The street cops nodded to the detectives as they ducked under the crime scene tape. A news van was illegally parked on the other side of Delaware Avenue facing south, its camera crew set up in front of it, angling to get the front of the Sussex Hotel, the ambulance and the police cars all in the same shot. Very cinematic, Lauren thought. Let’s make this crime scene Christmas card worthy.
‘Where are Anthony and Garcia?’ Sheehan asked. He looked a little disheveled, his thin gray hair mussed from the wind. He’d been relaxing in the men’s room for quite a while when Lauren had pounded on the outer door to alert him of the call out.
‘There was a shooting on Grape Street in the Fruit Belt. Doesn’t look like the guy’s going to make it,’ she told him. They paused to watch the ambulance pull away from the curb. ‘Lema and Avilla are over there too. That’s why we’re short-handed. They’ve got two crime scenes. We’re going to have to make do.’
‘We always got more cops than detectives,’ Sheehan said, trying to smooth his rumpled hair down. ‘Good for the overtime, bad for the follow-up.’
Lauren silently agreed with him wholeheartedly.
They ignored the news crew and hooked around the sidewalk to the valet parking area of the hotel. Four red-coated valets were standing on the curb watching the police cars with a knot of blue-suited managerial types. A short lady with a sharp steel-gray bob haircut broke off as Lauren and Sheehan approached the double door to enter the hotel.
‘I’m Theresa Hatten, the night manager. Can I help you?’
‘I’m Detective Riley, this is my partner Detective Sheehan. I think you might be able to,’ Lauren said, as Sheehan held the door open for both of them. ‘Is there some place we can go and speak to you in private?’
‘In my office,’ she said, eyebrows pulling together in a concerned V. ‘Follow me. We can talk in there.’
The manager led them through the brightly lit lobby. In the far corner a massive evergreen was decorated with red and gold bulbs. It was December twelfth and the holiday season was in full swing. Piped in Christmas music came at them from hidden speakers on all sides, adding to the festive mood. Everything looked perfect, except for the reflection of the blue-and-white police lights from the patrol cars bouncing off every surface.
While Lauren could pass for a disgruntled hotel guest, with her choppy brown hair and dark wool coat over black pants and winter boots, there was no mistaking Doug Sheehan for anything other than what he was. He oozed cop from every pore, another reason Lauren hated working with him. It was easier getting information from people if they didn’t feel like they were in a 1940s-style police interrogation. He even wore a stupid fedora when the weather was nicer. Every time he put that thing on the top of his head she wanted to slap it off.
The manager’s office was behind the front desk, a plain door discreet off to the side. Probably so the managers can monitor the front desk activity better, Lauren thought, as Hatten pulled out a swipe card and opened the door. The Sussex wasn’t the most exclusive hotel in Buffalo, but it was up there. It was one of those places that billed itself as a ‘boutique hotel’ and charged an extra hundred a night because they left a chocolate on your pillow. Lauren had never spent the night there. She was too cheap and single and she could fetch her own chocolates.
Crammed into Hatten’s tiny office was a desk and two chairs, a file cabinet and a printer. There wasn’t much room for anything else. It didn’t even have a window. She was neat, though. Color-coded folders sat stacked in perfect piles on her desk, unlike the papers on Lauren’s desk that looked like they’d been dumped there by a cyclone.
‘The valets are saying he was a guest here.’ Hatten maneuvered around the desk to her chair and took a seat. Now she was looking up at them with her round face and equally round glasses, hopeful that they would say no, he was not a guest of the hotel. ‘Do you have a name?’
Sheehan pulled his notebook out of his jacket pocket and flipped it open. ‘Gunnar Jonsson,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ She snapped her fingers in recognition. ‘I remember one of our staff saying we had a guest from Iceland booked here for a week.’ She swiveled to the computer monitor on her desk and started pecking away at the keyboard. ‘Just give me a second to pull up the details.’
‘Is that unusual?’ Lauren asked as the manager scrolled through some documents on her screen.
‘Someone coming from Iceland to Buffalo in the winter months?’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t remember a single booking like that, and I’ve been with this hotel for two years. We don’t get a lot of business travelers. Our clientele usually favors short visits for some personal reason: a family function, a wedding, wanting to scratch Niagara Falls off their bucket list. Those sorts of things.’
Lauren nodded along. ‘He was here on business?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know for sure. Just an educated guess. It is between the two big holiday weeks – you know, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Those are big for family travel. Maybe one of our cleaning staff who was assigned to his room could help more with that.’ Hatten squinted at the screen. ‘There are charges on his bill from the business center, where he made some copies, and for room service. Here’s the reservation.’
‘Can we take a peek?’ Lauren asked.
Ms Hatten swiveled the monitor around so they could see it. ‘I can let you look at it, but company policy says we need a subpoena for his records and a search warrant for the room.’
‘You’ve done this before,’ Sheehan said, bending over to peer at the screen.
She nodded. ‘Unfortunately, yes. And I’ll have our corporate security make copies of the hall and front door camera footage for today. That’s stored offsite, but we can usually get it from the server within forty-eight hours. But we’ll need a subpoena for that as well.’
‘I’ll go get the search warrant typed up.’ Sheehan turned to Lauren and asked, ‘You want to sit on the room? Make sure no one goes in or out?’
Lauren scanned the reservation. He’d extended his stay just the day before from seven to twelve nights. Something was keeping him in Buffalo. ‘Sure. I’ll just grab a cup of coffee.’
‘I’ll have the kitchen staff bring you a pot,’ Hatten told her. ‘And a chair. His room was on the third floor, 317.’
‘You have done this before,’ Lauren remarked, marveling at her efficiency in the face of a brutal murder.
‘I worked for a major chain in Las Vegas for twelve years.’ She righted her computer and sighed. ‘I thought when I took this job in Buffalo it’d be a nice change of pace. But it seems like hotels are magnets for crime.’
‘Anywhere human beings congregate are magnets for crime,’ Lauren assured her. ‘Thank you for all your help.’
‘Don’t thank me. Unfortunately, I know the more I cooperate the sooner you’ll be gone and I can get back to convincing my guests everything is fine.’
Smart lady, Lauren thought.
TWO
Waiting outside a hotel room while her slow-as-molasses temporary partner typed up a search warrant was pure torture for Lauren. The manager had given her a spare key card and she was literally one swipe away from getting into Gunnar’s room. She kept fingering the smooth plastic rectangle in her coat pocket. A lot of cops would have just gone in, knowing the search warrant was coming. She couldn’t say that she wasn’t tempted, not because she was in a hurry, but because she hoped there might be something in that room that helped explain what happened to Gunnar in that alleyway.
Lauren looked at the round black bubble in the corner near the ceiling. The hotel camera watched her as she sat in the folding chair a maintenance man had provided. Even if she was tempted, she wouldn’t risk getting everything thrown out in court because she was in a hurry. I’ll say one thing about constant video surveillance, she thought, crossing her arms against her chest, it keeps you honest.
Lauren checked the time on her cellphone. She had gone through almost the entire pot of coffee one of the girls who worked in t
he kitchen had brought her. A few curious guests had side-eyed her as they passed to go to their rooms, but not one asked who she was or what she was doing sitting alone in the hotel hallway. Maybe they assumed she was a cop because of the television crews outside, but maybe everyone had moved on by then to another tragedy striking somewhere else in the city that needed immediate live coverage.
As of this week, she’d been working in regular Homicide for five months, ever since Shane Reese got shot and fractured his skull when he went down. Reese was still off, recovering. The doctors predicted he should be back to work in the spring but, in the meantime, Lauren had gone to Homicide from Cold Case to have a more flexible schedule to help with his care. Reese and his dog, a West Highland terrier named Watson, had taken up residence in the guest room at her house. Nurses and physical therapists were constantly in and out, but they didn’t want Reese living on his own until he was in better shape. Thankfully, both of her girls were away at college, although they’d be home for winter break in a matter of days. They’d be a great help taking care of the Prince, as she’d taken to referring to him. She couldn’t complain though; she was the reason he had gotten shot in the first place.
She missed working the cold cases.
She’d seen a lot of dead bodies. People murdered in every way imaginable, and some you wouldn’t want to imagine, but this one? Gunnar’s murder was different somehow. In Cold Case, there was a distance between you and the murder and the victim. Now that she was working regular homicides, that buffer was removed. In the few months she’d been there she’d seen robberies gone bad, random attacks on women by predators, gang-related drive-bys. But Gunnar’s murder seemed especially personal, purposeful, and cruel. He’d fought back hard, almost escaping, but his assailant persisted until he was dead. And then some. The extent of the wounds was overkill. Lauren was sure the autopsy would show some were post-mortem, that the killer had kept pounding away after he was already dead.
Gunnar’s passport showed no other trips to the United States in the six years since he’d gotten it. Lauren studied the photo she had taken of it with her phone. The information was a little hard to read because it had been in the clear plastic evidence bag, causing a glare, but she could see Gunnar’s picture just fine. His longish dark hair had been swept off his face and he was smiling right into the camera with even white teeth. A handsome man. Not tall, on the short side by American standards, especially if he really was five foot five like his passport said. A small, slightly built man. Lauren was almost four inches taller than him.
Lauren racked her brain trying to figure out a connection to Western New York. Maybe he’d been here before, using an older, now expired, passport. Maybe he worked for a company that did business in the States. Maybe he’d been an exchange student in college. Maybe he had an ex-girlfriend living in Buffalo. Lauren needed to look at the paperwork in his room.
And Sheehan was pissing her off.
She kept checking the time on her phone. The squad had templates for search warrants right in their city-issued iPads. Some things you always needed a warrant for: a hotel room, a computer, a house. You just pulled up the template you needed and plugged in the relevant facts of the particular case, sent it to an ADA to look over and approve, then printed it up and took it to the on-call judge to sign. For something like this, the entire process should have taken less than two hours.
It was ten minutes after midnight when Sheehan came strolling off the elevator. She’d been waiting there for over three hours.
‘What the hell took you so long?’ Lauren asked, standing up. Both of her knees popped. Another surprise gift of turning forty that year.
He stopped in front of the door and stood next to Lauren. It must have started snowing again because there were flakes caught in his scarf and melted droplets dotting what was left of his hair. ‘Sorry, Lauren. I was starving so I stopped at that all-night sub shop and grabbed a sandwich.’
‘I’ve been sitting here with my thumb up my ass while you were eating a turkey hoagie?’
His cheeks burned crimson. ‘I got you a ham sub, toasted roll, just like you like it; it’s down in the car.’
She shook her head and motioned to the door. ‘Please just tell me you got the warrant.’
He reached inside his wool coat and pulled out a jumble of papers. ‘I left one with the manager. This is our copy and the return.’
He wanted her to take the paperwork from him, but as long as she knew they were signed and on scene, he could keep his papers.
‘Careful,’ Sheehan cautioned in a whisper. ‘I got your back.’
It was her front she was worried about. Lauren didn’t think the killer would be inside Gunnar’s room. But with my luck, Lauren thought as she approached the door, blading herself to the left side, out of view of the peep hole, the killer’s been sitting on the bed this whole time, knowing the police were waiting outside and wasn’t going down without a fight. Another fight.
Sliding her Glock out of its holster, she extracted the key card from her coat pocket and stuck it in the lock without a word. It blinked green with an audible click. She put her shoulder into the heavy hotel door and it swung inward. The room was dark. Still blading herself, she reached around, feeling the side of the wall for the light switch. She brought her gun up before she flicked on the light, covering the immediate darkness in front of her. They’d lost the element of surprise but she was still going to be tactical.
She flipped the switch and the room lit up. It was empty. The bathroom door was open to her left and it was unoccupied as well – only Lauren’s reflection in the mirror greeted her.
She let out the breath she’d been holding, which she shouldn’t have been doing, and entered the room. Her dad had been a deer hunter and used to chastise her for holding her breath when they would go target shooting together. It was a bad habit she was still trying to break, almost twenty years into the job.
The hotel room itself was typical, if a little nicer than most. It definitely wasn’t so grand Lauren would drop the extra money to stay there over one of the big chains she had a rewards card for. The main difference was that it seemed a lot bigger than a regular hotel room, without being a suite.
A king-sized bed that would have eaten up the space in a normal hotel room was made up, complete with a yellow rose in the center of the middle pillow. The room had a green, yellow and gold color scheme; very upscale and tasteful. Lauren walked in with Sheehan at her back, letting the door fall shut behind them.
‘Well, that was anticlimactic,’ Sheehan observed, looking around.
‘Really?’ Lauren stopped and stared back at him.
‘No bad guy.’ He shrugged his shoulders and Lauren noticed a piece of lettuce on his tie, near the bulge of his gut. ‘I’m just saying.’
‘You take the closet,’ she told Sheehan as she pulled two latex gloves out of her back pocket and proceeded to snap them on. Every good homicide detective has gloves in one pocket and evidence bags in another. ‘I’ll go through the drawers and suitcase.’
‘Got it, Lauren.’ On the plus side for partnering with him, unlike a lot of guys on the job who hated taking orders from a woman, Doug Sheehan was glad to give up any and all responsibility whenever possible.
I have to get my real partner back to work, Lauren thought, watching Sheehan pull his own gloves on, for my sake and Sheehan’s.
Standing upright in the far corner of the room was a large moss green suitcase. Lauren walked over to it as Sheehan dutifully began to go through every piece of clothing hanging in the closet. She had to give it to him, he wasn’t ambitious but he was thorough.
Thankfully, there was no lock on the suitcase. Lauren turned it on its back and unzipped it. Like she’d suspected from the amount of clothes hanging in the closet, it was mostly empty. It looked like once Gunnar had worn something and thought it was dirty, he returned it, neatly folded, to the suitcase. After Lauren had inspected every inner and outside pocket, she zipped it back up and w
ent over to the chest of drawers facing the bed.
Pulling open the top drawer, she struck gold immediately. Inside was a trove of papers, some of them in a foreign language she couldn’t identify, some in English. She immediately pulled out her cellphone and snapped some pictures before she touched anything.
‘I think I got something over here,’ Lauren called over to Sheehan.
‘I found a few dollars and some change in a couple of the pockets,’ he said, walking over. ‘Some receipts for Uber rides. He must have printed them out down in the business center.’
‘You grab those?’
‘Got ’em.’ He held up an evidence bag with a gloved hand, shaking it in front of her face.
Lauren didn’t bother to try to look at them right then, she was more interested in the neat stacks of paper in her drawer. Slipping her readers out of the inner pocket of her jacket, she perched them on her nose. She recognized the logo on one of the top papers right away. It was a printout of a DNA report from one of those genealogy sites that were all the rage. It was written in that same language she didn’t recognize. Picking up the stack, Lauren leafed through the pages, stopping on one with the pie chart on it.
Last year her sister had bought Lauren one of those kits for Christmas as a lark. They’d all laughed around the dinner table that maybe they’d find out they were royalty, or distantly related to one of the presidents of the United States. Lauren had sent in her sample, and six weeks later got the same, exact pie chart in an email. She was Polish and Irish just like she’d always been told, and not one of her relatives had come to the states before 1900. No surprises. She was exactly what both sets of her grandparents had told her she was.
Her chart had been neatly divided into three pieces: 60 percent Polish, 34 percent Irish and 6 percent random ethnicities. Lauren had read somewhere that Icelandic people could trace their roots all the way back to the Vikings, so she was a little surprised to see Gunnar’s – and she knew it was Gunnar’s because his name was at the top – was split in half. He was 48 percent Scandinavian and then a whole mess of other nationalities: Italian, British, Native American, Spanish, sub-Saharan African.
A Full Cold Moon Page 2
