The Murder Book

by Lissa Marie Redmond

  Her usual remedy for confronting bad decisions was withdrawal and immersion in her work, which is exactly what she’d done in regard to Mark. After the trial she broke off all contact with him, even after he sent a copy of his divorce decree to her office. Their affair had shattered her heart all over again, especially because she had finally accepted the fact that they would never end up living happily ever after. Love wasn’t the problem; it was trust. Seeing him earlier that day had brought all those feelings of loss and hurt back to the surface. She knew she had to stay strong and resist the urge to give in to the hope that somehow their relationship would finally work out. It wouldn’t. Ever. It was past time for her to move on.

  Which brought her around to David Spencer. Dealing with him was more problematic for Lauren. David was a different kind of animal. Immersion in work just brought him more into focus for her, since he was work.

  Over the summer Lauren had attended a homicide seminar the county had sponsored at the Charlotte, a swanky downtown hotel. The main topic was recognizing and identifying different personality subtypes in murderers through crime scene assessment. For four days Lauren sat silently, scribbling notes in her notebook, writing down every word the instructors said. Especially the first lecturer. Every part of his presentation made sense to her. Every point resonated in her brain, connecting David’s behaviors to the crimes she knew he had committed.

  A line uttered on the second day from the small, pale instructor, a retired criminal psychologist, stuck in her head: “The crime is not over until the perpetrator stops deriving pleasure from the murder.” He called this personality subtype Anger Retaliatory, or AR, for short.

  As soon as his session ended, Lauren had cornered the owlish little man in the hallway. She launched into her experience with David Spencer and how he was acquitted and did he have any thoughts about the situation? Lauren wanted to know how he would type David Spencer.

  Clearly amused, he cocked one eyebrow, offered his arm, and said, “Join me at the hotel bar for a drink and tell me more about your interesting young fellow.”

  That was at four o’clock in the afternoon. Six hours later, they were still talking.

  The psychologist, Dr. Stephen Durand, was a quirky man. He only drank Chardonnay, very good Chardonnay, and only if he witnessed the bottle being opened in front of him. Subsequently, he’d have the server leave the bottle so it was never out of his sight. Lauren was usually pretty good at guessing people’s ages, but with Dr. Durand it was difficult. He was surely over sixty, possibly close to eighty, but had such a mischievous way about him, it made him appear much younger. His thick glasses magnified his muddy hazel eyes, and his thinning, sandy brown hair was combed neatly to the side, making the owl comparison even more compelling.

  “Your young man has mommy issues,” he told her, sipping the contents of bottle number four from his elegant crystal glass. That was another thing he had insisted on. Real crystal, no glass. It’s a good thing this hotel has a five-star restaurant attached to it, Lauren thought as the bartender sent one of the bar backs to fetch the glasses when they first sat down and ordered. It’s a good thing Dr. Durand drinks hundred-dollar bottles of wine. He had told Lauren he’d been in there the night before, so the bartender didn’t act put off. Dr. Durand must also be a very good tipper.

  “His mother was a basketcase the entire time. Not that I blame her. I’d be the same way if my eighteen-year-old son was on trial for murder.” Lauren took a small sip, only enough to stay sharp. Dr. Durand was drinking the vast majority of the wine, and even though he was a wisp of a man, it showed no effect on him.

  “Ahhh, but you see, he does blame her. He blames the mother for everything bad that’s happened to him, in one way or another. He can’t kill mommy, so he finds a suitable substitute. Maybe his girlfriend laughed at him in bed. Maybe the rich woman turned him down when, in his mind, he thought she was making advances toward him. The fact is, it was a release for him to kill those women and he doesn’t feel bad about it. Not at all.” He paused for effect. “Quite the contrary. He believes those women deserved it.”

  Lauren turned that over in her mind for a moment, watching the odd reflection of the two of them in the mirror behind the bar. Her tall, blond, and serious; and him short, bookish, and academic-looking. A mismatched couple if there ever was one. She ran a finger around the rim of the wineglass. “Will he kill again?”

  Dr. Durand reclined a little in his high-backed bar chair. “Probably. And I would guess sooner rather than later. His high from killing and getting away with it will only last so long. Then he’ll have to find another suitable target, either consciously or subconsciously.”

  “When he stops deriving pleasure from the other murders,” she said, reiterating his classroom statement back to him, “he’ll have to kill again.”

  He pushed his wire rim glasses up his nose with a sly smile. “Precisely.”

  They went over the other subtypes: Power Reassurance, Anger Retaliatory, Anger Excitation. It was a lot to learn, and a four-day seminar was not going to be enough time. “I’m just the messenger,” Dr. Durand admitted as they polished off the last bottle of wine. “If you want an in-depth study, I’d read the Keppel/Walter paper on the subject. It really is fascinating stuff.”

  Fascinating and useful, especially for re-examining old crime scenes. Lauren looked up the journal where Dr. Durand had told her the article could be found and she’d ordered a copy online the very next day.

  She and Dr. Durand developed an odd mentorship-like relationship over the next few days and evenings that extended to emails and phone calls for a few months after the seminar had ended. His validation of her suspicions didn’t bring David Spencer any closer to facing justice for what he had done, but she’d become a believer in the offender classification system. Eventually the emails had died off but she had saved every single one in a special folder, in case she ever needed to refer to them, along with all of her notes.

  The idea of criminal personality subtypes had fueled her fixation on David Spencer for a while, but like the friendship with Dr. Durand it, too, faded over time as David stayed out of trouble and cold cases stacked up, waiting to be solved. David Spencer was still on her radar when the Murder Book got stolen, but much further back in her brain, in a mental holding pattern. All it would take would be one thing to pull him back into the forefront of her attention.

  Like bringing flowers to the hospital.

  Absently, she tapped the space bar on her computer with her index finger, sending the curser across the page: click, click, click.

  She had so much else to be worrying about, like this impending caper with Reese and Charlie.

  Click, click, click.

  A mother was out there with no answers to her son’s murder. Who thought the detective coming to her door was on her side, fighting on her behalf. It’d all been a cruel, sick farce. Gabriel Mohamed and his mother deserved better. Lauren had to do better for them.

  Snapping her laptop shut, she startled a snoozing Watson lying at her feet, who had passed out on top of what was left of the slipper. Lauren told the blinking dog, “I’m not going to get anything done tonight.”

  Standing up and stretching, she looked at a picture of herself with her daughters again. A tightness wound around her throat, that yearning feeling that came with the realization that her girls had flown out of her nest and probably weren’t coming back. But also from the urge to protect them from people like David Spencer and the Schultzes: predators who could look like angels.

  Maybe I am nuts, she told herself as she started up the basement steps, Watson at her heels. Maybe I’m the crazy one in this situation and I should have Reese lock me up for my own good. I can’t think about David Spencer now. I have to concentrate on Sam Schultz.

  Watson ambled over to his food dish to lap up any remaining morsels he might have missed earlier. The night light in the hood over t
he stove cast the kitchen in a yellowish tint. Three rooms over, Reese’s thundering snores penetrated the walls.

  Come tomorrow night, Lauren thought, bending over to scratch Watson’s ears as he moved over to slurp from his water dish, if we go through with this, me and Reese will both be certifiable.

  39

  “This tie is cutting off the circulation to my brain,” Reese called up the stairs to Lauren, who was touching up her make-up in the upstairs bathroom. “Come fix it before it asphyxiates me.”

  Blowing out a breath of frustration, Lauren gave herself the once-over in the mirror. Her long black dress hung loosely on her body since she’d lost all that weight from being injured. The last time she’d worn it, to a wedding with Mark thirteen years ago, it had hugged her in all the right places, making her look quite curvy. Now it accentuated her extreme lack of anything that could be remotely called voluptuous. At least it’s floor length and I can wear flats, she told herself, applying a tad more blush. I won’t look like a flat-chested, fifty-foot woman in heels.

  Lauren had swept her hair up into a chignon, pinning it with the jeweled bobby pins Erin had given her for Christmas last year. She’d noticed her hair growing darker over the past year, the California blond replaced with a honey-colored girl-next-door shade. She had considered getting it lightened back to its original color, then decided to let nature take its course, at least until the grays showed up. Then she’d have to rethink that strategy.

  My hair looks nice for once, she consoled herself, but this is as good as it’s going to get.

  She smoothed down the sides of her silky dress and headed for the stairs.

  Standing at the bottom, tugging at his cranberry-colored tie, was Reese. He looked up, his green eyes taking Lauren in as she walked down the stairs. He looked strikingly handsome in his new charcoal gray suit and tone-on-tone shirt with polished black shoes.

  They locked eyes for a moment, his brilliant green meeting her soft blue. A whisper of a second passed as she stopped on the second stair and he looked up at her, tall and graceful, hand demurely sliding along the railing, a faint smile on her lips. His mouth opened slightly, as if words were about to tumble out he didn’t know he had.

  Then he shook his head.

  “Nope. Nothing.”

  “What?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I thought if you got dressed up, and looked super beautiful, which you do, I might find you attractive. But no, nothing.”

  She put a hand on her hip, a flush rising to her cheeks. “You were afraid if I got dressed up, you might be attracted to me. And?”

  “No. I mean yes. And then we couldn’t work together anymore. I certainly couldn’t stay living here with you. But thankfully”—he let out a sigh of relief—“I’m not attracted to you. At all. Not even a little. Don’t get me wrong,” he explained quickly, seeing the anger cloud her face, “you’re a pretty woman. You just don’t do anything for me. Sorry.”

  “Well, thank God you find me repulsive.” She pushed past him, walking into the living room. Picking her jeweled evening bag from the coffee table, she clicked it open looking for a cigarette, remembered she quit smoking years ago, and snapped it shut again.

  Following her, Reese tried to rephrase. “You’re not repulsive. Far, far from it. You know what I mean.”

  She let the empty bag slip back down to the table. She didn’t know why she had even brought it out, she wasn’t going to take it. It went with the dress, she supposed. “I do know. While all these young ladies you like to booty call at one a.m. can’t get enough of you, they haven’t seen you talk with your mouth full every day or heard you fart so loud it scared your dog awake.”

  “Hey,” he protested. “No need to get personal.”

  She wasn’t mad. She knew what he was so terribly trying to put into words. “We both know if anything was going to happen between us, it would have happened a long time ago. Let’s just leave it at that.” Lauren turned toward him and yanked at his tie, which he had knotted all wrong. She pulled it out and quickly retied it so he wouldn’t pass out from restricted blood flow to the brain.

  “Okay,” he agreed, thankful that the matter was settled. He wiggled the tie back and forth, testing out how much give it had.

  She slapped his hand away from his neck. “Leave it alone.”

  Reese cleared his throat and rubbed his hand, pretending she’d hurt him. “Are we ready to go pick up Charlie?”

  Looking around the living room, she quickly checked her mental list of everything they’d need to pull this stunt off. “Yes.”

  “You got a gun on you?”

  “I have two.”

  He looked her up and down, much like Charlie had when she’d made the same claim to him. “You gotta teach me that trick.”

  40

  “So what’s the plan, Spy Kids?” Charlie asked from the backseat of Lauren’s Ford Escape.

  “This plan is, we go in, you stay outside with the SUV running.” Reese was halfway turned in his seat, looking over his shoulder at Charlie. “The ticket says the cocktail reception starts at six. Champagne toast kicks off at seven. Silent auction at eight. It’s”—he glanced at the phone in his hand—“six thirty right now. Lauren and I go and hide in the can until Sam Schultz is done giving his kickoff speech, then Lauren records while I sneak up and steal anything he leaves behind. Then we haul ass out of there, and you drive us straight to the Erie County Lab so we can deposit the evidence in the overnight lockers. Got it?”

  “You two are going to hide in the shitter together?” Charlie sounded amused but grim at the same time, as if the danger of what they were about to do barely outweighed the ridiculousness of it.

  “Me in the ladies’ room, him in the men’s,” Lauren explained, not taking her eyes off the road as she drove.

  “There’re going to be lots of cops in there, retired and on duty. We don’t want anyone to see us, obviously. I’ll hover around the door. When it sounds like Schultz is wrapping up, I’ll text her and we’ll meet in the reception room. Hopefully all eyes will be on Sam,” Reese said.

  Charlie smirked. “Ain’t technology wonderful? Back in the old days we would have had to synchronize our pocket watches to pull off a heist such as this.”

  Lauren glared at him in the rearview mirror. “Don’t make me regret bringing you.”

  “Hey,” Charlie protested. “I wore my cleanest shirt and a real pair of pants for this. I even slicked back my hair.”

  “The effort is appreciated, my brother,” Reese told him, turning back around.

  It hadn’t snowed yet, but the sky was dark with clouds just waiting to open up. Lauren could feel the cold creeping into her bones, dry winter air sucking the warmth out of everything in its path. Within the month Buffalo would be white and glittering, like a picture postcard sent from the North Pole. Until then it teetered on that ominous precipice, that plunge into the first real snowstorm where the city would coat itself with ice and slush, freezing itself into its winter state.

  The trio headed into the city, down Route 5, coming over the crest of the Skyway bridge. Lauren could see the old grain elevators to her left lit up with blue falling snowflakes, illuminated with lasers. The patterns changed with the seasons: leaves in the fall, flowers in the spring, yellow suns in the summer. It was a beautiful way to embrace the city’s abandoned buildings.

  The tops of the ships in the Naval and Military Park peeked out above the darkened horizon and Lauren thought about how much the city had changed in the last ten years, trying to reinvent itself through its waterfront. Twenty years ago the city rolled up its sidewalks on Friday nights after all the commuters fled back to the suburbs. With the advent of the new HarborCenter arena, Canalside, and the development of the inner and outer harbors, new life had been breathed into downtown. As she drove straight up Delaware Avenue, the city looked lit and alive. People crowded
the Saturday-night sidewalks, rushing to one of the theaters, hopping from bar to bar, or enjoying their favorite restaurant.

  She swung around Niagara Square. It was actually a traffic circle, not square, that enclosed a marble obelisk. City Hall, in all of its art deco glory, loomed over them. Offices were randomly lit up throughout the building, even at that late hour. Vaguely, Lauren wondered if the mayor was in his office, watching across the street to the new Strand Hotel and Suites, where the function was being held. Mayor Karnes had yet to announce his endorsement for district attorney, a bad sign for Carl Church, the incumbent.

  “Where do you want me to park while I wait?” Charlie asked as Lauren continued around the circle. Warm yellow light radiated from the front of the hotel, decorated with a massive silver wreath under its logo. People in party clothes descended on the hotel from the parking ramps sprinkled around the downtown streets, wearing hats and gloves in preparation for the weather to turn. The trees out front were strung with white twinkling lights.

  Pulling into the front reception area, a red-jacketed valet came running up. Waving him off, Lauren pointed Charlie to the front of City Hall. “Wait there. You got your off-duty badge?”

  He patted his breast pocket. “Never leave home without it.”

  “Try to park in front of the cop car there and tell him you’re waiting for us,” Lauren instructed him. A uniform patrol officer was assigned to sit in front of City Hall at all times. They could see the car’s back end peeking out from behind the obelisk. “If he won’t let you park, just keep circling the block.”

  “Like a shark,” he groused, opening the back passenger door and easing his bulky frame out. How ironic, Lauren thought as she opened the car door, I can see the old Federal Courthouse, soon to be our new headquarters, from here. If we had already moved, we could have just walked over to carry out this raid.