April didn’t feel normal yet. She was still thinking about the case every day. She could still feel the scorching blast that knocked her and Sanchez, the Sergeant supervising her, through a door and sent them crashing down a flight of stairs into the garage below. If they’d hit the wall of the upstairs room instead, they would not have survived the fire. Sanchez lost his mustache, his eyebrows, some of his hair, and had burns on his ears, neck, and forehead. He had shoved April behind him at the last second even though she had her gun drawn and could have shot him. So there were no scars on her face, only on her hands and ankles. She owed him.
In her first days of being a detective, when April didn’t have to wear the blue uniform anymore, she had tried dressing in skirts, like a woman. In the summer she wore short sleeves on the street. After a few experiences of scrambling around garbage cans, trying to catch a mugger, her legs all scratched and hanging out, and getting a favorite skirt caught in the barbed wire somebody had put on his back window in Chinatown to discourage intruders, she knew better. Now she wore long-sleeved blouses, jackets, and man-tailored trousers all year around.
Sometimes when she looked down at the scars on her hands that might never match the brown of her skin, she thought the blouse, the jacket, and the pants had spared the rest of her. But deep inside she knew it was really Sanchez’s macho reflex—to protect the women at all costs—that saved her. She often wondered if he would have made the same move if she had been a male detective, or a Sergeant like himself.
Today Sanchez would be back from a week’s vacation in Mexico. He’d probably be unbearably Spanish for quite a while. April swallowed some hot water with lemon in it, old Chinese remedy for she didn’t even know what, and started her leg lifts. She wasn’t sure exactly when flesh had gotten to be such a point of interest to her. Sometime in the year since she was transferred from the 5th Precinct in Chinatown to the Two-O on the Upper West Side she started working out more.
She still missed Chinatown. She was born there, lived there most of her life, was posted to the 5th after eighteen months on street patrol in Brooklyn. She was promoted to Detective 3rd grade after only two years in Chinatown, then Detective 2nd grade, which earned her Sergeant’s pay but not the supervisory rank. She had expected to remain, a social worker with a gun, in Chinatown forever. The move to the Upper West Side made no sense. In a police force of over thirty thousand, with only a few hundred of that number Asian, it seemed absurd to be assigned to a precinct that was overwhelmingly white, African American, and Hispanic. Of course, if she hadn’t been transferred, she would never have met Sanchez, and who knows, might even have married Jimmy Wong and been unhappy the rest of her life, not to mention just a Detective 2nd Grade with not so many ambitions for a higher rank and a college degree.
April finished her exercises, showered, dressed quickly, and set off from Astoria, Queens, hoping to get into Manhattan before Sanchez did.
The traffic on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge was a thick clot as usual but light on Eighty-fifth Street, crosstown through Central Park. She made it to the Two-O by 7:50 and parked her white Chrysler Le Baron in the police lot next to the precinct. Mike’s red Camaro was already there.
Upstairs in the squad room, Sanchez was working the phone, feet up on an open drawer, wearing his usual combination of gray shirt and darker gray tie, light gray trousers. He liked to mix his grays. A gray linen jacket hung over the back of his chair. His black hair and bristly mustache were as lush as ever, and he was, as April had predicted, very dark from the Mexican sun.
For a week the squad room had smelled like old steel furniture. Now a familiar odor charged the air again. Sanchez was back. In the early morning his aftershave was strongest, powerful enough to sweeten a garbage dump.
“Hi.” April breathed in and whistled. “Wow.”
He grinned and put his hand over the receiver.
“Miss me?”
She shook her head.
“Aw, and I thought you were mi querida.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she muttered.
“Close enough.” He took his hand off the receiver. “Yeah, yeah, I’m here. What day did you say you saw Elonzo with the car in question?”
April slung her bag down on her desk and went through the motions of getting the files of her current cases together. Sure she missed Sanchez, and he knew it. But she would never say so. It would give him even more ideas than he already had. Although she’d heard there was a lot of Chinese-Mexican mixing in California, the combination would never work for her. Not with her hopes for the future, and the kind of family she had.
Anyway, no matter what their private feelings, Sanchez was a detective-sergeant on the way up. He’d fixed it so that she worked under his “close supervision” a whole lot of the time. Nobody in the precinct had any doubts about what that meant. Sanchez had monkey business on his mind, and he was in a position to hold her back or push her ahead. She had to be careful about a lot of things, and falling in love with him was absolutely out of the question.
“Yeah, but Thursday of what month?” he asked. He made a note on the paper in front of him.
“Oh, now it’s this month. Can you give me a date on that? A date. Like Thursday the fourth. Or Thursday the twenty-second.”
At ten o’clock April Woo and Sergeant Sanchez were the first detectives to see Maggie Wheeler.
4
Oh, God, she’s in there!” the woman cried, pointing to a door at the back. “Oh, God, the poor kid. Who could do that? How could that happen? Oh, God.”
April looked quickly around, saying some comforting words she wasn’t even aware of. The store was only two blocks from the precinct and already blue uniforms were swarming around outside. It was one of the expensive boutiques that April noticed every day and never went into because she couldn’t afford anything there. Right now it had some colorful shirts that probably couldn’t be washed, hanging on a clothesline in the window. Below the clothesline there were some piles of sand on the floor. Like everyone was supposed to be at the beach wearing shirts like this, April supposed.
The woman started screeching at her.
“What kind of city is this that two young women can’t even work in a store without getting killed?”
A terrible city, April didn’t have time to say.
“And hundreds of cops only a block away. What the hell were you all doing when this happened?”
In a second April had taken in the soft, pouchy skin all blotched with relocated makeup, hair redder than anything nature ever intended, the funny figure with its skinny legs and thick middle, big breasts straining at a lime-green silk shirt tucked into matching shorts with a big twisted rope belt that emphasized the nonexistent waist. April estimated her age at late fifties or early sixties. Understandably hysterical. The woman said it was her store, and yes it was all right if April took a look around.
“Here, sit down,” April suggested. “I’ll be right back.”
Crime Scene had already been called, but there was no way of knowing how many homicides the sixty-man unit was working just then. There were about six homicides a day in New York City. She and Sanchez could be body-sitting for ten minutes or three hours, depending on when a team was available. April headed where the woman said the body was. Two? Was it two bodies now?
There was only a tiny space at the back, hardly big enough to be a storeroom. The door was open. April hesitated for a second and then pushed it open as far as it would go, careful not to leave a print.
“Oh.” She recoiled involuntarily at the sight of the dead girl.