Copyright Information
The Murder Book: A Cold Case Investigation © 2019 by Lissa Marie Redmond.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
First e-book edition © 2019
E-book ISBN: 9780738755663
Book design by Bob Gaul
Book format by Samantha Penn
Cover design by Kevin R. Brown
Cover illustration by Dominick Finelle / The July Group
Editing by Nicole Nugent
Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Redmond, Lissa Marie, author.
Title: The murder book / Lissa Marie Redmond.
Description: First edition. | Woodbury, Minnesota : Midnight Ink, [2019] |
Series: A cold case investigation ; 2.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018041422 (print) | LCCN 2018042601 (ebook) | ISBN
9780738755663 (ebook) | ISBN 9780738754277 (alk. paper)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3618.E4352 (ebook) | LCC PS3618.E4352 M87 2019 (print)
| DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018041422
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Author’s Note
I was born and raised in Buffalo, New York. I have never lived anywhere else and hope my great love for the city shines through. This book takes place in Buffalo, but it is a work of fiction. In the spirit of full disclosure, I took many liberties with locations in this novel. The gated community Lauren lives in does not exist. Garden Valley resembles a neighboring town south of the city, but you won’t find it on a map. Real roles—such as mayor, Erie County district attorney, and the police commissioner—are populated with fictional people who in no way resemble any living person. I took great pains to create fictional characters to populate the very real Buffalo that I love. Hopefully my fellow Buffalonians will forgive the literary license I took.
1
“Homicide is killing me,” Shane Reese complained, slinging his duffel bag over his shoulder. “We’ve been here for almost twelve hours. You almost done?” He was standing in the main office of the Buffalo Police Cold Case Homicide unit, his tie hanging loose, his hand on the door knob. It was Friday night, and he was ready to get out of there.
“Not yet.” Lauren Riley smoothed some papers flat across her desk. They had been in the office for almost twelve hours for two days in a row, so she understood his eagerness to go. And was slightly jealous because her touch of OCD wouldn’t allow her to leave until she was finished. “You can kill that light, though. I’m only going to be a few more minutes.”
The second floor of police headquarters was already empty. The rest of the detectives from the other squads had gone out to start their weekends. The “regular” Homicide guys had caught a particularly nasty murder first thing that day and were out canvassing in the Black Rock neighborhood. They had needed Reese and Riley to help out in the morning but had everything under control by the late afternoon. Then she and Reese split off to do follow-up on their own cold cases.
Lauren could hear their radio squawking next to her computer. One crew was still going house to house to talk to the neighbors, while the other crew was hunting down any cameras local businesses might have pointed toward the scene. They wouldn’t be going home anytime soon. In the meantime, the Homicide wing was left deserted and probably would be for the night
“Not for nothing, but it’s already past seven,” Reese pointed out, still trying to convince her to go home. Five foot eleven, athletically built, and almost seven years younger than her, Lauren liked to consider biracial Reese the annoying little brother she’d never had. He ran a hand over his close-cropped hair, so short that Lauren called it the five o’clock shadow on his head. “We should’ve been out of here an hour ago.”
She tugged on the rubber band holding her own thick blond hair back. It was too tight and had been giving her a headache. “I just want to type these notes up or I’ll forget something from the interview.”
“I know it went better than expected, but we have time,” Reese told her. “You don’t have to do all of this right now.” Riley and Reese had gone to the holding center to talk to a prostitute about the murder of a young gangbanger. Francine hadn’t known anything about that boy, but she had known an awful lot about another murder they’d been working on. In fact, she’d seen her boyfriend kill a fellow heroin fiend over a money dispute and steal the junkie’s benefit card. She’d known where he’d stashed it in his mother’s house. Eddie, the boyfriend, was in jail upstate for a separate possession charge, so there was no worry about him ditching the card before they got a search warrant on Monday.
“If only Eddie hadn’t been sleeping with the woman in the cell next to hers,” Lauren said. The two women had a lot to talk about and all the time in the world to do it. Lauren smiled to herself. “Hell hath no fury like a junkie scorned.”
Reese narrowed his green eyes at her, but she acted like she didn’t notice. She wasn’t in the mood to spar with him, although it was one of her favorite pastimes. She knew she’d get more done without the witty banter. Some days it seemed like everything just fell into place and she was going to take advantage of it. “Put an overtime slip in,” he reminded her, giving up. “Don’t forget to lock the office.”
She waved her hand at him and turned toward her laptop. She had a brand-new city-issued iPad in her bag but liked to work with a real keyboard instead of the touch screen. Reese told her she could buy keyboards for the iPad, but that seemed to defeat the purpose of having one. “Okay, Dad. See you Monday.”
Lauren heard the door open and Reese laugh. “You’re unbelievable.”
It shut behind him, leaving her in the dark gloom of the office, except for the glow of her computer screen. She was almost forty now and typed better in the near dark. She had a pair of readers tucked in her desk drawer, but she only put them on when no one was around. They were just another little reminder that she was older than she sometimes felt. She pulled them out and perched them on he
r nose, feeling her age.
All around her were cardboard boxes, stacked in preparation for the impending move to a new building. The city had finally sprung for some new digs for the police department and now the detectives had to pack and work their cases at the same time. The clutter scattered about the office made her claustrophobic, so she combatted that feeling by diving deep into her paperwork.
Engrossed in typing her notes for the search warrant, Lauren didn’t look up when she heard the office door open. “What’d you forget, Reese? Your condoms?” she called out absently, fingers still pounding the keys.
The first blow hit her in the right side, knocking the wind out of her and sending her glasses flying as she crashed to the floor. The second was a vicious stomp, directly on her head, causing her to black out for a moment. When she opened her eyes to the dim light, Lauren could see the legs of her ancient metal office chair, and the worn pile of the filthy gray industrial-grade carpet. Her left hand looked out of place on the ground next to her head. Lauren’s first thought was how odd it was that she was on the floor. Her second was an awareness of a sticky wetness spreading around the left side of her.
Then she tried to breathe.
Like a goldfish out of its bowl, her eyes darted around, her chest heaved, but she could not seem to take in air. A fierce panic set in as her body desperately struggled to manage a breath. A sickly, thick, sucking sound accompanied every attempt.
Someone was walking around her office. She tried to call for help, to get their attention, because there must have been some kind of accident. Her heart thundered in her chest as her mind raced: something horrific had happened to her, she couldn’t take a breath, she was dying.
I’m dying. That fact was the only clear and concrete thing she knew in that moment.
She was dying.
As her vision began to fade, she saw two things pass by her limp, useless hand: a pair of city-issue boots and the unmistakable olive-green cover of the Murder Book.
2
All around her, there were strange sounds, like the buzzing of flies very close to her ear. Her throat hurt, burned, as if someone had poured turpentine down her mouth and threw a match.
Pulling in a breath, she tasted something pepperminty, only not. This was not where she was supposed to be. She was supposed to be somewhere else. Thoughts were coming to her in disjointed clusters of sensation and awakening.
If I could just open my eyes, Lauren thought. I could figure this out.
The brightness hit her like a boxing glove to the temple. She immediately squeezed her eyes shut again. Someone in the room must have noticed because the buzz became a loud frenzy around her head. There was something on her face, a mask, pinching the bridge of her nose. Unfamiliar voices were swirling around her, interspersed with electronic beeps and the shuffling of shoes. Lauren’s hands batted out weakly, trying to get that thing off her face, until someone took hold of both her wrists and held them to her sides. She let out a croak of protest.
“Riley, it’s okay.” Reese’s voice popped into her head above sounds of the rest of the commotion going on around her. “You’re in the hospital. You’re okay, girl. You’re okay.”
She forced herself to open her eyes again. Blinking, blinking, blinking, the frame of the curtain that snaked around the top of her bed came into focus. The room was too white, too bright. She was lying in a bed surrounded by monitors. Everything was foreign; nothing was right. A man started passing a penlight in front of her eyes, causing her to snap them shut again. “Don’t do that,” she rasped. It was barely a whisper. “Reese?”
A hand came down on her shoulder. “I’m right here.”
She yanked her right hand free from her side. It seemed like it had been encased in cement somehow and reached up to touch his wrist. She willed her eyes open again. Shane Reese was standing above her, baseball cap on, dark circles under his green eyes. “You look like hell,” she said.
He laughed. Not a happy, you told a good one kind of laugh, but a half-hysterical, half-relieved version. He clutched at her gown for a second, then released his grip a little. “Thanks. You look great, by the way.”
Someone slipped a blood pressure cuff around her left arm and it began to inflate. Her right hand had an IV line taped to it, the tubing snaking up to a bag hanging from a metal pole next to the bed. The saline, if that’s what it was, hung an inch from Reese’s head. It didn’t make any sense. “What am I doing here? What happened to me?”
He swallowed before he answered and Lauren thought she had never seen him look so old and tired. “Do you remember anything after I left you on Friday night in the office? Anything at all?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. What do you mean, Friday? What day is this?”
“This is Sunday.”
“Sunday?” Now she began to panic, she could hear the pulse monitor hanging next her start to beep faster. “My daughters. What about Lindsey and Erin? Are they okay? Please—”
“No, no, no.” He tried to calm her. “They’re fine. I sent them home to get some sleep. Lindsey got in on Saturday night and Erin made it here today. They are fine. You’re in the ICU now. They’re moving you to a regular room soon.”
The confusion was too much; tears began to run down her cheeks. “Why am I here, Reese? What happened?” She felt an itch in her right side. When her hand went to scratch it, she felt gauze and plastic. Lead lines stuck out from her chest connecting her to various equipment. A furious beeping pulsed from a machine above her head. “Is that a tube? Oh, God. Reese, do I have a tube in my chest?”
A doctor swooped in and grabbed Reese by his free arm. “You’re going to have to leave now. She’s too upset. We have to bring her pressure down.”
“No!” Lauren didn’t recognize her own voice. It was shallow and raspy and forced. She began to shake uncontrollably. “He needs to stay. I want him to stay.”
The thin, balding doctor turned to her. “He needs to leave. Just for a while. He can come back soon. Just until we can evaluate you. You had surgery and we need to make sure that you’re recovering properly.” His face was ruddy and flushed, like he’d been standing out in the wind all day.
“No. Don’t leave, Reese.” His hand was still on her shoulder. She managed to grab onto his wrist now. Lauren could feel the tension in his fingers through her hospital gown.
“We need to work on her.” The doctor’s patience was wearing thin, but Reese’s was no better.
“Yeah? Call the police,” he challenged. They locked eyes for a second and the doctor turned away. Reese wasn’t going to budge. Lauren heard the doctor ask the nurse to get Security. Her eyes started to lose focus.
“What happened to me, Reese?” Lauren asked in a fading voice.
“I forgot my baseball hat. I came back and found you.”
She was breathing hard. Why was it so hard to breathe? Why did she have a tube in her chest? And why was this answer so difficult? “But what happened to me?” she insisted in a forced whisper.
“Someone stabbed you.” His voice was soft and far away. She tried to hang onto the sound of it, to keep her head above the water closing in. “Someone came into the Cold Case office while you were alone and stabbed you.”
The dark crept back over her and she was gone again.
3
When Lauren woke, it was morning—or so she assumed from the angle of the sunlight coming through the gray blinds of her window—but she still wasn’t sure what day it was. She coughed, coughed again, and tried to remember why she was in a hospital bed with an oxygen mask on her face.
She recognized the telltale signs of a standard hospital room: cold, sterile, and white. White walls, white sheets, a white board on the wall with red and blue marker scribbles on it. She vaguely remembered seeing Reese, but it was her daughters who filled her mind now. They should be away at college, she thought absently, it�
�s not Thanksgiving yet.
Lindsey and Erin were both asleep on those plastic hospital recliners they wheel in for family members. Lindsey, with her blond hair that was just like her mom’s, was sitting straight up, like she had fallen asleep mid-sentence. Erin, on the other hand, was sprawled over the chair like she had melted into it, short dark hair spiked up in every direction. Lauren moved her hand to touch the tube in her side and everything from before came flooding back—what there was anyway.
Reese said she had been stabbed.
“Hey,” a familiar voice said from over her shoulder, “it looks like someone’s awake.”
She twisted her head to see her mom rising from her own recliner positioned at the back-right corner, behind her original line of sight. Lauren hadn’t seen her mom in over a year, since she last came up from Florida with her dad for a visit. Then, her parents had looked tan and radiant, true snowbirds who flourished in the vitamin D after years of hard Buffalo winters. Only these snowbirds had never come back, choosing to sell their South Buffalo home and get a condo in Tampa. Now her mother looked gaunt and drawn. Naturally thin and tall like Lauren, she looked emaciated from stress. Charlotte Healy’s gray-blond bob hung limply around her face. Her purple sweatshirt and gray pants draped off her size-zero frame, the lines in her forehead etched in worry as she stepped to the side of Lauren’s bed.
“Where’s Dad?” Lauren’s voice sounded muffled and rough, like she was breathing through wet sand. She reached up and touched the oxygen mask over her mouth and nose. Coughing, a stab of pain radiated up her right side, making her bend forward a little.
Her mom eased her back down against the bed with one hand, mindful not to interfere with any of the sensors they had stuck all over her. “He finally went back to your house to take a shower. We had to practically pry your partner from your side. He went home last night, but he’ll be back. He hasn’t left you since it happened. Jill is back at the house too. I hope you don’t mind.”
The Murder Book Page 1