A Full Cold Moon

by Lissa Marie Redmond

  Walking past their crew’s closed door, Lauren took another sip of her coffee, now drinkable, and wished Reese was back to work. As she walked into her own crew’s office, she realized how short they were on manpower. Their crew consisted of Doug Sheehan, Hector Avilla and Mario Aquino. She was filling in for Reggie Major, who was off on a medical leave, and would go back to Cold Case once he was cleared for duty. But with Aquino on vacation until after the first of the year, the entire squad was desperately understaffed. Hence, she and Doug had had to take the night crew’s homicide.

  She fired up her desktop and got to work. With every minute she wasted, Gunnar Jonsson’s murder got colder.

  FIVE

  ‘Hey Lauren, I heard you caught a real nasty one last night.’ Hector Avilla pulled a chair up next to her as she sat at her computer. His black hair was gelled up in front, away from his pockmarked face, which already showed a hint of five o’clock shadow.

  ‘Yeah, Hec. Poor young guy run down in an alley,’ Lauren said as she began scrolling through the public records. Now that everyone’s life is on display on the internet, people don’t realize how much information detectives have to wade through just to find a simple address. Just narrowing down on a common name could take hours. There were a lot of John Hudsons in Buffalo. ‘But it was wrong. Something was off about the whole thing, you know what I mean?’

  ‘Robbery gone bad?’

  ‘Could be,’ she conceded, then added, ‘but it just doesn’t feel right.’

  Hector’s dark brown eyes ran over the page she was looking at. ‘Is this the possible suspect?’

  Lauren shook her head. ‘I’m trying to find his next of kin. He had some paperwork on him that said he had family in Buffalo.’

  ‘Good luck with that. The chief just told me I’m doing the video canvas for you because he’s bringing in someone from the FBI to help you.’

  Good news traveled fast in the department. ‘Sorry about that. The chief is here already?’

  ‘He stopped me on the way in. It’s no problem. I’m going to grab Scott from Photography. He’s a whiz at that stuff. We’ll be done before you know it. And maybe we’ll have something for you.’

  Lauren gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘A nice clear shot of the assailant’s face would be nice.’

  ‘Yeah, that’d be something.’ He smiled. ‘Too bad that never happens.’

  ‘Only on TV.’

  Hec slapped her shoulder as he got up. ‘I’m going to make some coffee. Want some more?’

  Lauren looked down into her half-filled cup. ‘I’m good for now,’ she called as he made his way through the open door and toward the coffee maker at the end of the main corridor.

  She turned her attention back to the most likely candidate on the screen: John Robert Hudson, age fifty-two, with an address out in a swanky new subdivision in the town of Orchard Park.

  John Robert Hudson. Lauren knew that name from somewhere.

  She hit the print icon and heard the copier rumble to life out in the hallway as it spit out the information. All around her the homicide squad was waking up for the day. The new space they had given them, when they moved police headquarters from Franklin Street to the old federal building on Niagara Square, seemed less than ideal at first, but cops will complain about anything. It took a couple of months for the lot of them to realize just how crappy and dilapidated their old building really had been. It was nice to walk into a building where you didn’t have to fight cockroaches for your desk chair.

  ‘Can you grab those for me?’ she called out to Marilyn. The homicide report technician, a fancy way of saying office manager, was the department’s unofficial den mother. Or more like a referee, which was what she was most of the time. With the door open, Lauren could lean back in her chair and the two of them would go back and forth chatting all day. She’d miss that when she had to go back to the Cold Case office, which was further down the hall and out of sight.

  ‘You got it.’ Marilyn scooped them up and brought them over to Lauren, her navy slacks swoosh, swoosh, swooshing as she came. Lauren would have gotten up herself, but Marilyn insisted on retrieving paperwork, getting coffee refills, and bringing her squad members whatever office supplies they needed. She said it was her only exercise, but Lauren knew she loved mothering the group of detectives.

  ‘Thanks,’ Lauren said, shuffling them around, trying to put them in some kind of order.

  ‘You still seeing that dreamy UPS driver?’ she asked. Marilyn was in her early sixties and was married to her high school sweetheart. She took a great interest in Lauren’s love life, or lack thereof.

  ‘Nope,’ Lauren told her. ‘He was nice to look it, but the elevator didn’t go all the way to the top floor.’

  ‘As long as he can deliver the package, does it matter?’ Marilyn laughed.

  ‘Trust me, it never even got close to that,’ Lauren assured her. They had a total of six dates, including her taking him to the Homicide office holiday party the first day of December. It was four dates too long and the party was the last time she had seen him in person. Lauren was still ignoring his texts and phone calls, not quite ready to totally block him, but definitely done with dating him.

  ‘You’re so tough on the poor guys you go out with.’

  Lauren puckered her lips in a smirk. ‘I can’t help it if they can’t keep up with me. I have to cut them loose quick or they get too attached.’ Which was true. Before she’d met her first husband she’d spend hours getting ready trying to meet someone. Now she’d go to the grocery store in sweatpants and keep right on wearing them out to dinner. Middle age is a wonderfully freeing time, Lauren thought, because now I just don’t give a shit.

  Marilyn walked back to her desk where the phone line never stopped blinking and sat down. The huge calendar the police union put out every year framed her head. Lauren looked over at her to ask something and found herself staring at the month of December. Something caught her eye.

  Marilyn noticed her staring. ‘What?’

  Lauren got up and approached Marilyn’s very organized desk, bypassing the inbox and going straight for the wall. In the right-hand corner of certain dates on the calendar were the phases of the moon. Lauren had looked at the Buffalo Police Union’s calendars almost every day since she had gotten the job, and never really cared about the phases of the moon. Now she leaned in and took a good look.

  ‘What in the hell are you doing?’ Marilyn asked, leaning back so she could see what Lauren was squinting at.

  ‘Last night was December twelfth – a full moon,’ Lauren told her, stepping back, knocking over a Mason jar full of pens and pencils.

  Marilyn scrambled to gather up all the writing utensils Lauren had just displaced across her desk. ‘Yeah? And we caught a couple homicides, so what? All the crazies come out during the full moon, you know that. And today is Friday the thirteenth, if you’re superstitious.’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Lauren said as she tried to stuff as many pens as she could back into the glass jar. She grabbed a few more, trying to get them in, but a couple went point side down, which was not allowed on Marilyn’s desk.

  Marilyn quickly plucked them back out and righted them.

  ‘It’s not a problem but I want you to go sit down,’ Marilyn said, shooing Lauren with her hands as she looked up at her. She worried in her mom-like way that Lauren was not 100 percent recovered from getting stabbed the year before. ‘You’re as white as a ghost.’

  Lauren could feel her brow furrowing as she went back to her paperwork. She googled the lunar calendar on her phone. She’d been right. Last night had been a full moon and since it was December, that made it a full cold moon. A chill ran down her spine.

  Gunnar Jonsson had been killed under a full cold moon.

  She had another case, a very old case, that had happened during a full cold moon. She’d been working on it since she first got to the Cold Case squad. She’d worked it with every resource she had, chasing every old lead, putting more man-hou
rs into it than any other case.

  And she hadn’t solved it yet.

  SIX

  Lauren was not a superstitious person. Not at all. But her dad had been a hunter. The kind that actually ate what he killed and was respectful of conservation. The kind of hunter that had learned from his dad and grandfather. He took it very seriously, even if she didn’t totally understand why he had loved it so much. He’d take a trip south of the city to his cousin’s land at the start of the season, spend a few days in the woods, maybe get a deer, maybe not, but always came back happy. Then with a clear head, he’d put on his work clothes and go back to the Ford plant.

  One of the things Lauren Riley’s dad really believed in was the cycles of the moon. He used to tell her that October was the hunter’s moon and just like the tides, the moon had an effect on the wildlife in the forest. Sometimes the December moon was called the long nights moon or the Yule moon, for obvious reasons. Around Buffalo, in December, when you woke up it was dark; and when you got home from work it was dark. It wasn’t a bad thing, or a scary thing, just the natural order of things. For her, that December moon would always be the full cold moon, because that was what Billy Munzert’s dad had called it.

  On her first day in the Cold Case squad one of the old timers about to retire had put a thick file on her desk. ‘I caught this case decades ago. Good family. All heartbroken. I don’t know what you can do with it, but try, OK?’

  She’d looked at the faded cover of the file, then back to the detective who would end up dying later that year of a heart attack before he got his pension. ‘OK,’ she’d said, and meant it. Because when you first get to Homicide you haven’t had your heart broken over and over yet, and you were willing to take on the hard cases.

  Lauren hadn’t been a new detective, she’d transferred over from the Special Victims Unit, and before that she’d spent years on patrol. So she thought she was ready. She believed she was immune to emotional attachment at that point. She thought this would be a good first case to get her feet wet in Cold Case.

  Lauren dug into the file as soon as he walked away from her desk. In 1978 a twelve-year-old boy from the Kaisertown neighborhood had gone to the milk machine on the corner for his mom. It was past dinnertime, around seven p.m., and his mother had wanted to make sure her kids had milk for cereal the next morning. She had forgotten to grab a carton at the now closed grocery store earlier that day.

  The quarters his mother had given him were found scattered on the ground in front of the machine. Three days later his bike was discovered caught on some branches on the banks of the Buffalo River. His body was never recovered.

  Billy Munzert had been in sixth grade, loved playing army guys with his friends, and couldn’t wait for Star Wars to come to his local movie theater because his parents didn’t own a car and he could walk there.

  Lauren had stayed at the office until almost midnight reading the file. She took an entire yellow legal pad of notes. She flipped through the interviews and photos of the boy’s bike caught up in the bare branches of a low-hanging tree along the river. She kept going back to the school picture his mother had provided: a red-headed, toothy-smiled, freckle-faced boy grinning right at her in his cowboy-styled shirt.

  She went to see his mother the next day.

  The mom was distraught and grateful and mad and hopeful, even all those years later. She’d heard rumors about a local pervert that lived near the corner where the milk machine had been. Her husband and some neighborhood guys roughed him up before the detectives got to him, but he had an alibi. An alibi the detectives couldn’t shake. Those rumors and that alibi had been checked and rechecked by the original detectives two and three times over. They got nowhere. The pervert moved from the neighborhood shortly after he’d been officially cleared.

  The streetlight above the machine had been out, Mrs Munzert explained as her husband hung in the doorway of their living room with sad, mournful eyes. Haunted eyes. ‘I should have gone myself,’ he muttered, passing an old-fashioned tobacco pipe over and over between his hands. ‘I should have gone when I got home from the plant. I still had my work clothes on. I could have walked. But Billy wanted to go. I thought it was light enough, with the full cold moon out. I thought he was old enough …’

  Lauren hadn’t heard that phrase since she was a kid herself, from her own father.

  The only light on the corner that evening had been from the moon, Billy’s father told her, a full cold moon. As big around as a dinner platter and as bright as a bare light bulb in an empty room. The milk machine was only two blocks away. It hadn’t snowed so the sidewalks were clear, which was why Billy had ridden his bike. Though kids in Buffalo rode their bikes in blizzards if they had to. Everyone in the neighborhood should have seen him riding by, but no one had. Not one person.

  As Mrs Munzert sat in her living room on the blue-and-green afghan she’d probably knitted herself, she begged Lauren to finally find her son. Her husband’s watery eyes joined in with her desperate pleas. They were both in their seventies by then, beat down by the circumstances surrounding the loss of their child.

  ‘I don’t want to die without knowing what happened to my son,’ she said as she clutched a framed school picture of him to her chest. ‘It’s the not knowing. It eats away at you. My other children don’t even talk about Billy. It’s too hard. Too hard.’ Her head drooping down over the photograph and she whispered, ‘Please. Please find him.’

  And Lauren made the biggest mistake a new homicide detective could possibly make: she promised she would.

  She promised Billy’s parents she would find their son.

  Lauren had tirelessly worked and reworked every lead for the last five years. She had talked to the mother weekly, then monthly, until their oldest daughter had asked Lauren to call her instead with any updates; the stress on her parents was too much. And when Reese had come to the Cold Case squad, Lauren had dragged him into Billy’s case as well.

  But no matter how hard they tried, they just could not catch a break. They couldn’t develop a suspect, or even a new lead. They re-canvased the neighborhood, looking for older residents who’d lived there when Billy went missing. They checked the national databases on missing children and unidentified bodies. She uploaded his dental records and swabbed his siblings for DNA for familial comparison. They had all the old evidence tested with the newest technology and came up with nothing.

  And still the promise remained unkept.

  A full cold moon. If Lauren hadn’t wanted to make it personal with Gunnar Jonsson, circumstances possibly just made it so.

  SEVEN

  Lauren stuck her head into the sarge’s office. ‘I think I got a good address for John Hudson, the victim’s father. It’s over in Orchard Park. Want to take a ride?’

  He shook his head. Unlike Marilyn’s tidy desk, his was wild with papers and files and notepads. ‘They’re sending the FBI guy over now. I have to wait and brief him.’

  She looked at the time on her phone. ‘I really have to make this notification. Tell him or her I’m sorry I couldn’t wait.’

  ‘Just handle it. Hopefully Hector will come up with something on the video canvas.’

  ‘Hopefully. I’ll be on the air if you need me.’ Lauren touched the portable police radio sticking out of her coat pocket.

  ‘Hey’ – he scooped up a set of car keys and tossed them to her. She snatched them easily out of the air – ‘if you’re heading to Orchard Park, take my Explorer. I heard they got four inches last night. I don’t want you getting stuck out at the Bills stadium in one of our shitty motor pool cars.’

  ‘Because I’m irreplaceable, right, Sarge?’

  ‘Because you’re the least pain in my ass. For the moment. Now go and bring my truck back in one piece before I rethink this.’

  She held the keys up, jingling them for effect. ‘Thank you.’ Getting the sarge’s truck was an honor akin to getting knighted by the Queen. The motor pool cars were so notoriously bad that detectives w
ould steal the car keys to the better ones right off of your desk if you left them out. Lauren figured she’d stop at a Tim Hortons on the way back and bring him a coffee and blueberry muffin. She’d known the sarge for a lot of years, but it was always good practice to butter up your superiors whenever the opportunity arose.

  She walked past the holiday decorations clustered together against the back wall: a plastic Christmas tree with blue-and-white ornaments, a pretty metal menorah, a Kwanzaa Kinara with seven candles, and a pole someone had leaned up against the wall to symbolize Festivus. Technically, they were a government building and shouldn’t have had anything displayed at all, but the unsaid rule of the office was to put up whatever you wanted to celebrate, and everybody else would respect it. It was actually one of the best things they did together as a squad all year long.

  Tugging her knit hat on and tucking her scarf down the front of her jacket, Lauren double checked that her fingerless gloves were in her front pocket. She always pulled those on last. Mentally, she took stock of everything she had on her: Glock, handcuffs, radio, zip-up folio with her paperwork in it, a good pen in her inside pocket. She was ready to do the death notification and get some background on Gunnar. Maybe his dad would be able to shed some light on who might have wanted to hurt him.

  It was always a delicate dance, getting information after telling someone their loved one had just been murdered. Lauren knew how to tread lightly.

  She checked the address with the GPS on her phone: 251 East Glass Lake Road. She had pulled up a picture of the house on Google Maps. Gunnar Jonsson’s father had a house worth almost a million dollars in one of the priciest suburbs just outside of the city. One of the siblings, Brooklyn, had the same address. Another son lived just a few miles away in a somewhat less expensive, but very exclusive, neighborhood.