Killer Winter

by Kay Bigelow

  “Come in,” Leah said.

  Both Davidson and Weston walked in.

  “I didn’t call you, Weston.”

  “If you’re going to talk to my partner, you may as well tell me at the same time because she’ll tell me later.”

  “Get out.”

  “But—”

  “You have thirty seconds to get out of my office.”

  “Or what?” Weston asked with a sneer.

  Leah was sick and tired of his insubordination. She held his gaze but didn’t respond.

  Weston blinked first. “Who needs this bullshit?” He stormed out of her office, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the windows.

  Leah would deal with him later. “Allison, Peony needs a partner and a mentor. She needs someone with the knowledge of how to be a good detective and how to survive the bullpen. I’d like that person to be you, if you’re willing.”

  The relief on Allison’s face was far too obvious.

  “Thank you, ma’am. I’d like to work with the kid. From what I’ve seen, she has good instincts and the potential to be a good detective.”

  “I agree. Thanks for taking her on,” Leah said.

  “No problem.”

  “Where were you and Weston?”

  “Ma’am?” Allison asked, clearly trying to stall for time to think of a plausible excuse.

  “You heard the question. You guys got back nearly an hour after the rest of us.”

  “You told Weston to stay at the scene.”

  “I didn’t say anything about you staying.” Leah watched as expressions flitted across Davidson’s face. She’d been a cop long enough to know when someone wasn’t telling her the whole truth.

  “I rode to the scene with him. He wouldn’t give me the keys to the car.”

  “Dr. Scott released you long ago. So where have you two been?”

  “Weston wanted to have breakfast,” Davidson said, not able to meet Leah’s eyes.

  Leah watched as the young detective clenched her jaw several times. Is she afraid of Weston? I’ll kill the son of a bitch if he laid a hand on her. “Didn’t you hear me tell the team to be here in twenty?”

  “Yeah. But Weston didn’t care.”

  “Send him in when you go back out there,” Leah said.

  Leah saw Davidson stop by Weston’s desk. As she spoke to him, she nodded in the direction of Leah’s office. Weston kept Leah waiting fifteen minutes. Then he entered her office without knocking. This is going to be fun.

  “Sit down, Weston.”

  “I’ll stand,” he said as he squared his body and looked at her defiantly.

  Leah took a moment to look Weston over and didn’t like what she saw. He was greasy looking—his hair was dirty, his tie had stains on it, and his shirt looked like he’d had it on for weeks. He looked like he hadn’t had a shower since last fall, and she could smell him from where she sat three feet away. He was a study in brown: brown hair, brown eyes, brown suit, but then there were the black shoes and white socks. Worse than his lack of sartorial sense was that he always reminded Leah of Billy Tompkins, her grade school’s resident bully. Not in looks, but in his actions. When young cops joined her team, they always looked up to Weston because of his years on the force. It didn’t take them long, however, to lose their hero worship. Weston thought work was beneath him, so he had the young cops write his reports, perform the scut work of the day-to-day investigations, and never gave them credit when they solved a case for him. Everyone who had ever worked as his partner had asked for either a new partner or a transfer to another precinct within a month of being forced to work for him. He was universally hated by all, including Leah. Weston was vicious and vindictive. He’d been brought up on charges numerous times, including charges of abusing suspects more than once, but nothing had ever stuck.

  “Suit yourself. I’ll make this short and sweet. You’re being transferred.”

  “What? You can’t do that,” he told her, clearly surprised at her news.

  “It’s done. I’d prefer to fire your lazy ass, but the captain said the Eighty-sixth was shorthanded, so that’s where you’re going.”

  “You can’t send me out there.”

  “I repeat, it’s done,” Leah said, glad to be rid of him.

  The Eighty-sixth Precinct was the armpit of the police department. It seemed like every misfit, malcontent, and suspected dirty cop was sent to the Eighty-sixth. They were always shorthanded because members of the precinct were killed on a regular basis. An internal analysis by the police commissioner’s office said the high mortality rate among the cops at the Eighty-sixth was due to their own negligence. In fact, cops there were as likely to be killed by a fellow cop as by criminals.

  “I’ll go to the captain. He won’t let you do this to me.”

  “Go. He signed the transfer order.”

  “That’s where the losers go.” Weston stepped toward her and glowered at her as if to intimidate her.

  “You’ll be amongst your own, then. Pack up your desk and be out of here in the next fifteen minutes. If you’re not, I’ll have you escorted out.”

  “You’ll be sorry that you did this, bitch.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Get out.”

  They’d been at odds with one another since they’d been at the academy nearly twenty years earlier. He’d been lazy then, too. At the time, she’d been sure he’d cheated on the tests, but she couldn’t prove it. He’d intimidated the weaker cadets into doing his bidding, proving he was a schoolyard bully who had simply grown older. He’d graduated last in their class. How he’d ever passed the test to get his detective’s shield was beyond Leah. She was convinced it had involved bribes, or cheating, or both.

  Things hadn’t improved over the years. Every time Leah had been promoted, Weston went ballistic and, more than once, accused her of sleeping with the captain to get the promotion he’d believed should have been his. He’d never been promoted above detective third grade, the lowest of the detective levels. Leah didn’t understand why he hadn’t been fired. It was rumored he had something on the chief.

  As Weston left her office, he slammed the door again, but it lacked the force of his first exit. He returned to his desk and Leah could see, but not hear, him ranting. The cops in the bullpen ignored him. He had no friends out there. Leah watched as Weston sat at his desk, leaned back in his chair, and put his feet on his desk.

  Leah called the desk sergeant, Derek Kendrick. “Sergeant, Weston has been relieved of his duties here, and he’s been told to leave the building within fifteen minutes. Please have some of your men up here in sixteen minutes to escort him out if he hasn’t left.”

  “Yes, ma’am. With pleasure.”

  Weston stayed seated at his desk, glowering at her window, until Sergeant Kendrick and four burly cops walked in. Weston literally jumped to his feet, regained his bravado, and sauntered out of the room. He hadn’t bothered to pack up his desk. While Leah was sure there was nothing in his desk but candy and gum wrappers, she’d have Davidson go through it and box up anything of importance and toss the rest into the recycler.

  Leah was relieved that Weston hadn’t turned violent. She was also relieved he was out of her life. She’d fought against his being assigned to her squad but had lost that battle. Now he was no longer her problem and she wouldn’t have to deal with the daily complaints from her own squad members and others in the precinct house. She wasn’t one to back down from a fight, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed meaningless confrontations either.

  Later in the afternoon, Leah received a call from Dr. Scott. “We’ve run an analysis on the crime scene photographs and video, and we don’t think there’s more than twenty victims despite the amount of blood and other evidence. We do have a tentative identification of one of the victims,” Scotty said.

  “Only one, and that’s tentative?” Leah asked, disappointed.

  “Yeah. Honestly, we may never identify the others because it looks like the evidence may be cross contaminated. If w
e could find teeth or fingers, we’d be able to identify more of the victims.”

  “Okay. Tell me what you found.”

  “As you know, we’ve found lumps of flesh all over the field, most of them tiny. When we vacuumed the field, we found hundreds of thousands of tiny bone fragments. It could take us years to identify them. Then we got lucky, we thought, when I found the partial remains of a thumb, or at least the fleshy section below the thumb.” Scotty paused.

  “That’s good, right?” Leah asked. Even one lead could mean a break in the case.

  “I couldn’t get a decent print off the lump of flesh, so I ran a quick DNA scan on it. We have a preliminary identity.” Scotty paused again.

  “Scotty, will you give me the bottom line here?” Leah asked, getting frustrated.

  “I ran the DNA test three times…”

  “Drude, Scotty. Who is this person?”

  “You’re not going to believe this.”

  Leah pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes in an effort to keep her temper in check. “Just tell me.”

  “The DNA says the hand belongs to Bishop Solomon Cohane.”

  Good Lord. “Bishop Cohane? The Bishop Cohane?” She knew Scotty wasn’t the type to kid about his evidence. But this? She wished there was a way to reset the day so she could ignore the dispatcher’s midnight call.

  “Yes.”

  Cohane was the head of the planet’s Christian church. He was well respected by everyone. He had a worldwide reputation for piety, for many, many good deeds, and a commitment to both his and others’ religions.

  “My God, what was he doing there?”

  “That’s your job to figure that out. Mine was to identify him.”

  What the phuc was the bishop doing in that field at midnight in the middle of a blizzard? The man had to be in his eighties. What or who would have lured him out on such a night? Leah tried to keep an open mind about how the bishop got to the field. Was he killed elsewhere and his body dumped in the field? That would make as much sense as his having been lured to the field only to be killed.

  Leah tuned back into what Scotty was saying.

  “We’ll keep testing what we’ve found out there.”

  “Thanks, Scotty. Don’t let anyone else work on this case but yourself, okay? I don’t want this to hit the media until we’ve put together what happened in that field and why.”

  “I agree. My techs are cataloging what we found out there. You and I are the only ones with this information. I’ll call you later when, or if, something else turns up.”

  Leah thumbed off her phone, leaned back in her chair, and closed her eyes. She should be used to cases with unexpected twists, but there was no way she’d ever expected what was coming at her now.

  Chapter Two

  Leah sat mulling over what Scotty had told her. She knew she was sitting on a time bomb and had to find a way to get off the bomb before it either derailed her career or killed it altogether. The death of the much-beloved bishop would explode in the media, and demands for the PD to find his killer would escalate every day thereafter. She and her team would be in a fishbowl with everyone watching their every move, second-guessing every decision, and demanding both her removal from the case and her resignation if she didn’t find the killer fast enough for them. After a few minutes, she called Allison Davidson.

  “In my office, and bring Peony with you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Allison said.

  The two detectives walked into Leah’s office a moment later.

  “Scotty has found evidence that Bishop Cohane was murdered at the killing field. Call his people and see if he’s gone missing again. Don’t tell them anything about him being dead. We need to keep that under wraps as long as possible. Understand?” Leah knew as the bishop aged, he’d developed a tendency to get lost if he was on his own. Each time, the police would be called and sent out to find him. Perhaps he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “Yes, ma’am,” they said almost in unison.

  “Allison, has Weston left the building?” Leah asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Boss, I’d watch your back. He said you’d pay big-time for sending him out to the Eighty-sixth,” Peony said.

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” Leah said, not for a moment believing Weston would have the balls to come after her. She’d been threatened before by men far more dangerous than Weston, and she knew he was no more than a bullying ass.

  Allison was back at Leah’s door fifteen minutes later.

  “I found him,” she said. “Kind of.”

  “Alive?” Leah asked hopefully.

  “No. Well, he might be. His housekeeper reported him missing this morning. She said the last time she saw him was yesterday morning when he left for his office at Saint Mike’s Cathedral.”

  “Who caught the case?” Leah asked.

  “O’Donnell at the Seventy-third,” Allison said.

  “I’ll ask that the case be assigned to us,” Leah said, not wanting to have another precinct digging around the perimeters of her case.

  Leah had a bad feeling about this. She went to stand in front of what she called her murder board. The department wouldn’t spring for a holographic board, citing budget constraints as the reason. She had the next best thing, though—an electronic murder board that could be projected onto a wall. It was how she kept track of her current cases. She opened a new file for this case. As the case progressed, she’d put everything related to it on the board. It was blank for now, but it would soon hold case notes, photos, interviews, and anything else she could think to put there. It helped her keep track of the minutiae every case generated and kept anything from falling through the cracks. Members of her squad had joked about her obsession with the details when she first started using the murder board technology, but when one of those details helped them solve a serial killer case a few years earlier, they stopped teasing her. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been fascinated by details.

  She took the keyboard from the cradle and typed in when she’d caught the case, her impressions of the crime scene, what Scotty had reported about Bishop Cohane, and what Allison had found about whether the bishop was merely lost or really missing. She tried to think if she could add anything else, but nothing came to mind.

  As she sat staring at the limited information she had on the case, she picked up her phone and called the captain’s office.

  “Franklin,” the gruff voice said.

  “Captain, it’s Samuels. I’d like to brief you on the case we caught this morning.”

  “What’s wrong with the old-fashioned way of briefing me? Why can’t you send me your case notes?”

  “The case involves Bishop Cohane.”

  There was silence on the other end for a moment. “Please tell me that the bishop took another wrong turn on his way home last night.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “Get up here.”

  Before leaving her office, Leah turned off her murder board and engaged both the encrypted password and palm print protections. She also locked her office door, something she rarely did. She took the glide up to the fifth floor and waited until the secretary, Sylvia, told the captain she’d arrived. As she waited for permission to enter the captain’s office, she casually studied Sylvia. The woman had been every captain’s secretary for as long as Leah could remember. She was older now, neatly dressed with her graying hair kept under control in a bun at the back of her head. She looked more like a grandmother every time Leah saw her. Of course, I’m not getting any younger either.

  She was jerked out of her thoughts when she heard Sylvia say, “Go right in, Lieutenant.”

  “Thanks.”

  Leah had no sooner closed the door than the captain started in. “What’s going on with Cohane?”

  Leah didn’t ask how much he knew about her case. She knew he’d always had his ways of finding things out. She wouldn’t be surprised if he knew nearly as much right
now as she did.

  “We think he’s dead.”

  “Think? What does the crime lab say?” the captain asked.

  “Dr. Scott is unwilling to state with one hundred percent certainty that Cohane is dead.” Leah wished she had better news.

  “Why not?”

  “The crime scene was a bloodbath. There were lumps of flesh and tiny bone fragments strewn over the entire field. Dr. Scott started testing a partial thumb in the hopes of identifying one victim. The other blood, lumps of flesh, and bone fragments will take longer to test, although he thinks there aren’t more than twenty victims in total. He’s facing an uphill battle on identification not only because most of the evidence in the field is no larger than a computer chip but because the blood was diluted by the amount of snow that fell between the commission of the murders and when he was able to vacuum it up.”

  “Good God. What happened out there?” the captain asked, rubbing his fingertips across his forehead as if wanting to chase away the implications of the victim being the bishop.

  “We have no idea yet. My team can’t do much until Dr. Scott figures out a way to identify who or what we’re looking for. He did give me the heads-up when the thumb came up as belonging to Cohane, but he’s unwilling to say unequivocally the victim is Cohane because of the cross contamination of the evidence.”

  “Has anyone contacted the bishop’s office?”

  “Yeah, he was reported missing this morning by his housekeeper.”

  “Who caught it?”

  “O’Donnell at the Seventy-third.”

  “I’ll have him transfer the case to you. They’re overwhelmed with a series of home invasions and the murder of the occupants. He’ll be glad to get rid of a missing persons case.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m assuming we have no idea what Cohane was doing there?”

  “None.” Leah paused, not sure what to say next.

  “Well, phuc,” he said as he fiddled with a small trophy he kept on his desk.

  She was sure he’d immediately jumped to what a public relations nightmare this case could turn into, just as she had. It could be a career ender for both of them.