”

The deep tan receded from Sergeant Grove’s face as he listened.

“The girl from New York April was looking for was burned,” he said when Jason was finished. He didn’t look bored or disinterested now.

“Burned? Is she—?” The acid from Jason’s stomach bubbled up into his mouth. He swallowed.

“Oh, yeah, she’s dead. But she wasn’t a whore. She was a college girl on vacation.”

The two men looked at each other. Then Grove handed over the sheet. Jason reached for it with a tremor in his hand. Well, now they had a suspect with a history of burning people that went back to third grade, and a dead girl from New York. The guy they should be looking very
hard for was a draftsman in a defense company, rode a motorcycle. He knew Emma from high school, and hadn’t been seen for over a week. Emma needed immediate protection.

“Can I use your phone?” Jason asked.

The blanket didn’t move all the way out to Queens. Troland watched the dashboard clock and forced himself to look at the blanket only every two minutes. The traffic was so heavy on Second Avenue around the bridge he started muttering to himself. What if he hit her too hard. What if she was dead. If she was dead, she wouldn’t know anything. She wouldn’t even have met him. Shit. Then he couldn’t make things right. Not ever. He fumed at the gridlock. Thousands of cars trying to get into a single lane to get across the fucking bridge. And the fucking bridge was falling down. He didn’t want her dying before he fixed her.

The inside lanes were completely closed. There was one outside lane on each side that seemed to be outside of the bridge altogether. Getting across meant hanging over the water in a single lane that didn’t even have a solid roadbed under it. Looking down, Troland could see the water in the East River. To his left, the Roosevelt Island tram passed by on its wire string, high in the sky. It passed the
one going the other way. The traffic was going only three miles an hour. Sometimes it stopped altogether.

He had been feeling so good. And now when he looked out at the cars halted around him and down at the motionless bundle he had gone to so much trouble for, he started feeling bad again. He put his hand under the blanket on the seat beside him. Touched a piece of bare flesh. Arm, he thought. He stroked it with his finger and was excited by its warmth.

It took nearly an hour to get back to his place. A very pale light shone from the front room, which meant the old woman was probably sitting there in front of the television with her back to the window. It gave him an unpleasant memory of his grandmother who died last month. He pushed the thought aside as he got out to open the garage door. It wasn’t automatic. He had to pull it open and shut. The light was automatic. It came on when the door went up. No one saw him.

Still, he was almost jumping out of his skin when he carried her up the stairs at the back of the garage. He had hit her hard. She was a dead weight, still out cold. He almost staggered at the top when he had to get the door open.

And then he was inside with the door closed. He put her on the sofa in the living room. This must have been where the old man had his studio, because the skylight was in here. He had noticed none of the other houses in the area had a skylight. The skylight bothered him because of the planes coming into the airport. They did that in San Diego where he worked, but there they were friends. Here, they seemed to hover directly over the house, casting a huge shadow like a giant evil bird. They seemed to be watching him somehow, getting ready to dump a load.
He wasn’t thinking of that now, though. He was high again with how great this was.

Yeah. He studied her on the sofa, looking for the girl he knew. He didn’t see the soft smile, the golden hair. He started pulling at her clothes. First the short boots, then the jeans. Yeah. It was the body in the film. He frowned, studying her legs and the tiny bikini briefs she was wearing. They were white, a silky material, and looked new. She looked good like that.

He struggled to get her sweatshirt off and was a little disappointed because she made no effort to wake up. The bra matched the panties. He took them both off and held them in his hand. They had a strong fragrance he didn’t know, some kind of flower. The body looked good, real good. Well kept, clean. He liked that.

The hair wasn’t blond, but wasn’t so bad. At least her breasts were bigger than the other girl he tattooed. He liked that. And there was no excess flesh around her stomach and thighs. He liked that, too. Fat women disgusted him. On his knees, he sniffed her shoulder and then her breast. The fragrance was stronger there. He wanted to sniff all of her, but he was getting too excited. He had to pull out the Polaroid of the other girl to remind himself of his mission. He didn’t want to fuck her before she was right. Yeah, he had stuff to do.

He got up and walked into the other room with her clothes, put them in his suitcase and the suitcase under the bed. He went into the bathroom and urinated for a long time, then carefully combed his hair. Wanted to look good for her. Then he figured he better get the ropes and tie her up. He put the gun down on the table in case he had to scare her. He had a whole collection of ropes. They were all thin nylon, the kind that would cut deeply into her flesh if she struggled too much. He had planned to put
one around her neck with a slip knot. Now he thought that might be a mistake. He wanted her perfect, beautifully decorated, but not marked by anything else.

Looking at her, lying on her back with her eyes closed and one arm flung out, it occurred to him that just doing the torso like the other girl was not enough. He could do all of her. Her hands, her feet. He’d even seen people with the inside of their lips tattooed, their armpits. He started sweating as he thought of tattooing her cunt. He could put anything on it. It was so exciting he had to remind himself over and over to cool down or he’d never get it done.

He tied her hands and feet loosely, considering places he could work on her where no one had ever tattooed a person before. Too bad he didn’t have a table to put her on. The sofa was low. Lower than the bed. He didn’t want her on the bed in the other room, though. The black bird was on the other side of the wall. She might hear something.

Finally he was ready. He was cool. He slapped her face a few times.

“Emma, Emma. Wake up.”

When she didn’t wake up, he put a few drops of ammonia on a paper towel and waved it under her nose. She started coughing.

“Wake up, honey.”

After a long time, her eyes fluttered.

“That’s right. Come on. Look at me. Look who it is.” He dabbed a wet towel on her forehead the way a nurse had once when he was in the hospital. He still remembered how good it felt.

Dabbed at her cheek with cold water.

Emma groaned and opened her eyes.

“Hi, Emma. Guess who.” Troland leaned over so she could see his face.

She closed her eyes again.

“Oh, come on. You’re all right.”

“My head,” she mumbled. “Car crash.”

“Hi, honey. Look at me. Say hello.” When she didn’t respond, Troland got some more water and sprinkled some on her neck and forehead.

She opened her eyes and tried to focus. “Car crash, get me out,” she cried, fighting the ropes.

“Hey, stop that. You weren’t in a crash. Look who it is.”

Her eyes moved around, trying to make a picture. “Car crash. My head …”

“It’s Tro—remember me?”

She stared at him, tried to lift her hand to touch her head. It wouldn’t move. It was attached to something.