Cold Day in Hell Read Online Free Page A

the jury. His voice came on like a low rumble of thunder. “One thing I want to make clear to all of you right now, before I go any further. You
will
be going back into that jury room first thing tomorrow morning. You
will
continue to deliberate. And you
will
be delivering a verdict to this court, even if I have to sit in there with you and hold your hand and slap you silly and referee all the
crap
that’s been going on for too damn long now. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
    He placed his hands down flat and leaned forward. He looked like he was ready to bound right out of his chair. “I want to see twelve heads nodding.
Now
.”
     
3
     
    THE SNOW HAD NEITHER let up nor intensified but was still coming down like finely sifted sugar. Nearly a dozen police cars, along with two ambulances, were clogging the narrow street, their lights flashing blue and red tattoos on and off the snow-powdered trees, the parked cars and the gawkers. The latter were growing in numbers and animation by the minute. Yellow crime-scene tape embraced the front of five attached brownstones. But it was the middle one that was receiving most of the attention, the one with the oversize Christmas tree all atwinkle in white in the high front windows.
    I followed the scores of footprints to the edge of the onlookers. A bank of spotlights had been set up and directed at the brownstones. The illuminated area looked not so much like daylight as like the light of a flashbulb stilled at the moment of going off. Inside the apartment with the Christmas tree, real flashbulbs were going off.
    Not a good sign.
    Having gotten as far as I could, I pulled out my cell phone and hit the code for Margo. She answered immediately.
    “Fritz! Where are you? You’re never going to guess what’s happened.”
    “One of your neighbors has been murdered.”
    “Oh. You know.” She sounded disappointed.
    “Poke your head out the window.”
    I looked up at the top floor of a brownstone across the street from where all the activity was taking place. Several seconds passed, then I saw a form pass in front of a window. The window went up. Margo Burke leaned out into the abyss, holding the phone to her ear. In my ear, her voice said, “I don’t see you.”
    “Down here. Not too tall, not too short, just right.” I waved my free hand.
    “There you are!” She waved back. “I’ve been watching out the window for about an hour. It’s a murder, right?”
    “I believe it is.”
    “Oh, Jesus. And you see who it
is
?”
    “I see whose apartment it is,” I said.
    “Oh, Fritz, come on. It has to be her.”
    “You’re jumping to conclusions.”
    I saw her switch the phone to her other ear. “I’m not jumping to conclusions. Come on, this was Marshall Fox’s
lover
, for Christ’s sake.”
    I reminded her, “Former. And what of it? Since when do you have to be involved with a celebrity to get whacked in this town?”
    “Whacked. Well, aren’t you Mr. Mob tonight?”
    “Besides,” I said, “we don’t know yet if it’s her.”
    The line crackled. Even though we were separated by only a few hundred feet, I guess our signals first had to travel untold miles up into space before bouncing back down to us. “You know the policeman’s secret handshake. Why don’t you go find out?”
    Which is what I did. And, of course, she was correct. The first official homicide victim of the New Year in the borough of Manhattan was Robin Jane Burrell. Age twenty-seven. Originally from New Hope, Pennsylvania. Or, as one of the tabloids would put it the following day in a caption beneath the grim photo of the woman lying trussed beneath the Christmas tree: NO HOPE.
     
     
    KELLY COLE WAS REPORTING from the dark snowy steps of the courthouse. Even though there was no logical reason for it, the news department still felt that the courthouse steps were the appropriate backdrop for the story about the fracturing Marshall Fox jury and Judge Deveraux’s refusal to accept a deadlock. The