Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [reading in the dark TXT] 📗

and resentment in her eyes. She wanted to take him. I ignored her and focused on Teddy. He was swaying and panting. He was still holding the broken bottleneck. I said, “Drop it, Teddy. Let it go. Lie face down on the floor. It’s over. Wayne is dead. We know everything.”

He blinked. “Wayne?”

“He’s on his way to the ME right now. They’ve seen my car. They’re coming in. Put it down, Teddy.”

He frowned. “Wayne?”

I coughed, gathered my voice and shouted, “Down here! In the cellar! Detectives Stone and Dehan!”

Then I saw Teddy’s face and I knew it was too late. It twisted into an ugly mask and he screamed. It was not a word. It was a primal, bestial, terrible noise and he rushed Dehan. I saw her eyes go wide and her mouth open. I fired at his head and watched the slug explode in red dust against the wall. By the time I’d pulled back the hammer again he was on her. The bottle plunging in, in a low thrust at her belly.

It was too fast to follow, too fast for thought. She had stepped to her left. The bottle had torn her blouse, but she was behind him now. His wrist was in her right hand, but her left arm was in a lock around his neck, and in an instant her right hand had released his wrist and was pressing the back of his head. She jerked and he went limp. She let go of him and he dropped to the floor in a strangely unnatural heap.

She stared at me. She said, automatically, “I did it without thinking. I had to stop him.”

I nodded. “He had to be stopped.”

I stepped over to her and put my arms around her, whispering over and over, to her and to myself, “You’re alive. Dear God, you’re alive.”

I felt her arms around my waist, squeezing tight, and she started to sob, warm, living tears into my shoulder. On the wooden stairs I heard the tramp of feet, and the inspector’s voice shouting, “John? Carmen? Are you there?”

I ignored him. I just held her, and a moment later I heard his voice again, no longer shouting but gasping, “Dear God, what in the name of hell…?”

I kept my eyes firmly closed and whispered again, “Thank God you’re alive…”

EPILOGUE

The inspector had his window open. The sky was very fresh and blue, and the birds in the plane trees and the oaks on Storey Avenue were getting a little over excited. But it was OK. They were getting a kick out of being alive, and that was something I could relate to just then.

I wasn’t sitting at the desk. Today I was an honored guest in his office, so I had one of his blue armchairs under the window, and a cool breeze was touching my face. Dehan had another armchair and the inspector was watching me from his big black leather seat, with a small frown of what I like to think was admiration.

“Well, John, I guess we all owe you an apology. You were right and we were all wrong. But, what I don’t understand is… well…” He made an elaborate shrug, opened his eyes wide and concluded, “…anything!”

Dehan smiled at me. “I have to say I’m pretty confused too. Who was doing the killing? Was it Jimmy, Wayne or Teddy? Or all three?”

Before I could answer the inspector nodded and added, “And, how did you know?”

I took a deep breath. “Well, the point is, as I kept telling Dehan, most of the time I didn’t know. I had the feeling right from the start that we were being maneuvered through a rat’s maze toward a conclusion that Wayne wanted us to reach. And it seemed pretty obvious to me that, if that was the conclusion he wanted us to reach, it was the wrong conclusion. So, I didn’t know, but everybody else thought they did know.”

He made a face like a shrug and said, “There were things that troubled you from the start. Yet, Wayne seemed to answer those doubts…”

I nodded. “Wayne was smart. If he hadn’t been so self obsessed…”

The inspector glanced at a file on his desk. “His therapist at Rikers said he was a narcissistic sociopath.”

“Yeah, that’s no surprise. If he had directed his attention more to what he was doing and less to how he looked and sounded when he was doing it, he might actually have achieved something. He enjoyed the game of playing with the cops and feeling he was smarter than us.

“But he was sloppy and lazy. For a start, the place where he said he lay and watched the murder take place made no sense. There was a comfortable, grassy knoll where he could have lain and been invisible from the road. And if you come through that gate, as he said he did, the path takes you right to that spot. There was no reason for him to go and lie on those rocks and prickly bushes.”

I paused, gathering my thoughts. “The fact that he then went to the trouble of explaining it, when it simply made no sense, told me he had gone away and thought it through and decided he needed to explain it to me. That meant one thing and one thing only, he was manipulating us. So I had to ask myself the question.”

The inspector frowned and nodded. “Why would he want to manipulate us? I see.”

I shook my head and saw Dehan smile. I said, “No, I try not to ask why, inspector. Why is too open. I asked myself, what: what would make him try to manipulate us? When you ask it like that, the answer leaps out at you.”

Dehan raised a hand. “Hang on, Stone. Aren’t we getting a bit too rarified here? He