Burning Time awm-1 Page 4

  On the table the regulator chimed its deep gong. Reflexively, Jason checked his watch. The regulator was a full five minutes slow.

  “It wasn’t a screening, was it?” he said suddenly.

  “What?” Emma said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, my love, it’s already opened. I saw it.”

  “When?” She reached for a towel to cover herself.

  “Just now. It’s at the Eighty-third Street theater.”

  “I thought your flight came in at seven.” She frowned, glancing quickly at her own clock, a functional, battery-operated alarm that was never wrong or quirky. “When did you get back?” she asked, confused by the discrepancy in timing.

  “About four. I didn’t stay for the lunch.”

  “Oh.” She stared at him. “You didn’t call.”

  “No, I thought I’d surprise you.”

  “You never surprise me.” There was a long pause. “Did you like it?” she asked when nothing more was forthcoming.

  “What do you think?” he replied, as calmly as he could.

  She smiled almost shyly. “The Times said it was good. So did the Voice.” She warmed to the praise. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  No, it wasn’t. Her appearing nude in a film that made psychiatrists seem evil was very far from wonderful. Jason dumped some clothes and books off the chair by the bed and sat heavily. Why did she tell him it was a screening when it was an opening? She must have wanted him to go to Toronto and miss it. He simply couldn’t believe her first film was in the theaters, had already been reviewed, and she had neglected to tell him a thing about it. He was utterly crushed.

  She, on the other hand, was smiling with wonder and excitement, obviously thrilled with herself. Where was her brain? She never asked him if the film would hurt him, never consulted with him. And it was a terrible embarrassment. His patients might not know that Emma Chapman was his wife, but his colleagues did. She had just opened a big window on their life that could not fail to humiliate him deeply.

  He watched her pull on another pair of stretch pants and sit cross-legged on the bed, holding the towel up to her neck to hide the breasts that were already property of the world.

  “Ronnie had three calls today,” she went on.

  Jesus Christ, there was more. He looked at her legs. “What did she call you about?” he asked.

  “About other scripts. Isn’t it amazing? After all the years when I couldn’t even get a commercial.” Emma talked as if she hadn’t done anything unusual, as if this sudden interest in her, these calls to her agent, were totally unexpected.

  “No, it’s not amazing,” Jason said. Of course she would get other offers to fuck on the screen. The camera loved her.

  “So, you liked it,” she said eagerly. “It’s kinky, isn’t it?”

  It was kinky all right. He paused for a long minute. If this were a session it would seem like an hour of empty space. Some of his patients squirmed in such spaces, felt they were falling into the abyss. He shook his head, sure of one thing. He wasn’t kinky. He couldn’t stand sadistic movies. Hated horror. He experienced enough terror in his work. He didn’t want to see it in his free time, didn’t want a wife who would do something like this—mock his work, destroy his dignity, his privacy, everything he believed in. Still, he was a professional. He kept his voice calm.

  “Why didn’t you mention the nudity and the sex to me?” he said softly.

  She twisted the towel in her hand. “I don’t know, it was a private thing.”

  “A private thing?”

  “Yeah, kind of like therapy. You don’t talk about therapy with anyone, do you? It’s your private life, your work.” She looked at him challengingly. “This is my work.”

  “Emma, there’s a difference. Therapy really is private. No one else can know what happens in it. It has to be confidential.”

  Emma shrugged. “Well, I thought it would help me be more secure, because up there it isn’t really me.”

  “Oh? Who is it?” He didn’t try to control the coldness of his tone.

  “It’s the character. I do what the character would do.”

  Jason shook his head. “Baby, it’s still you up there, and you have something to do with me. You’re not alone in the world. You’re married to me. Don’t my feelings count?”

  She lifted a shoulder with a provocative smile. “Well, did it turn you on?”

  “Jesus, is that what you wanted to do?”

  “Oh, come on, Jason, acting is what I do. You knew that when you married me. Don’t you ever secretly want to sleep with a star?” she asked slyly.

  “No,” he said sharply. “No, I don’t. And we agreed you’d never do that kind of thing.”

  Her lip trembled. “I thought you’d like it. Your whole world is mystery and secrets. You love your patients. You live in a secret world with them. I have nothing to do with your life.”

  “That part of my life. Only that part,” he protested. “You’re in this part. You’re everything in this part.”

  But even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t true. They came home with him. They lived with him in his heart. They wounded him, and touched him, and often made him want to cry. Nobody could compete with the drama of their lives.

  “I can’t live in anybody’s shadow,” she was saying.

  Emma had a life of her own. She didn’t live in his shadow. Jason couldn’t bear this. He got up to wind one of his beautiful, silenced clocks. He heard her now, as if from a long way away, telling him she had done it to have something of her own.

  6

  They had seen the buzzards. That’s what Jimmy said made them go off the dirt track the bikers had worn years ago into the rough landscape of the lower hills. The girl was so hysterical Darlene had to take her into the storage room that doubled as a lounge and give her some herbal tea. She’d already vomited a couple of times, but still looked pretty green.

  “Horrible, horrible, horrible. I’ll never get it out of my head.” The little girl with bright red hair didn’t look old enough to be riding around the hills behind a boy on a powerful motorcycle. She couldn’t stop crying.

  “Just drink a little of this,” Darlene suggested. “It really works.”

  The girl sipped, making a face as if she’d rather be having a beer.

  “What’s your name?” Darlene let go of the hand she had been holding and took her pad out.

  “Scarlett, don’t laugh,” the girl said.

  “I won’t laugh.”

  Nobody was old enough to find a dead girl being eaten by birds. “Scarlett what? I’d like to call your mother.”

  She shook her head. “I’ll wait for Jimmy.”

  “You’ll be here a while then.”

  Jimmy had insisted on taking Sheriff Regis back there to show just where it was, even though they might be able to find it on their own, the teenager said, because of the birds.

  “I didn’t have anything to cover it.” Jimmy seemed apologetic about that.

  Sheriff Newt Regis, whose hair had gone gray by the time he was thirty, and who was now forty-three, churned into action. He was not as lean as he had been and already had a grandbaby, but he was fast when he had reason to move. He roused the coroner from a nap to come out and have a look—and bring an ambulance. He called Raymond and Jesse in from the field and told them to bring the equipment. If it was a crime scene, they wouldn’t have a second chance to go over it. He called Rosie and said he wouldn’t be having her Monday night pot roast.

  Then he sighed deeply because this could very well mark the beginning of spring, and got into his car to follow the kid.

  For Newt Regis, spring was not a welcome time in north San Diego County. Spring was when bikers from all over the world started drifting in to camp in the hills and hang around raising hell. They came for the motorcycle races at Carlsbad, and some of them could do some pretty terrible things. Stealing people, or killing them, was just one. Newt didn’t know which was worse. He’d heard gypsies used to take gi
rls. Well, now the Hell’s Angels roaring through a town sometimes grabbed a pretty girl off the street just like that and drugged her so bad she didn’t know who she was or where she came from. Then they’d take her to another state and sell her. The fear that one of them would go berserk in his town made Newt pretty nervous and jerky from about March fifteenth to the beginning of June. Then when the races were over and it started getting really hot, they took off.

  The rest of the year was pretty quiet in his small town of Potoway Village, a retreat of modest houses and stores tucked almost two thousand feet up in the hills of San Diego County, east of Carlsbad. It was a wild place, typical of California, where within the space of a few miles, there was glittering ocean and beaches; mountains that climbed as high as five thousand feet; and desert, as barren and dry as any in the world.

  Newt wanted to keep his people safe, but he also liked quiet because there were only six of them in the Sheriff’s Office in Potoway: two grumbling rookies too green to know when to wipe their asses, two experienced deputies close to retirement, and Darlene, who typed, manned the phone, took care of women and children, and made awful coffee. Only six, and if there was more going on than a bad wreck on the road, a robbery at the Quick Stop, a rattlesnake in someone’s living room, and a drunk or an OD, they just couldn’t handle it without help from outside.

  Usually, though, they only had one or two of these things happening at a time. Camp Pendleton, the Marine base that covered over twenty miles on the north-south highway that everybody called the Five, had their own policing; and Oceanside—affectionately called Marine City U.S.A.—and the bigger towns to the west netted most of the drug scene and homicides.

  In addition, in this part of the world so close to the Mexican border, the Feds known as IMNAT constantly prowled the hills and deserts looking for illegal aliens. There was a lot of Federal and State money in law enforcement in San Diego County. But there weren’t many signs of it in Potoway, so Newt made it a special concern of his to keep up-to-date. He went to conferences and took some courses. Once he went all the way to Atlanta for one. And he still worried about what the Sheriff’s Office of Potoway would do if they ever had a really big case to solve. Collecting material from crime scenes was a complicated science these days. They could tell a lot of things from fibers and soil and the patterns blood made when it spattered, a lot more things than they used to. The last course he took emphasized how it was vital for labs and crime scene people to work together closely. Out here, close was a long way away. The nearest lab was thirty-five miles from here, and that kind of mattered because things like body fluids had to be handled just right, or they spoiled.

  Newt gunned the accelerator and turned on his siren. Already the kid was way ahead of him, charging his Harley along the mountain road, clearly delighted to have a cop chasing him with no chance of being arrested.

  It took nearly twenty minutes to get to the spot on the edge of the desert where the land started chunking up into hills and ridges. It was late afternoon, nearly evening. When Newt got out of the car, the boy had already been standing there motionless beside his bike for some time, riveted to the sight of two buzzards tearing at the nose and lips and cheeks of a dead girl, whose naked red and black body had already begun to dry and split in the sun.

  7

  It didn’t look so terrific, this college dormitory. More like a run-down apartment building. April parked the car quite far from the curb, kind of on an angle, and left it there. One thing was good about being a cop. You could leave your car anywhere and never get a ticket. She always locked it, though. April adjusted the gun at her waist. Never go into a situation alone was the rule. But this wasn’t a situation. It was an investigation. You could do that alone.

  Abandoned buildings were April’s personal terror. When she was on the beat in Bedford-Stuyvesant for a few months, she got adjusted to a lot of things. Addicts. They used to call them junkies. Heroin was the thing, and free-basing. The addicts cooked the stuff and sometimes caught on fire when they were too high to be careful. Lot of abandoned buildings there.

  “Mei Mei’s daughter is an accountant,” April’s mother told her. “Why don’t you do something up like that?” She thought a cop was a low thing to be. Not as high as Mei Mei’s daughter. Another friend of hers had a son who was a doctor. She was always trying to get them to meet. Neither one wanted to.

  It wasn’t only that the job was not as high as maybe working at Merrill Lynch in computer programming. It was the fact that cops got infected through the eyes. They saw too many things.

  Well, you got used to it. Seeing people shot up pretty bad. Stomach wounds, head wounds. April was first on the scene once when a Korean was shot in the neck in the middle of a robbery. The guy with him was already dead, and this guy was lying there in a lake of blood. It was pumping out of a hole in his neck with every heartbeat. Five months in the Academy didn’t exactly train anybody to deal with neck wounds of this severity, but April didn’t panic. She tried to plug up the hole, applied as much pressure as she could, and stayed with him until they got him out.

  He was one of the lucky ones. Somehow the bullet missed the carotid artery. He lost his voice box, and was six months in the hospital, but he didn’t die. She did the follow-up on him, so she knew how he had to learn to talk by holding the hole closed with a flap of skin.

  Being a cop wasn’t as high maybe as being a doctor, but April knew the Korean wouldn’t have lived if she hadn’t been there to get help and keep his blood from escaping out the hole in his neck while they waited for the ambulance.

  She wasn’t afraid of getting hit like that. She’d pulled her gun, but she’d never used it except at the range every month, and no one had ever shot at her. What scared her was the empty, falling-down buildings, with the windows boarded up, and what happened in them. There were ghosts in the buildings, living and dead. Sometimes the windows weren’t boarded up. They were just holes. She could see the pigeons flying in and out.

  What scared April was getting a call about a dead body in one of those buildings and having to go in and find it. Down an elevator shaft, or just lying on the floor in a room upstairs. She used to dream about it every night. Getting that call and having to climb the stairs looking for it, having no idea which room it was in. Or what else she might find. On the night shift when she was a rookie she confessed this to one person, and then everybody knew.

  Long-ago advice from her mother: Never tell your weak place. People can break you from there. After she told about her weak place, April worried that they would get her there when that body turned up.

  They didn’t, though. When she finally got the call she had known would come because she dreamed it too many times for it not to happen, her supervisor told her she didn’t have to go in. He didn’t break her in her weak place after all. He told her to wait for backup. It was on the third floor of a walk-up. Boarded up except for the front door.

  April stood downstairs that day, thinking they would make her go in when they got there because you weren’t supposed to have any weak places in NYPD. If she didn’t go in when they asked her to, she wouldn’t get promoted. She’d have to stay on foot patrol in Bed-Stuy all her life. That was another scary prospect.

  April knew whenever she was really frightened from deep inside it always came from something her mother told her, something Chinese that didn’t make sense in America. Her mother talked constantly, and couldn’t seem to stop. Her father hardly spoke at all. Sai Woo said she had to fill the silences her husband made or else ghosts would come in and fill them with wickedness. April said there weren’t any ghosts in America, and her father might have something to say if Sai Woo gave him a place to let his thoughts out.

  This was when her mother looked at her with the greatest scorn and dropped another one of her priceless pearls that had nothing to do with anything.

  “Sun rises in the East, goes down in the West,” like April was supposed to know what that meant.

  Still, April
did know what it meant. It meant there were ghosts in America, and you were supposed to eat the ones that plagued you just like in China. If you devoured them, they healed you. In China they would devour anything at all. If it was hairy or bony or truly awful, they ground it up into powder, put it in boiling water, and drank it.

  As April stood outside the Bed-Stuy building waiting for backup that day, she felt old China crowding all around her. If she were a true American cop, she’d have no trouble climbing those stairs and looking at the body. So what? How bad could it be? But if she were truly Chinese under everything, she’d have to consume some little something, a hair or a piece of dust, something from the scene. If she didn’t do that, the weak place would always be there inside of her.

  But something magical happened when her supervisor showed up and said, “All right, April, you stay down here and secure the area.”

  “No, it’s okay. I can do it,” she had assured him.

  She climbed up the three flights of stairs, not first maybe. But she was there when they found it. It had been there for months. There wasn’t even any smell anymore, nothing like a dead animal decaying behind a wall. There was just a pile of rags and hair and bone with some dried skin that looked like leather covering it. Was this what I was afraid of, she asked herself. She decided she was all American and didn’t have to consume it.

  So this was what I wanted, she thought now, going up the stairs into the dorm where Ellen Roane lived. The place was gloomy and looked almost deserted. The girl would have been better off living at home. Better address downtown. But not the freedom to do as she pleased. April went inside. There was a fat guard sitting at a small table that didn’t look like it was always there.

  “I’m looking for Ellen Roane,” she said.

  “Well, you won’t find her here,” the guard said. He was Hispanic, not very friendly.

  “How about Connie Shagan?” April said. Connie Shagan, the Roanes had told her, was Ellen’s roommate.

  “Won’t find her either. Or any of them.”