Welcome to book fourteen in the Operation Quickline series. When old evidence in uncovered in the long-unsolved murder of Sid’s mother, he and Lisa end up mired in one of the messiest cases of their careers. You can read the first chapter here, or check out the other chapters here.
The next morning, Sid hauled me down to the basement and the building’s fitness center at six-thirty that morning to get a run on the treadmills there. Sid had found it shortly after we arrived while doing some stair climbing to make up for it being too cold and snowy to run outside. Sy had been surprised to find that the building had a fitness center, which was odd, because he’d only been living there since the early ‘70s when his father passed away. He later inherited the apartment from his mother, who had died a few years later.
Sid showered before I did, and I went to help get breakfast laid out. Sy had called in an order to a local delicatessen the night before, and since no one else was awake at that ungodly hour, twelve-year-old Janey had taken delivery on the huge box of bagels, cream cheese, lox and capers, with some lettuce and tomato slices. It happens that way. Sid and Janey are the only morning people in the family.
I staggered back to our room just as Sid was getting out of the shower. He grinned when he heard about the bagels and lox. Then I got into the shower and tried to wake up.
Dressed in a sweater and jeans, I went into the dining room.
“You two were busier than usual last night,” Neil was telling Sid.
“Neil!” Mae shoved her husband with fond irritation.
Sid focused on layering a bagel half with cream cheese, lox, and a tomato slice.
“At least you didn’t bang on the wall.” I grumbled.
Mae and Neil had the bedroom next to ours, mostly because of the noise issue. Sid and I were trying to keep it down. We just don’t always succeed.
Mae, my older sister, is shorter than me and with a rounder figure than mine. But we both have the same brown hair. She grows hers out straight and cuts it short. I like mine longer. Neil, on the other hand, is tall and lanky, with the same red hair that he passed on to Darby, the twins, and Lissy. In fact, we have some photos of Neil when he was sixteen, and he looked almost exactly like Darby does now at age fifteen.
“Yeah, well.” Neil’s grin was less than innocent as he pushed his glasses up on his nose. “We might have been a little busy ourselves.”
“Neil!” Mae gasped even louder and flushed a deep red. Then she giggled.
Sid shook his head. “You two had better be careful. That’s how you ended up with Lissy.”
“Sid!” Mae snarled. “Will you cut it out?”
Sid pointed at her. “You’re the one who keeps blaming her conception on me.”
Just to be clear. Sid used to sleep around a lot, and was incredibly popular, too. For good reason, I have to say. But Mae has no actual knowledge of how good. It’s just that Neil once asked Sid the secret of Sid’s popularity. Sid told him – whatever it was. He’s never told me. [A- you never asked me to, and B- you already knew what it was because I’d explained it to you before any number of times, albeit not in those terms. – SEH] Anyway, Mae confessed to me that things had gotten better between her and Neil after that night, which is why she blames Lissy on Sid.
“Not going to happen, Sid.” Neil smirked as I flopped into a nearby chair. “We’ve learned our lesson and taken yet another cue from you.”
Sid laughed hard as I gaped.
“You got fixed?” Sid said.
“We weren’t going to say anything about that,” Mae hissed at her husband, then looked at me. “I’m sorry, Lisa.”
I’d had some trouble right before Sid and I got married almost three years before because Sid and I can’t have kids together. Sid got a vasectomy back in late 1972 (after he’d conceived Nick, although he didn’t know he had). As much sleeping around as he was doing, it was the responsible thing to do, especially since he couldn’t have imagined wanting to get married or wanting a child.
I shrugged as I grabbed a bagel. “I’m pretty much over it.”
The sound of Mama’s voice giving either Darby or Nick what for floated into the dining room.
“Having an adolescent can do that to you,” I continued, splitting open the pumpernickel bagel.
“Tell me about it.” Mae sighed and got up.
She planted a kiss on Neil’s hair, and he patted her backside. She returned a minute later with the news that it wasn’t Darby or Nick who’d sassed Grandma, but Marty, who at eight years old hadn’t learned the difference between smart aleck and going too far. Come to think of it, Darby and Nick hadn’t entirely learned the difference, either. The living room phone rang, and a minute later, Mitch, Marty’s identical twin, came running in.
“Uncle Sid, a Mr. Fedders is on the phone for you,” Mitch said.
“Thank you.” Sid got up and ruffled Mitch’s hair. “I’ll get it.”
I finished piling cream cheese, lettuce, tomato, lox and capers onto the two halves of the pumpernickel bagel and on another two halves of a plain bagel, and started eating.
Stella joined Neil, Mae and me in the dining room a couple of minutes later. She looked pretty bleary-eyed, and I had to wonder how much sleep she’d gotten that night. I debated asking, but with Stella the odds were only even she’d admit that she’d had a bad night.
Stella has a lot of issues with her nuclear family, most of them deserved. Um, let’s just say that it wasn’t a coincidence that Stella’s younger sister turned tricks to make their living. Which is only one of the reasons Stella didn’t talk about her family. She was determined to bury that part of her life in the past and, really, you could hardly blame her.
Sy came into the dining room, sat down next to Stella, and whispered in her ear.
“Of course, I’m certain!” she snapped.
Sid appeared in the open doorway between the dining room and the living room, my mother behind him.
“Stella, I’m perfectly happy to look at the photos for you,” Sid said. He glanced at me.
“I will look at them,” Stella growled. “You do not have to coddle me. I am a grown woman and perfectly capable of handling myself.”
“Oh, Stella, honey.” Mama sighed. “Nobody is saying you’re not. It’s just that this can’t be easy for you. I mean, I wouldn’t want to look at crime scene photos, especially if somebody I knew was in them.”
“Crime scene photos?” I looked over at Sid.
“Yeah.” Sid nodded and sighed. He had on an off-white Aran Isles sweater over his blue sport shirt and really tight jeans. “Jay Fedders has been in touch with the woman who has the original casebook. Or access to it. She’s a detective with the N.Y.P.D., and her father was the detective on the case originally. Fedders called her yesterday after we left, and she’s agreed to let us look at the photos and the reports. The photos are pretty grim, she said.”
“I want to find out who killed my sister,” Stella said, her eyes blazing. “God knows, no one gave a damn at the time!”
Mama winced. She hates foul language and damn counts. But I guess she figured that if anyone had a right to curse at that moment, Stella did.
“Well, we clearly care now.” Sid’s voice got on the acerbic side. He sighed, then glanced at me again. “I’ve got an appointment for one o’clock at Detective Reilly’s precinct station.”
Sy cleared his throat. “Then I say it is time we followed Lisa’s excellent example and apply ourselves to our morning repast.”
“We’ll still be able to spend some time at the World Trade Center before we go,” Stella said, helping herself to an onion bagel.
Sid finished his bagel quickly. He and Mae started cleaning up before everybody was done, but as soon as I’d finished, Sid pulled me aside and we went to our bedroom.
“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” he told me.
“I know.” I smiled at him, then took a deep breath. “But I think I’d better.”
“I can handle—”
“I know you can. It’s for me.” I swallowed. “Desensitization. Remember?”
Sid nodded and held me. I have this phobia of corpses, which can be a real problem in Sid’s and my work for the organization within the FBI known as Operation Quickline. It’s primarily a courier group, but we also do some investigative work. Quickline is how I got my phobia. The one good thing about it is that no one is going to suspect me of being an operative when they see me barfing over a stiff. And I’d been working on the problem with a really good trauma shrink for several years by that point. So it was getting better. Which was why I wanted to look at the photos.
We all made it out and headed downtown on the subway. We ate lunch on Mott Street, then Sy, Stella, Sid, and I headed to our appointment.
I was surprised that Detective Jane Reilly worked in a fairly modern building. The detectives’ room was an open space filled with ugly metal desks, most of them piled high with binders and other papers. Reilly was tall, with dark curly hair, pulled back into a ponytail at the nape of her neck. She wore a navy polyester suit jacket over a shiny blue blouse, and matching navy pants.
“Good to meet you folks,” she said, shaking each of our hands. Her eyes lingered briefly on Stella, then Sid, and she got a tiny glint in her eyes as she noted the family resemblance. “I appreciate you guys coming in. Come on. I’ve got the casebook in the conference room.”
“How did you get involved on the case?” Sid asked her as we walked down a nearby hallway.
“I’m not officially,” Reilly said. “It was my dad’s case. I don’t know if you’d understand, but sometimes a case just sticks with you. This one was Dad’s. He told me that it went cold almost immediately. Then someone higher up ordered him to let it go.”
“Wealthy, powerful men,” Stella whispered.
“I’m afraid so,” Reilly said. She paused in front of a door. “It really pissed Dad off. He always said that the vic had a sister. She had a child. How could they just let her go?” She shuddered briefly. “Anyway, the pictures are not pretty.”
Sid held Stella’s shoulders as the two went over to the table where the black and white prints were laid out. Sy stepped up and put his hand on Stella’s back. I swallowed the twisting in my gut and went to look, too.
There were dark stains all over the bed, and the body lay crumpled under the dark bedside table. The table, which looked black in the photo, was fairly shallow, with four small drawers on the top half, and a larger one below. The whole thing stood on four squat pillars, and the top had sharp, protruding corners.
“They said her head was bashed in,” Stella said, her voice going even flatter than it had the day before.
“Possibly on the corner of that nightstand,” said Sid.
“Hm.” It was hard to tell if Stella agreed with him or not.
Reilly pointed to the front left corner of the nightstand. “They found some hairs and blood there. The blood type matched the, uh, victim.”
Stella nodded once more. “Is there a way to get a copy of these?”
“I shouldn’t.” Reilly sighed. “It is totally against policy. But you know what? I’ll find a way to get a copy of the whole casebook to you.”
She led us from the room, and we followed her back through the open detectives room downstairs toward the front door of the precinct house.
“Dad kind of passed the case onto me,” Reilly continued as we walked. “I was so glad when Jay started bugging me about it. It gave me an excuse to look at it again.”
Stella paused on the stair, her brow creased. “So someone did care.”
“My dad,” Reilly said, her voice small and sad. “Yeah. He cared a lot.”
“Cared?” Sid asked, gently.
“Yeah. He, uh, passed away a couple years ago.” Reilly gave us a pained smile.
“I’m so sorry,” Stella said even before I could.
Her voice was soft and tender, too. Not her usual tone by any stretch. But one thing I have come to appreciate about Stella is that the second you think you’ve got her pegged, you discover you haven’t. Not unlike Sid, now that I think about it.
“Thanks,” Reilly said with a shrug. “He lived a good, long life and died in bed from a heart attack. He’s the reason I became a cop. So was this case, in a way. Mom had just told Dad that she was pregnant with me when it went down. Dad would take me to the station to look at the case book to hide that he was still trying to find the killer. He had to be careful how he did it because with my four older brothers and me to support, he couldn’t afford to get into trouble.”
We arrived at the glass door to the building.
“I can’t thank you enough, Detective,” Stella said, offering her right hand.
“I haven’t done anything,” Reilly said. “At least, not yet. But Jay’s right. The more people we have looking at this, the better the odds we’ll find out something. Heck, you might think of something that didn’t occur to you at the time. And fortunately, plenty of the people involved are still alive.”
“Well, we appreciate all you’re doing,” Sid said, then gave Reilly our business card. “You can send whatever you can to this address. I’ll pay for the shipping, too.”
“Thank you,” Reilly said.
We all shook hands again, then Sy, Sid, Stella and I left.
Thank you for reading. For more information about the Operation Quickline series, click here.
Please check out the Fiction page for the latest on all my novels. Or look me up at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Vroman’s, in Pasadena, California.