Richard Hawke - Cold Day in Hell

Gottlieb interjected, “Not ‘something to do with.’ Stop pussyfooting around, Peter. My contention, Ms. Lamb, is that Bruce Spicer’s our killer.”

Megan turned to me. “You were looking into this?”

“Lewis mentioned his theory to me the day I got dunked in the East River. I haven’t really had a chance to pursue it.”

Gottlieb lowered the ice pack. “We’ve got nothing to contain at this point-not after Nancy Spicer’s gesture. I suggest very strongly that you and your boss look into this. The man’s a fanatical anti-abortionist, and Ms. Burrell admitted on the stand to those two abortions. Not just one but two.”

“What about Riddick?”

“Lifestyle, Ms. Lamb. Our Mr. Spicer is fond of words like ‘heathen’ and ‘fornicator.’ Our dear departed Zachary surely falls into these categories.”

I turned to Megan. “What do you think?”

She steepled her fingers and rested her chin on them. Her gaze bored through the table to the floor below. “Something Spicer said just now. Upstairs…” She let the sentence drift off, unfinished.

“What?”

“Oh my God!” She looked up sharply. “Did you hear it? When he was going on about suing everyone? ‘I’m coming.’ I knew there was something that’s been nagging me.”

Peter’s mouth dropped slowly open. “My God. You’re joking.”

“I’m not. It’s what he said. ‘I’m coming.’ The same voice. ‘Can you taste the blood?’” Megan’s eyes traveled from face to face as the meaning sank in.

Four chairs screeched abruptly away from the table.

HE WAS GONE.

After his rant, Spicer had been escorted from the visiting area to the room that was being readied for his wife. Nancy Spicer had emerged from her coma nearly simultaneously to her husband’s histrionic display in the visiting area, and according to the aides who wheeled her up from the ICU, Bruce Spicer had whispered something in her ear, given her a squeeze on the shoulder and exited the room. A quick search of the floor told us that he was no longer on it.

“I’m going downstairs,” Megan said. “I’ll put in a call from one of the cruisers. He can’t have gotten far.”

Peter wasn’t so confident. “He could be on a subway. He could be headed anywhere.”

“We’ll flood the Port Authority,” I said. “We’ll alert the airports. Airport security will pluck him out in a heartbeat. Don’t worry. He’s stuck in the boroughs. Plus, you saw him. The man’s like a mad chicken. He won’t be able to hide.”

I joined Megan. We took the stairs two at a time. As we approached the hospital’s front door, I had a thought, and I pulled up short. “Allison Jennings.”

“What about her?”

“Spicer called her. He threatened her. We still don’t know why.” I pulled out my cell phone. “I’m going to see if I can get ahold of her. See if the name means anything to her.”

“I’ll be outside.”

I had to track around in the lobby before I could get a decent signal. I leaned up against a wall engraved with the names of financial Samaritans and pulled Allison Jenning’s card from my wallet. Something felt peculiar as I punched in the numbers. Just before the final one-a four-I realized why it felt peculiar. I shifted my thumb over one number and hit the five instead. It picked up on the second ring.

“Kelly Cole.”

Son of a bitch. That was it.

“Kelly, It’s Fritz. Where are you?”

“I’m still outside the hospital, why?”

“I want you to put your hand lovingly on your pretty throat.”

“My…what are you talking about?”

“And then I want you to say a prayer to whatever God you believe in.”

“I don’t believe in any of them.”

I switched ears, huddling in to the wall to fix the reception. “You might want to reconsider that stance, sweetheart. Just a heads-up.”

THE DIN WAS LIKE the amplified chewing of an army of ants, but it was only Brasserie on a Saturday night. Above the long sleek bar ran a bank of brushed chrome video monitors, ten in all, displaying in black-and-white stop-action the comings and goings of patrons, captured by a small video camera mounted just inside the glass entrance. The trip from the first monitor to the tenth and final one took about twenty seconds. It was a novelty that never failed to crane necks. Caught on hidden camera. (“There you are! That’s you!”) From Patty “Tania” Hearst to Princess Di at the Paris Ritz, no one can get enough of it.

Sometime shortly after eight-thirty, the image of Rosemary Fox pushing through the glass door began its stuttering trip along the monitors. She was accompanied by Alan and Gloria Ross. No one at the bar seemed to recognize Marshall Fox’s wife on the screen. However, diners seated at their tables turned their heads and watched as Rosemary and the Rosses were ushered to a table in the far corner of the large loud room. The Rosses took a seat on either side of Rosemary, who looked pale and angry, even behind her blue-tinted sunglasses. She also looked lovely in her $10,000 Versace “smock,” her thick hair falling nearly to her elbows. The hostess had given the invisible signal, and by the time the three were settling in, a basket of cracked poppy-seed bread was being slid onto the table, a deep blue bottle of sparkling water was landing on the linen, and a frog-faced man in a deliberately oversize silk blouse was folding his hands together and silently kissing the air in front of him as he crooned, “How might I please you with cocktails this evening?”

Rosemary answered that one. “Double vodka martini. Three olives. Tell your man he’s never built one so dry. Tell him also to wait approximately seven minutes and then build another one. No olives in that one.”

The frog-faced man practically snapped his heels. “The lady knows what she wants.”

“Yes.” Rosemary sighed. “The lady does, at that.”

Samuel Deveraux was going to declare a mistrial. This wasn’t officially official, but it was what Fred Willis had all but guaranteed when he’d phoned Rosemary earlier in the day. Something about the jury foreperson wigging out. A suicide attempt? Rosemary hadn’t paid much attention to the details. Apparently, the husband was a nut. That much was abundantly clear. There was even a rumor making the rounds that he was wanted for questioning in the murders of Zachary and the Quaker girl. As of early evening, the man was not yet in custody. Rosemary had also received a phone call from that woman detective, the one who had put Marshall under arrest in May. Real balls on that little gal, Rosemary thought, making that call herself. The detective had wanted to tell Rosemary about the juror’s husband, equivocating on whether she thought the man was really the murderer everyone was looking for, but she did feel confident that he was the one who had left the crude message on Rosemary’s phone machine. “A friendly warning, Mrs. Fox. You might want to be extra-cautious until we bring him in.”

Alan and Gloria Ross sat silently, waiting for their cue from Rosemary. Rosemary was only slightly difficult to read behind the blue sunglasses. Her left index finger was tapping rapidly on her folded napkin, and her perfect chin was dipped slightly. Ross couldn’t help but steal a glance at her breasts, pale and full, nudging the silver fabric of the dress. Familiarity with Rosemary Fox had bred no lack of astonishment on Ross’s part at how beautiful and sensual the woman was, even wound tight as a clock, as she clearly was this evening.

Gloria was giving her husband a signal: a head bob in Rosemary’s direction. Ross reached over and placed his hand over Rosemary’s fingers, snuffing out her nervous tapping.

“I know a new trial seems like just about the worst thing on earth, honey,” he said in as soothing a tone as he could muster in the noisy restaurant. “It pushes the time line way back for getting your life back to normal, I know that. But that jury was getting more and more freaked by the minute, Rose. They could have easily come in with a guilty verdict, you have to remember that. Marshall could be in the stew this very minute, but he’s not. We all live to fight another day.”