Reese laid a hand on Lauren’s shoulder, gripping it. “You okay?”
“All these years these guys have been covering up this murder. They’re still covering it up.” She touched her hand to her side where her scars were throbbing. “And Sam has the audacity to run for Erie County District Attorney. It’s a sick joke, really.”
Picking up the crime scene photos and talking while he examined them, Reese tried to get her to refocus. “The Schultz brothers have always stuck together, right? Daddy was the old police commissioner. I bet they thought they could do no wrong.”
Pushing away from the table, Lauren stood up. “I’m making myself a drink. Do you want one?”
“I’ll have a whiskey on the rocks. The good stuff. Not the girly crap you drink with Dayla.” Reese continued to leaf through the paperwork spread out in front of him. “Too sweet.” Watson dropped his bone and stood up with her, tail wagging a mile a minute.
Lauren marched up the basement steps into her kitchen with Watson at her heels. A dozen thoughts rolled through her mind at once. Vince Schultz had stabbed her and stomped her. To get his hands on the Gabriel Mohamed file. Because his little brother had shot Gabriel. And his older brother, Ricky, covered it up. Reaching into the top shelf over her stove, she produced a bottle of Jameson Irish whiskey. Reese might have assumed she drank “girly” drinks—and she did, on occasion—but at times when her head was about to explode, she always pulled out the Jameson.
She put ice into two plastic tumblers and let the whiskey slosh over the cubes liberally. Stopping to give Watson one of his squeaky toys—a little rubber chicken wearing a bow tie—Lauren made her way back down the basement steps.
Reese was sitting straight up in his chair, holding a single photo, clamped between his finger and thumb.
“What’s that one?” she asked, careful to put the sweating tumbler on the desk next to him and not on the table with the fragile papers.
“This, my friend, is a picture of the scene, from Wadsworth, facing east on Allen Street. Examine closely the unmarked car in the upper-left corner. Sure looks to me like Ricky Schultz is sitting in the backseat talking to Sam Schultz, who doesn’t appear to be very happy.”
Snatching the picture out of his hand so fast it made her spill a couple drops of whiskey on her Berber carpeting, she squinted at the picture. Sure enough, there was a young Ricky Schultz in his winter detective gear sitting in the backseat of a Lumina talking to Sam Schultz. Sam, whose mouth was set in a hard line, looked like he was intently trying to absorb whatever his brother was telling him. “Ricky knew right from the beginning. That night. At the scene. And all of this”—she waved her hands over the piles of paperwork—“was just to cover up for his little brother.”
Reese took a hard slug from his plastic cup. “I’ll have to get the original property sheet for the gun tomorrow. If Ricky did sign out the evidence, that signature is the nail in Sam’s coffin.”
“He’ll have sent Vince to get it. He’s not dumb. He’s been on top of this thing for over twenty-five years.”
“Vince is a patrol guy. He’d need a detective to sign for it. I wonder if anyone has tried. It might raise a few red flags if a patrol officer came out of the blue wanting an original property sheet for a case he didn’t work on.” Reese tipped the cup back so that the ice came rattling forward against his teeth.
“It would be interesting to see who tried to get it for him, though.” She swirled the ice cubes around in her glass. Reese set down his empty cup. “I should have brought the whole bottle.”
“You aren’t supposed to be drinking anyway.” Reese deftly swiped the drink out of her hand, taking a sip before Lauren could protest. “Go to bed. You look like hell. I’ll go and check on the property sheet tomorrow and make sure the samples are at the lab.”
“Nope. I’m coming with you. We can’t trust anyone with this.”
“You’re supposed to be off duty with your injuries. Recovering, you know?” Reese drained the whiskey from her stolen tumbler. “But I’m not going to argue. Not tonight.”
“Good.” Scooping Watson in her arms and ignoring the pain in her side, Lauren headed back up the stairs.
“Where is that whiskey bottle anyway?” Reese called after her.
“Above the stove.”
“Think Dayla is awake?”
Lauren turned and looked at him standing at the bottom of the stairs. “Yes. But don’t even think of calling her. You’ll wake her husband.”
“Does Dayla really have a husband? I mean, I’ve never actually seen the guy.”
“Yes, Dayla has a husband. The plastic surgeon with all the billboards on the thruway? He works a lot, kind of like cops are supposed to.”
Reese snapped his fingers in recognition. “Now that you mention it, she does look a little more perky now than she did this time last year. Maybe you should pay him a visit. Get him to do something about that twelve-year-old boy’s body you’re walking around in.”
She wanted to throw something back at him about getting his own breast-reduction surgery, but she was too tired to start down that road. “Go to bed. We’ve got work to do in the morning.”
She thought she heard him mumble something about being a party pooper. She ignored it. This party is just getting started, Lauren thought as she made her way to the staircase to the second floor. And I’m the one who’s doing the conspiring now.
32
She was back on the floor of the Cold Case office, the scratchy, stiff pile of the carpet biting into her cheek. The taste of blood was flooding her mouth. All around her there were sounds of people; people walking and talking, laughing, a few coughing. Lauren tried to call out to them, tried to get their attention somehow, but all she could do was wheeze and gasp for air.
I can’t breathe.
She tried to reach out to something just on the edge of her field of vision, some dark shape that maybe she could grasp, get someone’s attention with it. Using every bit of strength she had, she snagged the object and pulled it toward her.
If I could just signal someone …
It was hard and cold. It took her a second to realize it was metal. When she finally pulled it into view, she choked on the gore in her mouth from fright.
It was a tire iron covered in gray brain matter.
Lauren shot up from bed like a bullet, drenched in sweat, gasping for air. Watson bounced awake next to her, scared at her panic, and began to bark.
I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. Her hands went to her throat. I’m going to die.
Watson finally broke through her terror, licking frantically at the tears that were running down her cheeks. Her eyes darted around the darkened area, taking in the familiar landmarks of her bedroom, the horror slowly draining away.
“I’m all right,” she whispered out loud, grabbing onto Watson and holding him close. He still licked at her face as she rocked with him in bed, back and forth. “I’m all right. It was just a dream.”
33
One good thing about going to headquarters at ten o’clock on a Thursday was that you could blend in with the crowd on the first floor where the property room was located. After morning arraignments, the arrestees from the night before lined up on the Church Street side of headquarters to retrieve their property. That day people were bunched around the side door, waiting for their turn at the Property Department’s window. Riley and Reese breezed past them into the main hallway, past the elevator, to the back of the building, and up to the door where the coppers who worked Property came and went.
The door was old, as old as the building, having never been replaced. The word Property was painted in red across the frosted glass. It had no swipe; you either had a key to get in, or you didn’t. Not even the commissioner could get inside after the personnel assigned there went home for the day. Reese gave the heavy wooden door a good double knock, so the RTs
up front at the window would hear it.
Helen Downey, who’d been with the department for fifty years, opened the door a crack and peeked out.
“Shane!” She threw the door open wide. Helen was straight off the boat from Dublin and made no secret of her crush on Reese. “What brings you to see me today?” It came out more like: Wha brings ya ta see ma to-da? Lauren didn’t care why she let them in. Whatever works, she thought, giving Helen a huge smile.
“And Lauren, how are you feeling, love?” Helen leaned in and gave her a hug. In her white shirt, navy-blue pleated pants, and tastefully tinted red hair, Helen resembled an aging airline stewardess; all she needed was the tiny scarf tied around her neck.
“I’ll live,” Lauren replied, still smiling. “Thanks for asking.”
“Of course you’ll live! You got the Irish in you, Miss Riley. We’re hard to kill. Just ask the British.” She gave Lauren a wink and backed farther into the Property room to let them all the way in, the door falling locked behind them.
“We need your help with something, Helen,” Reese told her, lowering his voice. “We have to ask you a few questions, but it cannot leave this room.”
“What do you need, darlin’?” she whispered back, eyes glancing over to Sadie Covington, who was helping a sad-looking man at the window. Sadie was a notorious gossip.
Pulling a copy of the property sheet from his back pocket, he put it in her hand. “I need you to see if the property on this form, especially the gun, is still here. And we need to know if anyone else has come looking for it lately.”
Helen perused the sheet. “It’s a homicide case. Everything should still be here. No statute of limitations on murder.”
Reese nodded along with her. “Exactly. Can you get the chain of custody sheet so we can look at it?”
“For you, Shane? Anything. Be back in a jiff.” She walked toward the side room where the files were kept, disappearing behind another heavy door.
“Laying it on pretty thick, weren’t we?” Lauren asked, leaning up against one of the desks.
“What? My attraction to women knows no age limits. Real men know mature women are sexy as hell. That’s good news for you; you’re getting a little long in the tooth.”
“I’m thirty-nine.”
“Soon to be forty, according to my calculations.” He shook his head. “You have officially passed into straight-up cougar range. You should embrace it. Get a younger man in your life.”
“I have a younger man in my life, and he drives me crazy,” she pointed out.
“Only because we have a strictly platonic relationship. Believe me, if you were getting a piece of this”—he motioned grandly from his head all the way down to his toes—“you’d be one happy lady.”
“I think I’ll just stay single, thank you very much.” After her disastrous affair with her ex-husband the year before, Lauren had put a moratorium on her sex life. Not that there was ever any danger of her and Reese crossing any lines.
“Plenty of cats available at the shelter this time of year,” he told her. “No better time to start your brood than now.”
Frowning, Helen appeared in the doorway holding two pieces of paper. “This is odd,” she said, smoothing a yellowing sheet on the desk in front of her. It was the original of the form Reese had handed to her, except that as the evidence moved from the lab back to Property and out again, various handwritten notations had been added to the back page.
“It says here the gun went to the lab the night of the homicide. Came back in March of 1992.” Her knobby finger traced its way down the page. “Here, in April of 2006, the lab checked the gun back out. It was returned in August. On September 5th of 2006, that same gun was checked out by the lead detective, Richard Schultz. It doesn’t show it was ever checked back in.”
“Did Schultz actually sign for the gun?”
She turned the paper around and pointed out the signature. “Right here.”
“I knew it,” Lauren said.
“Has anyone else asked to see this evidence or the property sheet? Recently, I mean. Last two weeks maybe?” Reese pressed.
Helen shrugged. “Not that I know of. But if they did, they didn’t leave with it, did they?”
“Ok, Helen, now this is important.” Reese leaned across the desk, palms down, fingers splayed over the blotter. “I want you to make a copy, put it in the file, and give me the original with the signature. Don’t worry, we’ll get it back to you when we’re done. You won’t get in any trouble.”
“I can’t give you the original property slip,” she protested. “They don’t ever leave here.”
“This slip itself is important. It’s evidence in a homicide investigation. That’s why I need it. And it’s important that you don’t tell anyone about this. I promise when we’re done you’ll get it back. Have I ever lied to you before?”
Her watery blue eyes softened. “No.”
“Please make a copy, put that in the file, and call me if anyone else wants to see it.”
Helen gathered up her paperwork and disappeared into the side room. Coming out four minutes later, she handed Reese a manila envelope. “No one’s come asking about it, as far as I could tell. Just you two. Don’t let anything happen to this.”
“You know I won’t,” he said, taking it from her. He gave her one of his dazzling smiles, but Helen still looked distressed at breaching her sworn duties to protect the property sheets.
Lauren tried to sound reassuring as she told her, “I promise we’ll take the blame if anything blows back on you. We wouldn’t have asked if it wasn’t really, really important.”
“I trust you two. Never done me wrong, yet. But I don’t want it getting around I do this sort of thing.”
Chucking her gently under her double chin, Reese said, “It’s our secret, Helen. See you soon.”
They left the poor woman wringing her hands near the door, still unsure if she made the right call or not. Lauren felt bad for putting Helen in that position, but Ricky’s signature on that document proved he tampered with, and probably destroyed, evidence in a homicide case. That piece of paper was a crucial bit of evidence.
“You wait here. I’m going up to the Homicide office to check in with Joy, tell her I’m taking off the next couple of days.” Still holding the envelope, Reese hit the button for the elevator.
“I’ll just wait here for you here with my thumb up my ass,” Lauren told him as the doors opened.
“Better take the stick out first,” he advised as the doors shut in front of him.
Cocky, immature, unprofessional—
Lauren’s thoughts were interrupted by a tap on the shoulder.
Swiveling around, she found herself face to face with Vince Schultz. Her hand reflexively went to her gun at the small of her back. Vince took a step back with his hands up. “Whoa! I didn’t mean to startle you, Lauren. I just wanted to say hi and see how you’re doing.”
Struck dumb for a second, Lauren stared at the man who had shoved a knife between her ribs. His pockmarked face, his graying dark hair, his blue uniform shirt stretched over his broad chest. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, the rational part of her brain was telling her, Smile, right now. Don’t let on that you know anything.
It took every ounce of undercover police training she had to keep herself together.
“I’m sorry.” She managed what she hoped was a smile. “I’m a little jumpy these days.”
“Yeah,” he laughed, hitching his thumbs in his gun belt. “I get that. I’m glad you’re doing all right. Do they have any leads on who hurt you?”
She noted he said hurt, not attacked, or stabbed, or tried to kill. Hurt, like he had hurt her feelings, not left her to die on a dirty carpet in her own office. She shook her head. “Right now, they have nothing.” Lauren was not going to give anything away to this piece of garbage.
; “And your old boyfriend? Do they think it’s connected?”
Realizing as she stood in front of him that he was taller than Joe, like the killer had been, she took a step back. The dream from the night before came rushing in, the brain and blood on the tire iron, the copper taste in her mouth. She blinked hard twice, trying to keep her focus.
“They’re looking at all the angles,” she replied in the most neutral tone she could muster. Standing so close, Lauren could smell Vince’s bad breath. Her eyes fixed on the gold chain around his neck and the way his white chest hair curled around it. Can he hear my heart? The one he tried to stab? Her mind raced as she tried to control the panic rising up in her. It’s about to beat out of my chest.
“I think it’s pretty sick, that someone is running around …”
His voice trailed off in her ears as her eyes slid down to his black city-issue boots. Pant legs stuffed inside, laced up high. Those have my blood on them. Her pulse raced. Soaked in the laces or stuck in the cracks of the leather from when he stomped on my head. Or from when he walked through the blood pooling on the carpet next to me or spatter from Joe’s crushed head. He washed them, I know he washed them, but there’s always a trace …
“What’s going on here?” Reese’s voice cut through her thoughts, bringing her back to the dirty hallway in front of the elevator whose car just deposited Reese next to her.
Head reeling from the images embedded in it, Lauren said, “Vince just stopped to ask how I’m doing. I think you were right, Reese. I shouldn’t have come here. Not with all the medications I’m on. Not yet.”
Reaching past her, Vince stuck out his hand to Reese, who shook it without hesitation. “Good to see you,” Vince told her partner.
Reese answered with his normal, pleasant, friendly tone. “You too, man. Let me get my partner out of this place. I told her not to come.”
“Yeah. It takes a long time to recover from those kind of injuries,” Vince said. “Don’t overdo it.”
The Murder Book Page 16
