Winter House

by Carol O'Connell

  “You know who killed him, too?”

  “An old lady.”

  “Good,” said Slope, finding this only fitting since Willy Roy Boyd had murdered three women. And now he better understood police concerns about leaks to the newspapers. He envisioned the headline: Old Lady Kills Lady-Killer.

  Kathy Mallory parted the hair on the dead man’s scalp. “This drop runs horizontally. The woman said they were both standing when she stabbed him.”

  And blood ran down, not sideways. “So, either the law of gravity has changed or the old woman lied.”

  “No, I believed that part. He was on his feet when she stabbed him the first time. But he was down and dead when she pulled out the pick. And that explains the drop of blood in a horizontal streak.”

  The doctor nodded. “And then the shears were pushed into a prone corpse.” He smiled. “Congratulations. Now you can nail an old lady for mutilating a corpse, but he’s just as dead either way, and hardly worth the trouble of—”

  “I want that autopsy. I need proof that the ice pick killed him.”

  “Any idea why this woman would go to the trouble of planting a second weapon?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re not going to share. No, of course not. What was I thinking? So, obviously, you want evidence to dispute her claim of self-defense.”

  “No, that holds up,” she said. “Willy Roy Boyd was a one-trick pony. He was in that house last night to kill a woman.”

  Though Edward Slope’s brain had stripped a few gears, he was damned if he would let it show. The doctor stared at her with his best poker face, but hers was better.

  Endgame.

  Kathy Mallory had won a full autopsy by the chief medical examiner, for now that he had been suckered in—what were the odds that he would let anyone else touch this corpse?

  Waiting for the explosion, boys?

  The upper half of the wall was a wide window on the squad room, and, with the blinds open, Lieutenant Coffey’s private office was a damned goldfish bowl on view for fifteen pairs of eyes. He pretended not to notice the men beyond the glass as they covertly looked his way.

  The lieutenant was young for a command position, only thirty-six, but he was aging fast to fit the job. Stress had chiseled new lines into his face, giving him an expression of constant pain, and, just now, it was a fight to bite back a scream as three detectives brazenly walked up to the glass, the better to observe their boss, the poor bastard with the thinning brown hair, the tension headaches and a knotted-up gut.

  The caseload for Special Crimes Unit had spiraled out of control. And the new mayor, a man with the soul of a corporate raider, was planning to cut the department’s allotment in manpower and funds. Every day was run at a heart-attack pace, and yet, Jack Coffey was showing no early warning signs that this was the worst possible time to jerk him around, nor had he raised his voice to Mallory and Riker, who sat unmolested on the other side of his desk. He was not even holding a gun on them, and the other detectives must find that odd.

  When he glanced at the glass wall again, he saw money flashing out there in the squad room. Bastards, they were making book on this meeting.

  Never let the troops see you crying like a little girl.

  That was his mantra today.

  Riker and Mallory were on their best behavior this morning, quietly waiting for him to finish scanning another precinct’s report on a common burglary gone awry. He crumpled the cover sheet in one hand. Well, this was just great, this crap. Why would these two detectives drag this case home to an elite squad of first-grade gold shields?

  “Mallory, close the blinds!”

  This was a test, and he was gratified to see her do it, and so quickly, not even dragging it out to jack up his frenzy.

  Big mistake, Mallory.

  Now he knew that all the leverage in this room belonged to him. Better than that—with the blinds drawn and no witnesses, he could do whatever he liked with these two. He leaned forward and gave them his most benign smile to knock them off balance. The partners exchanged looks that clearly said, Oh, shit.

  So they wanted this case really bad.

  Well, tough.

  But he just had to know why.

  He pulled one sheet out of the pile of paperwork, the results of the fingerprint search they had requested. “You’ll be happy to know that neither one of your socialites has a criminal record. What a surprise, huh?” He also crumpled this paper into a ball and tossed it over one shoulder, then picked up a collection of forms that transferred the dead man to his own doorstep. “And this makes it official. We’ve been screwed in triplicate.” He took his time crushing these sheets into another ball. He bounced it off the back wall. After spreading out the remaining paperwork, he selected two sheets from the array. “Well, what have we got here?” Could his sarcasm be more obvious? Did he need to work on that? “I’m looking at two witness statements, one from a little old lady, eighty years—”

  “That’s a typo,” said Mallory. “Nedda Winter’s only seventy.”

  “And she’s at least as tall as Mallory,” said Riker.

  “Maybe an inch over,” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Riker. “Make that five-eleven.”

  Coffey glared at his detectives, then looked down at the paperwork, saying, “And next we have a shitpile of biblical quotations from Bitty Smyth, a forty-year-old woman of undetermined height.” He paused to glance at Mallory. “Just jump right in if I get anything else wrong, okay?” His true message to her, delivered only by the tone of his voice, was You speak—you die.

  The lieutenant turned to his senior detective, whose face was always easier to read. “So, Riker, the catching detectives agreed with you. They figured it for a staged crime scene. Fair enough. Heller’s report backs them up. But the old lady explained that in her statement. She was afraid the cops wouldn’t be very understanding if she’d killed an unarmed burglar. So she put the ice pick in his hand.” Jack Coffey leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “Well, I say no harm done. She gets to slide on that one. I may even send her roses for killing that butcher.” He swiveled his chair to face Mallory. “I’m surprised that Nedda Winter isn’t your new best friend. Willy Roy Boyd was your perp. You think a quick death was too good for that little freak? Would you rather wait out years of appeals before the state put him down with a needle?”

  “That old woman lied about the—”

  “Miss Winter gets away with everything, Mallory.” Coffey picked up the amended statement and scanned the lines for the one he wanted. “She says her medication causes confusion.”

  “Ah, bless her.” Riker flashed a smile at Mallory. “Nedda was good, wasn’t she?”

  Jack Coffey was not amused. “Maybe you guys should’ve brought her in here to do your talking for you. I called the old lady myself. It took me five minutes to queer the idea of an inside job. She said there was always a spare key in the planter outside the front door, and she couldn’t remember setting the burglar alarm last night. So much for our perp turning off the alarm with a security code. She also solved your problem with the missing videotape. A patrol cop named Brill took it out of the security camera.” Coffey looked down at his personal notes. “That was last week after an attempted break-in. The cop returned it to Bitty Smyth, but she never got around to reloading the camera. The ladies figure the housekeeper tossed out the videotape with the trash.”

  The lieutenant picked up Mallory’s report, but never bothered to read it. He preferred to make up his own more accurate summary. “Now the catching detectives couldn’t fob the case off on Robbery Homicide. And why not? Because those guys had the brains to bow out early. Then, while you two have your backs turned, the West Side dicks skate out the door and leave their mess in your lap. Now I know the two of you could’ve dumped this case on another squad if you’d only tried harder and talked faster. You’ve got thirty minutes to do the paperwork and close it out as justifiable homicide.”

&nbs
p; Jack Coffey was shuffling all the reports and statements into a neat stack when Mallory leaned forward.

  Trouble.

  “There’s more to it,” she said. “West Side screwed up. Willy Roy Boyd was hired for a murder. It’s all there,” she said, pointing to her own report, the one he had never read. “It all fits.”

  “Talk fast, Mallory.”

  “The West Side precinct has no volume in homicides,” she said. “They looked at the same evidence and came up clueless. If we just write this one off, then one of those women dies.”

  “Not so fast,” said Coffey. No, he was not getting stuck with this lame case. “If you guys are right about murder for hire,” and he was not conceding this, “why wouldn’t the ladies ask for police protection?” He turned to Riker for his answer.

  Mallory jumped in. “Two other people live in that house—the old lady’s sister and brother. They were conveniently out of town for the attempted break-in last week, and they weren’t home last night, either.”

  “Even if you were onto something,” and Coffey doubted that, “it’s still not a case for Special Crimes. The department has a task force for that kind of—”

  “It’s not a mob hit,” said Mallory, “and it’s not gang related. Willy Roy Boyd wasn’t connected that way. But he had an expensive lawyer for his bail hearing, and the bail bond cost him a fortune. He’s got no assets, no job, but his wallet was full of hundred-dollar bills. He was hired to kill one of those women. If we don’t work this case, no one else will.”

  “And your partner collects ice-pick murders,” said Coffey. “You left that out.”

  This was no joke. His detectives had not been invited to last night’s party on the Upper West Side. He knew that Riker had been tipped to the aspect of the ice pick.

  Over time, word had come back to Jack Coffey, mentions of his senior detective turning up at crime scenes in every borough where an ice pick was the murder weapon. Special Crimes had only handled one such case, only one standout among the more common murders via muggings and domestic disputes. No matter how ordinary the crime, Riker had been a faithful visitor at every scene all his working life. And no one knew the reason.

  “Why?” Coffey had to ask or he would have blown out his teeth trying to hold it back. If Riker would only answer him, the man could keep this damn homicide. The lieutenant’s only other consideration was the possible embarrassment of having a taxpayer drop dead after the case was closed out. “Why ice picks, Riker?”

  “He doesn’t have any normal hobbies,” said Mallory, betraying impatience with Coffey’s little side trip.

  The lieutenant was a second away from slapping her with a charge of insubordination when her partner spoke up.

  “I collect ice-pick cases,” said Riker, “because my father did. My grandfather collected them, too.”

  “I need a little more than that,” said Coffey, and he was surprised by his own lack of sarcasm.

  “Willy Roy Boyd was hired by amateurs,” said Riker, “but maybe he was killed by a pro, somebody who had a little practice with a pick. Maybe the ladies weren’t the only ones in the house last night.”

  “A pro?” The lieutenant was incredulous at this escalation from a nice old lady to a professional assassin. “A pro . . . with an ice pick?” He shook his head slowly from side to side. Oh, no, this was the age of miracles and wonders, long-range rifle sights equipped with infrared devices that could see in the damn dark. “No contract hitman has used an ice pick since the forties—”

  “And there’s one old case still on the books, mass murder,” said Mallory. “How would you like to wrap nine unsolved homicides this week?”

  Oh, Jesus freaking Christ.

  Jack Coffey could not find the words to toss these two out of his office. The partners politely waited for him to find his voice again. He did. He slammed his fist down on the desk. “No, this is not happening! Riker, tell me she’s not talking about Stick Man.”

  Mallory answered for Riker. “Special Crimes Unit would get all the credit, and we need good press right now. The timing is perfect.” She tacked on the reminder, “It’s budget-cutting season.”

  Ordinarily, these would be the magic words, but not today. Jack Coffey, feeling slightly giddy, covered his face with both hands, worrying that tics or twitches might betray his image of a man in control of this meeting.

  Mallory, of all people, should never have bought into this fantasy of a superannuated psycho from the last century. She was more jaded, better rooted in reality. Any cop could imagine the horror show of her childhood on the streets of New York, dodging kiddy pimps and pedophiles, ending every day in the exhaustion of a child’s poverty, then chasing down some place where she could be safe for a few hours, where she might close her eyes to sleep. Still feral in many ways, she was suspicious of everyone she met and everything she was told. Her belief in a ghost story intrigued him more than Riker’s.

  A fair detective in his own right, Coffey had worked through the puzzle in the very next minute. These two were holding something back, a bombshell. There was no other explanation. “Riker, do you have any idea how old Stick Man would be today?”

  “Well, yeah.” The man’s tone indicated that this might be a silly question since he was the expert on all things related to ice-pick homicides.

  “All right, let me see if I understand this.” The lieutenant uncovered his tired eyes to look at Riker. “You’re planning to reopen the Winter House Massacre. Have I got that right?”

  The man only shrugged to say, Yeah, that’s about right. And his partner was busy inspecting her running shoes for smudges.

  Jack Coffey shook his head. “Riker, you’ve got two minutes of my time. Give me the rest or get out.”

  “Okay. The old lady you talked to this morning? That was Red Winter.”

  “Of course it was.” Jack Coffey wore that special smile reserved for dealing with lunatics. “I should have guessed.” His smile never wavered, though his teeth were locked together and grinding. “So . . . when you asked Red Winter where she’d been for the past sixty years—”

  “Fifty-eight years,” said Mallory. “She was twelve when she disappeared. She’s seventy now.”

  “Shut up,” said Coffey. He only had eyes for his senior detective.

  “Well, sure,” said Riker. “We asked where she’d been, but she just yawned and went upstairs to bed. Left us to lock up the house.”

  With one angry sweep of his hand, Coffey wiped his desk of papers and sent them flying to the floor. He was on the verge of the explosion his squad had been waiting on, betting on. And now he realized that he was still smiling—actually grinning—not a good sign, not a healthy sign.

  Mallory bent low to pick up the scattered papers around her chair. “We got the medical examiner to lose the ID on Willy Roy Boyd for a week.” She was already assuming that he would believe the most ludicrous story ever told within these walls. “We have to keep a low profile,” she said, collecting the sheets and stacking them neatly on the edge of the desk, then bending down for others. “The reporters can’t get near this story.” She settled back into her chair to concentrate on aligning all the edges of every sheet. “It might be better if the rest of the squad didn’t—”

  “I won’t tell a soul,” said Jack Coffey. And he would not—no more than he would run naked through the streets, scattering rosebuds along the way. He continued to smile, feeling oddly calm. He just needed a little time was all, that and a bottomless bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Most of all, he needed to make these two detectives disappear. So much depended on that: his sanity, his stomach lining and what was left of his hair. Though the blinds were closed, he could sense the troops massing out there, pressing up against the glass, tensing, waiting for him to crack wide open.

  Any minute now.

  “You got seventy-two hours,” said Coffey. “I don’t expect to see your faces for three days. Got that?”

  He very much wanted to lay his head down on the desk and b
ang it a few times, but his detectives were still seated in their chairs, perhaps not fully comprehending that they had gotten away with this.

  “Leave,” he said. “Now!” And leave they did.

  They left the door open, unfortunately, and he heard a snatch of their conversation.

  Riker asked his partner, “Where to now?”

  “We’re going to mess up a lawyer,” she said.

  “That’s my girl.”

  Money was changing hands in the squad room, but the lieutenant no longer cared who had won or lost this round. He knew Mallory was going after the lawyer who had won a bail hearing, against all odds, for a cockroach who had murdered three women. The high school student, Boyd’s youngest victim, had been closer to a child. Jack Coffey had been the one to break the news to her parents, to show them the morgue photograph of their daughter’s face, a shot framed to expose the features least bruised and broken. The mother had touched the photo, caressing it with her fingers, then rubbing the glossy surface, as if desperately trying to break through that artificial dimension to get to her only child.

  Both parents had cried.

  The morale of the squad had gone down when that serial killer had walked out free on bail, spitting on the sidewalk and spitting on the law. The timing had been a gift from hell, the very hour of the schoolgirl’s burial. And so the lieutenant gave no thought to blowback from Mallory’s upcoming confrontation. Finally, he understood why she needed jurisdiction on the dead body of Willy Roy Boyd.

  She wanted payback.

  Coffey wondered if Mallory would go after the defense attorney’s testicles. There were some things in life that were worth his rank and pension; neutering a lawyer was high on the list.

  He picked through the cards on his Rolodex until he found the number for the parents of Boyd’s last victim. He would call them first and tell them that the man who had destroyed their lives was dead—stabbed to death by an elderly woman. They might find some just irony in that.