Burning Time awm-1 Read online

  Burning Time

  ( April Woo Mysteries - 1 )

  Leslie Glass

  A serial killer leaves a college coed to die in the California desert, his signature of fire seared into her flesh....

  A beautiful Chinese-American detective, recently transferred from Chinatown to the Upper West Side, is assigned a routine missing-persons case...

  A famous doctor returns home from a lecture to discover that his actress wife has been living a secret life....

  Now, the paths of the cop, the killer, and the psychiatrist are about to converge....

  A savage killer is on the loose in New York City. His calling card is a tattoo of flames; his trail of victims leads from the scorched sands of Californa to the blistering heart of Manhattan.

  Only Detective April Woo can block this vicious madman's next move. And with the help of psychiatrist Jason Frank, this NYPD policewoman will prove that the predator she's hunting is no ordinary killer--but then, April Woo is no ordinary cop.

  From the Paperback edition.

  From Publishers Weekly

  All superficial characterization and sadism, this thriller about a serial killer, its plot founded entirely on coincidence, is charmless in the extreme. When a man and a woman show up at NYPD headquarters to file a missing persons report on their college-age daughter, detective April Woo does the paperwork. Woo eventually learns that California cops have found the daughter's apparently fire-branded body near San Diego. Shortly thereafter, a New York psychiatrist approaches Woo with several disturbing letters sent to his porno-star wife. The letters have a San Diego postmark, prompting Woo to connect them with the murderer (3000 miles away, but not for long.) Horrific, if predictable, descriptions of the pyromaniac killer and his methods of torture are interspersed with updates on Woo's investigation. Glass ( To Do No Harm ) attempts a multicultural angle by casting Woo as a Chinese-American in conflict with her old-fashioned immigrant mother, but the tension between them is hackneyed at best. From its farfetched premise to its suspenseless action-drama climax, the novel is a chore to wade through.

  ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  FROM BANTAM BOOKS

  Hanging Time

  Loving Time

  A Bantam Book / published in association with Doubleday

  Doubleday hardcover edition / October 1993

  Bantam paperback edition / August 1995

  Copyright © 1993, 1995 by Leslie Glass.

  For Rick

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  For technical assistance and inspiration, very special thanks to Dr. Richard C. Friedman, my psychology professor and consultant of many years. Thanks also to all the good people at the NYPD, particularly Lieutenant Bob Davis and Detective-Sergeant John Ranieri, who head the Missing Persons Squad; Sergeant Nancy Mclaughlin; and Detective Margie Y. Yee. In the area of forensic science, thanks to Dr. Mark Taff, forensic pathologist, President and Founder of the New York Society of Forensic Sciences at Lehman College, and Dr. Lawrence Kobilinsky, Professor of Forensic Science, Director DNA Fingerprinting Laboratory at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. For help with motorcycles, and the Navy, thanks to Dr. Jay David Glass; Kent Brown; and Dorothy Fier.

  Gratitude and blessings are much deserved by my editor Kate Miciak, whose passion for books in general, and mysteries in particular, should be deemed a National Treasure; Jamie Warren Youll for a whole lot more than her beautiful book covers; my agent, Sarah Jane Freymann, friend and weatherperson for all seasons; and Alex, Lindsey, and Edmund Glass, for absolutely everything else.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgment

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Preview of Loving Time

  “But profound as psychology is,

  it’s a knife that cuts both ways.”

  —DOSTOYEVSKI,

  The Brothers Karamazov

  Prologue

  On her last day in San Diego Ellen Roane lay on the beach and reached out her arms to the dazzling sun as if it were a lover she could catch and hold tight forever. Out here you could see the sun setting and the moon rising at the same time. The moon was impressive in its cold, far-off brilliance, but the sun was right there complete in the way passion was, providing everything needed for a lifetime in a single moment.

  Ellen soaked it in, trying to make all her anxieties about college and her parents’ separation melt into the sand around her. Even this far away it wasn’t easy to do. There was so much aggravation all the time, so much yelling. Just hearing either one of them say her name these days was enough to give her a headache.

  The sea was calm, too calm for surfers, but they paddled their boards out there anyway, waiting for a wave. Ellen watched them and wondered how many times her mother had tried to call her. By now she would have her father in a state, too.

  Ellen smiled to herself at how clever she was. She had crossed the country by herself to have an adventure and think things through. It amazed her how easy it had been. All she had to do was flash the credit cards her father had given her when she moved out in the fall. And suddenly she knew what it was like to be a grown-up. She could go anywhere, do anything she wanted, buy anything. It was extraordinary. All she had to do was fly away, and for the first time in her life her parents couldn’t pick up the phone and reach into her brain.

  The relief was extreme. She turned over to toast on the other side, thinking the thing over. She was getting ready to pick someone up. After two days of eating meals on her own,
sleeping in The Coral Reef Bed & Breakfast, and going to the beach, that was all that was left to do.

  At noon she had lunch at a tiny health food place across the street from the beach. She took a long walk, then settled back down on the sand and closed her eyes. She couldn’t help thinking the deep warmth of the California sun was almost mystical in its healing power. New York was soul-destroying in every way. Mean and gray and cold. Now that she knew that, she knew she should have come to college here, escaped all the way instead of just moving a few blocks uptown. She checked her watch, wondering when the guy would come back.

  She didn’t mind that he didn’t make his move the first time he saw her two days ago. She was tired of people crowding her. This guy hung back. She knew she was gorgeous. Maybe he was shy. She kind of liked that. He watched her from the parking lot, leaning against his motorcycle. He always wore shades, but she could feel his eyes on her, feel him centered on her absolutely. It was a pleasant feeling, like something out of the movies.

  Her mother liked to say a beautiful girl like Ellen could pick and choose among men. Why look down when it was just as easy to look up. If she were here she’d tell Ellen to look for intellectual ability, maybe head for the mountain where the Palomar Observatory was and make some celestial discovery in the way of a balding astronomer from the California Institute of Technology. Ellen snorted at the thought of her mother turned on by intellectuals whose only hair sprouted from their ears and noses. It was a proven fact that brilliant men were arrogant, self-involved, and ugly. And none of them could see well enough to admire her.

  Ellen liked the one who took her in whole, the one who didn’t come down on the beach with a lot of little-boy toys and pass her by with sliding glances. This guy was blond and older than a kid, definitely a movie-star type. He wore a black shirt and black jeans and had the most amazing motorcycle she had ever seen, a huge, glistening chrome-and-maroon thing. She began to worry that he wouldn’t come back.

  But at four-thirty, just as she was getting tired of lying around, he was there, up by the parking area staring at her. She waited for a few more minutes before getting up to leave. Slowly she pulled on her jeans and shirt. Then she walked up to the retaining wall where she sat for a minute to brush off the sand and put on her shoes. He approached her there.

  “Want to go for a ride?” He indicated the machine parked behind him with a wave of his hand.

  She tossed her blond hair and looked him over as if she might really be considering it. Finally she said, “Sure, why not?” and followed him to the motorcycle.

  She didn’t become uneasy even when the ride took her way east into the dry mountainous area of the North Country. She wasn’t frightened when he stopped far off the road, miles from the last passing car. It wasn’t until he grabbed her unexpectedly from behind and wrestled her to the ground, pulling at her clothes, that the sharp jolt of adrenaline shot through her. And even then she wasn’t terrified. Boys had jumped on her before, lost control and bullied their way into her. Sometimes a girl gambled and lost. It was an old story.

  When he started mumbling and hitting her and shoving himself into places in her body nothing had ever been before, it got to be different. Suddenly he was not like a person anymore. She couldn’t talk to him, or fight back in any way. His face was frozen in rage and every part of him was a weapon. He moved her around, twisting her body one way and then another on the rocky ground, trying new things to make her scream louder, beg him to stop. They were little things at first. Then he broke her arm at the elbow, cracked her ribs, and crushed her cheekbone. He kept at it for a long time.

  Finally he staked her to the darkening desert ground, her legs together and her arms out straight like a flattened Christ. Until then she thought she would survive. He had a knife, but he didn’t stab her. All the time he was hitting her he had it with him, sometimes in his hand. He made motions with it, but he didn’t stab her. Now she thought he would do it, make all the cuts he threatened to make. She was so afraid of the knife she could hardly breathe.

  Then suddenly he seemed to forget the knife. He started doing something else, getting things, muttering to himself. He lit some kind of torch, and a blast of light shot up into the sky. The explosion of heat and light lasted only seconds. Then the flame was extinguished.

  He said something that she didn’t hear because she was screaming so loud. He put his foot on her stomach to stop her bucking, and lowered the glowing brand exactly in the middle of her heaving chest. It made a hissing sound as it seared her skin off, eating the soft tissue of her breasts in some places all the way to the bone. Her screams and the smell of burning flesh rose all around.

  After she lost consciousness, he untied her and left Ellen Roane nude in the gully, as the desert temperature dropped steadily, and her wounds began to weep.

  1

  Jason Frank, MD, psychoanalyst, writer, and teacher, stood at the podium for several seconds before speaking. An inch shy of six feet, he looked like a member of the Kennedy clan in his gray pin-striped suit. He had a determined jaw and mouth, straight nose, light brown hair cut short, and wryly humorous brown eyes. He was thirty-eight, and had a forceful intensity that made both the crazy and the sane pay attention to him.

  The hundred or so members, trainees, residents, and hangers-on of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Center who had come to hear him speak paid attention to him now.

  “Can anybody remember the music in Death of a Salesman?” he asked to begin his lecture on Listening. “What instrument is played?”

  The attractive Ph.D. who had offered him her apartment and her body within the first five minutes of meeting him the previous night crossed her legs the other way and tapped her pencil on her knee.

  “An oboe?” she asked.

  Even though there was a smile on her face, the rat tat tat with the sharp point on her expensive pantyhose indicated to Jason she was still annoyed by his rebuff.

  He shook his head, as he had last night. He waited for a few other wrong answers before giving the right one.

  “The flute. If it had been an accordion you might well remember it. Why the flute?”

  Jason allowed the audience to speculate for a few minutes before he made his point. “It’s vital to see and hear everything because everything has meaning,” he told them. “The background details, both visual and aural, of a projected self are like a symphony orchestra playing in a very special concert. As analysts, we have to be able to identify the individual instruments to understand the nature of the harmony, or cacophony, that’s being played out in each personality.” He smiled.

  For example, the young Ph.D. courted rejection from a visiting speaker to fuel her paranoia and deep hostility to men. Someone else might only have seen a pretty woman looking for love. But Jason wouldn’t have been tempted anyway. He was more than happy with his beautiful wife.

  He sneaked a look at his watch, suddenly eager to get home to her. He became distracted for a moment as a wave of guilt washed over him, then recovered his concentration. He had three hours before he could get out of there and head for the airport.

  “Ah, I’m going to present three segments of taped interviews to show how the interviewing technique is informed by what I’ve noticed about each subject. These are consultations. I’ve never met any of the subjects before.”

  Jason hit the button and the first interview began. He was seated opposite a youngish heavy woman. The woman fluffed up her hair for the camera and began to tell about her eating problem. She said she wanted to be a size eight and had tried to lose weight for ten years. Then she gave a list of all the things she ate from eleven at night until one.

  “And then what do you do?” Jason asked.

  “And then I go into the bathroom and I force myself to vomit.”

  In the tape there was a frozen moment as the two looked at each other, and suddenly the woman started to sob.

  Jason shut off the tape and went to the blackboard that had been set up for him. He picked up a p
iece of chalk.

  “What are the important things revealed in this interview so far?” Jason asked.

  No one volunteered.

  “Come on, I absolutely insist. This isn’t school. Get in there and tell me what the important thing is because everyone has patients like this.”

  There was a minor shuffling before a hand was raised. Jason nodded.

  “She overeats,” a young man said.

  “She has bulemia,” a woman added.

  Jason wrote, Overeats, Bulemia, and turned back. “What sorts of things does she eat? Let’s make a list of what she eats. What does her refrigerator look like?” He made the list.

  “All right. What’s another important thing? I want you not only to tell me your observations about the things she mentioned, but also tell me things she hasn’t mentioned that are directly related to the things she has mentioned. That is, your inferences about what her life is like. So what’s the next important thing because we’re going to have to follow up on her.”

  “Well, she’s crying,” offered a bearded man in the back.

  Jason wrote Crying on the board. “Okay, what’s your hypothesis about her crying? Why is she crying?”

  Now the answers came more quickly.

  “Okay,” Jason said finally. “Let’s put the things together that we know.” He made the hypothesis. The subject was thirty years old, living alone, and desperately lonely. Something happened to her ten years ago that was connected with her eating. She was trying to fill herself up with food. Size eight had a special meaning to her. Other people were important to her because she cried when she made eye contact with him after her confession.

  “All right, what should I say to her next?” Jason asked.

  Everybody had a different answer. Ask about food, ask about loneliness. Ask about refrigerator.

  He turned on the tape. “You’re crying,” he had said to the woman. He opted for feelings. And then her story came out. She was a good candidate for psychotherapy.