A Cold Day in Hell Read online

  “Thanks for your time.”

  “Hey, my pleasure. And if you ever want to go out for a coffee for real, give me a call.”

  “Straight to the point, huh?”

  “At my age, kid,” he said, getting up with his briefcase, “I have to be.” He winked and was gone out into the rain.

  Lauren sat listening to the sound of the drops hitting the pavement outside and sipped her water. When the waitress came by, she ordered a muffin and began to flip through the prenuptial agreement. All around her, people were furiously typing into their laptops, taking advantage of the downpour to get some work done.

  She opened her phone and called Violanti. “I just had the most interesting meeting with a retired cop.”

  “Another conquest?”

  “You wish. I got some nice juicy photos I think you’d like to look at and a copy of a very, very unfavorable prenuptial agreement, which sent Katherine Vine into the arms of a private investigator.”

  “The retired cop you mentioned before?”

  “You got it.” The muffin was delicious.

  “Are you thinking of an alternative motive?”

  “Is the pope Catholic?”

  “I love you, Lauren.”

  “Let’s not get crazy.” She brushed the muffin crumbs from her shirt. “I’ll call you tomorrow and we can meet. I’ll write you up a nice report, give you copies, all that stuff. I just need one thing from you—can you get us to see Katherine Vine’s car?”

  “I can start writing the motion now.”

  “Get on it. I’m going to enjoy the rest of my day and not think of you at all.”

  He snorted into the phone. “I bet you will.”

  “Goodbye.”

  Damn, was that a good muffin.

  25

  Joe Wheeler sat at his desk in his suburban office clutching a piece of paper in his hand. Outside the rain was coming down in steady sheets, the sound dulled by the drone of the air conditioner and the hum of the overhead lights.

  Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.

  She was screwing her ex-husband. Joe had come in on his day off. Taken the time to come in when he could have been enjoying himself, and ran the license plate. And it had come back to Mark Hathaway. The guy she ran off and married. His hand crumpled the paper as he thought about that. He had been keeping tabs on Lauren for a long time, but he’d never seen his car at her house. Why now all of a sudden? Hathaway was married, this Joe knew.

  Was she that desperate for a man? He thought for sure she would call him after he sent the flowers. That she would appreciate that he remembered her favorite flowers and call to say thank you. They’d had misunderstandings before. It wasn’t like he’d put her in the hospital; she’d just surprised him, that’s all. It was a misunderstanding. She even proved that by not calling his superiors. Sure, that little weasel of an attorney had brought it up in court, but he could see she was surprised by that too. He could tell she didn’t approve.

  So why was Mark Hathaway at her house?

  He threw the paper into the garbage can. Unless it was a legal matter. Something with the house or the girls? He knew Hathaway had sprung for the house after knocking up his gold-digging secretary. His family was big money, old money, stretching back to the grain elevator days. The Hathaway name carried major clout in the city to this day. They had hospital wings and academic buildings named after their money. He had to be careful about him.

  Outside the rain started to subside.

  What to do? What to do?

  Joe decided to put the information in his pocket for a while, until he knew more about the situation. He checked his watch. The strip club opened early on Saturdays. Maybe a nice lap dance with a little extra in the backroom was what he needed to take the edge off. Besides, there was a girl who worked there now who looked just like Lauren. She said she was eighteen and from Canada, but he highly doubted both those claims. If he paid her double her usual money she didn’t mind when he got a little rough. That and he could always arrest her.

  Being a cop did have its perks.

  26

  “Frank, you have to stop obsessing over this.”

  He looked up from the computer. His wife was standing in the doorway of his home office, arms folded, with that look he knew so well. She was a tiny little thing, with short black hair she kept spiked up around her face. Violanti had met her on a skiing trip when he was in law school. She had walked right up to him in the lodge and put a beer down in front of him. He remembered looking down at her and she up at him with that twinkle in her eye.

  “You’re the only guy in this place that doesn’t have to bend in half to kiss me,” she’d told him. And he did kiss her that night. And the next night and the night after that.

  “I would think you would cut me a break on this, Kim. He’s my godson and they’re going to fry him if he gets convicted.”

  She floated into the room cautiously. Right away he knew where this was headed. “Don’t you think,” she began gently, “that you should be preparing Sarah and David for the possibility of conviction?”

  She’d stressed the word possibility ever so slightly, as if it were a very farfetched notion that just had to be thrown out there.

  Violanti swiveled in his chair. “Kim, I don’t think David killed her. I don’t. I was there when he was born. We’ve taken him on vacation. We went to all his football games. How can you even think David has it in him?”

  “He changed when his dad died. You’ve tried to be there for him and he did his own thing. You said yourself, you never really know anyone.”

  “I wasn’t talking about David.”

  “He had sex with that woman in the car. She scratched him up and bit him. Why would she have sex with him? He’s a kid. It doesn’t make sense.”

  Violanti sighed. “How am I going to convince a jury he’s innocent if I can’t convince my own wife?”

  “I’m just saying that it makes more sense than some random guy coming by and killing her. Especially when you factor in that other thing.”

  Now he got mad. “That other thing is a nonissue. I can’t believe you even brought it up.”

  Kim stood her ground. “I think it has to be brought up when you consider his missing girlfriend. You can’t protect him just because he’s your godson. If he’s guilty, he needs to go to jail.”

  He shook his head. “No. Jail is the last place David needs to be. What would Sarah do? And what would he be like when he got out? The other situation was a misunderstanding and it was dealt with. It has nothing to do with what’s going on now. Jail is not an option, so excuse me if I pour my heart into this case and take away some valuable quality time we could be spending together.”

  “So that’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  Kim slammed the door on the way out.

  27

  “Yeah, I bartended at the Ozone for a year. What a year that was. The worst place I ever worked at.” Rodney Beamish was polishing glasses at the Lake Shore Country Club. Gone was the thick black mullet in his Polaroid; he was bald as a cue ball now. The early-

  nineties swagger was replaced with a middle-aged paunch threatening to burst the last two buttons on his white tuxedo shirt.

  “We’re wondering if you remember a particular night.” Reese leaned over the shiny polished wood of the bar. “July 29th, 1993.”

  They were trying to make some headway on the Ortiz case while the DNA was still being processed. For a fresh homicide, you could expect results in four to six weeks. For cold cases, you went to the back of the line, taking upwards of three months. Riley and Reese tried to get as much done in that window as possible, because if a hit came back on a suspect, the case went from cold to hot real fast. Waiting until Monday for Rodney to be back in town had sorely tested Lauren’s patience.

  “I don’t remember what I had for breakfast yest
erday. How the hell could I remember what happened that night?” He began stacking the polished glasses behind the bar.

  “There was a stabbing that night. A young woman named Vinita Ortiz was stabbed to death on the street outside the bar.” Reese pulled a picture of Vinita that her daughter had given them out of his folder. She was sitting at a picnic table, a cake in front of her, smiling right into the camera.

  Rodney took the picture from Reese, glanced at it, and handed it back with a nod. “I don’t know her, but I do remember that night. It was the only time someone ever got murdered while I was working.”

  Lauren noticed he had a slight lisp when he talked, making while I was working sound more like while I wath worthing. Her first husband had the same lisp after he got his front teeth knocked out in a roofing accident.

  “I saw the whole thing. Rufus threw them out. I could see out the window on my end of the bar, it was open to the street. They had some words and when the Hispanic girl turned around, the other girl dug something out of her purse and jumped on her. Her boyfriend pulled her off and they ran down the street. But the little girl didn’t get up and I could see her friend screaming. I was trying to get the bouncer’s attention, but it was so loud and crowded he didn’t see me. I ran to the office to call 911 because she wasn’t moving. Later I had to go downtown and they took my statement.”

  Lauren produced the statement from her own folder, ignoring the curious glances of the kitchen staff as they got ready to serve dinner to the membership. Mark had been a member there when they were married. She prayed none of them recognized her because she was sure they waited on the new Mrs. Hathaway quite often. “It says in your statement you didn’t know the assailant, but that you’d seen her and her boyfriend in the bar before?”

  He nodded. “Yes.” Yeth. “A couple times, but never again after that. And no, I never got their names.”

  “What made you remember them in particular?” Reese asked.

  He shrugged. “You do this long enough, you get good at remembering faces. I don’t know if I’d recognize them now—hell, I don’t recognize me now.” He grabbed at his belly and gave it a shake.

  You don’t recognize me, Lauren thought, but I never hung out at this bar with Mark. He’d drink scotch and smoke cigars in the lounge while we ladies sipped whiskey-laced tea on the veranda. I was never much good at being rich.

  “Is there anything at all you can tell us that could help us identify them?” Lauren asked, snapping out of her trip down memory lane.

  He snapped his fingers. “There was one thing, I told the detectives this too. The guy had a tattoo on his hand. His … ” He juggled his own hands in the air trying to jog his memory. “ … left hand. This was before everyone was tatted up. It was of a goldfish, but nicer, you know? What are those fish people put in their ponds?”

  “A koi fish?” Lauren offered. She had noticed in the file one of the original detectives had written the words TATTOO FISH on a piece of paper and stuck it in randomly with the rest of the paperwork.

  He nodded at her. “Yes. A koi fish. Really nicely done too. Right here in the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. I complemented him on it once when he was paying me for a drink.”

  Lauren handed him the pad and held out her pen. “Can you make a rough sketch of it, as best you can remember?”

  He took the pad and the pen. “I’ll do the best I can. I’m no artist.”

  “That’s okay. It’d be a great help.”

  28

  The morning after Rodney Beamish did his best to scratch out a Koi fish on a legal pad, Lauren found another piece of art on her desk. Carefully arranged in the center of her desk, on top of her mounds of paperwork, was a cartoon someone had printed out. It showed a woman smiling for a flashing camera and underneath it, in bold block letters it read: PIMP MY JOB! Someone had taken the time to hand draw money signs all around the border.

  She snatched it and crumpled it up before Reese could see it. She could hear him out in the hallway, bullshitting with one of the Homicide guys. It wasn’t the first time someone had left a literal sign of disapproval in the office. When Richie Bystryk got caught forging overtime slips people left pigs all over his desk. Ceramic pigs, stuffed pigs, pink plastic piggy banks, day after day to let Richie know what the rest of the squad thought about that. When Richie freaked out about it, thinking someone would fess up or get in trouble, his sergeant took him aside and told him it might be better for everyone if he transferred. Which he did, right before he got fired.

  This was mild compared to that, but it burned her up inside anyway. On an average day, the twenty-two other people in the Buffalo Homicide squad could give less than one shit what she did with her free time. But she takes on one case that seems to offend their shaky moral compasses and the ball busting comes out. This was only the beginning, she was sure. Suck it up, she told herself. Don’t let these fuckers know they’re getting to you or it’ll never end.

  “Hey partner.” Reese came bouncing in, all energy and smiles. “What’s good? What’s good?”

  I can’t let him know. She knew he’d go ballistic if he thought someone was messing with her. She forced a smile. “You’re in a good mood. Hot date last night?”

  He threw himself down into his chair and popped his feet up on his desk. “As a matter of fact, very hot. I’m pleased with the way things went down.”

  “Will we be seeing this young lady again soon?” She slipped the crumpled ball into the trashcan next to her desk.

  “What? Hell no. Let’s not get crazy.” He spun himself around in his swivel chair for effect. “I said I was pleased, not ecstatic.”

  That afternoon when she walked out to her car she noticed something stuck under her windshield wipers. As she got closer it looked like little white flags were ruffling from her windshield. She plucked up one of the little pieces of paper. Someone had stuffed Monopoly money under the blades. Keeping her face a neutral mask she casually plucked the fake bills out and got in her car. Knowing some of the arrogant assholes she worked with, whoever did it was probably watching.

  That’s what made you crazy—not knowing which one or ones was messing with you. Vatasha Arnold had never really liked her. She was an excellent detective but a total queen bee, and they had butted heads from the start. However, they worked completely opposite of each other and Lauren doubted she’d come in on her day off to screw with her.

  Craig Garcia was a miserable prick who used to take a dump in the woman’s bathroom every time Lauren worked until Marilyn, the secretary, caught him. He wasn’t ashamed, said he wanted to see if Lauren’s shit really didn’t stink, because she walked around like it didn’t. Reese hadn’t come up to Homicide yet but Lauren cornered Garcia down in the gym and words were exchanged. Just words, because Garcia was a pussy who liked to pick on women behind their backs, but crumbled when he was face to face with her, alternately denying and apologizing at the same time. He would’ve been her number-one suspect now if he wasn’t deathly afraid of Reese. He’d made a remark about Reese being half black the first week he transferred to the squad. Reese smiled and politely told him if he ever spoke to him again, he’d knock his teeth out.

  Who did that leave?

  Everybody, she thought angrily, pulling out of the lot. Everybody.

  29

  Katherine Vine’s white Mercedes was in the Garden Valley impound lot. Lauren snapped on latex gloves while Violanti took his own photos of the exterior of the car. Against the far wall of the garage, Joe Wheeler was watching silently. While it was a standard move for the defense to want to have access to a vehicle in a crime scene, especially when it was still being held in evidence, Joe still seethed inside that Lauren had to be there. Naturally, the State Police evidence technician and Joe’s lieutenant were both there, as well as ADA Lynn Ferro.

  Everyone wanted to watch the dynamic duo at work. Joe couldn’t help but wonder how s
he could be so close to him and not want to talk to him, or give some kind of sign that everything was all right. Of course, they were working on opposite sides of the field, so maybe she thought it was better that they have their next conversation alone. She could at least acknowledge him, though. Thank him for the flowers he’d sent her nearly two weeks ago, he fumed.

  Strangely, Lauren seemed focused on the outside of the car, instead of the interior. It was like she was purposely looking for something. Methodically, she started at the front bumper. Getting down on her hands and knees and pulling out a tiny flashlight, she looked under the fender. She then had Violanti pop the hood and inspected the engine. Satisfied, she got back down on her knees and followed along the passenger side of the undercarriage. All the while Frank Violanti had his cell phone camera trained on Lauren, documenting everything she did.

  She made her way around the rear of the car, laying on her back, shining her light up under the vehicle. “I found it.”

  Everyone stiffened for a second as she straightened up.

  “Under the rear fender near the muffler. There’s a GPS.” She turned to the State Police evidence tech. “I want this photographed and fingerprinted, please.”

  Now everyone rushed forward and began bombarding her with questions.

  Joe erupted, “You planted that. You came here and planted something under there. How else could you know to look for it?”

  “This is a video camera too. I have it all on video. Her hands never went under the vehicle.” Violanti waved his camera for all to see.

  The evidence tech was on his back now with his own flashlight. “She’s right. It sure does look like a GPS.” He looked up at Joe. “Can you get my kit for me?”

  Joe stomped off to retrieve what looked like an oversized tackle box. She didn’t care about the flowers. She didn’t care about his feelings or what she was doing to him. She was a selfish bitch who wanted to flaunt her tight little ass around his business. She wanted to ruin his case and throw everything they’d had together back in his face.