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ask if it was hers. Everyone assumed that babies belonged to the people they were with. She turned to Baum. "You notice anything missing from that apartment?"
Baum watched the woman wheel the baby outside, then stop to talk to the reporters. "Wouldn't they have had a stroller?'-' he said.
    "Yes. What else?"
    "What, more twenty questions?"
"More like twenty thousand questions. What's the answer?" April clicked her tongue at his silence. "All right: when my cousins have babies, they have showers."
    "So where's the stuff, right?"
"Exactly." She watched McMan signing off on the first of the teams. There was no sniper on the roof, no baby in the garbage, the incinerator, the elevator shaft. EMS was cutting out.
"So there was remarkably little baby stuff in there. Almost nothing in fact," Baum said.
"Right. Either Heather wasn't expecting a baby, or she didn't intend to keep it long."
    They watched the young woman in the halter finish talking to the press and turn toward the park.
    By 8:35 P.M ., there was press activity at the precinct, too. The reporters were spreading like bacteria, and April didn't want to catch anything. When she arrived at Fifty-fourth Street and got out of the car, a woman in a pale purple suit, carrying a mike torch with the letters ABC on it, ran across the sidewalk to talk to her. The woman thrust the microphone in April's face before she reached the cover of the precinct.
"Hey, look, it's Sergeant Woo. How are you, Sergeant? I'm Grace Faye. I was on the Liberty case. Great job you did there. I hear you were in the hospital for two months."
April grimaced at the exaggeration. "I was in the hospital overnight." Well, for a few nights. "Excuse me.
    "Hey, wait, what's your hurry?"
A second woman reporter April didn't know tried to push in front of Faye. "What can you tell us about the missing baby? What about the baby's mother? We had a tip she died on the way to the hospital. Is that true?" Faye pushed the other reporter back, and they had a bit of a shoving match.
April cocked her head for Baum to walk in front of her. "You're supposed to walk behind me except in instances where you have to clear the way for me," she muttered in his ear when he edged ahead.
Baum opened his mouth. "Clear the way," he said, using his elbows. "A spokesman will talk to you as soon as we have something."
"And I'll remember you at Christmas," the first reporter promised, cynically.
April didn't look at them as she went inside. What were they thinking? They knew she couldn't talk to them. She gave the desk lieutenant a little smile, then climbed the stairs to the detective squad room. Inside was the mob scene she'd expected. The phones were hogged by strangers, and the limited space was crammed with easels and flip charts. The noise and tension levels were high, and the room was filled with smoke. Lieutenant Iriarte was in his office with his three ugly henchmen. He gestured for her, but not Baum, to come in. April saw Baum flush with anger as he turned away to find someone else sitting at his desk.
She opened the door of the office. Creaker, Hage-dorn, and Skye filed out. Iriarte pointed at a chair.
"Baum's not a bad guy. Who knows, he may even turn out to have some talent," she murmured, not wanting to let the insult go.
Iriarte had a really skinny mustache that came nowhere near his mouth. He squeezed his thin lips into a moue, then made them into a line. Working his mouth was how he thought. "I wouldn't bet on it," he muttered. "Why'd you pick him?"
"Baum's new. He could use some breaking in," April replied, neutral. And he didn't have any loyalties yet. She needed someone like that on her team.
"Look, April, don't take this opportunity to make a flaming mess of things." Iriarte blew air out of his mouth. April could tell he was unhappy.
"No sir, I won't," she promised him.
"I want our best people on this." He punched the air with his pen. "We got to stay in it all the way, you hear what I'm saying?"
"I hear you, sir. Do you