18

Before Lauren got her detective’s badge, she had been a prostitute.

With less than a year out of the academy, Lauren got to work with Narcotics and Vice, posing as a prostitute. Working undercover, she dressed in the oldest, beat-up jeans she could find, spilled coffee down the front of ripped tee shirts, and rubbed dark-purple eye shadow into the lower corners of her eyes to transform from a fresh-faced police officer in her early twenties to a strung-out hype selling her body for drug money. After seeing her roll around with a suspect while assisting on one of his raids, Charlie Daley had handpicked her for the detail, thinking she had the stomach for the disgusting, perverted johns she’d have to encounter. She did. And for three months she had been pulled out of her precinct and plopped down into the shadows on the corners.

They never had to wait more than five minutes for Lauren to get propositioned.

The detail was Charlie’s baby. He had the idea that drugs and prostitution were so closely linked that to tackle one would help combat the other. In the three months she was a decoy, she witnessed and made arrests for drug deals, assaults, robberies, and domestics. Prostitutes are invisible. To the denizens of the drug trade, the gangbangers, and the users, prostitutes were a fixture, like lamp posts or fire hydrants. Always in the background, forgotten and invisible until their services were needed. But also vulnerable to abuse from all sides: the johns, the pimps, the other hypes.

Lauren discovered a great sympathy for the women and men out there selling their bodies to survive. Because that’s what it boiled down to, survival. To reach the point where you have to stand on the corner and sell yourself, you have to have endured enough physical, mental, and emotional anguish to wall yourself off from the rest of your life. When Lauren would talk to the street walkers, after they’d been arrested for threatening Lauren for standing on their corners, she’d find out they were mothers. And daughters. And sisters. Many had graduated high school. Or they had a family in the suburbs who were waiting for them to come home. They were more than just the bodies they were selling. Somewhere in their past they’d taken a wrong turn that had led to another, and now they lived on the corners, day to day, hour to hour, and didn’t think much about the future. They didn’t know if they had one.

One of the first things Lauren did when she got to Cold Case was to pull every unsolved murder of prostitutes she could find. She and Reese solved a couple, a few were still looking promising, but most had gone back to the shelves. Still, it was Charlie Daley who taught her that these people mattered.

She, too, had been at Charlie’s retirement party. Lauren had still been engaged to Joe Wheeler at the time and had to beg him to let her go to the party. Joe had been so controlling that he took the night off to go with her, just in case some other cop got any ideas about who she was with.

Even with Joe hovering by her side all night, it had been a great time. Charlie had been well loved and respected. When he gave his speech, he pointed out Lauren specifically, telling everyone gathered at the Bison Rod and Gun Club, “That kid right there, she’s going to run this department someday.” Lauren had swelled with pride, even though Joe was squeezing her hand so hard she lost feeling in her fingers.

She hadn’t seen Charlie since. She’d heard rumors he was living with a psychic south of the city in the Town of Lily Dale, famous for its lifestyle of spiritualism. Then she’d heard he was working as a railroad cop. The last word she had on him was that he was working in Lackawanna at a cemetery as a maintenance man.

“I forgot you were a hooker,” Reese commented on their way home. “Is that why I’m always broke?”

“There ain’t enough money in the world to pay me for servicing you,” she said.

“Between you and Marilyn, my manhood has been completely diminished today.”

“Not completely. You managed to get another date with the woman you blew off last night.”

“Oh, yeah.” Reese poked at the radio, trying to find a good station. “I forgot.”

They had stopped by the union office on the first floor, at Marilyn’s suggestion, to grab Charlie Daley’s most recent address. They got it, but no phone number. When Joy had run his name through the computer, it showed Daley hadn’t had a valid driver’s license in over five years.

Reese and Riley had left Joy and Ben behind at headquarters. They had wanted to follow up on the angle of the burner call coming in. Reese was supposed to take Lauren home.

“I’d like to say I hated every minute of that Vice gig, but it was just the opposite,” Lauren said. “I loved seeing the look on those guys faces when they realized their cars were getting impounded and they were going to jail for six hours.”

“Six hours? That’s all?”

“Long enough to get an appearance ticket and for their wives to find out.”

Lauren heard Reese give a low whistle, then say, “I’d rather stay in jail.”

She smiled. “Exactly.” More than one had begged to stay behind bars rather than go home to confront their wives.

Her smile faded as the reality of the situation hit her. “You know the cop that stole the Murder Book is going to try again to get the file he was after.”

Reese nodded in agreement. “He wanted it bad enough to kill for it.”

“Joy and Ben are running down phone numbers. They should be scooping Daley up right now. Once that file leaves the room, the homicide might as well never have happened.” The sick feeling in her gut had returned. It was only a matter of time before the motivated cop took another shot at getting into that file room.

Reese drummed his fingers on top of the steering wheel, one of his nervous habits when he had pent-up energy to spend. “You want to go knock on Charlie Daley’s door? Like right now?”

“We’re going the wrong way,” Lauren pointed out.

He made a U-turn in the middle of Delaware Avenue, causing cars in both directions to screech to a stop, colorful language coming at them from the other drivers. “Now we’re not.” He grinned and headed for the Skyway.