Burning Time Read Online Free Page B

“I needed to know.”
    “What would be the point?” he muttered.
    April made a note of the man’s hostility. She decided to reassure Mrs. Roane that Detective April Woo could do the job. She leaned back slightly in her desk chair and unbuttoned her jacket so that the Smith and Wesson .38 strapped on her waist could be seen clearly.
    “Yes, ma’am,” she said for the third time. “I am a cop and a detective.” She took the gold shield out of herpocket. The promotion to detective had come after only two years on the force. That was how good they thought she was. Down there, anyway, in the 5th.
    “You don’t look like a cop,” Jennifer Roane said.
    “For God’s sake, stop embarrassing the officer and let’s move on …”
    “Detective,” April corrected. “It’s all right. People say it all the time.”
    She never knew if she didn’t look like a cop because she was a woman, or because she didn’t wear a uniform except in parades, or because she was Asian.
    “Our daughter disappeared,” the man said. “What do we do?” He wasn’t going to yell because this young Chinese person had kept him waiting for an hour when she clearly didn’t have anything to do. He just wanted to get it over with.
    “When did you see her last?” April asked gently.
    “Four or five days ago. Saturday, I think,” the man said.
    The woman nodded. “Yeah, Saturday.”
    April made a note. She always more or less ignored the forms and started over. The forms didn’t tell much of a story. And often what people said downstairs were not the same things that they said upstairs.
    “You haven’t seen your daughter in more than a week?”
    “Well, she doesn’t live with us,” the father said defensively. He looked at the woman. “Either of us.”
    “Oh.” So none of them lived together. April made a note and starred it.
    “So, um, Ellen disappeared from where she lives on the twenty-first. Where is that?”
    “Well, she didn’t disappear the twenty-first. She disappeared the twenty-fifth,” the woman said, tearing up again.
    “And today is the twenty-seventh,” April murmured.
    “We thought you had to wait forty-eight hours,” she said quickly. She dabbed at her eyes.
    “We thought we’d hear from her,” the husband corrected.
    “Well, there is no rule about that. How old is she and where does she live?” April asked.
    Maybe this Ellen Roane didn’t fit into any of the categories they could investigate. People didn’t understand not everyone who disappeared was missing. Over eighteen, people could go where they wanted, without fear of being looked for, harassed, picked up somewhere by the FBI. Married people who had just had enough took off all the time. They couldn’t go looking for every missing spouse.
    There had to be some mitigating evidence: The person was over sixty-five or had a handicap of some sort, or had a history of mental illness; or else some indication the person was endangered.
    The mother chewed on her upper lip to control herself. April felt her panic and sympathized. This didn’t look like too happy a scene. The daughter might just have run away. It was bad luck for the parents, but it happened.
    “Seventeen,” the mother said after a second of hesitation.
    April nodded. Okay, anybody missing under eighteen had to be investigated, punched into the system. “Okay, where does she live?”
    “She goes to Columbia. She lives in a dorm there.”
    “That’s not in this precinct. She has to be a resident of this precinct,” April said slowly.
    “We’re
residents of this precinct,” the man said angrily. “We can’t start this all over again. We’ve already been here two hours.”
    April thought it over. Could she send them Uptown and wiggle out of this? Probably not. Sergeant Joyce hadtold her to handle it, and not just because she was the only one available.
    “You’re sensitive,” Joyce had said with a smile that made it sound like sensitive was not such a good thing to