Killer Winter

by Kay Bigelow

  “You’re the best, Scotty.”

  “I know,” he said and hung up.

  Now she had to wait, and Leah hated waiting. At the same time, though, she knew she had to have patience. Normally, a member of her team would get the warrant issued by a judge while the rest of the team stood by at the place that was going to be searched, waiting for the warrant to arrive. Now, though, her team consisted of herself and Peony. And Cots, kind of. I wonder if I could get a judge to issue the warrant electronically. Probably not. A few years earlier, a judge had been badly burned when he issued the warrant not to the police but to the guy they wanted to arrest. The suspect had simply torn the search warrant up, packed his bags, got on his private jet, and flown off planet. As far as anyone knew, he’d never returned. The next thing the cops knew, the Judicial Council had issued new guidelines for warrants, and the only change was there were to be no electronically issued warrants and, therefore, no more egg on the faces of judges. She decided to concentrate on her murder board, and added her thoughts on the connection between Martin and Preata to the murder book.

  Cots came into the living room as dusk began darkening the condo.

  “I’ve got another connection for you. Three years ago, Mrs. Martin called the cops when her husband beat her up. She filed charges, but changed her mind when Martin agreed to get counseling. Instead of going to a shrink, he went to a priest.”

  “Let me guess. It was Preata?”

  “It was.”

  “Do we know how long the counseling lasted?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “That’s all? That’s not enough time for someone like Frank to get through the litany of violence in his family.”

  “Preata declared him counseled in a letter to the judge two weeks after accepting the assignment.”

  “Poor Mrs. Martin,” Leah murmured.

  “Yeah. The same day Preata issued his letter, Mrs. Martin ended up in the hospital. Multiple broken bones, contusions everywhere, and a busted spleen. She didn’t press charges. In fact, she never even called the cops again, let alone filed charges against her husband.”

  “So we now know Preata knew Martin was a violent man. So when he wanted violence done, he knew who to turn to. Keep looking at Martin. The more we know, the more we have to help convict him.”

  Leah spent the rest of the evening waiting for Scotty’s call and thinking. She ran the evidence they had over and over in her head looking for flaws in her thinking. She couldn’t find any. She needed the physical evidence against Martin to be able to arrest him. Once she did that, she hoped he’d turn on Preata.

  I will be so glad to put this case and all the other stuff intertwined with it to rest. Then I can begin to deal with my feelings for Quinn. Until then, I need to focus on the case. I don’t want to make a mistake at this stage of the case because I wasn’t focused. I can’t deal with Quinn right now. The fact that she would have to deal with Quinn at all made her stomach churn. That was the last thing she’d ever have expected. Since that first bombing, her life had turned upside down, and it didn’t look like it was about to turn right side up anytime soon.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Leah had slept in the secure room, unable to bring herself to sleep in the same bed she’d shared with Quinn. As she lay awake in the early hours of the morning, she tried to get Quinn out of her mind. Every time Quinn popped up, she’d forcibly pushed her out of her head. “Focus” became her mantra.

  When she finally gave up on going back to sleep, she showered in the guest bathroom and donned sweats, a sweatshirt that said “You Rule,” and her favorite piggy fuzzy socks. She smiled when she looked down at her feet and saw the pigs flying. She went to the kitchen, made a pot of coffee, and sat sipping it while she waited for the others to join her. She ran over what needed to be done before she arrested Martin to see if she could find something to do with her day. There was nothing she could do until she heard from Scotty.

  “Good morning,” Peony said cheerfully as she and Cots entered the kitchen. Peony had given up any pretense of sleeping in her own room. Cots, always the grumpiest in the morning, grunted something that kind of sounded like “Morning,” but could have been anything.

  “Is it?” Leah hadn’t even looked outside yet; the storm within her was taking all her attention and most of her energy.

  “The sun is out for the second day in a row,” Peony said.

  “And there’s an additional two feet of snow on the ground,” Cots said sourly. As he was pouring his first mug of coffee of the day, he said, “Quinn called earlier.”

  He had his back to her, and Leah wasn’t able to judge what he thought of the early morning call. He obviously wasn’t going to volunteer what the call had been about.

  She couldn’t help herself as she asked, “Care to share?”

  “She pumped me for information about the case. She specifically wanted to know who we were going to arrest.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her we were going to arrest some guy who lived down in the tunnels,” he said, referring to the miles of tunnels running under the city that a hundred years earlier had been used for transportation.

  Peony started coughing, having guffawed just as she took her first sip of coffee.

  “Quick thinking. At least if the commissioner announces that, we’ll know who planted the story,” Leah said, smiling.

  Cots looked at Leah and returned her smile, but she saw the sadness in his eyes and knew it probably mirrored her own. He’d lost someone he’d known since childhood, and she’d lost a wife she’d thought she’d spend forever with. Now they were both operating on the assumption she was working against them. It sucked in ways she couldn’t even express.

  By midmorning, Leah was pacing the floor. She hadn’t heard from Scotty, and she knew better from years of working with him than to call him to try to speed things along. With nothing better to do, she paced.

  She glanced out the window and noticed Peony’s sunny day had lasted all of two hours. Dark snow clouds were moving in rapidly from the northwest. For lack of anything better to do, she turned on a newscast to find out how much snow they could expect. Another twenty-two inches of snow was being predicted before this latest storm moved out of town. The good news was the temperatures were going to be slightly higher than the overnight temps. Leah smiled. The weatherwoman was obviously trying to be optimistic and cheerful. Leah wasn’t sure how much difference three degrees would make when they were talking in terms of minus thirty-eight degrees.

  “Leah?” Cots asked as he came in from the secure room.

  “Yeah?” She turned away from the TV.

  “Can we talk?”

  “Of course. What’s on your mind?”

  “For what it’s worth, Quinn doesn’t represent all Devarians. She’s always had the morals of a Forsythe toad.”

  “Thanks for telling me, Cots,” Leah said. While she had no idea what a Forsythe toad was, she got the picture. “I have to admit, I’m still surprised you’ve taken my side over hers on this.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe it was a tipping point. Maybe it was getting to spend time with you and get to know you better. Maybe I just don’t like being played. Whatever, I know I made the right choice.” He looked at her speculatively. “Are you going to be okay?”

  Leah had no idea what the answer to that was. “I think so. I mean, eventually, yeah. I don’t feel like I knew her at all, and that makes me feel pretty stupid. I loved her, but I don’t know if the woman I loved even existed. I want to ask her why she married me in the first place, but I’m not sure I actually want to know.” She smiled at him sadly. “I hate not knowing what’s going on, and I think that’s pissing me off more than anything at the moment. What game is she playing?”

  Cots shook his head and they sat silently for a long moment. Leah knew they were both out of words and unsure if there was anything more to say on the subject.

  “Watch the news channel,” Peony yelled fr
om the secure room. She sounded almost panicky, and Cots grabbed the remote and turned to a news channel.

  There was a picture of Quinn on the screen; Leah’s heart began to race, and dread enveloped her.

  “Another breaking story related to the disappearance of Bishop Cohane,” a voice on the vidscreen was saying. “Quinn Benubrian, the wealthy real estate mogul, has been murdered. Benubrian was returning to her office after a meeting and was gunned down as she exited her car in front of her office building. In recent weeks, rumors began circulating Benubrian was helping the police in the investigation of the Bishop Cohane disappearance. So far, there are no leads as to who was behind Benubrian’s murder, and the police aren’t saying anything more about the Cohane investigation.” The vidscreen moved to a different scene. “And in another development, the Devarian Kings have been cleared of their involvement in the police station and crime lab complex bombings, leaving the rogue police detective as the only suspect.”

  Cots muted the vidscreen, his face pale and his eyes wide.

  Leah sat down hard in a nearby chair.

  Dead. Quinn is dead.

  Someone killed her. Who wanted her dead? She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Cots, too, had found a seat on the closest chair, and Peony rushed in from the secure room to stand mute, having no words to speak.

  Leah felt numb. Her mind was reeling and her thoughts were so jumbled they made no sense. Dead. Quinn is dead. My wife is dead.

  A silence enveloped them, and no one spoke for several minutes. Peony cleared her throat and broke the silence.

  “What is it?” Leah asked, glad for the distraction even as she felt her world spin further out of control.

  “The newscast implied Quinn was, ah, killed because she was helping us investigate the disappearance of the bishop.”

  “Go on,” Leah said.

  “There are only a few people who knew Quinn was working with us on this case, at least at first.”

  “Grandini, the commissioner, and probably the governor.” Cots counted them down on his fingers, and his hands were clearly shaking.

  “Right. So of those three people, who would Quinn have the most dirt on?”

  Cots scoffed. “Seriously? She could have files full of stuff on all of them.”

  Leah nodded. “True. So how does Quinn, and the information she was feeding people, tie them to the bishop case? Did she have information someone got particularly worried about?”

  “Could it be Grandini who had her killed, and not because of any ties to the case?” Peony asked more to herself than to Leah and Cots. “More as a crime of passion kind of thing?”

  Leah was glad Peony had asked the question she’d wanted to ask and wouldn’t.

  “Why would Grandini want to kill Quinn? She’d be more likely to kill Leah, don’t you think?” Cots asked. “I think Leah’s right. Quinn knew something too dangerous for someone to let her continue breathing.”

  Leah tried to quell the desire to vomit and turned her attention away from Quinn. “This is getting us nowhere fast. The commissioner will assign someone to investigate Quinn’s killing, and I’m betting they find phuc-all. We need to stay focused on the killing field case. Cots, I understand the need for you to find her killers. I want to find them, too. But right now, I want to find out who killed the thirteen innocent young women in that field. I have a strong feeling that once we find the killer we’ve been looking for, we’ll find the connections that lead us to Quinn’s killer, too.”

  “Okay,” Cots said reluctantly. “But we both know that because she’s an alien, they won’t spend much time on the investigation,” Cots said bitterly.

  “The good news is she’s a wealthy alien,” Leah said with a smile. “And they’ll find out she and I were married, so that will help, too.”

  “How will they find out?”

  “I’ll tell them when the moment is right, although given the amount of information she passed on to people, I’m willing to bet plenty of people already know. So let’s get our case resolved and see what they can do with theirs.

  “One question is whether I come out of hiding so I can go to the morgue to identify Quinn’s body.” Leah couldn’t believe the words were coming out of her mouth. The world felt surreal.

  “You can’t. Robinson didn’t specifically identify you as the detective conducting the investigation of the Cohane murder. You’ve got to stay undercover until you make the arrests.” Cots looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. He was slumped in his seat, the perfect picture of dejection. “I’ll do the identification.”

  Peony put her arm around him. “I agree, Boss. We’ve been effective in finding out who the killer is without the full weight of the department behind us. I think we should continue doing what we’ve been doing until we actually arrest the murderer.”

  Leah had been hoping they would say that. She wasn’t sure yet how to deal with her feelings about Quinn and her betrayals. It felt like Quinn’s death left her in kind of a limbo. She hadn’t even really begun dealing with her cheating, and now she was dead. She felt, irrationally, that Quinn had cheated once more. Cheated her by dying and thus not allowing her to adequately process her emotions regarding what Quinn had done. Now she’d never get the answers to the questions she hadn’t asked. How can I rant and rave against a dead woman? Leah mentally shook her head. Focus!

  “Cots, what are we going to do about a funeral?” Leah asked.

  “There’ll be no funeral. I’ll have her body shipped back to Devaria. She’ll be cremated and her ashes scattered across our estate.”

  “But—” Leah started to say.

  “Leah, she’s not human. We don’t bury our dead like you do. For generations, family members who die have had their ashes scattered on the estate. Quinn will be no different.” Cots’s tone was gentle but firm.

  “Will you take her back?” Leah would respect their traditions. In their few years together, end-of-life matters hadn’t come up, but what Cots said made sense.

  “No. I have no desire to return home. The family will send someone to accompany the body to Devaria. I’ll make the arrangements, but I won’t go with her. Besides, I wouldn’t be welcomed there.”

  “Why not?” Peony asked.

  “When Quinn and I moved here, we underwent several operations to change our appearance so we’d be better able to fit in here. We didn’t do that lightly since we knew we’d never be able to return to Devaria to live because we had become so…so human.”

  “What kind of changes?” Peony asked.

  “Devarians, particularly upper-class Devarians, are…” Cots stopped as he presumably searched for the right words. “They, uh, look remarkably feline.”

  “Wow. Cool,” Peony said.

  “I’ve got digiprints of my family if you’d like to see them,” Cots said more tentatively than Leah had ever heard him.

  Leah was glad Peony thought Cots was once again “cool.” Cots looked very relieved as well.

  “You two go on. I’ll look at the digiprints later,” Leah said, not sure she could bear looking at Quinn as she’d been growing up.

  Leah was beginning to understand she really had only superficially known her wife. She found it deeply disturbing she married a woman she knew so little about. She found she couldn’t remember any deep, heart-to-heart conversations or even discussions about beliefs. She wondered what it said about her, about them as a couple. Also, she’d prided herself on being able to read people. How good was she at reading people if she hadn’t been able to peg her own wife as being unfaithful and so blithely jeopardizing her career by passing information to the likes of Grandini? She forced her mind to turn away from the self-recriminations and move on to the relationship between Quinn and Cots. She’d assumed there was a close bond between the two, but now she wondered. But then, he was an alien, and he’d grieve his own way.

  Leah’s thoughts about Quinn were interrupted by her phone ringing.

  “Lieutenant, Scotty
here,” the MSI said before Leah could say anything.

  “What have you got for me?”

  “A couple of things. First, I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “What do you mean?” Leah said warily.

  “I know about you and Quinn. I’m sorry she’s been killed.”

  “Thank you, Scotty. How did you know?”

  “She was brought into the temporary morgue. I found a copy of your marriage certificate tucked into a fold in her wallet.”

  She carried our marriage certificate with her? Why would she do that? “What are you doing with it?”

  “I checked the wallet into evidence, of course.”

  Leah wasn’t sure whether the marriage certificate would go into evidence, too, or if Scotty would put it into his pocket. At this stage, she didn’t care. It would have to come out she and Quinn were married sooner or later.

  Scotty’s voice returned her to the present.

  “Before Quinn was killed, she told me about an old empty warehouse she owned. Perhaps I could use it to process the chipper. I went through it yesterday, and it would fit our needs perfectly. As her next of kin, you can give us permission to use it. I know it would mean coming out as her wife, but we need that space.”

  That was the question, wasn’t it? How many times had Quinn gone behind her back, and who else had she told things she shouldn’t have? “We’re at an impasse in the investigation until you finish processing the chipper, so let’s not stand on ceremony. I’ll get the search warrant; you go to the warehouse and get it ready.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Leah,” Scotty said. “If you need anything…”

  Leah sat in her favorite chair in front of the living room windows after the phone call and speculated on why Quinn hadn’t told her she’d told Scotty about the warehouse, and why she had. Quinn had to know she’d find out.

  Leah wondered whether it would come out Quinn had been supplying the Grandini family with information on her investigations. She didn’t know how long Quinn had been doing it, but she knew with a certainty born of instinct her investigation into the killing field murders had been compromised because of information Quinn had fed to Grandini, probably right from the beginning. The question was why. What was Grandini’s interest in the Taconic murders? Quinn wouldn’t have passed her information, and then kept pursuing that information even after Leah had told her to leave the condo, without reason. And who had Quinn given information to with regard to Leah’s other cases over the years? Did the commissioner come into this? The governor? Was I really just a pawn in some game I didn’t know I was playing? Quinn seemed to have information even after Leah had asked her to leave. She hadn’t even thought to check and see if the condo was bugged, but that possibility made sense, given the amount of information people outside the condo were privy to.