The Silent Bride Read online

  April hadn't guessed that this favor would involve listening to an endless, shaggy, Chinese dragon-riding tale (illegal entry into the United States) that was completely unbelievable not only because of the manner of the telling, but also the telling itself. Usually illegal aliens did not inform authorities of their plight.

  "My mother was the daughter of a fisherman," he'd begun over an hour ago. "My father a river god." Then the sly, appraising smile to see how she'd take such a tall story.

  Right then April had known this would take a while. She appraised Gao right back. Could be he was trying to make himself interesting. Could be he didn't know who his father was. In any case, she was no stranger to the most elaborate of superstitions. Along with her ancestors, April herself half believed that the skies were filled with ghosts and immortals flying around making mischief in far greater measure than good fortune. And she often thought her own mother was the most powerful Chinese mythical creature of all, a dragon capable of changing shape as well as anything else that got in her way. Secretly, she believed her Skinny Dragon Mother had invisible armor on her body made up of far more aggressive yang scales than kind and gentle yin ones. Further, April had no doubt that her mother carried the precious pearl of long (possibly everlasting) life in her mouth. The idea was terrifying to her.

  "My mother drowned when her seducer took her to his river god home in the weeds. I was orphaned before birth," Gao went on cheerfully. "My uncle had a small cafe in a tourist town. I learned to cook there."

  She watched his eyes as he described his teen years working in small restaurants and inris, then his horrific boat journey to the food mecca of the world, Hong Kong. He glossed over his years there, barely mentioning the sponsor who'd brought him here. And finally he hinted at a grave danger he faced from the gangsters who claimed they now owned his culinary gifts for life. April's classic oval face, almond eyes, and rosebud red lips remained neutral as she suppressed her irritation at this elaborate waste of her time.

  She'd bet a month's salary that Gao's story was made up from beginning to end and that he had arrived not in the filthy hold of some Taiwanese tanker, but in the comfort of an American airliner, and no gangsters of any kind were after him.

  April Woo might be an ABC—American-born Chinese—but she'd grown up in Chinatown and worked there in the Fifth Precinct on Elizabeth Street as a beat cop, then a detective for five years. She knew what was what. She listened to Gao's tall tale— as she did to all the others she heard in the course of her work—without letting any intelligence leak out of her eyes. She'd learned young to hide all emotion, to do her thinking behind the blank wall of a quiet, stupid-looking face. She let the man talk and talk, making the wheel go around. As they said in the Department, what goes around comes around. The way of Tao in the new world also happened to be the way of the NYPD. Eventually she'd learn why Ching had insisted on the meeting.

  At nearly four-thirty she dropped her wrist under the table and glanced at her watch. Her chico, Lieutenant Mike Sanchez, commander of the Homicide Task Force, was working today, supervising a double homicide and suicide. This morning he'd told her he might not be free until late tonight, so she eyed the food on the table to give him later.

  Gao Wan had cooked an impossibly big spread for her. It was late in the afternoon, and the feast was way too much even for a regularly scheduled meal. As her host, Gao wasn't eating a thing and, as honored guest, April could hardly pig out, either. Therefore, the fragrant steamed pork buns; wok-fried garlic tops; crisp scallion cakes; translucent Shanghai noodles, wide as a man's hand and swimming in spicy peanut sauce; clams with oyster sauce; mussels with fermented black beans; eggplant with garlic; shrimp balls; shui mai; and sweet/sour fish sat there cooling on their plates as April waited for Gao to say what he wanted from her.

  Gao caught April's sidelong glance at the potential leftovers.

  "Eat, eat, please," he urged for the fourteenth time. "You don't like?"

  "Oh, I ate so much," April said politely. "I'm stuffed." She changed the subject. "How did you meet Matthew, by the way?" They were speaking in Cantonese.

  She'd wondered about this because Matthew Tan, Gao's supposed "friend," was an ABC computer expert from California who'd met Ching Ma Dong at a convention in Tucson. Matthew's Chinese did not extend much beyond kuai he!, xie xie, and cha. Drink up, thank you, and tea. She'd be truly surprised if they'd ever met. April was spared having to wonder about it further by the ringing cell phone in her pocket. Caller ID said private, so she said, "Sergeant Woo."

  "Querida, where are you?" Mike's voice sounded tense.

  "Flushing, what's up?"

  "We've got a synagogue shooting up in Riverdale; looks bad...." His voice broke up.

  "Mike?" April turned her body slightly away from Gao. "Riverdale where?"

  "Burk ... aou."

  "Give me an address."

  "Independence Ave. Exit Nineteen on the HH Parkway. Copy?"

  "Yeah, I copy."

  She wanted to know how many people were hit. Was anybody dead? But his siren was wailing, the radio in his car was squawking, and he'd hung up anyway.

  The cop's life. April looked regretfully at Gao and the leftovers she wasn't going to get. "Sorry," she murmured. "Something's come up. I have to go."

  Three

  By the time April reached the restaurant door less than five feet away, she'd already forgotten Gao Wan. Crime always suspended real life. Didn't matter if it was her day off, or if she was in the middle of some important family occasion, a funeral or a wedding. When a call came, she hit the road.

  Outside the restaurant, a riot of Asia greeted her on the busy Sunday afternoon. Colorful dual-alphabet and language signs for everything from acupuncture and ice cream to hair cutting and gourmet tea all screamed for attention on storefronts and in upstairs windows. Dresses, East and West style, hung outside store windows and in doorways. Merchandise— gewgaws of every kind imported from dozens of countries—jammed small storefronts. On the sidewalk, street vendors hawked a kaleidoscope of familiar products for homesick arrivals: plastic sandals, embroidered silk shoes, toys from China, incense, paper money, herbal cures.

  Almost dizzying was the abundance of stalls featuring seductive, dewy-looking vegetables, long beans, cabbage, bok choy, radish, bean sprouts, bitter melon, oranges, Asian apples and pears. Nestled in their ice beds were cockles and clams, whole fish, shrimps, squid, baskets of clawing crabs still very much alive.

  The sidewalk was jammed with mothers and children and whole families taking the day to eat and buy food. Everything Asian. Asian faces and products everywhere mixed with the overriding aroma of sizzling garlic and ginger. It all created the impression of a metropolis anywhere but Main Street, USA.

  It was only a short block to the parking garage, but one that was clogged by hordes of people who were not in a hurry. April broke into sweat, dampening the armholes of the lime green shell under her lemon suit jacket. She stepped off the curb and dodged into the street, her shoulder bag slamming her hip as she ran. A bicycle messenger swerved to miss her when she dashed through a changing light.

  "Fuck you!" he yelled at her in the only words she knew in Korean.

  And then she was in her aging white Le Baron and on the road. For the next fifteen minutes she raced northwest, not even trying to rouse Mike on his cell. Beat officers on patrol had radios to communicate with dispatchers and bosses. Some detective units had cell phones or beepers as well so they could call each other directly. April's private car had no radio, and Mike was busy. She'd have to wait.

  In less than half an hour, she found the local street in Riverdale off the Henry Hudson Parkway. Two uniforms, both female, were standing in the intersection, directing traffic beside their angle-parked blue-and-white. April resisted the urge to query them about the incident. She showed her ID and the uniforms waved her through.

  Down the street half a dozen blue-and-whites were double-parked in a line, some with their doors still open, as
if their drivers had charged out. Four unmarked black sedans with shields in the windows indicated that brass had arrived. Two empty ambulances with their back doors closed stood like sentries. And all around was the pandemonium of deflated celebrants—all dressed up, bunched in groups outside their house of worship, stunned and angry, not yet released.

  No matter how many times April walked out of everyday life into somebody's death chamber, into somebody's nightmare of grief, into a standoff of innocence against evil, it was always the same. It was a bungee jump into the hell where ghosts and devils lived. Right now there wasn't the frenzy and chaos of people in imminent danger, no hostages to save, no tense SWAT team taking positions against a sniper. No hovering choppers in the sky.

  It looked as if a very big, expensive party had been interrupted. Maybe fifty or sixty elegantly dressed women, many of them stout and wearing flashy jewelry, their weight embraced by sparkly, bright-colored evening gowns. The same number of men in tuxedos with gold and red and bright blue cummerbunds and matching embroidered skullcaps. And there were children everywhere, dozens of them trying in vain to get some attention. Like the two sexes everywhere, the men and women had gathered in separate groups. The people were jittery and upset, but their attitude was marked by the kind of lassitude that comes when a tragedy has already taken place, when there's nothing left to do but go home. Whatever had occurred was over.

  She parked the car, anxious to get there and do something.

  "No more, no more, no more!" was the first thing she heard when she got out.

  A woman was ranting, "Where were the police? This is not supposed to happen again."

  Sweating heavily in her too-cheerful outfit, April felt her usual beginning-of-a-case sick feeling hit her hard. Headache, slight nausea. Hazard of the job. She was entering the fog of yin when everything was soft, hazy, unformed, and she had to keep her ears and eyes wide open to the sounds and sights around her. She could feel the presence of the immortals, the ghosts and demons churning in the air. It always made her a little queasy because she was an American and not supposed to believe in them. She shook them off and mapped the scene in her mind.

  The synagogue was a two-story, rust-colored building flanked by blazing red azalea bushes over five feet tall and wide. It was adorned with only a Jewish star carved in stone over two sets of wide dark-wood doors. Down a short slope to the left, a parking lot was filled with enough prime product to make a used-car dealer a rich man. The street side of the lot was fronted by a four-foot evergreen fence, possibly to afford some shelter to the fortune sitting there. Behind the hedge, a number of valets in red jackets were smoking in a clump, not fetching cars for the women and children waiting for them.

  April broke into a run when she heard snippets of angry conversation from the other side of the hedge. "Terrorists." "Israel." "Poor girl." The name "Tovah" and "car bomb."

  Then she saw Mike. He was on the sidewalk in a crowd far left of the building. His head was bent toward a precinct commander April had seen around but whose name she didn't know, two other high-ranking uniformed brass whose faces she also recognized, half a dozen stout men in tuxedos, and a small man in a black clerical gown with a blood-besmirched shawl around his shoulders. Her sunny suit caught Mike's eye, and he waved her over.

  "Sergeant Woo, this is Rabbi Levi, Mr. Schoenfeld, the bride's grandfather, Mr. Schoenfeld, the bride's uncle. Mr. Ribikoff, the groom's father."

  April nodded and murmured "Sir" after each of their names. Her face was neutral, but her head pounded with the shock of personal bad luck. To have a wedding case just when her ahnost-sister Ching was getting married was not good, not good at all. An irrational, uncoplike fear clutched her.

  The rabbi's voice chilled her further. "I want every car on the street checked for explosives. Get your dogs, your Geiger counters, I don't care what. And the cars in the lot. Every one. I don't want a single one of my people getting into a car that hasn't been tested for a bomb."

  My people! Oh, here zve go. Already the lines were being drawn. That always ruffled feathers.

  Mike took April's arm and led her toward the building before Chief Avise, the stern-looking chief of detectives, had a chance to respond. "Querida, you made good time."

  "The traffic wasn't too bad."

  "You okay?" Mike's almond eyes, not so very different from April's own, caught everything. Now he struck at her anxiety with the love look that had changed her life.

  When they'd first sat at adjoining desks in the Two-oh, he'd seemed a bully out for the trophy of getting her in bed when no one else she worked with could. Each time he'd brought her in on a case or horned in on one of hers, she'd thought he was trying to control her, mess with her career. She'd taken a strong position against a cop couple working together, but he'd wanted her front and center, both in his professional and private life. And Mike always got what he wanted. Despite her mother's dire predictions about ethnic incompatibility, he turned out to be her rock.

  "I'm okay." She tilted her head to one side. He looked out of place there with his mustache, leather jacket, and cowboy boots, but good to her.

  "Enlighten me," she said softly.

  His expression didn't change, even though he knew it would affect her. "Somebody shot the bride."

  "Oh." April felt the kick of the catastrophe fill her own body. To be a bride, charged with all the hope and excitement for a happy life. Every cliche April both longed for and feared herself. She didn't ask if the girl was dead. She gathered the girl was dead. What bad luck! Bad, bad luck for every spring bride in New York. She shivered for Ching and all the families who would be spooked, even though it had nothing to do with them.

  "The groom?" she murmured, scanning the tearful crowd of wedding guests.

  "No, he didn't do it. He was standing at the altar waiting for her."

  "I meant shot." April tried breathing again.

  "No, no. Two other people got hit. A twelve-year-old lost an ear. Another one took a bullet in the shoulder, both males. Looks like the shooter was only after the bride. Chief Avise told me the parents went nuts when the paramedics cut her dress open."

  "She's gone?" April asked. Meaning from the scene.

  "Oh, yeah. The girl arrived DOA at the hospital."

  "Did both officers go with her?"

  "One went with her. Two more arrived almost at the same time. They're still here."

  They moved closer to the building. The tapes were already up, barring the way up the front walk, but April and Mike would have skirted the bloodstained area anyway. This was going to be a challenge for the CSU unit. A hundred and fifty people stampeded out of the building, leaving footprints of blood, and other bits of themselves behind—tears, eyelashes, fingerprints, lint, fiber, even sequins from the fancy ball gowns.

  More car doors slammed. April and Mike turned to see two pairs of German shepherds with trainers arrive and get out of their cars. April knew one of them from a bomb scare at Kennedy a few years back. Actually, it had been an American carrier flying to Tel Aviv, now that she thought about it. The rabbi's wish for an examination of each and every car was coming true. This was going to take a while.

  "Any leads?"

  Mike shook his head. "The father insists his daughter never dated anyone else," Mike said. "So it's not a boyfriend/girlfriend thing."

  "No date? Ever?" April was surprised.

  "They're Orthodox. The boys and girls don't mingle. They don't even sit together. Men and women have separate sections here. The father also said no one outside the community knew her. She never left the four corners."

  "The what?"

  "That's what they call their neighborhood. I thought you knew Jews."

  April rolled her eyes. What she knew about Jews could fill a teacup. A Chinese teacup. "What about the parents?" she asked.

  "Wealthy. Very."

  "I mean, do they leave the four corners?"

  "It's a very tight group. I gather they don't mix socially outside, but Schoenfel
d, the bride's father, has his business in Manhattan. He claims he has no enemies. He doesn't believe his daughter could be a target. He thinks the shooting was just an attempt to get everybody running to their cars so they'd be blown up in the parking lot."

  "Imaginative theory. Is that why they're all in the parking lot now?"

  Mike shrugged. Everybody knew by now that terrorists didn't do two-stage operations in a single site. They always made one hit with the hope of getting as many people as possible. They wouldn't shoot one female in a large crowd and leave all the men sitting there. What sense was there in that? Also, shooting and bombing were two different activities, involving different planning, psychology, and equipment. The shooting of a bride at a wedding had to be a personal thing. Somebody wanted her, and only her, not living happily ever after. April shivered.

  Since Skinny Dragon Mother had told April in no uncertain terms that she'd rather see her only child dead on her wedding day than married to a non-

  Chinese, that sort of thing felt quite reasonable to her in a totally crazy kind of way.

  Police were everywhere now, moving people out of the parking lot, taking down names and statements, and starting to check the cars. Forty minutes from the 911 call, the CSU pulled up in two blue-and-white station wagons, and the investigation team was in place. It was a very high-profile case.

  Four

  Looks like we have all the big guns here. How ya doin', April, Mike." Captain Dan D'Amato, commander of the CSU unit, looked a lot like an actor playing a cop. Handsome guy, six feet tall, slim build. Styled hair, blue eyes that didn't miss a thing.

  He strode up with Detective Vic Walters, known as the architect because he had a degree in the field and was their structure specialist. Not that any of the forty-two CSU detectives considered themselves specialists in only one area. They were evidence collectors, supposed to know everything. Some of them were accredited scientists, like Vic, who analyzed the items they found and drew the pictures for the DA and the juries. Others photographed, sketched, collected thousands of bits and pieces of paint and soil and fiber and dust and markings of all kinds, handwriting, impressions like footprints, tire marks—everything imaginable for the scientists to match.