A Cold Day in Hell Read online

  4

  The county holding center was conveniently located across the street from Buffalo Police Headquarters and kitty corner from the county court building. The two made their way from the parking lot to the corner, where they dutifully waited for the light to change. Violanti had to take two steps for every one of Lauren’s long strides. The pair turned a couple heads of county court workers. Their rivalry was well-known around the local law enforcement community. One court officer stopped and watched them curiously as they crossed the street together. Lauren looked straight ahead, ignoring the gawkers, as she climbed the stairs to the holding center. Maybe they think he finally pushed me too far, Lauren thought as they entered the double doors, and I’m locking him up.

  More curious glances followed them into the jail. Violanti signed them in while Lauren stowed her gun in the lockers that were kept for visiting law enforcement. Instead of signing her name in the police book, he had written her name in the attorney’s book. The deputy on duty took it from Violanti and looked up at Lauren, arching an eyebrow. “Defense counsel?”

  “For now.” She signed the book and got her visitor’s pass.

  The deputy put the book back on the shelf behind him and typed something into his ancient computer. “I’ll call him down. Room 5.”

  Violanti led the way through the metal detectors toward the holding area.

  The fat, old deputy who kept watch at the lockup entrance wanded them both in silence. He had been the keeper of the gate since Lauren was a rookie cop. The same round man, the same stained uniform, the same facial expression. The heavy metal door behind him was rigged to close slowly. No loud slam like in the prison movies, but a soft, sure snap. It was less dramatic, but the message was just the same: you only get out when he let you out.

  They passed through that portal, only to wait for another heavy door to pop open and take them into the hallway that led to the lawyers’ visiting rooms. It was a complex labyrinth by design. Lauren always felt so suffocated in the holding center, breathing in the recycled air that smelled like cheap industrial disinfectant.

  Room 5 was all the way at the end. The small six-by-six room had two doors opposite each other, a table bolted to the floor, and one chair on each side that seemed to grow out of the floor like metal mushrooms. Someone had placed a white plastic lawn chair in the room, probably when the deputies realized that there would be three people instead of two at the interview. Lauren took the metal mushroom and Violanti sank down in the heavy plastic. It made a strained creak, like there might be a crack somewhere. He tried to shift his weight without splitting the chair in half.

  Turning toward Lauren, who was trying to ignore his presence entirely, he asked, “Are you surprised I have a godson?”

  She absently twirled her pen between her fingers. “I’d be more surprised if someone actually spawned with you.”

  “My wife and I are trying.” He moved to the left a little, felt the chair wobble, and repositioned.

  “How cute. Your kids will be so small you’ll be able to carry them around in your pocket.”

  “Be nice.”

  “Believe me, I’m trying.” She stared straight ahead at the door leading from the interior of the holding center, from where their prisoner would emerge shortly. “Let’s just get through the next half hour.”

  “Agreed.”

  Lauren was surprised when the kid walked in. She somehow expected him to be short and dark like Frank Violanti. David Spencer was anything but. A clean-cut, good-looking kid with a shock of brown hair that fell over his eyes, he looked desperately out of place in the dirty room. David wasn’t handcuffed, but he was dressed in the usual orange jumpsuit that they outfitted all the prisoners in. Even though he was tall and had an athletic build, his jumpsuit made him look sallow and small somehow. He sat down across from Lauren on his own mushroom and smiled. He had a sweetness and vulnerability about him that Lauren picked up on right away.

  “How’re you holding up, David?” Violanti asked.

  “I have to get out of here. Can’t you get me bail or something?” Despite being edged in fear, his voice was surprisingly deep and adult.

  “You’re being arraigned tomorrow morning; I’ll have to wait to make my motion for bail then.”

  “I have to spend the night here?” Panic rose in his voice. Lauren noticed how he was furiously picking at the skin around his thumb nail. Enough to draw a bead of blood.

  “You might have to spend a lot of nights here, kid. If anyone mistreats you—a guard, a prisoner—call me right away.”

  “They have me all by myself.”

  “That’s typical for someone like you.”

  His eyebrows knit together. “Someone like me?”

  “A white kid from the suburbs charged with a particularly media-worthy crime. They don’t want you to get molested before the trial.”

  He put his hand to his forehead and took a deep breath. “Thanks, Uncle Frank.”

  “Just keeping it real.”

  Lauren coughed in her best let’s get on with it way.

  Violanti focused. “David, this is the detective I told you about. I want you to answer all her questions truthfully, do you understand? Don’t embellish or leave anything out. You have to be completely honest or she can’t help you.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  Lauren waited a second for that to sink in before she started. He was staring at her intently, his eyes almost pleading with hers for something to make this nightmare go away. “I’m Lauren Riley. I work for the city homicide squad. I do cold cases, but your godfather here thinks I can help you.”

  “Aren’t you the police? Shouldn’t you be trying to put me away? The other detective I talked to, Detective Wheeler, arrested me.”

  Lauren sighed and explained slowly and patiently, “I work for Buffalo’s Homicide squad, but I’m also a licensed private detective. You were arrested outside my jurisdiction. That means Mr. Violanti can hire me to follow up on investigative leads as a private detective, as long as your crime doesn’t cross over into the city. Now, there’s a little bit of conflict because the same district attorney who’s prosecuting you also prosecutes my cases in the city, because he represents the whole county. But he can’t tell me not to work on your case.”

  “You can help me?” There was hope in that question. Not the usual pissed off mad because I got caught attitude.

  Lauren picked up on that right away. She poised her pen over her notepad, ready to write. “I don’t know if I can or if I will, but let’s start at the beginning. Full name?”

  “David Ryan Spencer.”

  She wrote that down. Then asked, “How old are you, David?”

  “I turned eighteen on November fourth.”

  He’s almost the same age as Erin, she thought, as she jotted in her notebook. Erin was her youngest. He looked like some of the boys she had brought home over the years. The boy she’d gone to the prom with, the boy she helped with his paper on Shakespeare. He could be that boy. Lauren tried to banish such thoughts from her brain; she had a job to do. She went ahead with the rest of his pedigree information and then got to the point.

  “Did you know Katherine Vine?”

  He picked at the edge of his thumb, but kept eye contact. “No. I mean kinda, but not really.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “She used to come into Toy City a lot, where I work. She used to buy these video games all the time and always two of the same one. I never really talked to her until last night when she left her credit card behind.”

  “Then what happened?” she prompted. He was going to be a bits-and-pieces interview. He’d tell her what happened, but he’d make her ask for it.

  “I called her.”

  Interesting. “How did you know her phone number?”

  “It’s in the computer,” he said as if this was the most
obvious thing in the world. “Anyway, she tells me to bring it out to her, that she’s in her car behind the building. So I did.”

  “Then what happened?”

  David paused and looked at Violanti, who leaned toward him in his unstable chair. “Tell her everything.”

  His eyes darted back to Lauren’s. “She was sitting in her car in the dark. She took her card back and told me to get in, then she practically attacked me.”

  “She attacked you?” Lauren asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “No, she didn’t attack me.” He stumbled, trying to find the right words. “I mean, she was all over me, kissing me, ripping my shirt open, pulling my pants down, biting me … ”

  “She bit you?”

  David unzipped his jumpsuit enough to pull the left side down over his arm and expose a perfect bite mark on his shoulder. “Yeah, she clawed my back too. The detective who arrested me this morning took pictures.”

  “Did you tell her to stop when she was hurting you?”

  “No. She was so into it. I’ve never been with someone so into it before. She bit me because she liked it.” A deep blush spread across his cheek. “And I liked it.”

  “You’re sitting here telling me that this older woman you’ve never really spoken to before dragged you into her car, roughed you up, and had sex with you? Is that how she ended up dead? Did it get too rough and you accidentally strangled her?”

  “No! She was alive when I got out of her car. I asked her if I could call her sometime and she kinda laughed and said no. I didn’t know what to do. She just sat there, so I walked to my car and drove home.”

  Lauren made a note on her legal pad. “Was she still in the parking lot when you pulled out?”

  “Yeah, she was still sitting there with the lights off. I figured she was waiting for me to leave.”

  “How long were you in her car?”

  “An hour, maybe more.”

  “You were in her car for an hour?”

  “We were doing things.” His eyes slid from her face, and his voice lowered. “She was doing things to me and I was doing things to her. We both were really into it. I liked her and I thought she liked me.”

  It was painful to hear him say that last sentence, it revealed to Lauren exactly how young this kid really was. How naïve. It was time to wrap this up. “Did you have intercourse?”

  The deep blush spread to his entire face now, including the tips of his ears. “Yes.”

  “How many times?”

  He hesitated, looked to Violanti, who nodded. “Twice.”

  “Did you use a condom?”

  He seemed to slump a little in his seat, glancing away from her before he answered, “No.”

  “Of course not.” She tried to control the emotion in her voice as she asked her last question. “Did she say anything to you before, during, or after sex, besides what you’ve told me?”

  “No.”

  David looked expectantly at Lauren, as if she was about to spout some great, unspoken truth. And she did.

  Lauren closed her notebook. “Kid, you’re in a whole lot of trouble.”

  5

  “What do you think?” Violanti asked as they walked back out of the holding center, his stubby legs still striding to keep up with Lauren’s.

  She stopped dead, causing him to almost collide with her. “Let’s examine what they have. I think they have two people, by his own admission, who don’t know each other. They have her bite marks on his shoulder. His DNA is going to be under her fingernails and all over her. I bet they have his prints everywhere in the interior of her car. I wish all my cases were this easy.”

  “What’s the motive then? Why would he kill her?”

  “Because she laughed at him when he asked for her phone number. Because he had a bad day at the toy shop. Because he doesn’t know his own strength during rough sex.” Lauren started walking again, not waiting for any kind of reply.

  “But do you think he did it?” Violanti pressed as he tried to keep up.

  “I think the prosecution already has a strong case, especially if he told that story to Joe Wheeler before he was arrested.” They were back in the parking lot where this whole thing had started.

  “I didn’t ask you that.”

  She sighed. He was persistent, she had to give him that. “I need to look at everything you have. The autopsy, her background, the crime scene photos. Everything.”

  “So you have doubts as well?”

  Lauren clicked her key fob and opened her car door. She got in and rolled down the window halfway. “I’ll see you at the arraignment tomorrow. I’ll decide after the felony hearing.”

  “I wasn’t going to run the felony hearing.”

  “You are now.”

  “See you tomorrow, Detective. And thank you.” An appreciative smile rolled across his boyish face. Lauren suppressed the urge to slug him.

  “Don’t thank me yet.” She rolled the window up on him and drove off. What the hell am I getting myself into? she thought as she made her way home. I should just walk away now, not get involved. Anything to do with Frank Violanti was suspect.

  But that kid, that kid, he couldn’t have murdered Katherine Vine like that. To savagely strangle a woman was cold-blooded murder. Something you graduated to over time, not something you jumped to after good teenage sex, she thought. She couldn’t shake the mental picture of him in his orange jumpsuit, how sad and embarrassed he was, how he was picking at himself until he bled. It was caught in her head.

  There was more to the story. Of that, she was sure.

  6

  The City of Buffalo was your typical rustbelt dinosaur. After the grain elevators shut down and the steel plants closed, people started flocking south to escape the harsh winters. While the nation’s economy plummeted, the downturn was barely a blip in a city whose fortunes were won and lost fifty years ago.

  Downtown, where Lauren worked, the city’s police headquarters was stuffed into a 1930s-era square building next to St. Joseph’s Cathedral. A new headquarters was low on the local politician’s pork barrel agenda, but there were rumors about moving into the old Federal Court building. In the meantime, Buffalo’s detectives and police administration toiled in a cockroach-infested, asbestos-riddled crime of architecture. The view of Lake Erie was obscured by a raised thruway that led commuters out of the urban blight and back to their neat suburban homes, far away from city crime or politics. Every day at five o’clock, you could watch the exodus from the detective divisions’ third-floor offices—thousands of cars making a break for it, escaping from the big bad city.

  Lauren managed to join the flow of traffic toward the north end of the city, where Millionaire’s Row used to thrive. She sped up and stopped, sped up and stopped, honked her horn, made an obscene gesture or two, all in rhythm with the rush hour traffic. Finally, she inched her way toward the entrance of her neighborhood after being cut off by a fifty-year-old woman driving a yellow Hummer. What used to be the mansions of the steel and grain tycoons was now a gated community, complete with security guard. Lauren smiled at Eddie in the guard shack as he lifted the wooden arm blocking the front of her car: city living at its finest.

  It wasn’t dark yet. The summer was stretching out the daylight until almost nine o’clock. Her two-story Colonial, a parting gift from husband number two as part of the divorce settlement (oh yes, she’d made more than one mistake in the love department), looked almost stately with its freshly maintained landscaping and tasteful slate gray siding with eggshell trim. The service must have been by, because stray pieces of freshly cut grass clung to her shoes as she walked around to the other side of her car. She grabbed up her bag, double clicked her fob, and officially called it a day. Kind of.

  Her brain didn’t work that way, like she could turn off being a cop. She never could. She might be able to pause it long enough to change he
r clothes and grab a bite, but then her cases came flooding back in. Without having her daughters around to clean up after, it was worse. She had managed to keep it together when Lindsey went away to college two years ago, but Erin’s departure last September had hit her hard. More so than she’d ever admit. Being a single mom for most of the last two decades had conditioned her to put them first, always. Now they were gone and all she had left was the job.

  Unlocking her front door, she escaped into her safe haven. The air conditioning felt like heaven as she threw her duffle bag onto the hallway chair, where it promptly slid off into a lump on the floor. She didn’t bother to pick it up. Who cared if she was slightly slobby? No one else was there to complain.

  That evening, as she sprawled on the flowered couch in her living room, she clicked off the flat screen over her fireplace. She wanted to concentrate without The Real Housewives of New York interrupting her. Lauren went over the article on the front page of the newspaper about Katherine Vine’s murder.

  She could have read it on her tablet, but Lauren was old-fashioned. She loved the feel of the paper in her hands, loved reading real words, not digital pixels, or whatever they were. Her fingers left little oily marks on the pages. It made her think of her father, coming home after work with his paper, drinking coffee and passing her a page once he was done with it. You have to know what’s going on, he’d told her, or else you’ll never get anywhere.

  She sank back, put her bare feet up, and took it all in. She had facts to get to.

  The picture they ran showed a beautiful blonde, tall and leggy, in some tropical paradise with the ocean behind her. Her loose hair was blowing in the breeze, she looked relaxed and happy. It was the kind of picture someone snaps at just that right moment, capturing exactly what you’re feeling. She was glowing. She was alive.

  The picture made her feel a heavy sadness in her chest. Katherine’s life had been viciously snatched from her and now she was reduced to tabloid fodder.

  Shaking out the page, Lauren continued to read. Katherine Vine, age thirty-two, had been married to Anthony Vine, the owner of a chain of gyms across the northeast. They had twin boys who were twelve years old, which explained why Katherine always bought two of the same games. Lauren’s daughters weren’t twins, but were close enough in age that she too had to buy two of everything when they were young to avoid catastrophic tantrums.