Catch Your Death by Lissa Marie Redmond

Author:Lissa Marie Redmond [Redmond, Lissa Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2022-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

As soon as she was alone in the hallway again, she switched over from camera to phone mode, punching in 911.

A female voice answered after three rings. ‘911, what is your emergency?’

‘My name is Lauren Riley, I’m a detective with the Buffalo Police Department and I need to report a homicide at the Sloane Spa and Retreat in Inverness.’

Lauren heard the sounds of someone punching information into a keyboard. ‘Ma’am? We’ve just gotten a similar call to that location. Can you tell me what’s happening there?’

‘There’s a female, age approximately thirty-five, named Erica Diaz who is in room 203, deceased. The cause of death appears to be a homicide.’

The dispatcher’s voice remained calm and even. ‘And you can tell this how?’

Lauren realized she was pacing the hallway without her shoe on. ‘I’m a homicide detective. I don’t want to speculate on cause of death, but it definitely is not from natural causes.’

More typing in the background. ‘Is there an imminent threat of danger? Does anyone there have a weapon or is threatening?’

‘The victim has a neck wound that looks to be from a cutting instrument,’ Lauren chose her words carefully. ‘Aside from checking for a pulse, I did not touch the body. The rest of the guests are on the first floor right now. All I can say is none of them appeared to be armed.’ She stuck her foot into her sneaker and squished it inside without undoing the laces, the tongue bending uncomfortably forward.

‘Do you know who the perpetrator might be?’

‘Not at this time.’

‘Is the perpetrator still on the scene?’

‘In all likelihood, yes.’

There was a long pause and she could hear the sound of more typing. ‘Stay on the line with me, detective. I’m trying to get through to someone at the State Police barracks. A State of Emergency was declared overnight. Hundreds of people got caught on the thruway in the snowstorm. Emergency services are tied up with that right now.’

Lauren looked over to the window at the end of the hall. It was a sheet of pure white. ‘I’ll stay on the line.’

A State of Emergency. That was not good. Freak snowstorms were so common in Western New York that you could almost take the ‘freak’ out of the phrase. However, unlike in most TV shows and movies, a snow dump of four to eight feet overnight usually didn’t mean the power went out or that you lost phone service or the Internet. In fact, if you did lose those things, they were the first things that got restored. It was mobility you could lose for days at a time. Even for an area that was used to regular, heavy snowfall, there was only so much equipment to go around and it had to be prioritized. Lauren thought of the secondary roads they’d had to use to get to the spa. And the almost three-quarters-of-a-mile-long private road you had to take to get to the doors. And the fact that it was still snowing, accompanied by high winds.

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