“It should be out in a day or two. I want you out of work for at least three to six weeks, and then I’d want you back on light duty only.”
Lauren shook her head. “That’s not going to happen. I need to be back to work as soon as possible.”
“You can’t be out there chasing criminals. You’ve suffered a serious injury, Lauren.”
“With all due respect, doctor, I haven’t done many foot pursuits since I got to Cold Case. Most of my suspects are a little long in the tooth at this point. The only way I’m running now is if a zombie is chasing me.”
Dr. Patel crossed his arms. “We’re not even at a place in your recovery where we should be discussing it. I’m more worried about your safety when you leave here. I was told you live alone.”
She glanced at Reese, who had mirrored the doctor’s crossed-arm pose.
“Not anymore,” Reese informed them both. “I just moved in.”
5
The living arrangements had been decided upon while she was still unconscious. “I have my parents, my kids, my sister, all staying at my house,” Lauren protested after Dr. Patel had the good sense to leave and avoid the brewing argument. “Where the hell are you going to stay? The old doghouse in the backyard?”
“Don’t get your blood pressure up,” Reese said. “When your family clears out, I’m going to take the downstairs guest room. You won’t even know I’m there.”
Lauren’s house had an old servant’s quarters on the first floor that had been converted to a bedroom with its own bath and separate entrance. Her daughters used to love it when they had sleepovers, stuffing the room with five or six friends, sometimes trying to sneak out. But Lauren knew the game and caught them. Most of the time.
With the doctor gone, her family drifted back into her room one by one. Lindsey, Erin, then her mom and dad, followed by her sister, Jill, who must have shown up while the doctor was in. Reese faded into the background, keeping a watchful eye. My own personal bulldog, Lauren thought as he leaned up against the far wall.
“It’s the Healy family reunion,” Lauren said as her sister came to her bedside, hugging her gently. Jill was dark, like her father, like Erin. And tall, like her and their mom and Lindsey.
“It shouldn’t have taken this,” her dad said, standing on the other side of Jill, holding Lauren’s hand, being careful of the IV.
“Your place looks like a funeral home,” Jill said, forcing a smile. “There must be a hundred flower arrangements there. We keep taking them from the nurses’ station every time one of us goes back to your house.”
Born four years apart, Lauren hadn’t had much of a relationship with Jill growing up. Lauren had always been a handful; Jill has always been the good girl. Jill, the little sister who went to college, got married, had three boys. She had done all the right things, in the right order, unlike her messed up older sister, who got knocked up a month before she graduated high school by the neighborhood loser.
While Jill was making honor roll in high school, Lauren was changing diapers and working overnights as a waitress. Maybe that had been Jill’s inspiration, her motivation to excel in school, graduate magna cum laude, marry a steady, stable man who made a decent living. Jill was Martha Stewart to Lauren’s Angelina Jolie. The only thing they had in common was the unwavering love for their children.
“Thanks for coming, Jill,” Lauren told her, and she meant it. It was hard for Jill to get away. She lived in Portland, Oregon, and two of her sons were still in middle school. The youngest, Evan, had just started kindergarten in September.
Now it was Jill’s turn for the tears to well up. “We thought we’d lost you,” she whispered, leaning down, draping an arm around Lauren’s neck. “I spent twelve hours in planes and airports not knowing if I was coming home to a funeral. I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
Lauren’s dad put a hand on his younger daughter’s shoulder. Lauren watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down in his throat.
“I’m okay now,” Lauren whispered in her sister’s ear. “I’m okay.”
“Don’t you ever do this to us again,” her father warned, wiping a tear from his eye.
“I promise,” she said. “I will not let someone stab me in my office ever again.” In the background, she heard Erin suck back a sob and her heart clenched up. All these years she spent protecting her children and here she was, flat on her back, helpless.
Anna the nurse brought her more meds and more chairs to accommodate her family. Lauren tried to keep up with the conversations swirling around her, the words and voices and faces. In the end, the stress and strain proved too much, and she found herself drifting off while talking to Lindsey.
At least she didn’t dream.
6
Arguing with Reese and her family about Reese coming to live with her was futile, and Lauren knew it. Better to just go along and pretend he was going to move in. It took two more days before Dr. Patel removed the chest tube. Now she had matching scars on her right side, front and back. Once the tube was out, the face mask was reduced to two irritating tubes stuck into her nostrils. Her stitches itched like crazy, it still hurt to breathe, but even she could tell she was getting better.
Better enough to get interviewed by Joy Walsh on Thursday night. Joy, with her crazy short, dark choppy hair and gum-chewing habit, came in like a hurricane with Ben Lema following after her.
Lauren’s parents exited, taking Lindsey and Erin down to the coffee shop on the first floor. “You two don’t need to hear this again,” Dad told them, herding them out the door. Lauren suspected her daughters would be caffeine addicts like their mom by the time she left the hospital. Reese had gone out to get a pizza for the nurses. It was always good to butter up the people changing your bedpans.
“How are you feeling?” Joy asked, snapping her gum. “You look good. Your color, I mean. I saw you in the ICU and you looked like shit.”
Lauren had to laugh at Joy’s approach. There wasn’t a ladylike bone in her body, and Lauren appreciated it. “It’s better to look good than to feel good, right?”
“Are they letting you have caffeine yet?” Joy asked.
Lauren glanced up at the apparatus hanging above her head. “If you could just dump a cup into my IV bag, I wouldn’t tell the nurses who did it and I’d be in your debt forever.”
“Sorry, friend,” Joy said. “Fresh out of java.”
Giving an encouraging smile, Ben added, “We’re all just glad you’re on the mend.”
“Have you got anything?” Lauren asked the mismatched detectives. Both in their early forties, they were a study in contrasts. Where Joy was a swirling mass of energy, Ben was the neat, quiet thinker type, with his sand-colored hair neatly combed to the side and eyebrows so light they looked almost invisible. He was fantastic in the interrogation room, and his patience was legendary. An hour, three hours, or ten hours; he could literally wait out a confession without ever raising his voice or showing signs of getting tired. He stood slightly behind Joy in his charcoal gray suit, letting her take the lead.
“We’ve been working with Reese as much as we can. He’s been up here ninety percent of the time, but I swear every time he goes downstairs for coffee, he checks in.” Joy ran a hand through her crazy mop of hair. “I have a copy of the new file you were working on when you were attacked, and Reese gave us the rundown on the two cases you were working hardest.”
“The Thu Chang murder and the Jolene Jefferson case.”
“Your suspect in Jolene’s case is in Folsom Prison in Louisiana for another murder,” Joy told her, but Lauren was already well aware. The next stop in that case was a trip down South and if Reese had his way, preferably during the famous Folsom Prison Rodeo. “We didn’t find any family ties to the police department. None in the Thu Chang murder, either. We’re not ruling anything out, but your work on those two cases doesn’t seem to be related to your stabbing.”<
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“The murder that happened earlier that day? You think that’s connected to me?”
“We know someone stole Garcia’s swipe and keys off his desk sometime between when the homicide occurred, roughly nine a.m., and six o’clock, when Garcia told Marilyn it was missing. That was right before she closed up the main office for the night and Garcia and the rest of his crew went out to finish their canvass.”
“It was a messy situation,” Lauren remembered. “Three scenes. Multiple witnesses. Me and Reese both pitched in and took statements. Every interview room was full. All the chairs in the hallway occupied.”
“We have every cop we know that was in the Homicide office that day making a list of every single person they remember seeing,” Joy said. “Between detectives, uniforms, report technicians, and cleaners, we’re up to forty-six people. And we haven’t got some of the reports yet. You know how coppers are.”
Did she ever. Joy and Ben would be chasing those pieces of paper for the next week.
“I want you to look at the list of names we have so far.” Joy produced a piece of paper from her folio and put it face down on the tray table next to Lauren’s bed. Lauren picked it up and scanned it, silently wishing for her readers. “I want you to go over them and tell us if you’ve ever had any problems with anyone on it. I mean any problems at all.”
“You know that me and Garcia have had problems, right?”
She and Craig Garcia had had a confrontation when she first got to the Homicide squad. Over the years they’d had continual squabbles: a snide word here, a smirk there, a snarky note about one of her cases posted where everyone could see. It was a constant battle of micro-aggressions. But sometimes those could bloom into outright aggression.
Both detectives nodded in unison. “Already checked and cleared,” Joy said. “He wasn’t too happy we came to him first.”
Ben added, “And it’s not a secret there’s no love lost between you and Vatasha Anthony, either.”
Vatasha. There was no reason for the animosity between the two women, they just didn’t like each other. Still, Lauren was certain that she saw a man’s boot.
“I think this kid, Connor Adams, cut me off in front of headquarters at the end of October.” She was reaching now, she knew. Then a name jumped out at her. “Patrick Harrington got a reprimand for not doing a report for a domestic violence victim back when I was in the Special Offense squad. The victim called the office when he pulled away without doing a thing. I got him on the radio and asked him to go back and take a report. He refused, so I drove out to her house and did it myself. His lieutenant got wind of it and let him have it. That was years ago, though.”
“A reprimand in your file follows you around your career like herpes,” Joy said, making a note. “That can kill a promotion.”
“You think that Harrington blamed you?” Ben asked.
“I know he did, but I wasn’t the one who told his lieutenant what happened. As far as I was concerned, everything was handled.” Lauren remembered walking by him at a party a few weeks later and hearing him call her a bitch, then pretended not to notice her when she turned around. After that incident, he’d never said another word to her. She’d seen him a hundred times since, all without so much as a dirty look.
“Did you run into him in the office the morning of the homicide?” Joy asked.
She shook her head. “No. But I wasn’t looking for him, either.” Lauren had more questions about that day. She tried to steer the conversation away from Harrington for the moment. “And the swipe cards? What do they say about who was there?”
“We got the records, but that propped door throws everything off. People were just coming and going at will. We should have a scene integrity sheet for the Homicide office, too, not just the crime scenes,” Ben threw in. “We do have all the camera footage from within a two-block radius of headquarters.”
“And?” Lauren prompted.
“It shows a lot of cops coming and going from headquarters until a little after six, but only Reese leaving at 7:05, and then him coming back into the building at 7:18. The next thing you see is a swarm of ambulances, patrol cars, and fire trucks.”
“To help me.” Somehow, she felt shame in that. That she hadn’t been able to protect herself in her own office. That Reese had to be the cavalry that came in and saved the day for her. She changed the subject: “Reese said the person who attacked me tried to get into the file room.”
Joy nodded. “The video from inside the room shows a shadow. Damn frosted glass. But it does appear that someone was trying keys and turning the knob.”
“Whoever did this was smart,” Ben continued. “We don’t think you were the intended target, but he did plan the break in. He stole the swipe card and the keys during the day, hid out somewhere, and came back to the office after he thought it was all closed up. It looks like he couldn’t get into the file room for some reason, even with the stolen keys, and went into your office for the Murder Book. He just didn’t plan on you staying late on a Friday night.”
“The captain changed the locks last year on the file room. It used to be everyone in Homicide had a key. Now only Cold Case, the captain, and the day RT have one.”
“Why’d he do that?” Ben asked. “I didn’t even know my key didn’t work anymore.”
“Twenty-two people in Homicide, four in Cold Case, two report technicians, and one captain equals a lot of people with access to files that are considered evidence in and of themselves. The DA’s office wanted us to limit the access if we could. Like you said, you didn’t even know the lock was changed. You probably just asked Marilyn, the RT, when you needed to see an old file and gave it back to her when you were done anyway.”
Ben smiled. “Guilty.”
Joy opened the folder she’d brought with her, poised her pen over it and asked, “What do you remember?”
Lauren dutifully went over her attack for the hundredth time, trying not to leave out any details, although there wasn’t much to say, it happened so fast.
“You’re sure whoever it was took your Murder Book?” Ben asked. Joy and Ben both knew Lauren used that book on an almost daily basis. Since none of the Homicide files were digitized before the year 2000, it had been her best way to look up cases quickly. Lauren was often seen wandering between her office and the file room with that distinctive green binder under her arm, looking for an old file.
She nodded. “Right in his black-gloved hand.”
“You saw them? City-issue gloves?” Joy tried to clarify.
“I’m not sure about the gloves, but the boots were definitely issued by the city. That’s all I really saw. I passed out pretty quick.”
“You tell us, Lauren,” Ben said, “if someone was trying to get into the file room and couldn’t, why would they steal the Murder Book instead?”
That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? Lauren had been thinking about that a lot over the last few days and had come to only one conclusion. “If there was a file a cop didn’t want anyone to look at from twenty years ago, it’s only on paper in that room. If you took the file and burned it, there’d be no way to piece together that investigation again. All the original notes, reports, everything, are in those files. Sure, you could get the crime report off microfiche and the crime scene photos from photography, but the entire investigation would be lost.”
“And the book?” Ben asked.
“It’s my indexing system. Say all you had was a year and a street, I could flip to that year and look the homicide up by street.” Lauren’s eyes searched around, looking for something. “Give me a pen and paper.”
Joy flipped the legal pad inside her leather folio to a new page and handed over the pen she’d been using. Lauren quickly sketched out what a page in the Murder Book looked like:
DATE/TIME-VICTIM NAME-RACE/GENDER-ADDRESS-METHOD-ADRESSS OF OCCURENCE-ARREST
“See?” She held the drawing up for them. “I could look up all the white females strangled in 1998. Or all the males shot on Cherry Street, if you didn’t have a year. It was the original database. Some brilliant copper thought it up in the eighties. The oldest entries are handwritten. Those are the cases that aren’t in the computer yet. I make sure the RTs add all the previous years’ homicides every January, and it works like a charm.”
“And now someone took the book,” Ben said as he and Joy bent over the sketch. “What would be the point? Why would someone want to steal it?”
“To hide something.”
“Hide what?” Joy asked, taking the paper from Lauren’s hand.
“A murder.” Closing her eyes, Lauren eased herself back against her pillows. She suddenly felt exhausted. “Finding an old cold case from limited information just got a hell of a lot harder.”
7
The removal of the chest tube seemed to signal that the worst was over. Lauren told her daughters they should go back to school; that she was out of the woods, and she should be home for Thanksgiving break the following week. They protested, of course, but knew she was right. Sitting there staring at their mom and her IV drip wasn’t helping anything, and their school work was piling up.
Before they would leave, the girls made her do something Lauren swore she’d never do. Something that she had fought against for years. “I don’t want to tweet or be on Instagram or Snapchat,” she protested as Lindsey positioned Lauren’s personal laptop on a pillow in front of her.
“I’m just signing you up for Facebook,” Lindsey told her mom. “All the old people are on Facebook.”
Rolling her eyes, Lauren entered her email address. “I don’t want any perverts contacting me on this thing.”
“We’ll set the privacy to the highest level,” Erin assured her. “Only friends of friends will even be able to find you, and you can block anyone you want. I do it all the time.”
“Who are my friends?” Lauren stared at the blank profile page as Lindsey started dragging and dropping pictures from her hard drive into the empty spaces.
The Murder Book Page 3