Fifty-seven

His assignment completed, Woody Baum cruised slowly to the end of the block. He was free now, and there were a lot of things he could do. He had the unmarked vehicle and was working on the chart. He'd copied the photo of Rick Leaky and his dog. One thing he could do was take that drive out to the Hamptons and get a positive ID from the lawyer, Paul Hammermill. Save the task force some time. It might be what April would do if she were still on the case. He wanted to do what she would have done.

He slowed the car down to a crawl, thinking about other things his boss might have done in the remaining hours of the day. And he also considered things his boss never did. One thing she never, ever did was strand herself without a car. This thought pulled him to a complete stop. He knew his sergeant's Le Baron was in Forest Hills. Why hadn't she wanted a ride there to pick it up? Maybe she hadn't asked because she felt bad. Lieutenant Sanchez must have knocked the starch out of her, and Woody knew that scenario too well from his own career. He worried about her.

A car behind him honked, and he realized he was blocking an intersection. He shot the driver the finger and remembered that he hadn't fulfilled his assignment. Sanchez had told him not just to drive April home, but to see her all the way into the house and make certain it was secure before leaving. It was just a routine precaution, but he hadn't done that. The car behind him honked again. Woody made a U turn in the intersection and headed back.

Fifty-eight

April did not make it out the front door. Chaos reigned over the calm lake of her fighting spirit. She could not lure both attackers out the door. Blood poured from Leaky's bleeding mouth and a cut on his forehead. Skinny Dragon was shrieking with pure terror as he tried to get a killing hold on her slippery daughter. April's father had disappeared into the kitchen and was now trapped inside.

In a second of clarity, Skinny reached for a soap-stone smiling Buddha from the dining room shrine, stepped across the room, and whacked Leaky on the back.

"Arrgggh." Bellowing like a bull, he turned and in one fluid motion grabbed the old woman by her scrawny neck.

The game was over. April's heart almost stopped when she saw the Dragon she'd thought all-powerful transform into an old woman in a giant's choke hold.

That was it. She lunged for the gun in the corner of the room, kicking away the table that blocked the kitchen door. Frayme flew to block her. She rolled away from him, and the gun skittered under the sofa. As she dove after it, the kitchen door swung open and her father came out with a butcher knife in each hand. Stunned, Ja Fa Woo saw his wife of forty years caught in a killing hold.

"No!" April screamed. Her father had bleary eyes behind his thick black frames. He was a cook, and not entirely a sober one. His watery eyes seemed puzzled as he tried to choose in a nanosecond which knife to throw at the bloody-faced man holding his wife.

"Ma," April screamed. She did not have a chance to say "duck." She was distracted. In that second Frayme grabbed her and twisted hard. She felt searing pain as her shoulder dislocated. Then her mind cleared, and she came up with her head, bashing him under the chin. His body jerked up. As he straightened and became a clear target, Ja Fa Woo moved like a ninja in his underwear. One hand, one knife. The biggest one, his hacking knife, he wielded like a hatchet, striking Frayme between the shoulder blades.

April dodged the falling body as Frayme crashed on the sofa. Then Ja Fa turned to a stunned Leaky.

"Aieyeee," he yelled, and launched his second knife. This one had a very thin razor-sharp blade and was his favorite. It was the one he used for boning duck and chicken.

Leaky screamed as the knife sliced into his chest only an inch from the top of Skinny's head. He reached to pull it out and her knees gave way.

At that moment, Woody Baum charged into the house with his gun drawn yelling, "Police-freeze!" at the bloody scene.

Fifty-nine

April had a headache that wouldn't let up. Long after her shoulder and other bruises had healed, important Department people were still dragging her through every move she'd made in the weeks since Albert Frayme had first tried to take her down in Washington Square. She felt terrible. The terrible feeling was constantly reinforced by everyone.

The questions IA investigators asked over and over sounded to her as if they actually believed it was her fault for not immediately linking Al Frayme with karate after his name came up as a caller on both Bernardino's and Devereaux's phones. No, she had not been holding out on them. No, she could not have acted sooner to identify Frayme as Bernardino's killer and save Birdie Bassett. It was an insulting idea. Still, she felt bad. The killer had been an expert at locating disappearing graduates. He had known exactly who she was and where she lived (or used to live) as soon as her name appeared in the press following Bernardino's murder-long before he decided he had to kill her and her parents in their home. She hated to think about missing that.

She told herself that it was not her fault that Frayme had known ways to escape from his office, and had done so many times when people assumed he was there. Before the unfortunate incident in her home, she had told Mike everything she knew about Al Frayme. It had not been on her watch when he took a subway to Queens to meet Leaky after she and Woody had fingered him as an accessory in the case. Nor was it her fault that they set out to convince her parents into thinking they were Con Edison workers so they could get into the house to rig an accident. But she felt that it was her fault. They all could have died. All the Woos.

IA's job, of course, was to deconstruct any and all failings occurring in the system. Why had the case ended in a spectacular mess in an officer's private home? How could they prevent such a disaster from happening again? It wasn't a hard one: Keep cop victims away from their own cases. That was their conclusion. Even though she had solved the case, she hung her head.

Like Harry Weinstein and his story about the quarter mil from Bernardino's lottery money, April had her story about what had happened in the Woo house. She stuck to it. The knives got into the perpetrators' bodies… she had no idea how. The dead couldn't speak, and Ja Fa Woo could speak, but only in Chinese. She didn't want him under any kind of scrutiny, so she took the Department hit for a thousand mistakes. It was her filial duty.

So many faults gave her a bad headache, but there were a few compensations. Mike couldn't apologize enough, couldn't do enough to atone for sending her almost to her death with only the useless Woody Baum to protect her. He'd do anything to win back her love and trust, and April had quite a list of tasks toward that end. Paint the interior of her parents' house, buy new furniture for the living room. Renovate the awful avocado bathroom. Promise never, ever to thwart her again in any way. Ha. That was the big one, and he was taking it pretty well. After all, it was his fault that Frayme had gotten away. They should never have released him in the first place. There were lots of should-haves and should-not-haves in the case, but who was counting?

In the middle of her interview ordeal, when April was holding back one of several hundred little details about the case that she didn't want known, she had a surprising insight that was so obvious she couldn't imagine why no one had thought of it before. On her first day of freedom she called Kathy Bernardino.