Free Winter House by Carol O'Connell

good press right now. The timing is perfect.“ She tacked on the reminder, „It’s budget-cutting season.“
    Ordinarily, these would be the magic words, but not today. Jack Coffey, feeling slightly giddy, covered his face with both hands, worrying that tics or twitches might betray his image of a man in control of this meeting.
    Mallory, of all people, should never have bought into this fantasy of a superannuated psycho from the last century. She was more jaded, better rooted in reality. Any cop could imagine the horror show of her childhood on the streets of New York, dodging kiddy pimps and pedophiles, ending every day in the exhaustion of a child’s poverty, then chasing down some place where she could be safe for a few hours, where she might close her eyes to sleep. Still feral in many ways, she was suspicious of everyone she met and everything she was told. Her belief in a ghost story intrigued him more than Riker’s.
    A fair detective in his own right, Coffey had worked through the puzzle in the very next minute. These two were holding something back, a bombshell. There was no other explanation. „Riker, do you have any idea how old Stick Man would be today?“
    „Well, yeah.“ The man’s tone indicated that this might be a silly question since he was the expert on all things related to icepick homicides.
    „All right, let me see if I understand this.“ The lieutenant uncovered his tired eyes to look at Riker. „You’re planning to reopen the Winter House Massacre. Have I got that right?“
    The man only shrugged to say, Yeah, that’s about right. And his partner was busy inspecting her running shoes for smudges.
    Jack Coffey shook his head. „Riker, you’ve got two minutes of my time. Give me the rest or get out.“
    „Okay. The old lady you talked to this morning? That was Red Winter.“
    „Of course it was.“ Jack Coffey wore that special smile reserved for dealing with lunatics. „I should have guessed.“ His smile never wavered, though his teeth were locked together and grinding. „So… when you asked Red Winter where she ‘d been for the past sixty years – “
    „Fifty-eight years,“ said Mallory. „She was twelve when she disappeared. She’s seventy now.“
    „Shut up,“ said Coffey. He only had eyes for his senior detective.
    „Well, sure,“ said Riker. „We asked where she’d been, but she just yawned and went upstairs to bed. Left us to lock up the house.“
    With one angry sweep of his hand, Coffey wiped his desk of papers and sent them flying to the floor. He was on the verge of the explosion his squad had been waiting on, betting on. And now he realized that he was still smiling – actually grinning – not a good sign, not a healthy sign.
    Mallory bent low to pick up the scattered papers around her chair. „We got the medical examiner to lose the ID on Willy Roy Boyd for a week.“ She was already assuming that he would believe the most ludicrous story ever told within these walls. „We have to keep a low profile,“ she said, collecting the sheets and stacking them neatly on the edge of the desk, then bending down for others. „The reporters can’t get near this story.“ She settled back into her chair to concentrate on aligning all the edges of every sheet. „It might be better if the rest of the squad didn’t – “
    „I won’t tell a soul,“ said Jack Coffey. And he would not – no more than he would run naked through the streets, scattering rosebuds along the way. He continued to smile, feeling oddly calm. He just needed a little time was all, that and a bottomless bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Most of all, he needed to make these two detectives disappear. So much depended on that: his sanity, his stomach lining and what was left of his hair. Though the blinds were closed, he could sense the troops massing out there, pressing up against the glass, tensing, waiting for him to crack wide open.
    Any minute now.
    „You got seventy-two hours,“ said Coffey.