A Cold Day in Hell Read online

  But all he could think about was the scene in the parking lot that afternoon. He found himself staring at his cell phone, the tips of his fingers red with pressure, waiting for it to ring. Lauren always brought out the worst in him. There was something about her that provoked him every time he came into contact with her. She was like poison to him. Now she had him right where she could really screw him. He should’ve never popped her in the mouth. That was a mistake. He had a big cut across his knuckle that was throbbing.

  Bitch, he thought. Every time he got something good in his life, she had to come around and mess it up. He had wanted to marry her and she laughed in his face. He’d had to leave the city police because of her crazy partner. Now he had the case of a lifetime, sewed up and perfect, and she joins forces with that troll of an attorney just to stick it to him.

  The papers sat on his desk as he fingered his phone, turning it over in his hand. Where was the call from his boss asking what had occurred between them? Why hadn’t she reported him right away? Called her boss? Called her stupid young partner? Of course, there were no witnesses; it was just her word against his. But her lip was busted when he left and his knuckle was split open.

  Maybe she let it go. After all, she knew she was wrong to stick her nose into his business where it didn’t belong. It was her own fault. And she’d always been good about that when they were together. She knew when she was wrong. She knew when she had provoked him into doing something he didn’t want to do.

  Still, they weren’t together anymore. She had walked away and then married that rich attorney who knocked up his secretary. She’d gotten what she deserved. He had loved her and her kids and had been willing to take care of them all. She threw it away to marry money, showing her true colors. He’d written her off after that as the manipulating harpy she was. But now he found himself worrying about her rather than concentrating on what really mattered. His case.

  She was provoking him again.

  11

  David lay staring up at the ceiling of his cell. A white moth bumped into the plastic light panel over and over again, making a dull thumping sound with every attempt. He was in a small room that had two hard beds, one bolted over the other, and a toilet. The upper bunk was empty and the toilet was out in the open so everyone could see you do your business. The guards had let him have some paperback books his mom brought, but they sat unopened on the ledge built into the wall that formed a little desk.

  Jail wasn’t what he thought it would be. Mostly because they kept him away from everyone else. He could hear other prisoners but he hadn’t seen any. They sounded muffled and far away, maybe on another floor. He was told eventually they’d start taking him for recreation time in the basement but that hadn’t happened yet.

  A guard stopped to peer into his cell, checking on him. David gave him a little wave. He thought the guards were actually pretty decent. He didn’t know that was because it was so much easier to deal with a scared kid than a hardened gangbanger. They brought him his food on a tray and took it away when he was done. One of them even asked if the food was okay because he hadn’t eaten much. It wasn’t gourmet, but it was edible. He just wasn’t very hungry. The smell alone in the place was enough to make you sick: a mix of piss, old sweat socks, and pine-scented cleaner. But that wasn’t the worst part.

  The look on his mother’s face as they led him away in court was heart-breaking. Of all the things that were happening to him, that was the worst. Her pain. Ever since his dad died, he was all she had. She depended on him to the point where it felt like he was the parent sometimes. She was already having a really hard time with him going away to college soon, and now this.

  He listened to the sound of his own breathing and tried to concentrate on something else.

  It was hot in his solitary cell, sweltering, like it had been in the car with Katherine. He couldn’t help thinking about his mouth on her shoulder and the way she had cried out. Her nails raking down his back. He remembered about the sweat on her body mixing with his in the heat of the car.

  He rolled over onto his side and was glad he was all by himself.

  12

  “Who punched you out?” Reese asked as soon as she walked through the office door.

  “I fell.”

  “Right. I may have been born on a Tuesday but not last Tuesday.”

  She fell into her seat and stashed her purse in her desk. “Don’t worry about it. I had a little run-in with Joe Wheeler yesterday.”

  Reese pushed back from his computer, crossing his arms over his chest. “Joe Wheeler did that to your face?”

  She and Shane Reese had been partners for the last two years. Reese was something of a rising star in the department. It had been an unlikely pairing. Almost seven years younger than her, Reese was biracial. His mom a black schoolteacher, his dad a retired white firefighter. You’d never know he was an officer by looking at him. He radiated a positive nervous energy, usually reserved for inspirational high school football coaches. He had flawless caramel skin, deep green eyes, and a smile that gave him an impish, mischievous appearance that absolutely mirrored his personality.

  When he had come to Homicide two years before, other detectives had been taking bets on how long he would last. Late nights, long days, and dead bodies wore on people. Half of the detectives that transferred in asked for a transfer out in the first six months. Not only had he outlasted everyone’s expectations, he excelled at the job. When he asked to do cold cases exclusively, people assumed he was having an affair with Lauren, or that he wanted to. The fact of the matter was that they were a good fit as partners. Their cases started coming together almost immediately. The rumors died off. The partnership lasted.

  He was single as well, but the thought of them as a couple had never entered her mind. Lauren thought of Reese as the annoying little brother she never had. Whatever that romantic spark is between two people, they lacked it. They did, however, have a strong friendship. When her sink clogged, she called him. When there was a bat in her basement, he was there with a tennis racket and a goalie mask over his face swinging away. He was the one man in her life she could totally depend on.

  She waved him off. “It’s nothing. You should see what my face did to his hand.”

  “What do you mean, it’s nothing? It’s not nothing. You got assaulted.” Reese’s face was getting hot. “And you’re not going to report it? When I see that weasel, I’m going to knock his teeth out.”

  “In his town? To his boss? Where he’s the only detective? How much good do you think that’ll do? And knocking his teeth out will only get you in trouble. I’m a big girl. I can take care of it myself, Reese.” She thought if she kept repeating that mantra, eventually it would be true. And truth be told, she was embarrassed. She was a cop and should be able to defend herself. Especially from a guy like Joe Wheeler.

  “You shouldn’t have taken this job,” he spat out. “It’s a conflict. We have to work with these same ADAs. The district attorney is going to go nuts when he finds out you joined up with the dark side as a paid underling. And you’re getting your ass kicked to boot.”

  Lauren sighed. His concern was touching, but unnecessary. “No one is more surprised than me. But I met the kid, and I just don’t think he did it. My gut tells me something is wrong with the picture.”

  “Like what?”

  “It’s too good. It’s too easy. It’s like someone wrapped it up in a neat package and handed it to Joe Wheeler on a silver platter.”

  “Who else would’ve wanted her dead?”

  Lauren shrugged. “Hard to say yet. I want to look at the husband more.”

  “Don’t forget we have diversity training at the academy all day,” Reese reminded her, then glanced at the time on his phone. “Starting in twenty minutes.”

  “Aren’t the two of us diverse enough?” she crabbed.

  “I don’t think being Polish and Irish coun
ts as diversity,” Reese teased, but it was a tense joke, squeezed through his teeth.

  “What about having boobs? Doesn’t that count for anything?” Lauren knew he was genuinely concerned for her, but their dynamic was to mask it in sarcasm and insults.

  “Don’t even try to play that card. When I order pizza you love to remind me about my man boobs, so apparently it’s not only a lady thing. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

  There was a knock on the door and Marilyn, the secretary from the main Homicide office, came in. She was carrying a huge glass vase filled with long-stem roses. “These just came for you, Lauren.”

  She handed over the giant display and Lauren set it down on the only clean spot on her desk. Yellow and pink, her favorites. “Thanks, Marilyn,” she said, looking over the display. Baby’s breath dripped down onto her autopsy reports.

  “Someone has the hots for you,” Marilyn teased, giving a half wave and walking back out.

  Reese was intrigued. “Who are those from, heartbreaker?”

  Lauren pulled the little white card from the plastic prong stuck in the roses and opened the envelope. It simply read: I STILL LOVE YOU.

  She tore up the card, dumping the pieces in the trash can next to her desk.

  “Well?” Reese prompted.

  She grabbed up a blank notebook to scribble down diversity notes she’d never look at again, ready to head to the training downstairs. “It was blank.”

  13

  Riley’s coffee was almost cold the next morning when she deposited the brown tote bag Lindsey had gotten her for Christmas last year on the paperwork scattered across her desk. She slugged the last of it down, eager to get a refill from the fresh pot down the hall in the break room. The aroma had hit her as soon as she’d swiped in. For some strange reason she loved the new coffee service the Captain had brought in. It reminded her of the Jamaican stuff she’d downed by the gallon when she vacationed in Montego Bay four years ago with the girls. Just the smell of it made her want to chuck the cheap swill she’d gotten from the drive-thru. So she did.

  Snatching up her mug, she strolled down the hallway past the “regular” Homicide squad. She had woken up in a good mood. She had an extra ten grand in her bank account, the Fourth of July weekend was coming up, and even though she usually worked it, the holiday always marked the real start of summer for her, since it could stay cold in Buffalo well into May sometimes.

  “Morning, Lauren.” Mario Aquino lifted a hand in recognition as he dug through a gym bag on the floor. The sixty-year-old still hit the gym every morning before the start of his eight o’clock shift, dyed shoe-polish-black hair glistening from the shower. The squad room was already buzzing. A late-night shooting had called in half the manpower, but the victim had survived. A twenty-two-year-old gang banger shot twice in the head at point-blank range, he wasn’t even unconscious in the emergency room, he just sat there with a bandage wrapped around his melon and told the coppers nobody shot him.

  Still, the squad had to come in out of bed, process the scene, gather up witnesses, and start a neighborhood canvass. Now the sleep-deprived detectives were finishing up last night’s shooting and jumping right into today’s shift. Lauren could hear Marilyn, the squad’s secretary/report technician/mother hen, deftly answering the phone lines in the main office, taking one call after another, keeping the unit smoothly floating along.

  Glad I got off that boat, Lauren thought, filling her mug to the brim, taking a sip, and then topping it off again. That pace had been killing me.

  The swipe lock clicked and Reese came strolling in. “Hey,” he called lifting a bag in each hand, “can you bring me a cup? My hands are a little full right now.”

  Biting back her usual snarky comment, she grabbed a mug from the drying rack over the sink. “Okay, but check the messages.”

  He pushed back the baseball hat on his head with his forearm, almost whacking himself in the face with a plastic bag filled with God knew what. “Yeah. Two creams, two sugars, please.”

  She reached for the fridge handle. “I know. I know.” A long time ago Lauren had been a waitress for almost a year. Sore feet, blistered hands, and a pocketful of dollar bills had helped motivate her to take the police exam. Maybe that’s why she loved the smell of coffee so much—it reminded her of how far she’d come, from slinging it to pay the bills to sipping it by the ocean in an expensive resort.

  “Good morning,” Joy Walsh called as Lauren walked by with two steaming mugs of java. Joy was dragging herself in with the rest of the squad, her haggard face advertising her lack of sleep.

  “Did you do the post from the DOA yesterday?” Lauren guessed.

  Joy paused in the doorway of the squad room, short brown hair sticking up at odd angles. That wasn’t lack of sleep; she always looked like she just combed her hair with a fork. “It was a natural, like I thought, but you never know, right?” Post was short for postmortem, or autopsy, in other words. The county medical examiner liked to do his at six o’clock in the morning, so even if you worked all day and all night, you still got to have your morning cup with Dr. Kogut, the ME, if you caught a body in the previous twenty-four hours.

  “Right. Have a good one,” Lauren shot back, shouldering open the door of the Cold Case office, balancing her two coffees like a pro.

  The door shut behind her, cutting off any reply. Reese looked up, “Thanks.” He reached for the mug Lauren was holding out to him.

  “Double cream, enough sugar to let the stirrer stand up by itself.”

  He settled back in his seat with a satisfied smile. “You know me so well. Your lip looks better today, by the way.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Too bad about the rest of your face.”

  She sighed. “I work with a toddler.” Actually, her lip looked worse, turning a nasty purplish color. She had camouflaged it with a shit ton of makeup that morning. Lauren was an old pro at post-battering concealment.

  “Well?” she asked, waiting.

  “Well what?”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “Messages?”

  He snapped forward, sloshing some coffee onto his desk as he grabbed two slips of paper. “Marilyn took these for us yesterday. It was so busy she must have just left them on my desk.”

  Lauren took the papers. “Same woman?” Carlita Ortiz. It didn’t ring a bell.

  “Yep. She called in the morning and after lunch. We were out. Mar said she gave her our direct number so I’m guessing we should be expecting a call any second.”

  Lauren sat at her desk and started unpacking her tote bag—laptop, notebook, power bars, cellphone charger. Keep your phone close, Violanti had told her, I’ll text you. She stuffed her cell in her top drawer. She wanted to get Violanti off her mind and the case she’d just signed up for. The felony hearing hadn’t even happened and she was already trying to think of ways to avoid direct contact with the little demon. “I’ll call her after I finish my coffee.”

  “Good, because I have to figure out my Fourth of July plans.” He bent over his phone and began rapidly text messaging.

  “Could you plan on trying to figure out what’s wrong with the air conditioner in here? It’s supposed to be a scorcher today.”

  He nodded, thumbs still dancing. “Someone should tell the weather that we live in Buffalo. They’re saying it might break a hundred degrees this week.”

  The office phone shrilled loudly at Lauren’s elbow. “So much for finishing my coffee. And I’ll believe a hundred degrees when I see it. It’s never been that hot in Buffalo.” She grabbed the receiver with one fluid movement, bringing it to her ear. “Cold Case, Riley. How may I help you?”

  There was an awkward pause as the caller got themselves together. That happened. When a person thought of calling the Cold Case squad for a long time, years sometimes, and finally got the courage to actually dial the number, it seemed like they were alwa
ys surprised when someone answered.

  “Hello?” A lilting Puerto Rican accent.

  “Cold Case,” Lauren repeated, “Detective Riley. How may I help you?”

  A deep breath in, a beat before the caller could push out her words as quickly as she could muster. “Yes. Hello. My name is Carlita Ortiz. I’m calling about my mother, Vinita Ortiz. She was killed in 1993 on Virginia Place near Allen Street and her killer was never caught.”

  “Okay,” Lauren said, swinging around in her seat to grab the olive green Murder Book off its shelf. The Buffalo Police Department decided in 2008 to digitize all its Homicide files, but started from the most recent and worked its way back. Scanning one entire file could take up to two weeks, with all the notes, reports, and statements, not to mention photographs. As far as Lauren knew, they were up to January 2000, meaning everything before that was not in the computer, not entirely, but mostly still on paper.

  So Lauren kept a Murder Book, a hand-typed list of every murder that had occurred in the city of Buffalo from the present on back to 1979. Some enterprising detective whose name was lost to antiquity started the murder book in the eighties and every year the squad’s report technician added the last year’s homicides to the book. In chronological order it listed the case number, the date of occurrence, the victim’s name, the place of occurrence, manner of death, and, if an arrest had been made, the suspect’s name. Without the book, it was almost impossible to find cases over twenty years old. It was one of Lauren’s favorite jokes. When one of the Homicide guys asked her to look up an old case, she’d smile and say, “Let me check my computer,” and start flipping through the pages, just like she was doing then.

  “Carlita? I think I found it. July 29th, 1993?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. I was a baby when it happened. My brother was three. I just want to know what happened with her case ’cause no cop’s ever called or talked to us about it.”