‘Brooklyn, you can go now.’ Mr Hudson’s face was red and blotchy. ‘Unless you have more questions for her, Detective?’
Lauren shook her head. ‘I will, but we can do that in my office later.’
‘Good. Go downstairs, Brooklyn. Now.’
She didn’t argue but Brooklyn Hudson’s thin face twisted up in a look of sheer hatred as she stomped out of the room. Her father visibly relaxed when she left, sitting up straighter against his wheelchair, as if a great weight had just been lifted off him. Does he have to go through hell with this kid every day? Lauren wondered.
‘What settlement were you speaking of?’ she asked Hudson.
‘I used to work for Garden Valley’s sanitation department. Ten years ago, my coworker backed over me. The driver was the town supervisor’s nephew and a drunk. He’d been out partying the night before and was still hammered when he came to work. I told my boss I wouldn’t get on the rig with him driving and he threatened to fire me. Then I almost died. It took seven years and twelve surgeries, but I got a $17 million settlement.’
The light bulb flipped on in Lauren’s head. It had been a high-profile case when it went down, and that’s why his name had been so familiar to her. Gross negligence, his attorneys had argued, coupled with an attempt to cover up the extent of knowledge of the driver’s drinking problem by the town’s elected officials. A few people lost their jobs. Very sensational stuff. John Hudson was now a very vocal local advocate for better workplace safety laws.
‘As you can see, I’m not in the best health,’ he went on. ‘My kidney was crushed. Now my other one is failing. I’m on dialysis three times a week. There’s so much scar tissue and damage I’m not a candidate for a transplant. My days are numbered and those numbers are running out.’
‘I’m so sorry to hear that.’
He waved off any sympathy with a shaky hand. ‘It’s nothing. Nothing compared to what happened to my son. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe he’s dead.’
‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ Lauren repeated, and she was. Discovering you have a child just to lose them was beyond heartbreaking.
‘Did Gunnar know anyone else here in Buffalo?’ She gently pressed on with her questions. ‘Anyone at all?’
‘No one. He only came to meet me. Meet his family. And now he’s gone.’ His uneven lip quivered a little. ‘I followed Gunnar to the door last night. He hugged me before he got in his car and left. I watched him go. It was already dark outside but the moon was so bright. I called to him from the doorway to be careful and he just waved and smiled. I should have told him to stay here. I shouldn’t have let him stay in a hotel …’ The tears came freely and he made no move to wipe them away. Lauren heard the echoes of Billy Munzert’s father saying he should have gone for the milk himself, the blame and regret and pain.
Lauren could see him starting to unravel, so she suggested: ‘Why don’t we take a break?’ It was as much for her as him. She had to put Billy Munzert out of her head and concentrate on Gunnar Jonsson. ‘Erna, can you make me some coffee while we wait for Ryan and his wife?’
‘I think that’s a good idea.’ She bent down and adjusted the blanket over Hudson’s lap and checked to see if he had enough water in his cup on the table. ‘I’ll only be gone a few minutes. If you need anything, call. OK?’
Grasping the joystick on his wheelchair, he nodded and silently turned away from them, facing the hockey game. Erna motioned toward the door and they left Mr Hudson alone.
‘The kitchen is this way,’ she said.
Following her through the house, Lauren kept her eyes peeled for Brooklyn, who apparently took her father’s command to go back in the basement to heart.
The kitchen was done in classic black and white, including a checkered floor and dark-stained island with matching bar stools set around it. Lauren pictured a little Italian lady cooking Mr Hudson’s meals at the huge modern black stove.
‘Please, have a seat.’ Erna said, motioning to one of the chairs, then immediately started fussing with the coffee machine.
‘I’m so sorry to have to tell you this terrible news,’ Lauren reiterated as she sat down.
‘It’s been an unbelievable week,’ Erna replied, opening a cabinet and extracting two coffee mugs. ‘First, Gunnar shows up out of the blue. Then both the kids went ballistic. They wanted to hire a private investigator, you know, to find out what he was about. They were afraid for their inheritance,’ she said as she waited for the coffee to drip down into the carafe. ‘Neither one of them had anything to do with their father until he got his settlement. Then they both hopped on the first plane from Nevada, where they’d been living with Mr Hudson’s ex-wife, to be here. Ryan took that test before Mr Hudson got his settlement, while he was still in Las Vegas. He was probably hoping to find a rich uncle he could leech off of.’ She gave a bitter laugh. ‘He never would have taken that test nowadays. No way he’d risk finding more heirs.’
Lauren asked, ‘Have you been with Mr Hudson long?’
‘I’ve been Mr Hudson’s nurse from the beginning. I was assigned to him from a temp agency two weeks after he was released from the hospital, when he was living in a one-bedroom apartment over a dry cleaner. He couldn’t leave because there was no wheelchair ramp. When he had a doctor’s appointment I had to call one of my sons to come over and carry him down the stairs until the state put a cheap-ass lift in for him. Where were the kids then? Nowhere to be found.’ Erna shook her head in disdain as she poured the coffee. ‘And now all they do is leech off of him. Cream? Sugar?’
‘Black is fine.’ Lauren’s phone vibrated in her pocket, but she let it go to voicemail.
Erna gathered up the mugs and came over to the island. A glass sugar bowl and a little pitcher of cream were already sitting on a serving platter next to Lauren. ‘Mr Hudson likes his coffee as soon as he wakes up,’ she explained, sitting on the stool across from Lauren. Erna carefully scooped some sugar from the bowl into her cup. ‘Although I suspect he waits until eight in the morning to ring me, because I know he doesn’t sleep much anymore. And now this.’ She propped an elbow on the island and leaned her head into her hand. ‘This could really set him back.’
‘You live here with him?’ Lauren asked, even though it was obvious.
‘I do now. When he had this place built, he insisted. I have three rooms on the second floor. A separate staircase leads to the outside from the back of the house. He has been so generous to me. It breaks my heart what his children put him through.’
Lauren sipped her coffee. ‘Even the one who’s on his way here?’
Her brown eyes narrowed. ‘Especially him. Miss Riley, I don’t pretend to know a thing about doing your job, but watch out for Ryan. Brooklyn is a needy, unstable addict, but what you see is what you get. Ryan is a whole other animal.’
‘Meaning?’
She put her mug down and looked Lauren straight in the eye. ‘Don’t trust him. Don’t you believe a thing that man says.’
NINE
Ryan Hudson was nothing like his emaciated, strung-out little sister. He and his wife, Kristin, came strolling in looking like a pair of Manhattan socialites. Reese liked to call people like that ‘Beverly Hills by way of Buffalo,’ a saying to describe those people who stumbled upon their money in one way or another and tried to mask their humble beginnings by being the most insufferable snobs possible, as if that gave them some sort of status. That was the first thing that popped into Lauren’s head when Ryan offered her his hand and said, ‘Ryan Hudson, how do you do?’
She wanted to say, I just saw your brother with his head caved in, does that concern you in the least? but replied with a tame, ‘Fine, thank you. I’m very sorry for your loss.’
‘This is unbelievable,’ the wife said, opening the cabinet to grab two coffee mugs. Erna and Lauren were on their second cup when the couple had let themselves in and finally appeared in the doorway. Apparently, they felt there was no rush to talk about their murdered relative.
>
‘Mr and Mrs Hudson, maybe you could answer a few questions for me before you go back to talk to your father?’
‘I don’t know what we’ll be able to add. We only saw the man once when my father called us over here a week ago.’ Ryan took the hot coffee his wife was holding out to him but neither of them made a move to sit with Erna and Lauren. Instead they both leaned up against the marble countertop, shoulder to shoulder. ‘We spent an hour with him and went home.’
‘And called our attorney,’ the wife added, with the husband nodding slightly as he sipped his coffee.
‘And you made no effort to see him again? He was your brother. I’d think you’d be interested in getting to know him.’
‘Just because he had a piece of paper in his hand that said we were related doesn’t mean he was my brother.’ Color rose to Ryan’s unnaturally tanned cheeks. He and his wife had either just gotten back from somewhere sunny or they were both hitting the tanning booth hard. ‘Who knows whether he was a scam artist? Maybe he read about my dad’s settlement and came up with this crazy scheme. I took that DNA test years ago. How do we even know he was from Iceland? He spoke damn good English for someone from another country.’
‘I thought the same thing,’ his wife said, her brown hair bobbing along in agreement. ‘It was too good to be true.’
‘Well, ma’am, I understand they teach Icelandic, Danish, and English to children in Iceland.’ Lauren was not that smart; she had googled Iceland before she’d left for work that morning. ‘And with the proliferation of genealogy sites, a great many people are now being united with relatives they never knew they had. According to the paperwork we found he only took his test recently and it matched to yours.’
‘It all seemed very convenient to me,’ Ryan said.
‘Very,’ his wife concurred. Lauren wondered if she always threw in a word or two of solidarity along with every statement he made. ‘I read about the women and men from Eastern Europe who run these scams on unsuspecting people here in the States. If the Russians can hack our social media, they can hack one of those websites. Who knows? Maybe he goes from city to city pulling the long-lost-son scam.’
‘That seems like a very elaborate scam – finding someone who visited Iceland thirty years ago, who’s just come into some money,’ Lauren said. Erna sat silently, clutching her coffee, mouth set in a hard line.
‘When there’s millions of dollars at stake, I’m sure it would seem worth it,’ the wife replied. Lauren noticed Ryan gave his wife a quick shot to the ribs with his elbow. She stared straight ahead at Lauren and didn’t even flinch.
Lauren’s phone vibrated in her pocket again. She slipped it out, saw the call was from Doug and let it go to voice mail. She then seized the opportunity to open her photos to look at the date of Gunnar’s copy of the DNA report. ‘So that was the first you knew of Gunnar Jonsson? When you met him here in Buffalo?’
Ryan hesitated, just long enough to debate whether he should lie or not. ‘I took that test years ago. I got the kit as a birthday gift from my future mother-in-law. All I’ve gotten in the last three years have been distant cousins. The website sends you a notification when there’s a match. All of a sudden, two months ago I get a DNA report back saying I have a half-brother, but his profile was set to private, so I didn’t know who he was or where he was from. I sent him a message but he never responded.’
‘Is that why you didn’t tell your father?’
‘What could I say?’ he shrugged. ‘“Hey, Dad, you have a son out there somewhere, but I don’t know who or where he is.” That wouldn’t have been great for his health.’
Lauren wasn’t buying it, but the Hudson family kitchen was no place to have that conversation. ‘I hate to have to do this,’ she told him, ‘but I’m going to have to ask both you and your sister to come down to headquarters and give me a statement. Preferably later today.’
‘A statement about what? I just told you every single thing I know about that man.’ The red on his face was becoming more pronounced. A vein started to bulge in his forehead.
‘It’s standard procedure. I just need to document what you told me and also get your whereabouts last night on paper.’
‘My whereabouts? I was with my wife and two small kids, at my home.’
‘He was,’ Kristin Hudson tossed in, ‘home with us all night.’
Lauren stood up. ‘Once again. It’s standard procedure. I need your sister to come in as well. Maybe you could arrange to come down together? That way we can get it over with and I can get down to business finding out what happened to Gunnar.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ Ryan’s wife said.
‘I need to talk to you too,’ Lauren told her, buttoning up her coat.
‘Me? Why?’
Lauren wanted to say because she was Ryan’s alibi, but once again held her tongue. ‘I’ll need statements from all of you, including Erna. But I’ll wait on that until Mr Hudson has had time to absorb the shock a little.’
Ryan and his wife exchanged glances and then he said, ‘I’ll work it out with Brooklyn. Do you have a business card?’
‘I was just about to ask you the same question,’ Lauren countered, producing hers like magic from her coat pocket.
‘I manage my father’s investments,’ he replied, taking the card from Lauren’s fingers and looking down at it. ‘I don’t have a business card.’
‘I can give you both his and Brooklyn’s information on the way out,’ Erna said. She rose from her stool, gathered up their cups and deposited them in the sink.
‘Always the helper, aren’t you?’ Ryan said to her as she passed by him.
‘That I am,’ she called over her shoulder. Lauren saw the look he gave Erna when she followed her out of the kitchen. There was no love lost between those two.
Lauren jotted down both Ryan’s and Brooklyn’s cell numbers as Erna led the way back to the front door.
‘I’m no private eye, but you know what I noticed, Detective Riley?’ she asked as she held the door open for Lauren. ‘Neither one of those kids ever asked how Gunnar was murdered.’
‘You caught that too, huh?’ Lauren asked as she made her way down the icy steps.
Smart lady.
TEN
Lauren’s phone vibrated in her pocket again as she drove away in the sergeant’s SUV. Someone was trying like hell to get ahold of her. She didn’t have her power cord to plug into the truck’s system, and she didn’t want to get on her phone while she was driving on a sheet of ice. She’d be back at headquarters soon enough. She could see and hear the calls being put out by the dispatcher over the radio and scrolling down the computer mounted to the dash, so she knew it wasn’t a police emergency or another body. But she wondered if she should pull over and look. She needed to be reachable in case Reese needed something.
The roads were pretty empty, it being the middle of a workday, but Lauren took it slow anyway. The plows had gotten to the streets in the subdivision and to most of the main roads, but a tricky layer of ice had formed since the snow stopped falling. Driving during the winter in Buffalo is almost an art form: knowing when to turn into the skid, rock the car when you got stuck, use your momentum to push yourself over a snowbank. In North Carolina, her cousin’s kids’ school closed when there was two inches of snow. In Buffalo, two feet wasn’t even enough for a half day off.
Lauren thought about how the notification went the whole way back to headquarters, dissecting it in her brain. She had one obviously distraught father on her hands, two selfish kids more worried about their cut of the inheritance than the murder of their brother, and a caregiver who was trying her best to shield her boss from his offspring. And it wasn’t even noon yet.
Lauren parked in the sarge’s underground spot once she inched her way into headquarters, and dug her phone out of her pocket as she headed for the stairs. Nothing from Reese. Four missed calls from Doug Sheehan. Two from the sergeant. Two texts, one from each of them saying the same thing: Call the office
ASAP.
She made it to the Homicide wing as fast as she could, realizing on the way up she had turned off her portable radio to do the notification. She’d made every rookie mistake possible, except leave her gun at the Hudson household. Lauren double-checked to make sure it was still on her hip, just to be on the safe side.
‘Sergeant Connolly wants to see you,’ Marilyn told her as soon as she walked in. ‘He’s in his office.’
‘Got it,’ Lauren called back, making a beeline to his door. He liked Lauren, but he was not the kind of guy who does you a favor and then appreciates you going radio silent on him in the middle of a murder investigation. She fully expected him to chew her out as soon as she walked into his office.
Rapping on the leaded glass with her knuckles, Lauren eased the door open a little and stuck her head in. ‘Hey, Sarge,’ she said, pushing herself the rest of the way in the room. ‘Sorry I didn’t call you back. I was in the middle of the notification. Wait until you hear this one.’
‘Lauren Riley, I’d like you to meet Special Agent Matthew Lawton.’
She’d been so focused on groveling her apology and telling her big news that Lauren had totally ignored the kid sitting in the room with the sergeant. He looked so young she thought he must be one of the eager new vendors that were always coming around trying to sell the squad paper or office supplies, not knowing you had to go through a whole bidding process with the city.
Lauren extended her hand and he stood up and shook it. Not too tall, and athletically built, he had neatly cut dark hair and a nose that looked like it had been broken at least once. ‘It’s nice to meet you,’ he said. ‘Looks like we’re going to be working together on this.’
‘Nice to meet you, too.’ His hand was warm and his voice was deeper than she expected. ‘Did the sergeant bring you up to speed on the case?’
‘He did. And I can request those records for the bridge right away.’
A Full Cold Moon Page 6