10

The techs at the Erie County crime lab confirmed that the phone was indeed the one used to call and lure Brianna McIntyre. While that didn’t do much to identify who had abducted Brianna, it did tell Lauren a lot about the methods her abductor was using. He was being cautious, leaving the phone behind before the crime. He had scouted the locations beforehand, making sure he’d have a visual on his victim. And he hadn’t bothered to come back and dispose of the burner phone because he was certain it couldn’t be traced back to him.

With the task force starting in five days, Lauren wanted to make the most of the time she had left in the Cold Case office with Reese. Sixty days was a long time to be away from the cases they were working on, especially when she wasn’t sure what the conditions at the task force were going to be like. Carl Church had convinced the county to lend one of its buildings in the city to use as the temporary task force home. It was downtown on Oak Street, but Lauren had heard parts of it were still under construction. Still, it’s better than being housed at the state attorney general’s office or one of the other municipalities involved; a neutral space would be the most conducive for teamwork, Lauren thought.

Reese had a whole laundry list of things he wanted to take care of before she left. “You don’t get a vacation from your real job,” he reminded her. “And you’re not sticking me with all this crap before you go.”

His blunt insults were music to her ears; they told her that their relationship could survive her going to the task force after all.

It was Friday, which meant Reese also had a multitude of weekend plans, so his urgency to get some work done was tripled. There was no way, Lauren knew, he was coming in on a Sunday morning to do busywork he could get done right then.

“I want to find Betty Ray today,” he told her as soon as she came in the door. “And I know it rhymes, so keep that comment to yourself.”

Lauren snapped her mouth shut and stowed her tote bag in her desk drawer. She had wanted to work on adding cases to the new Murder Book.

Since she had come back to work, she’d been slowly adding to the spreadsheet on her departmental iPad, remembering to save often. It wasn’t the old fashioned olive-green three-ring binder she used to use on a daily basis, but unless the thief could erase the Internet cloud, it could never get stolen again.

Reese took off his Buffalo Bisons baseball hat and twirled it on his index finger. “Betty was supposed to come in so I could re-interview her on that deli murder from Jefferson Avenue. She’s ducking me.”

“She’s about eighty years old,” Lauren reminded him, mentally putting her Murder Book plans on hold. “Are you sure she wasn’t put into a nursing home?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.” Reese balled up a piece of paper and shot it into the trash can over by the spare interview room. “I think her grandkids are hiding her because they don’t want her to be involved.”

“Can you blame them?” Lauren threaded her Glock along her belt to her right hip, then buckled it. “Dante Henderson is a stone-cold killer.”

“Yes. Exactly. That’s why we need to put him in jail.”

Dante Henderson had at least three bodies on him they knew of, none of which they could prove until Reese had found Betty’s statement in the file saying she was in the deli when the robbery occurred and said she knew the young man who shot the owner, but only as Henny. At that time, Dante Henderson hadn’t yet reached the peak of his criminal career and that nickname meant nothing to the original investigating detectives.

“I want to go over and peek out her son’s house on Michigan Avenue. You ready to take a ride?”

She picked up her Tim Hortons cup, checking the contents—three-quarters full. “Let’s go.”

The drive over to the East Side took them down on Main Street past the new medical corridor, where millions of dollars of construction was going on in multiple projects. Yellow-helmeted construction workers wove in and out of scaffolding along the road. If someone had told Lauren ten years ago this type of investment was going to happen in that section of the city, she would have laughed. Now the joke was on the people who had written off that area. Business was booming.

But beyond that, in the neighborhoods, life went on as if none of that was happening.

Lauren was always happy to let Reese drive. The radio chatter was steady for a Friday morning. It was a holiday weekend and everyone, whether you were of Irish descent or not, took St. Patrick’s Day very seriously. Buffalo had not one, but two parades: the downtown parade and the Old First Ward parade. Since the holiday fell on a Sunday this year, everyone had started the party early on Thursday night. As they drove along Main Street, people had on green jackets, shamrock apparel, and leprechaun hats. She wondered how many of them were just coming home from the night before or starting their Friday party early. Lauren was grateful for her gold detective’s badge; parade weekend was always a nightmare for patrol officers trying to rein in the fights and drunks.

Reese turned down Northampton Street to cut over to Masten Avenue. “Her son’s house is near the corner, next to the Dollar Store.” He pulled a picture out from his visor and handed it to Lauren. “I Google Mapped it.”

It was nice to be able to see the houses they intended to drop by on before going there. Google Maps gave them the layout of the outside, what structures were on either side, and the general condition of the property. It was so much better than flying in blind the way they used to do it. The house was a wood frame double, flanked on one side by a store and by another double on the opposite side. Lauren wondered when the picture was from. A kid’s tricycle was on the porch along with a battered-looking porch swing. It was hard to tell what time of year the picture was taken, other than not the dead of winter. No snow was piled up, no shovels against the porch, no cars in the driveway covered in ice.

It was almost ten o’clock in the morning and the streets were just starting to wake up in the neighborhood. They parked along the curb across the street to watch the house for a few minutes. Lauren’s old lieutenant, Charlie Daley, had taught her to always sit on a house, no matter how routine the matter, so that you knew exactly what you were walking into. She had passed that habit down to Reese when they started working together because his first instinct was to jump out of the car and rush right in.

Betty’s son was a mail carrier and probably at work, so there were no cars parked in the driveway. The swing and the tricycle were both gone from the porch, but someone had painted the shutters a nice cheery blue since the Google Maps picture was taken.

“Think she’s in there?” Reese asked, staring at the front picture window.

There was no movement, no sign of life coming from the house at all. “Hard to say. Let’s give it a minute and we’ll go check it.”

The car radio crackled to life. “Any car in C-District, I’m getting a call of a robbery in progress at the Dollar Store at 890 Masten Avenue. Caller says a man with a knife is demanding cash from the register.”

Reese and Lauren exchanged a quick glance.

“Son of a bitch,” Reese said, slipping his Glock out as he opened his door. Lauren followed suit, gun at her side.

They were just about to cross Masten Avenue when a man with a ski mask came bolting out of the store in a Boston Celtics jersey. He made a quick turn and ran north on Masten. Something silver glinted in his left hand.

“Call it in! Call it in!” Reese yelled back to Lauren, dodging the cars on Masten as they both gave chase.

Lauren yanked the portable radio from her back pocket and keyed the mic as she ran. “Radio, this is 1271. We’re chasing that robbery suspect down Masten towards Eaton Street.”

Reese was ahead of her, cutting the distance between him and the suspect. The suspect pulled off his ski mask and threw it, looking back as he did, then doubled his efforts, realizing he was being chased. He cut down Eaton Street and immediately ran up a driveway and into the yards.

“The suspect is in the yards on Eaton Street, Radio,” Lauren updated, huffing along through the debris-strewn backyards. “Skinny white male, six foot, wearing a green basketball jersey.”

For a second, she lost sight of Reese in the back tangle of yards. She stuffed the radio in her pocket and turned around and around, trying to orient herself: a rusty swing set, a snowblower, broken patio furniture.

Panic started to wash over her. She knew you never, ever lose sight of your partner. The sound of her own heartbeat filled her ears.

A dog started barking. Then she heard the sound of wood breaking to her left. Lauren sprinted through a cut in the bushes into the next yard over.

Reese had the man backed against a tall wooden fence. In his left hand he had a knife with a five-inch blade. Reese had drawn down on him with his Glock. There was nowhere left for the skinny junkie to run.

“Drop the knife!” Reese yelled. About six feet separated the two men. Lauren came up next to her partner, the barrel on her own Glock pointed at the man’s chest.

“You got nowhere to go. Drop the knife,” she yelled. The radio in her back pocket screamed with the chatter of coppers coming to back them up.

The man’s eyes darted from side to side, looking for an opening.

“How much did you get, man?” Reese asked, his voice out of breath, but calm. “Twenty bucks? Come on, man. Drop the knife.”

The noise of sirens and tires squealing filled the air. Their backup was all over the street behind them but didn’t know where they were. They might as well have been a million miles away.

The knife flashed in the morning sun, tip pointed upward. Lauren’s breathing evened out as her muscle memory and training kicked in.

Everything seemed to slow down. The details in front of her became sharp and focused, like she was viewing the scene through a telescope. She could see the black hooded sweatshirt he had on underneath the jersey, the beads of sweat dotting his forehead, and his shaggy brown hair sticking to it in spots. Paint-stained baggy jeans hung from his hips and his beat-up white sneakers were caked in brown mud. A scraggy mustache under his nose twitched as the knife bounced slightly in time to his ragged breathing.

She watched him through her gun sight as he shifted his weight from side to side, debating his next move.

“Don’t make us shoot you over nothing,” Lauren called to him. “Drop it!”

His chest heaved up and down with adrenaline or drugs or both. He was going to make a play.

The man suddenly threw the knife to the side of him, feigned like he was going to slam into Reese, then ran straight at Lauren. A split second before he would have plowed into her Reese tackled him from the side, his gun still in his hand.

Lauren holstered her weapon and jumped on the pair rolling around in the muddy snow patches scattered in the backyard, managing to grab one of the suspect’s arms and twist it behind his back. She hooked her leg through one of his, causing them to fall back in a jumbled knot against the fence.

Reese straddled the guy and grabbed his other arm with one hand while the suspect tried to fight them off. The man kicked and spit, screaming, “Get off me! Get off me!”

They were both huffing and exhausted when the first pair of coppers came crashing through the neighbor’s bushes.

Rolling off him together as the patrol guys cuffed the suspect, Reese and Lauren looked at each other. Covered in mud and dead leaves, twigs sticking out of Lauren’s hair, they caught their breath while a young cop brought the guy to his feet. “You guys okay?” he asked the panting detectives.

They both burst out in tension-laced laughter.

Stifling the laugh, Reese let out a low whistle. “That was close.” He brought himself up on one knee, his khaki pants stained and wet.

A heavy-set cop offered her hand and helped Lauren up. “Too close,” Lauren said, trying to brush the muck off her own pants without much success. The reality of how near they’d come to shooting that man washed over her and she said a small prayer of thanks. Every cop’s worst nightmare is an on-duty shooting, even if it is justified.

“Great job, detectives!” an eager-looking young officer called to them as he helped lead the suspect out of the yards. The man’s head was hanging down, greasy hair framing his gaunt face, all the fight suddenly drained out of him.

“I didn’t know what to do with my gun,” Reese said, finally holstering it. “I’m fighting one-handed and trying to keep my gun away from him with the other, while you’re all over him like an octopus.”

She had been all over him, even if she was huffing now. I must be getting myself back together, she thought. All those early-morning walks are paying off.

A lieutenant neither one of them had ever seen before showed up and started organizing the scene: ordering cops to string tape, look for witnesses, and safeguard the evidence. Apparently, a wad of one-dollar bills he’d stolen had leaked out of his pocket and left a trail down Eaton Street into the yards. Lauren hadn’t noticed in the heat of the chase.

“I don’t think we’re going to find Betty today,” Lauren told Reese. He reached over and plucked a stick out of her ponytail and dropped it on the ground.

“I just hope no one stole our car,” he said, turning around to get his bearings. “I left it running at the curb when we hopped out.”

An old-timer with a huge belly walked by and slapped Reese on the shoulder. “Nice pinch,” he told them and went to stand over the knife until the crime scene unit showed up to collect it.

“Wouldn’t that be just our luck?” Lauren asked.

“Yeah,” Reese agreed. He tried to wipe some mud from his forehead with the back of his hand but only succeeded in smearing it around. “It would be.”