Richard Hawke - Cold Day in Hell

I asked to hear the message again. Gallo hit the rewind button then replayed the message. The voice was clearly being disguised. It was menacing, but in what sounded to me like a calculating way. I asked, “What time was this left? Does Robin’s machine have a time stamp on it?”

“It was left at six-forty-one.”

“That’s just around the time Deveraux was biting the heads off the jury.”

Gallo picked up a stack of black-and-white photographs from the desk and started leafing through them. “We found no signs of a forced entry.”

“So Robin either knew her attacker,” I said, “or, more to the point, knew him and trusted him enough to let him in. Or else she got this message and showed unfathomably stupid judgment in opening the door to the first stranger who came along.”

“Exactly. We’re working on both scenarios.”

“Robin Burrell was not an unfathomably stupid person,” I said.

“I’m sure she wasn’t.”

He tossed one of the photographs on the desk. I picked it up. It was a close-up of a tray holding a piece of cheese still in its cellophane along with a knife and an apple. Gallo went on, “We’ve traced Ms. Burrell from a yoga class she took over on Broadway. On the way home, she buys cheese and fruit. She also buys throat lozenges and Kleenex and other stuff for a cold. Her yoga instructor confirmed that she was sneezing and sniffling in class.”

“It’s cold season,” I said.

“If you’re popping lozenges and drinking Throat Coat tea, I don’t see that you’re eating cheese. Especially set out all nice on a tray like that. She was expecting someone.”

“In that case, why does stupid scenario number two have legs? You’re saying it wasn’t a stranger.”

“Because I don’t want to rule out something that might still hold up. You don’t toss out a scenario just because it might be a little stupid. Think about it. What’s one way to get inside someone’s apartment without forcing your way in?”

I got it. “Be there when they’re opening the door.”

“Right. Leave a message that will scare the hell out of them. A woman in her apartment alone? You get a message like that on your phone, especially on an unlisted number? That’s got to spook her. She’s not going to feel too good just sitting there. So you leave the message and be there waiting when she comes running out the door.”

“Right into your arms.”

Gallo nodded. “Or merge the two stories, if you want. It’s someone she knew who made the call, disguising his voice, and he stood there waiting. Either way, he flushed her out. He got her to open the door.”

“If it’ll make you feel any better, I can sort out the cheese mystery for you.”

“Sure, Fritz. Sort away.”

“The person she was expecting was me.”

Gallo blinked. “You. What are you telling me? You had a date with Robin Burrell the night she was killed?”

“Don’t go smearing me with that brush, Joe. I didn’t have a date. She wanted to talk some more about all the nutsy stuff that had been going on lately. I was testifying on that pirating case, and we’d arranged that I’d swing by when I got out.”

Gallo rested his chin on his fingertips and studied me. “Margo know about this date?”

“I just told you, it wasn’t a date.”

“This little cheese party, then?”

“Is that question relevant to your investigation?”

“So the answer is, she didn’t. What’s going on here, Fritz?”

“Nothing’s going on. I make a living out of other people’s problems. Robin Burrell had some problems.”

“Was she your client?”

“Now you’re sounding like Margo.”

“Oh. So you’ve had this conversation with Ms. Burke?”

“A similar one.”

“And she’s okay with your breaking cheese with the pretty lady across the street?”

“Joe, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re prying.”

“You don’t know any better.”

“Okay. Margo’s nose is out of joint. I’m doing what I can to put it back in place.”

“We’ve established that Robin Burrell was a pretty woman.”

“From where I sit, Margo’s no side of burnt toast. Robin Burrell was upset. If I was able to calm her down some, that’s not a crime. Check your codes. Have you got one for ‘unlawful assisting of damsel in distress’?”

“Okay. None of my business. But I wish you’d told me about this last night.”

“Cops scare me,” I said.

Gallo picked up one of the crime-scene photos and shook his head sadly at it. He dropped the photograph back on his desk, leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers carefully against the back of his head.

“The guy did a real chop job on your cheese friend. We’re looking at one sick, angry bastard here. And when word gets out that Ms. Burrell was found with her hand mutilated against her chest like those other two…” Gallo let the sentence hang.

“Any more thoughts on whether it’s a copycat or if this guy actually did the Central Parkers?”

“The answer to both those questions is maybe. But I sure as hell hope it’s the first one.” He indicated the tote bag. “I wish you could tell me he’s in there.”

“Sorry, Joe.”

Gallo came forward in his chair and plucked one of the e-mails from the bag. As he read it, I took a few of the other photographs and flipped through them. It was a reckless thing to do. I knew there was likely to be at least one of them that could get under my skin. There was. The wiseass crime-scene photographer had fashioned what he’d probably thought was an art shot. The photograph was taken looking down from the crown of Robin’s head as she lay on the floor. Her hairline, her eyebrows and her nose were in the foreground, slightly blurred. The focus of the shot was on the mirror fragment protruding from Robin’s neck, just above her collarbone. The photographer had angled the shot to capture the reflection of a portion of Robin’s face. This wasn’t exactly the last memory of the woman’s deep hazel eyes that I’d have preferred to hold.

Joe Gallo finished reading the e-mail. He set it faceup on his desk, squaring it perfectly. “Suspect number one.” He made a rueful face. “So begins the glamorous side of law enforcement.”

I’VE NEVER BEEN SITTING on top of the world myself, so I don’t honestly know what that’s like. For that matter, who can say that having the number-one-rated late-night show in the midnight slot and getting mountains of money thrown at you truly qualifies as “sitting on top of the world,” but that was the tag that Time magazine had given Marshall Fox when they’d put his grinning mug on their cover just three months before the murdered bodies of Cynthia Blair and Nikki Rossman surfaced in Central Park a little over a week apart. Fox’s emergence on the entertainment scene three years earlier, almost literally from nowhere (“South Dakota isn’t nowhere,” Fox joked during the first week of his show, “we prefer to think of ourselves as just south of nowhere”), and his blurringly fast trajectory to stardom had made the high school dropout and former ranch hand a household name almost overnight. Fox’s particular combination of easy charm, faint naughtiness and at times downright reproachful wit struck an immediate chord with viewers. The Time story called it “a near-fluke-ish alchemy.”

One has to conjure the incongruous image of a cowboy Lenny Bruce wandering in from the heartland. Like Bruce, Mr. Fox is not one to mince his words, a trait that also lands him in the grand American populist tradition of Will Rogers or Mark Twain. But ask any female fan of Marshall Fox if she thinks either of those two venerable sagebrush sages had even a fraction of the edge or especially the sex appeal of this new kid on the block, and you’re likely as not to hear a resounding “As if!”