The Silent Bride (25 page)

Twenty-nine

A
t seven A.M. sharp on Thursday morning Mike parked his Camaro in front of April's Le Baron and pulled himself out of the car with far less energy than usual. April had been waiting for him by the window and saw right away that his right cheekbone was bruised and a white bandage decorated his forehead. He hated showing wear and tear, so he held his hand over it as if shading the morning light. She had her answer. Brother must have resisted being taken in.

"Looks worse than it is," Mike said sheepishly as she ran out to give him a long hug.

"How's the other guy?" she asked lightly. Mike was on his feet, nothing in a sling. She knew better than to make a big deal about it if he didn't.

"Heavily sedated on the psych ward. Hungry?"

"Yes."

April didn't want to admit that she'd missed dinner and missed him, but at least last night there had been a reason. She gave him another hug and climbed into the car, making it a point not to press him for details as they headed up to the Bronx. They stopped for a big breakfast in a diner. Mike ordered bacon, eggs, hash browns, toast, lots of ketchup.

While they were waiting to be served she skirted the subject, keeping neutral. Was Brother their man? Come on, give.

"Stitches?" she asked about his forehead.

"Only six. Right along the hairline." He sugared his coffee heavily, then sipped. "Not as good as yours," he commented, giving her a crooked smile. "Are you missing me yet?"

She nodded. "What do you think? Is Brother our killer?"

Mike stirred in more sugar. Four packets made it a record. "I want to think we have him. He seemed pretty out of it last night, but drugs could do that. When he comes around, we'll see how connected he is to reality." He touched his forehead. "I'll tell you, he has a lethal kick. I wasn't expecting it," he admitted. "Careless."

April's heart thudded. Between the two of them, Mike was the dirtier
mano-a-mano
fighter, but she had it all over him in kickboxing and karate. She felt she should have been there. She didn't say a word. The food came. They started eating. Two fried eggs suddenly didn't seem like enough. Mike ordered pancakes, too.

"I hope he's our guy," she said.
Let Brother be our guy,
she prayed, pouring on the syrup with a heavy hand.

"Let's hope. I think Louis is involved somehow, but I don't see him as a killer. The question is, did the African leave in Louis's truck at two-thirty, as Tito and Louis said he did, or did he stay behind? If he stayed behind, how did he get back to the city? Subway? Bus? Did he ditch the gun in a garbage can? Did they wait for him?"

All the garbage cans in the area had been thoroughly searched on Sunday and Monday, but the killer could have dumped it in the Hudson River. There were many places to get rid of a gun.

They ate slowly, puzzling over different aspects of the case. The tangle of leads kept going back to the wedding people, none of whom were entirely what they seemed, but none of whom had a motive, either. April flashed to Ching's call last night and her request for April to be her maid of honor. She didn't want to discuss it with Mike right now. They had more important things to worry about.

"What's the matter, run out of steam?" he said.

"Yeah." The pancakes sat there in a lake of syrup.

Mike paid up and they were on time for their meeting with the Bronx DA, an older guy neither of them knew. Shad Apply was tall and skinny. His face was the color of window caulk, prematurely rutted with deep wrinkles. Two younger, gray-suited ADAs were in the office with him. All three showed signs of life when Mike told them about the suspect in custody.

"Where is he? We want to talk to him," Apply said, nodding with satisfaction at his henchmen, a chubby male who looked about thirty, and a long-haired female of indeterminate age. Both were intently taking notes on legal pads. Apparently between last night and now, no one had been in touch.

"Talking's a problem right now. He's in Bellevue," Mike told them.

"Is he injured?" Shad Apply frowned at Mike's bruise and the bandage on his head. "Did you hurt him?"

Mike shook his head. "Not as bad as he hurt me.

The guy's a head case. He went berserk in the middle of the interview. We're having him evaluated, but it may take some time. He'll have to wake up first."

The prosecutor's face organized itself into a smile. The good news outweighed the bad. The good news: A confused psychotic would be a big plus for everybody. They could nail him quickly and have done with an ugly case. The DA's office wouldn't have to dig too deeply for a motive. Crazies lived in worlds of their own; their circuit boards were down. The pathways to reason didn't connect.

There were other pluses. Incidents involving seriously mentally impaired people, though catastrophic for the victims and their families, were not that common. If the perpetrators happened to be wholly unconnected to reality, they couldn't plan, couldn't repeat a crime, couldn't get away. Such a resolution of the Tovah case would be ideal. The bad news: It would probably take quite a while. Psychotics didn't get stabilized overnight.

"Good job," Apply said, appraising Mike in a rosier light. "You're the one who brought him in?"

Mike nodded.

"Did he give you anything at all?"

"Not enough. He was scared to death, less than lucid. Also, his boss, the florist, made an initial statement saying he was with him at the time of the shooting. We have a little problem with that."

The DA pulled on his nose. "We can bring him in as a material witness, hold him for a while. That might jog his memory. I'd like to clean this up before the weekend. Okay, thanks. That should do it for now. I'll start talking to the attending shrink. You follow through on the background check." Apply unfolded from his chair.

"Excuse me, sir." April took a few minutes to fill them in on her and Bellaqua's work on Wendy.

He wasn't that interested. Her past misdemeanors were way too old to be admissible in any case against her. He looked fifteen years younger when they left.

By two in the afternoon Mike and April were on the phones at the Five-oh. Mike was trying to locate the church group that had brought the Liberian into the country. April was following through with her study of the seven-page printout that described each event Wendy had done since January, five months of completed events and a summer of parties to come. April also had an older file of events Wendy had managed, going back some five years, that had been printed out from her computer. She spent all day on it. Late in the afternoon she found something that pushed her alarm button.

Another of Wendy's brides-to-be hadn't made it to the altar. Andrea Straka. April recognized the name right away. Another sad case. The day before her wedding, Andrea Straka had jumped or fallen—or been pushed—off a subway platform in front of an oncoming train. She'd been killed instantly. The tragedy made all the newspapers. A horrible thing, a famous unsolved case. Had it been suicide, accident, homicide? No one knew for sure.

April's heart raced as she considered the possibilities this new death presented. One bride had died the day
before
her wedding, another bride on the day of her wedding. Eight months apart. April tended to think in threes. Another bride on the day
after
her wedding, sometime down the road? Or what about eight months
before
Andrea's death? Had there been another case—a young woman just engaged?

Maybe Tovah's murder meant that a killer was getting bolder, was coming out in the open. April shivered and shook herself. Her cynicism was getting ahead of the evidence. She had no reason yet to panic. Still, she had to take Andrea's death very seriously. Someone had to take another look at Andrea's file, reinterview the witnesses, the whole nine yards.

April also had to dig deeper to see if anyone else had died near a wedding date. Andrea's death could be a coincidence, but cops were suspicious. When it came to police work, April didn't believe in coincidences.

Thirty

T
hunder rumbled over the city, and jagged shafts of lightning cracked the sky open like an eggshell. The clouds let loose, sending rain down in a long free fall, so heavy the water itself sounded like thunder and the thunder like artillery in a war.

Prudence Hay had settled into a state of peaceful sleep Thursday night, knowing that rain was on the way and they were fully prepared for it. Her father, Terence Hay, was a Weather Channel aficionado. Throughout every day of his life he consulted it frequently. He checked the weather in the morning and afternoon before traveling back and forth to Long Island, and even before he left his office for lunch. He followed storms the way he studied the stock market, trying to keep out of trouble on both fronts.

His concern about rain had affected his decision so many months ago to have a hotel wedding, not a tented affair out at the house where a heavy rain would dampen a good deal more than spirits. He had one daughter to give away, not five or six like his brothers and sisters. One beautiful girl, and he didn't trust the weather to do her proud. Although Prudence would have preferred to hold her reception at home among the spring flowers, her father was always right. The way he always took charge in so many ways had irritated her hugely when she was young. But now his planning contingencies for weather and other disasters made her feel safe. He always said she should let him do the worrying for all of them, so she did.

That was the reason she slept well through the thunder and lightning. Her gown was in the apartment, perfect now. Kim had embroidered a little angel in it. White on white, so it was very subtle. A nice touch, she thought. Tomorrow afternoon they would have their rehearsal in the cathedral and stay for Mass. Then they would have their prewedding dinner. It didn't matter if it rained. Her father's careful planning would become part of the story in the toasts. No one's feet would get wet in the grass. The lunch would not be cold. The St. Regis would bloom like Hawaii indoors. The rain came and washed her doubts away. She was confident she and Thomas would live happily ever after just like they were supposed to.

Thirty-one

T
hursday marked the fourth night that April slept alone in her empty family house. Her parents were still away, and not even the poodle was there for company. Mike was taking a hard line with her, probably hurting more from his injuries than he'd ever admit. And Ching was insistent about the maid of honor thing. Nearly a week had passed since Tovah's murder, and now there was just a week to go until Ching's wedding. This uncomfortable juxtaposition of events worried April.

Two weeks—three weekends—meant they were almost in the mid-position of a triangle with tragedy on one side and great happiness for a loved one on the other. In Chinese philosophy numbers had a huge significance. To April, this mid-position of three was like the midsection of a hexagram in the
I Ching
in which things could change for the better or the worse, depending on the action or nonaction one took.

Whether from Confucius or Mencius, the Tao, or the smiling Buddha, the underlying principles for the superior person (or state) in Chinese thinking were three: whether or not to take action, when to take action, and how to take action. The Tao's absolute favorite course of action was perseverance in complete passivity, a nearly impossible path to travel if one happened to be a cop.

Since Mike's ultimatum about getting married and Ching's pronouncement that she was stubborn, April had steadily been taking stock of herself. She knew that people with whom she'd worked said she was inner-directed, like an ingrown toenail—frustrating and difficult to get to know. Such an assessment might well be in her record. And she knew it was there because she was neither fully Chinese nor perfectly American and couldn't be both at once.

As much as she'd longed to be all reason, April had always been guided by less rational laws of the universe—those of her own gut instincts and the wisdom of the ancients. The homicide of a bride, when Mike wanted her to be his bride and Skinny Dragon Mother wanted her to be anyone else's, brought it all into sharp focus. Tovah's murder had aggravated Chinese superstition (her own, Auntie Mai's, Ching's), and she was stuck trying to sort out reality from feeling.

In many of April's cases, synchronicity played a part. One unconnected event after another suddenly connected unexpectedly in a brutal murder, in catastrophe, and these evils created chaos. The abrupt, dreadful occurrences that changed lives forever were often completely random. The victim was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The randomness, the luck of the draw in so many aspects of life even in the twenty-first century, was at the core of Chinese superstition and was in complete opposition to Western belief in causality and reason.