The Murder Book

by Lissa Marie Redmond

  His voice was grave. “Keep me in the loop on this. I’m not kidding. Those guys? The Schultzes? They’re old-school. Family always comes first. Rita ain’t nothing to them.”

  Lauren waited for a break in traffic to pull out. “Neither was I,” she reminded him and headed south on Elmwood toward the Skyway.

  30

  “Okay, Mata Hari, what’s so important we have to have a clandestine meeting in the dark away from the office?”

  Reese had his heavy navy-blue peacoat on. The wind off the lake had been wicked all day, and the temperature had plummeted as soon as the sun went down. After dropping Charlie at the cemetery, Lauren had turned around and gone home to get a heavier jacket. She had grabbed her gray wool waist-length coat to keep the chill at bay, thinking that would do. Now she stood with her hands stuffed into the pockets, collar up, trying to keep her back to the wind. “Is everyone still up in the office?”

  “Only a couple of people. Vatasha. Major. A few other guys, probably. Why?”

  “I need to get into the file room and I don’t want anyone to see me.”

  Reese scratched his five o’clock shadow. “That’s going to be tough, considering they just installed a new camera on the door to get into the Homicide wing. And then there’s the camera inside the file room itself.”

  “No one is going to be sitting watching those monitors 24/7. I don’t care if I’m taped. I just need you to run interference so I can grab a file and get out without anyone seeing right away, since we still don’t have a clue who the leak is.”

  “Okay. I’ll swipe in. If the hallway is clear, I’ll give you a wave. Have your key ready and pop into the file room. I’ll hang around outside until you’re done. You going to tell me exactly what you’re looking for?”

  She braced for the full force of the wind on her face. “Let’s walk and talk. This is a long story.”

  They both bent their heads into the wind as they walked toward the ancient brick building that currently housed headquarters. The wind off the lake whipped down the sidewalk, carrying the day’s refuse with it: plastic bags, a newspaper, an empty Styrofoam cup that bounced off Lauren’s shoe and kept skipping down toward the Canalside entertainment complex.

  When she was finished, Lauren said, “We have to protect Rita until we can make a case.” As they reached the back door, Lauren saw that most of the windows on the upper floors were dark. That was a good thing, it would help her to focus. Let me see what Vince Schultz saw right before he attacked me, she half prayed. Let me find what he wanted to find.

  Reese let out a low whistle. “When I was a rookie, me and Vince Schultz worked in D-District together. No one wanted to ride with Vince, so he became the training officer for a while. He was a miserable prick, but he knew all the shortcuts: where to go to get free coffee, what pizzeria would give you a whole pie, how to blow off calls and let other cars do the work for you. I spent six weeks on pins and needles thinking this guy was going to get me fired.”

  “It looks like he’s graduated from free donuts to attempted murder. And possibly premeditated murder, if he killed Joe Wheeler.”

  Reese swiped the outer door open to a darkened hallway. “Why would he kill Wheeler?”

  Slipping inside the building and out of the wind, Lauren shook her head. “I don’t know. Misdirection? Look over at Joe while I frame you?”

  “Seems a little extreme.”

  Taking the staircase instead of the elevator, Lauren was huffing by the second landing. “So is covering up the murder your brother committed so he can become district attorney twenty-five years later.”

  She couldn’t see it because she was in front of him, but she knew he had his sarcastic smile on when he agreed with her. “Right.”

  They stopped on the third-floor landing, Reese sticking his head out into the corridor to be sure they were alone. When he gave her the thumbs-up, they walked to the main Homicide door, not bothering to creep because of the newly installed cameras. She waited as he swiped himself in, took a look around the hallway, then waved her inside.

  She went right for the file room door, key in hand. On the door near the latch were deep grooves where Vince had tried to pry it open when the keys hadn’t worked. She slipped hers in, and the lock turned easily.

  The room was black as India ink. The RTs had the windows covered to keep direct sunlight from damaging the fragile paper files. Lauren fumbled her fingers along the wall until they hit the light switch, the familiar smell of stale paper and dust filling her nostrils.

  The first thing her eyes focused on was the camera aimed directly at her. If someone was in the captain’s office, they’d see her face filling up the monitor. Thankfully the Invisible Man was gone by six like clockwork, and no one went into his office if they could help it.

  What year did Rita say? Lauren stepped into the file room, looking at the rows of metal cabinets: was it 1991 or 1992? Winter, for sure, but sometimes people’s sense of time was distorted, especially if they were cracked out. Lauren moved to the cabinet with 1991 written on a white piece of copy paper taped to the front of the drawer and opened it.

  The fronts of the folders were all printed the same, with spaces for the victim’s name, age, gender, date of birth, address, and place of death along the top. Beginning with September she pulled the files one by one, read the information and replaced them: too old, too young, too female, strangled, drowned.

  She got to December 31st and shut the drawer. It was disheartening, downright depressing, that there were this many unsolved homicides. A lot of them were gang-related drive-bys, the hardest to solve. The early nineties were the height of the crack epidemic and with no clear-cut head of distribution, thirty separate small street gangs fought each other relentlessly for turf and money.

  Lauren moved to the next olive-green cabinet, pulling open the drawer. On January 1st, 1992, the detectives logged the first homicide of the new year at 12:16 a.m. Harry Cranston was shot in the chest on Zenner Street. She scanned for a name added to the arrest information. There was nothing. Another unsolved. I’ll get back to you, she thought as she tucked the file back in. I promise.

  As she continued to tick through the drawer, a file thicker than the ones around it caught her eye. She kept checking each file before it, but somehow she knew that was going to be the one she wanted. The January files ended. February started slow, until she hit the big file: February 24th, 1992. Sure enough, file 92-035 belonged to Gabriel Mohamed, age 18, from 1801 Wadsworth Avenue.

  Lauren carefully pulled the file the rest of the way out, then checked to make sure there weren’t any supplemental files in the drawer connected to the case. Pulling back the elastic tie, she made certain the crime scene photos were intact. It would have held things up if she had to order them from Andy Knowles over in Photography.

  Satisfied she had everything, Lauren went back to the outer door with its frosted glass window and listened for a second. If Reese was engaged in a loud boisterous conversation, she’d have to wait it out. Technically, she was violating departmental policy by removing the file. Not technically, she thought, actually and totally. The only place those original files were supposed to go was the DA’s office and court.

  If I’m going to get suspended, I might as well make it count. She turned the knob, holding the folder under her right arm.

  Reese was waiting by the door. “Got it?” he asked in a quiet voice.

  Just as she nodded her head, Garcia came walking from the main Homicide office into the hallway. Lauren handed the folder off to Reese, who cradled it in front of him, as if he’d had it the whole time. Garcia didn’t notice. “Hey,” he said strolling toward them. “What are you doing here, Riley? I thought you were still out injured. Stab wound healed already?”

  “You find out who killed Joe Wheeler yet?” she asked.

  Garcia shrugged his shoulders. “Not my case. Joy and your boy h
ere are all over it. Ain’t that right, Reese?”

  Reese’s face pulled back into a tight smile, his voice cold and hard. “Call me a boy one more time. Let’s see what happens.”

  Garcia held up both hands. “No offense, buddy,” his words stumbled out. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  Without answering, Reese hit the exit bar for the door with his hip and Riley slipped through. He let it slam behind them, cutting off Garcia’s nervous laughter.

  “Let’s go,” Reese said, handing her back the folder.

  31

  Lauren’s basement office didn’t have a mess table to spread the file out, like in the Cold Case office, so they had to improvise. Combine that with a very enthusiastic and known-paper-chewing West Highland Terrier and it was a hectic first few minutes of set up.

  Lauren wrestled the card table out of the back storage closet while Reese carried two folding chairs with one arm and Watson with the other, who was licking Reese’s face like it was a bacon ice cream cone.

  “Should I put him in his crate?” Watson wriggled around in his arms to get at the unlicked side of his face.

  “No, he’ll just bark and cry until we let him out.” Lauren arranged the chairs and deposited the folder onto the brown padded surface. She retrieved a couple of pens from a cup holder on her computer desk. Sitting down, she realized she hadn’t used this table or these chairs since she and the girls used to play games of scat on Friday nights. They’d both been in grammar school then. Lauren ran one hand over the cracked faux leather top. How many nights had she and the girls spent laughing and drinking soda over that table?

  “You’re spoiling him.” Reese let Watson down. He promptly ran over and tried to crawl onto Lauren’s lap. She held him off with one hand.

  “There’s a rawhide bone over on the shelf. Go grab it.”

  Reese pulled the knotted bone off the shelf and tossed it to Watson. Catching it easily, he settled at Lauren’s feet and began to gnaw on it. “Why do you have bones hidden around your house for my dog?” he asked, putting his hands on his hips like Lauren’s mom used to do when she got caught doing something she shouldn’t.

  “I got him a couple of treats and toys when I was at the store.” She feigned innocence. “What’s so bad about that?”

  “It’s going to break his heart when we leave,” Reese reminded her, taking his seat at the card table.

  Lauren ignored that comment; they could argue about custody another time. She pulled the elastic off the fat file folder. For larger files, the Homicide squad used extra-large accordion folders that could expand to about seven inches before they had to add another. This one was stuffed to maximum capacity, a lot of room taken up by the crime scene photos. Slipping those out first, Lauren put them aside. She then divided the paperwork into witness statements, police activity reports, and physical evidence articles. Smattered about the file were handwritten notes, messages, and phone numbers. Those she separated into their own pile and pushed them to the corner. They’d get to those last.

  “I’ll go over the crime scene reports, the integrity sheet, and 911 print outs,” Reese said, gathering up those particular documents.

  Lauren reached across the table to her computer desk, grabbed a legal pad, and passed it over to him. “I’ll start with the evidence reports.” Plucking her readers off the top of her head, she put them on, adjusting them until she could read the fine print on the old paperwork. “That gun had to be collected by someone.”

  Spending the next hour poring over the paperwork, Reese and Riley managed to fill three pages of notes each. Every so often Lauren would say, “Paper,” and Reese would tear a sheet from the back of the pad and hand it to her without looking up. The only sound in the room was the scratching of their pens and the chewing of Watson, who had turned one end of his bone into mush.

  “Son of a bitch,” Reese said, holding up a two-page crime scene integrity report. It was the job of the first officer on the scene to record every single person who came into the crime scene, at what time, and what their assignment was. “Right here on page one, it says the first Homicide car to show up was Richard Schultz and his partner, Walter Lindhydt. Four minutes later Vince Schultz and his car partner in 3-South One get logged in.” He flipped the page. “Here, twenty minutes later, baby brother Samuel Schultz is logged onto the scene as walking the beat that night.”

  That made sense. They still made cops walk the beat in Buffalo, only now they parked their patrol car and walked in the entertainment districts, like Canalside or Chippewa Street. Back then, another car crew would dump you off, usually a lone rookie, and pick you up when your watch was over. You were supposed to learn the neighborhood, check the businesses, and get to know the usual suspects.

  “Do you see Charlie Daley’s name on there anywhere?”

  Reese ran a finger down along the column on the second page. “It looks like three Narcotics cars came to the scene to help out. Yeah, he’s there, but he doesn’t show up until after all three of the Schultz brothers. A lot of cars came over; must have been a cold, boring night in February.”

  He handed the integrity sheet to Lauren. She scanned it with a practiced eye. “All those cops coming to the scene, now it makes sense why no one saw the shooter running away.”

  Reese finished her thought. “Sam Schultz probably scooted down one of the side streets and doubled back.”

  Sifting through the crime scene photos, Lauren noticed a picture of the gun sticking out from beneath a beat-up four-door sedan. When the car had been parked, the heat from the engine caused the snow under it to melt, leaving a dry patch on the pavement. “At least we got lucky, and he didn’t toss the gun in a snow bank.”

  Reese’s brow furrowed as he looked at the picture. “That’s a five-shot revolver. It’s not city-issue.”

  “The second gun old-timers used to carry,” Lauren told him. “Now you have to qualify with every weapon you carry and make sure it’s on your C-Form down at the range. Back then, guys would take a gun off a guy, stick it in an ankle holster, and it became their backup gun.”

  “Could you even imagine doing that today?” Reese asked.

  Lauren examined the rest of the scene photos. The young victim looked like a broken doll, crumpled face-down on the icy sidewalk. Cop cars ringed the scene, crime scene tape stretched from light pole to light pole. Officers milled around the perimeter, jacket collars turned up against the cold.

  Someone had stapled the victim’s school ID card to the inside edge of the file flap. Gabriel Mohamed, date of birth January 5th, 1974. He had just turned eighteen. From under the yellowing laminated plastic, a handsome dark-skinned young man grinned up at her. The card proclaimed he was in the 10th grade at Hutch Technical High School on South Elmwood Avenue. Heat crept across Lauren’s cheeks as anger flooded over her. His mother had escaped famine and poverty in Somalia just to have her son gunned down on the sidewalk for stealing change out of a car.

  “The good old days definitely had their dark side.” She tried to push the disgust for what the three brothers had done to the side for now. She needed to be clinical and precise, not emotional. For Gabriel’s sake. “One of Sam’s brothers probably gave that gun to him. Told Sam that was how things were done.” Putting the photo back in its pile, Lauren picked up another piece of paper, dangling it in front of Reese. “We have a problem, though. The gun was put into evidence at the Erie County Lab that night. It was test-fired and sent back to Property. There it sat until 2006, when a cold case DNA initiative from the state gave out grants to test evidence from old homicide cases. The gun was tested, and DNA was recovered from the trigger area, the grip, and the barrel.”

  “That’s good news,” Reese said. “Where’s the problem?”

  “The lab sent the results to the detective in charge of the case: Ricky Schultz.” She slid the DNA report across the card table. “What do you want to bet if we g
o down to the Evidence unit, Ricky checked that gun out and it never came back?”

  Engrossed with the data on the DNA report, Reese didn’t look up. “Doesn’t matter. The actual samples are on file at the lab. All we need is Sam Schultz’s DNA and they can still match it.”

  “I’m sure he’s just going to open up his mouth and let me swab him.” Lauren sat back in her chair, which creaked in protest.

  “Then we’ll have to get creative. If Rita won’t go in front of a judge for a search warrant, we’ll have to get an abandoned sample.” Reese’s green eyes flashed as they met hers, thinking of how they could swipe one of Sam’s used Tim Hortons coffee cups or a discarded toothpick. “We’re going to get these guys, Riley. We’re going to get Sam for murdering that kid, Ricky for covering it up, and Vince for stabbing you.”

  “If my memory is correct, I was a detective working on the Sex Offense Squad when Ricky retired. I remember not being able to go to his retirement party because I had a call out on a rape. I was at the hospital, holding this woman’s hand thinking I needed to put a transfer in.”

  “I could never handle Sex Offense cases,” Reese admitted. “Too hard.”

  She nodded. “It was, especially with two daughters at home. It wears you down. But I learned a lot. I just remember feeling guilty that I was mad at missing a party when this poor girl was so horribly abused. I knew I needed to leave the squad before I lost my mind.”

  “You did.” Knowing when it was time to put the witty banter aside, he told her, “You never stop fighting for the victims. You taught me that.”

  “It’s funny the way you remember things. I should have no idea when Ricky retired. But it’s etched in my brain because it’s attached to that poor woman’s suffering. And now it’s attached to Gabriel Mohamed.” She put her pen and paper on the table.

  The images of Joe Wheeler and Gabriel Mohamed, both lifeless, left for dead on the street, mixed in her mind. Bending forward, she pinched the bridge of her nose, taking as deep a breath as she could manage.