Judging Time Read Free Page A

marker and decorated with gold garlands, read MIDTOWN NORTH WISHES YOU A HAPPY NEW YEAR! On the wall nearby a cartoon showed a hand slipping into a jacket pocket with the words WATCH YOUR WALLET in several languages. Sitting at a table below the front desk, an irritated female uniform spoke rapid-fire Spanish to a sulking Hispanic male.
    As April headed for the front door, the bald sergeant at the desk put his hand over the receiver and called out to her. "Where you going, Woo? There's been two homicides at Liberty's Restaurant. Get over there ASAP or night watch will fuck it up." At two minutes after 1 A.M. April caught the call.
    The crime scene was at Forty-fifth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Midtown North was on Fifty-fourth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. From the front desk April called the detective squad room upstairs for a detective to go with her. The only one still around was Charlie Hagedorn. April had nothing against Hagedorn, but nothing for him, either. Hagedorn was a white male, early thirties. Five nine, weighed about 190. Didn't appear to work out. His pale, light brown hair was baby fine and soft. It lay flat on his crown as if lacking the energy to stand up like a man's. His lips were thin and chapped, his nose was thin and red. He had chubby cheeks and brown baleful eyes.
    April's mother, Sai Woo, who was old Chinese to the core, would diagnose Hagedorn as "not in harmony," too much yin, not enough yang. A person in perfect harmony had to have the right amount of yin and yang. Yang was male—intellectually strong and action-oriented. Yin was female—passive, receptive, relaxed, pleasing, generous. Extreme yin, of course, made for a person who was passive and vague, physically soft and weak, emotionally anxious and vulnerable, intellectually indecisive and uncertain. A yin was not the kind of person you'd want in the alley with you when that 250-pound man (the one the males were always throwing at female cops to try and make the point they couldn't do the job) cornered you in an alley with a chainsaw and two assault rifles blazing. Could be April was wrong about Hagedorn, though, and just didn't know him yet. There were a lot of people around who said the same of her.
    Hagedorn took the time to wait for an elevator to carry his chunky body down the one flight of stairs to the precinct lobby where April was impatiently cooling her heels. One of the problems being a boss was you couldn't always move at your own speed or deviate from protocol, which was different from procedure. With protocol, in every situation there were about ten thousand or more things that one just couldn't do. In this case April couldn't go get a car. She had to wait for Hagedorn to lumber out into the lot for an unmarked unit to drive her to the location. What a sorry idiot. Turning the very first corner on old tires and a patch of ice he spun out the forest green Pontiac. In the passenger seat April held on and said nothing even though she'd probably have to take the blame if one of her men cracked up the unit while she was in it.
    Hagedorn said nothing as they pulled up to the address of the call and stopped behind a line of blue-and-whites where the first officers at the scene were not having a lot of luck securing the area. They'd taped off a hundred or so feet. of sidewalk on either side of Liberty's Restaurant, but already a half a dozen people were inside the tapes tramping around.
    Right away April started having a bad feeling about this. But that was not so unusual. Every time she went to a scene her skin tingled, almost as if she developed a whole new layer of antennae around her body to take in as much information through as many channels as possible. Sometimes, no matter how much evidence was collected by the Crime Scene Unit, or how many witnesses and suspects told their false stories about what happened, it was April's first impressions that led her through the maze to the true story.
    This was the