Cloudy with doubt for a long time, Charles’s eyes slowly cleared to a hard intensity. From time to time as Jason spoke, Charles stopped him with a question, then nodded at the answer. Finally Jason finished.
Charles tapped his coffee spoon against the table, shaking his head at the cracked Formica tabletop. For a moment the two friends sat in silence as Charles searched for a response to a situation that was incomprehensible to him. The people Charles knew and treated suffered from a different kind of illness. They didn’t do things like this.
“I can’t believe it,” he murmured, finally raising his head to look Jason in the eye. But even as Charles spoke in denial, Jason could see that all their years of training, and their long and close relationship, weighed more heavily than any doubts he could have. Charles did believe it.
Jason reached out to pat his friend’s arm, then raised his hand for the check.
74
Hannabelle started barking the second Milicia opened the door. She was pretty good about staying in the cage and not making too much noise when Milicia was out, but the minute Milicia returned, the dog went wild, barking and scratching at the wire sides to get out. Milicia always let her out right away because she couldn’t stand the racket.
She couldn’t stand it now. “Shut up,” she said sharply.
Suddenly Hannabelle was a liability. Milicia didn’t know why the police were so interested in the dog. What did they know anyway? Even if they thought one of the dogs had something to do with it, how could they tell which one? Keep calm, she told herself. There was no way to tell which one. It was all a bluff.
But even so, the sight of Hannabelle made her sick. She couldn’t remember now why the animal was there in her life. She didn’t even like dogs.
Ar, ar, ar. Hannabelle sobbed like a baby, deep inside her throat.
“Shut up!”
Milicia stood in the doorway, studying the living room to see if anything had been moved. The doorman had told her a Chinese cop had been to the building looking for her, but had not asked to go inside the apartment. Milicia didn’t trust the doorman. Maybe he had let the cop in and that’s how the police knew about Hannabelle.
Damn fucking dog. “Shut up,” she screamed at it.
Hannabelle barked louder, combining grating yelps with her intolerable whine for maximum effect. She wanted love, had to pee. Why couldn’t she get out?
Milicia squinted through the slanting afternoon sunlight to see if the thin layer of dust on the antique tables had been disturbed. It didn’t look like it. Then she crossed to the window, impatiently pulling off the jacket and blouse that smelled so offensive to her in the police station. She didn’t see anything unusual on the street.
Her apartment was on the twenty-second floor. It was decorated with as many of her parents’ antiques from the house in Old Greenwich as would fit in the two-bedroom rental. Milicia was very proud of it. Everything was dark wood, Queen Anne, with graceful curves and carved ball feet. She’d had everything carefully repaired after her parents’ death. The nicks and marks and stains from all those years of abuse were gone now. The settee and wing chairs had new upholstery and no longer sagged in the arms and seats.
Now it was obvious what kind of people she had come from. This was how it had all looked in her grandfather’s day, when the Stanton family was everything it should be. After her parents’ death, the IRS made her pay tens of thousands of dollars just to keep the pitiful furniture she had planned to throw away. She hadn’t known how valuable it all was until the lawyers showed her the tax bills the estate would have to pay to own it.
The Sotheby people said the highly polished silver tea service on the Queen Anne sideboard in the dining area was genuine George III, worth a fortune. By the time Milicia was an adolescent, it had long since been stuffed in the back of a closet, black with tarnish.
Ar, ar, ar.
“Shut the fuck up, you little bitch.” Milicia’s face stiffened with rage as she looked through the kitchen door.
Hannabelle was standing on her hind legs with her muzzle poked through the wires. Her eyes were bright, black, puzzled. She pawed at the cage door, showing that she wanted to get out. When her mistress didn’t respond, she cocked her head and raised the pitch of her wail. She weighed only three pounds, but she made a lot of noise.
Milicia threw her clothes on the floor, didn’t care if anyone saw her in her bra through the window.
“Bitch.” She stepped into the kitchen and opened the cage.
In a second Hannabelle had charged out and was circling Milicia’s feet, barking happily, jumping up, her tongue out, lapping furiously at whatever she could reach. Milicia watched her for a second with utter disgust. Then, as Hannabelle pawed at Milicia’s ankles, one of her razorlike baby claws snagged Milicia’s panty hose. An ugly run snaked up her leg.
“Shit—” Milicia reached down for the little dog, scooped her up with one hand, and held her out at arm’s length, scolding her furiously. The dog’s woolly body was still, her legs hung down, her eyes were bright with despair and puzzlement.
“Bad dog!” Milicia screamed. “Very bad dog!” She brought Hannabelle to her chest, squeezing her hard so she didn’t have to look at her. The dog was trouble. She didn’t know what to do with her.
She wanted to get rid of her, but it would be suspicious if Hannabelle suddenly disappeared. The puppy clung to her, making pitiful mewing noises like a baby. Milicia smacked it hard, overwhelmed with the impulse to wring its neck. She thought for a long time about killing it, trying to decide if she should do it, while the puppy cried.
75
It was mid-afternoon, just before three o’clock. From inside 1055 Second Avenue came the sounds of running water and a dog barking. Downstairs, the chandelier shop was closed. Its heavy gate was locked with a massive padlock.
Two people had tried to enter 1055 in the last hour. A tall, bulky woman, well dressed in a designer suit, had walked back and forth in front of the building for nearly fifteen minutes, looking up for signs of life. She tried the bell a number of times, stepped back on the sidewalk, and looked up at the windows again. Her pale hair had recently been molded into a complicated style of swoops and swirls that didn’t move when she did. Finally she took a key out of her bag and tried it on the inside door. A second later she was back out on the sidewalk, hailing a taxi.
The other person who came to the door of the brownstone was a black man with dreadlocks. He, too, rang the bell and tried to get into the building with a key that didn’t fit. He, too, went away after a few minutes.
It was hot in the van. From time to time the whine of the dog came piercingly out of the amplifier.
Mike clapped his hands over his ears. “Ow, can’t you fix that, man?”
Ben, the sound expert, adjusted a knob. “That better?”
The barking stopped abruptly. Now they couldn’t hear anything.
“Uh-oh. Can you get it back?”
“I don’t know. I’m not getting anything. Maybe she took the collar off.” Ben played with the knobs.
“Shit.”
“She didn’t take it off,” April said after a minute. “She just picked up the dog. It stops crying when she picks it up.”
Discouraged, Mike sighed and stretched. “I knew this wouldn’t work.”
“We didn’t have a lot of options,” April murmured. They couldn’t exactly put a wire on Camille without her knowing it. They couldn’t bug the whole house. And they couldn’t just let her go back in there alone while they sat outside without any clue what was happening inside.