Page 108 of Stay Awake
Chapter
Sixty-Five
Twelve Hours Later
Thursday 11:45A.M.
“Halliday. Lavelle,” the captain called out when he noticed the two detectives enter the office, single file. The glass Detective Bureau doors slammed shut behind them. “In my office. Now.”
Lavelle leaned against the filing cabinet with his arms crossed. Halliday sat by the captain’s desk while they waited for him to finish a phone call.
“Lavelle, you look like shit. Get rid of the stubble,” the captain said when he’d hung up the phone. “That was the media team. They’ve scheduled a press briefing. You can’t face TV cameras looking like a drunk, Jack.”
“Not a drunk, just a hardworking detective too tired to shave this morning. We both had maybe two hours’ sleep last night,” Lavelle said, looking at Halliday for confirmation. “Anyway, I won’t be addressing the media. Detective Halliday will do the talking.”
The captain turned his attention to Halliday. She wore a dark blue suit with a pale pink shirt that matched her light makeup. Herchestnut hair was tied up in a tight ponytail. She looked fresh and focused.
“Jack says you did well.”
“I held my own.”
“You more than held your own,” the captain said approvingly. “Now tell me. What evidence do we have against Brett Graham?”
Halliday handed him a preliminary report, which he flicked through as she spoke. “The lab’s checking the Ted Cole murder weapon for Brett Graham’s DNA. Apparently, he cut himself on the blade when he stabbed Cole.”
Halliday’s voice was hoarse. She’d been up most of the night fielding questions from internal investigators about the shooting. She’d been swabbed for gunshot residue and she’d had to write a detailed statement about what had happened at the warehouse. Her final statement was eight pages long.
Lavelle had stayed at the warehouse for most of the night while it was processed by investigators and the forensics team. He and Halliday had gone straight to the lab first thing in the morning to find out what evidence they had to build a case against Brett Graham.
“I see the Reese woman’s prints are on the knife,” the captain said, scanning the report. “That will complicate things in court.”
They all knew it wouldn’t be a cut-and-dry case, especially given Liv Reese’s amnesia. It would be difficult to build a solid case on the testimony of a witness with documented memory problems.
“Any hard evidence that ties our suspect to the Cole murder?” the captain asked, handing the lab report back to Halliday.
“Microscopic chips of black paint were found at the murder scene,” said Halliday. “The lab matched paint scraped from under Brett Graham’s fingernails to the paint traces found at the murder scene. It also matches the black paint at Liv Reese’s apartment, suggesting Brett Graham was at her apartment where he destroyed evidence by painting the walls and setting fire to her journal.”
“He sure did everything he could to cover his tracks,” the captain said. “That’s a heck of a lot of effort to go to. He didn’t even know Ted Cole. Why kill him?” the captain asked.
“To frame Liv Reese for the murder,” said Lavelle. “He figured that once we charged Liv Reese for the Cole murder, we’d charge her with the Decker-Reggio murders as well, which had a similar MO. Then the case would be officially closed. He didn’t want to live in fear that Liv Reese’s memory might come back.”
“Still, to kill a man just in case. I’m not sure if a jury would buy it,” the captain said.
“Ted Cole was also helping Liv Reese find out who’d killed her friends,” Halliday explained. “He was asking around about things that connected Graham to the Decker-Reggio murders. Graham found out and decided to remove Cole from the equation. Permanently. Framing Liv Reese was the cherry on top.”
“What sorts of questions was Cole asking?”
Halliday told the captain how earlier that morning she had finally reached the designer who’d telephoned Cole when he was at the apartment of his fiancée, Elisabeth, on the night Cole was murdered. The designer said that Ted had asked him to make inquiries about a dotted fleur-de-lis sketch that Liv Reese had drawn after a flashback of Amy and Marco’s murders.
“The designer reached out to an exclusive men’s custom-made shoe store on Cole’s behalf. The store is well-known for giving each client their own unique dotted medallion design. Brett Graham’s design was a fleur-de-lis. It was on all his shoes.”
Halliday showed the captain a copy of the sketch, as well as a photo of Graham’s shoes from the previous night, which they’d taken into evidence. The captain whistled when she told him that the shoes cost over $1,500 a pair. Graham apparently owned more than a dozen pairs.
“When the owner of the shoe boutique heard that questions werebeing asked about Graham’s unique shoe design, he contacted Graham as a curtesy to let him know,” explained Halliday. “That’s probably what tipped Graham off that Ted Cole, Liv Reese’s ex, was asking questions about him.”
On the way to brief the captain, the two detectives had stopped at the exclusive bespoke shoe store on Fifty-Seventh Street. The owner had shown Halliday and Lavelle photos of the shoes his artisans had made for Graham over the years. Among them was a pair of oxblood shoes that Amy had given Brett for his birthday before she died. Halliday suspected this was the pair he’d worn when he’d murdered Amy and Marco. That might explain Reese’s flashback of shoes covered with blood that Detective Larry Regan had mentioned when they’d spoken to him earlier. At the time, Reese’s recollection had been dismissed because there was no blood tracked on the carpet at the murder scene. Maybe the killer’s shoes weren’t covered in blood, they were simply the color of blood: oxblood, Halliday had suggested to Lavelle on the way back to the precinct.
“Liv Reese is awake again. Her doctors say she can talk to us,” said Lavelle after checking a message on his phone. “We’d better head over to the hospital before she falls asleep again.”
