Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [story read aloud .txt] 📗

What is it, less than a mile and a half?” I gestured up river. “Why go to all the trouble, and difficulty, of struggling with the body over fences and/or railway lines if he could have brought her here? If he dumps her here, within the week, instead of showing up here, she would be out in the East River and nobody would have any idea where it had come from.”

She sniffed and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. I began to squelch through the mud back toward the footpath. Dehan fell into step beside me. “That tells us something,” she said. “Actually, it tells us a couple of things: the killer is not experienced. He most likely panicked and went for what he saw, for some reason, as the simplest solution. It also tells us it wasn’t premeditated. He had not planned out beforehand how he was going to dispose of the body. So the killing was, possibly, an unpremeditated act of rage. Finally, and this is real important, the killer probably has access to the river through his place of work, somewhere between here and Starlight Park, and that was what made him go there, instead of the simpler option of coming here.”

We had come to the car and I stood, stamping my boots and nodding. “That makes a lot of sense, Dehan, though it raises the question, how did he get her from the playground to his presumed place of work? We need to get onto that right away, but before we do, I want to talk to Lenny about Celeste’s phone records. I would have expected them to be in the file.” I opened the car and we sat with the doors open, changing out of our rubber boots. I spoke over my shoulder as I laced up my shoes. “It seems pretty obvious to me that she called somebody, or somebody called her, Saturday night. And that somebody was the person who met her at the playground. That’s why she was standing, waiting at the corner: she had arranged to meet somebody, or somebody had arranged to meet her. So our first port of call is to see who she spoke to that night on the phone.”

We dumped our boots in the trunk. I climbed in behind the wheel and she got in the passenger seat and slammed the door. As I fired up the engine, she said, “Shouldn’t that be whom? ‘…see whom she spoke to that night on the phone.’”

I pulled away up Colgate Avenue. “Nobody likes a wiseass, Dehan.”

“I do,” she said. “I like you, and you’re a wiseass.”

“That’s different. Tell me, do you like Chad for this?”

She puffed out her cheeks and blew. “Yes and no.”

“OK. Explain.”

“On the ‘yes’ side, you have the fact that he was clearly much more attached to her than he wanted to admit. Maybe because he’s trying to play the ruthless New York attorney, maybe because he is trying to please his father, or maybe because he’s smart enough to realize that having feelings for her gives him a motive. Whatever his reasons, he had feelings for her.”

“It wasn’t all an act. He really is like that.”

She nodded. “Yeah, I agree. Don’t interrupt. Having said that he has feelings for her, I am willing to believe that those feelings run more to possessiveness, dependency and sexual ownership than tenderness, love and caring. So their relationship may well have had that toxicity that can make infidelity a very explosive, violent business. He has a lack of compassion, lack of empathy, his nerves are on edge all the time. Add to that his temper, the fact that he becomes violent and abusive at the flip of a switch, and it is not hard to imagine a situation where he could lose control and kill her. Plus, her phone is missing and we have no phone records, so we only have his word for the fact that she didn’t call him, or he didn’t call her.”

She paused, holding her lower lip between her teeth. “On the other hand,” she said. “I believed him. I didn’t get the impression at any point that he was lying.”

I grunted. “Is that because he was telling the truth, or because he wasn’t lying?”

She raised an eyebrow at me and said, “What? Who’s being a wiseass now? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

I laughed. “OK, let’s suppose that Sunday night I went out, scored a couple of grams of coke, got off my head and then went and shot up a club full of coke heads and dealers.”

“You?”

“Yeah. Now let’s suppose you are investigating that crime and you want to know everything that happened on Saturday, the day before, and you question me about Saturday. You don’t ask me any questions I need to lie about and so your radar doesn’t pick up any dishonest vibes from me. I wasn’t lying, per se, but I wasn’t telling the whole truth either.”

“So what are you saying, that if we had questioned him about Sunday night in more detail, he might have started lying?”

I made a face and shrugged. “I’m just saying that you may have had the feeling he wasn’t lying because he had nothing to lie about at that stage.”

She was quiet for a while. “Do you like him for it?”

“I don’t know yet.” And after a moment’s silence, I added, “I agree with you, it is easy to imagine the situation arising.”

We pulled into the parking lot at the 43rd and ducked in out of the rain. While Dehan started the laborious task of finding out what properties and businesses lay along the banks of the Bronx River between Starlight Park and Soundview Park, I went to look for Lenny. I found him at the coffee dispenser.

“Hey, Stone. What’s happening? I never got to congratulate you. Carmen Dehan,