2

Despite its homey 1950s red brick façade, the Chautauqua County Sheriff’s Office was a lot more modern than Lauren thought it was going to be. She wasn’t kidding when she joked about not being a country girl to Reese, but she had forgotten one very important thing about the area: it was home to the famed Chautauqua Institution, a world-renowned center for arts, culture, and learning. That was big, big money. Any crime, no matter how small, was going to be handled with the upmost professionalism and care; at least that’s what the poster hanging in their detectives’ squad room said. Lauren sat at an empty desk across from Reese, studying the layout of this alien place. Clean open work spaces. New, modern chrome-edged furniture and natural light pouring in from the windows were as foreign to Lauren as deer tracks and bear shit.

“I’m Manny Perez, senior investigator,” Reese mocked in a high-pitched voice as he reclined in one of the office chairs, fingers laced behind his head. “I like to throw my weight and low testosterone around at other people’s crime scenes.”

“It’s not nice to argue at someone else’s party,” Lauren reminded him.

“And thank you for not scaring our hosts with tales of the demonic David Spencer.”

“You don’t think he did this? You think some other guy killed Amber and Brianna? Dumped both their bodies out here?”

“I think we should wait for all the evidence before we jump off the conclusion cliff.”

Lauren’s face got hot. “After everything that’s happened, you know he did this.”

“I think he most likely did this. Let’s do our jobs and find some good solid evidence and maybe then put him away for good.”

He was right, she knew, but that just made her angrier. Lauren liked to think of their partnership as a codependent, verbally combative collaboration. She’d been borderline obsessed with David Spencer since they’d found ex-cop Ricky Schultz’s body in his basement with a cryptic message left on his computer screen just for her. And while the department had handed that investigation over to other Homicide detectives, she’d worked it from the wings since she came back from her medical leave.

“This squad room is great.” Reese tried to swivel around, but the chair hit the desk with a clang. “I love the décor in this place.”

“You want to transfer out here?” Lauren asked, thumbing through a travel brochure someone had left on the desk. A picture of a smiling family boating on Chautauqua Lake graced the cover with the words DISCOVER CHAUTAUQUA COUNTY! blazed in green letters across the top.

“I think our skill set is better suited for the city,” he replied, sipping the Tim Hortons coffee they had stopped and grabbed on the way over to the department. Maybe the rest of the country ran on Dunkin’ Donuts or fueled up at Starbucks, but in the Buffalo area Tim Hortons coffee and donuts reigned supreme.

“And what skills would those be?”

He glanced around the immaculately clean office. The secretary who led them there had politely sat them down and retreated. “The ability to deal with urban problems. This here is a whole other set of rules.”

“You think so?” She dropped the brochure back down. “I think people are the same all over.”

“I do not think so. I mean, yeah, to an extent. I’m sure they have their drugs and domestics and drunk drivers just like we do. But the vibe is different. Can’t you feel it?”

“I think your hat is too tight on your head.”

Tugging on his knit cap, he flashed her his brilliant smile. “You’re just saying that because I shaved my head and you don’t like it.”

She couldn’t deny it. “You look like a biracial Yul Brynner.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment. Yul Brynner was smooth as fu—”

“Sorry about the wait.” The deputy who headed up the scene finally came banging through the office door, cutting off Reese’s profanity-laden comparison to the late actor. He pulled his winter police hat off, tousling his dark brown hair and slung it on the coat hanger next to the door. “The medical examiner and his assistant just finished up.”

“No worries.” Reese stood with an outstretched hand. “Detective Shane Reese, Buffalo Police Department.”

Lauren got to her feet as the two men shook, then offered her own hand. “Lauren Riley.”

His hand was warm and smooth around hers. She noted the gloves stuffed into his coat pocket. He must have peeled them off right before he came in. “Deputy Sheriff Jack Nolan. Good to meet you both.” Releasing Lauren’s hand, his eyebrows pulled together. “I know you.” Hazel eyes searched her face. “Where do I know you from?”

Reese ran interference for her. “She’s got that kind of face. People say that to her all the time. Anyway, we brought a copy of the Brianna McIntyre file with us if you want to make some copies.”

Nolan snapped his fingers in recognition. “You’re the one who got stabbed.” Seeing the look on Lauren’s face, he quickly tried to recover. “I’m sorry. Forget I said that. Probably a sore subject. It’s just that it was all over the news.”

It had been. Live-streamed for a week straight until a coup in some country Lauren had never heard of stole the cable news cameras away. Waving a hand in dismissal, she told him, “It’s fine. You should see the stares I get when I go to the grocery store.” That was a lie. Except to go to work and on PT-prescribed walks before most people were even out of bed, she barely left her house. The drive-thru at the fast food place a mile from her house was keeping her alive. That and whatever she and Reese grabbed during their shift. It was no wonder she was a physical ruin.

Jack Nolan unzipped his heavy police jacket and draped it over the back of a chair. Lauren surmised it was his chair, at his desk, due to the framed photo of him standing with his arm around a teenage boy who looked exactly like him, only thirty years younger. “Let’s try this again. I’d love to see the file you have on Brianna McIntyre.”

Reese handed over the paperwork while Nolan cleared a space for them to gather around his desk. Pulling up the chair she had been sitting in, Lauren sat shoulder-to-shoulder with the sheriff while Reese dragged an older wooden chair from against the wall to sit across from the two of them.

The first thing Nolan pulled out of the file was an 8x10 photo of the missing girl that her mother had provided. The generic blue background practically screamed that it had been taken at a discount department store somewhere, probably as some sort of family portrait package. She was resting her chin on her fist, smiling right into the camera, strawberry blond hair falling down around her face in thick curls.

“Her mother, Angela McIntyre, said that picture was taken two years ago. The only difference was the length of her hair,” Lauren explained. “She said Brianna had grown it out.”

Nolan placed it face up on his desk and pulled out the official missing persons report. She watched as he carefully read it over, jotting some notes on a random piece of paper left on his desk. “She was last seen in a coffee shop?” he asked, looking up.

“According to her friend, she was supposed to meet a guy she met on an online dating site at the shop. It was early, seven o’clock. The last text the friend got was that the guy was late. That was at …” Reese’s face scrunched up as he tried to think of the exact time. “Seven ten, I believe.”

“And you canvassed the coffee shop?” Nolan dipped his hand into the file and pulled more papers out.

“Not us. The original detectives. This is their canvass report here,” Lauren tapped one of the papers in his hand. “It was happy hour on a Friday. That particular coffee shop is right on Chippewa Street in the party district. It used to be a bar until the owners lost their liquor license last year for serving minors. It doesn’t serve alcohol, but it hasn’t changed much,” she explained. “It was packed that night. They have a happy hour on Friday nights with coffee specials. No one on the staff remembered her specifically. Her friends said she didn’t frequent that place, so it must have been the guy’s suggestion.”

“Her cell phone records?”

“Her last text and the last ping off the tower put her in the coffee shop. But it looked like she had her phone in her jacket pocket at the crime scene.” Lauren reached over and pulled the cell phone records from the stack to show him.

“The medical examiner removed an object from her jacket pocket before moving the body. It was a cell phone,” Nolan replied, “ but the battery was missing.”

“The killer made sure right away she couldn’t be tracked by her phone. It shows pre-planning,” Reese commented.

Nolan was flipping through the pages of phone records. “This unknown number that’s highlighted. Is this our online boyfriend?”

Lauren nodded. “We think so, but it’s a burner. Prepaid cell phone. It looks like he called and texted her for three days before they met. He was very persistent.”

“And the online dating site? Did you look at this guy’s profile?”

“Fake,” Lauren said. “Pictures of a male model from Germany. It was created at an Internet café on Main Street, near the University of Buffalo’s south campus. Whoever did this was very careful not to have anything fall back on him.”

She wanted to tell Nolan that David Ryan Spencer was very careful. She wanted to tell him she had gotten a very smart little monster off on a murder charge and now he was running amuck. She wanted to say it was his ex-girlfriend’s body they had found in the same spot over a year ago. But she held her tongue. Reese was right. The body hadn’t even been identified yet. No use in sucking Jack Nolan into her paranoid obsession with David Spencer until she had to. It was bad enough poor Reese had to deal with it on a daily basis.

“Her car was found parked in the lot behind the coffee shop. Doesn’t look like she ever got back in it once she parked,” Reese added.

“This was in May of last year though, right? You think she’s been there since May? Out in the open all summer like that and no one’s found the body until now?”

Lauren shrugged. “It’s hard to say. Even the medical examiner will probably have a hard time giving a rough estimate of how long she’s been out there, given all the freezes and thaws we’ve had. Not to mention the hot summer months.” Not as hot as the summer before though, Lauren thought. That was record-breaking heat that David worked his black magic in.

“No ex-boyfriends? No stalkers? No one lurking in her past?”

“An ex-boyfriend who goes to school in California whose whereabouts on the day of the crime are well documented. Kids these days post everything they do on social media. We can track what Brianna did all day long, every day, for months just by looking at her feeds. She gets to the coffee shop, sends a few texts, and everything just stops. It’s like she was erased.”

“You have everything she posted that day, right?” Nolan asked.

Reese picked up the studio portrait. “We could’ve put a hundred different selfies from the day she went missing on the posters, and some of the ones her mother had printed up do have them on the bottom, but she was showing cleavage or making a duck face or posing in a bathroom mirror.” He handed the picture to Nolan, who looked it over.

“Millennials live their lives on the Internet.” Nolan motioned to the picture on his desk. “My sixteen-year-old son posts ten pictures of himself on Instagram every day. He lives in Colorado with his mom, but I never have to wonder what he’s doing.”

“Thankfully, Brianna’s mom found a notebook in her room with all her passwords written down. We’ve been monitoring her social media accounts.” Lauren produced a typed-up cheat sheet they had taken down to their computer analysis techs at the Erie County computer crime lab. “Our lab guys should be able to juice it up and get in. We’d have been in big trouble with the phone if we didn’t have her security code.”

“What do you do with a victim or suspect’s phone if they won’t give you the code?” Nolan asked. “We don’t get a lot of homicides out here.”

Reese shrugged. “If the victim is dead? With certain brands of phones, nothing. Once it’s locked, it’s locked. If it has a six-digit passcode, even the FBI can’t get in. Not for a long, long time, sometimes never. You have to reconstruct their movements through their friends’ phones. All of those text messages? They’re from the phone records of her best friend, Olivia Lange, and a few others. We can get the cell tower data, but in this case, it just puts her at the coffee shop.”

Nolan sat back in his chair, looking at the records Reese had provided. “What do we know about the victim? Does she have any connections out here?”

“As far as we know right now, no. She lived in North Buffalo. Worked at an Italian restaurant on Hertel Avenue, which is also in North Buffalo. She was taking accounting classes at Erie Community College City Campus,” Lauren replied. “She had only recently started using dating websites and the one she was on is actually one of the less skeevy ones. The man ‘likes’ the woman’s picture, and if she ‘likes’ his, his profile will appear and it’s up to her to make contact with him.”

“I’m so glad I meet my women the old-fashioned way. In bars,” Reese said.

“You and me both, brother,” Nolan assured him. He had the dating site profile in his hand now. “I wouldn’t even know how to go about doing all this.” His eyes flickered over the fake profile’s stats and measurements. “It’s like a casting call.”

“It’s the perfect way for a killer to anonymously attract a victim.” Lauren wanted to point out to Reese that he met women in bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, insurance agency waiting rooms—pretty much wherever women were—but it was not the time for witty banter between them.

“We called the DA’s office on the way here. They’re sending out their victim’s advocate to speak to the mom. Carl Church’s people are making arrangements with your county attorney and coroner to have the body sent to the morgue at the Erie County Medical Center. The press is going to be all over this.”

“Thanks for that.” Nolan got up, gathering the file back together. “Mind if I make copies of these?”

“Go ahead,” Lauren told him. She watched as he crossed over to a fancy new copier in the corner. Their copier had run out of black toner yesterday morning, so they were printing everything in blue until the copy guy could get there and install a new one. They’d run to an office store and buy a new cartridge themselves, but the model was so old stores didn’t carry that brand anymore.

“Are you going to talk to the mom?” Nolan called over his shoulder as he fed in the pages.

“Yes,” Lauren told him, “but probably tomorrow. It’s going to be hard on her because she won’t be able to bury the body until we get it back from the forensic anthropologists our medical examiner’s office uses down in Pennsylvania.” Lauren pictured Mrs. McIntyre sitting on the brown microfiber couch in her North Buffalo living room, eyes vacant, nose running, hearing but not hearing what the victim’s advocate was telling her. She could feel her stomach knot up again at the thought of having to endure that news. The mom had clung to the hope that as long as Brianna was missing, there was a chance she’d be found alive somewhere. Now there would only be grief and questions. Every mother’s worst nightmare.

“Would you mind sending me an email copy of your notes from that interview?” Nolan asked.

“Not a problem. I’ll send you the entire digital file.” Lauren liked the calm and easy demeanor Nolan had. As opposed to Reese, who’d found a scrap piece of paper and was ripping it into tiny shreds, making a little white pile on the desk. Her hand shot out and clamped over his. Giving her his best apologetic look, he brushed the mess into his hand and quickly dumped it in the trash can next to him before Nolan could see. Ripping things up was one of Reese’s nervous ticks when he got excited.

“I’ll email you copies of everything from our end if you leave me your cards.” Nolan crossed back over to them, handing back the paperwork. Reese grabbed it and put it back inside the file folder as Lauren fished her business card out.

“Our extension is the same.” Lauren wrote Reese’s name and cell number on the back of her card. “You shouldn’t have any trouble reaching us.”

Nolan took the card. “Oh, and hey,” he said, suddenly sounding a little sheepish, “sorry about the whole ‘you look familiar’ thing.”

Standing up, Lauren gave him a tight smile. “Not a problem. Don’t worry about it.”

They all shook hands again and Lauren noted Nolan’s was still warm.

Funny, she thought as she and Reese made their way out of the building, I feel cold as ice.