Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [classic children's novels txt] 📗

like decomposing, smelling, and generally looking out of place. It is very difficult for a dead body simply to vanish. Which was what Alicia seemed to have done.

“Also,” I said, “Why leave Sean in full view, and dispose of Alicia so that no one will find her?”

As I said it, I knew that was an important question, and by the way Dehan looked at me, she did too.

I held up the fingers of my left hand and enumerated.

“First, tomorrow morning we go and visit Alicia’s parents, set that up tonight if you can. Second, after that, we pay a visit to Conor Hagan, see what he has to say about the Tiffany Street squatters. Third, we go through the contents from Sean’s room with a fine-toothed comb. There is something here we are missing.”

She pointed at me like she was going to shoot me with her finger.

“Different motives, but it would be too bizarre for it to be coincidence. So, same killer, same overall crime, but different personal motives.”

I nodded. It made sense.

I had been expecting it. So when I was awakened from my sleep by the incessant ringing on my doorbell, I wasn’t surprised or alarmed. I groped for my keys in my pants pocket and leaned out the window. It was cold and still dark. The sun wouldn’t be up for another half hour at least. Dehan was doing her cold weather dance and grinned at me. “They are early risers,” she said.

I threw the key down to her and groped my way to the bathroom.

As was her custom, when I got downstairs she was frying bacon and eggs and making coffee. I sat at the kitchen table.

“Did you sleep?”

She gave her head a quick shake. “No.”

The toast popped. She buttered it and shoveled bacon from the pan onto the plate with a spatula. Then she broke the eggs into the pan.

“When we were small, we were like sisters, always in and out of each other’s houses. Her parents didn’t care that my dad was a Jew.”

I blinked. These were big issues for before coffee. But she didn’t need an answer, now she was shoveling eggs.

“These days, Jews and Christians are uniting against Islam, a common enemy, but not so long ago Catholics hated Jews about as much as Muslims do.”

She put two huge plates of eggs and bacon on toast on the table. She had even found some mushrooms and fried those too. She went back for two cups and the coffee pot. She was still talking.

“But Alicia’s parents weren’t like that. Gregorio and Marcela. They were good people, you know what I mean?” She sat and attacked her food with a kind of determination to get the job done. “And I was thinking about that all night. How do you know a person is good? I mean, really good?” She glanced at me as she stuffed food into her mouth. It didn’t stop her talking. “I meam, whadish goom, righ?”

“What is good?”

She nodded. I sipped my coffee, hoping it would give me strength, and speared a rasher of bacon. She swallowed, as though she was getting the food out of the way of her stream of thoughts.

“Yeah. Nobody has ever been able to define good or evil. It’s one of those things, like love. You can’t define it. But we know, don’t we, when a person is good. We know when they are false, hypocrites, on an ego trip—and we know when they are genuinely good.” She waved her knife at me. “Me? I’m just confused. You, you’re basically a good guy who is smart and has learnt to be careful. Gregorio, Marcela, and Alicia, they were genuine good people.”

She was starting to carry me along with her relentless flow. I said, “That’s a lot of genuinely good people: Sean, Gregorio, Marcela and Alicia. What are the odds?”

“Astronomical. But you get enough monkeys with typewriters, one of them will write the Torah. The point is, they found each other, they came together, and they tried to do good. Sean was a kind of catalyst for them, do you see that, Stone? His energy, his conviction, his faith—whatever! He acted as a catalyst and they started to do something to bring about change. And that is why they died. It’s wrong, Stone. They—people like Conor Hagan—they own the world, and they can’t be allowed to keep getting away with this kind of shit.”

“You didn’t sleep at all?”

“No. You done?”

“No, I am still mopping and I still have my coffee. Your revs are too high. Let in the clutch and breathe.”

“It makes me mad, Stone.”

“I can see that.”

“Why?”

“Why can I see that?”

“No. Why do they get away with it?”

“I don’t know. It’s the nature of the world we live in.”

“It shouldn’t be.”

I drew breath, looked at her, and killed my reply before I said it. She had tears in her eyes as I reached across the table and gave her hand a squeeze. “We do the best we can, Carmen. It’s all we can do.”

The horizon was turning pale and the dawn chorus was in full swing as we stepped into the street. There was a fresh, green smell of hope in the air. Somewhere in the distance, a car radio was giving the weather report for the day, and a bus, grinding through it gears, ferried yawning people from slumber to morning. Hope, I thought to myself, was it one of those things that Dehan had talked about, like good and evil, and love? Something you couldn’t define, but you knew it was there.

I sighed and climbed into the car. I was no good with all that abstract stuff. I was good at getting the job done and that was exactly what I planned to do.

Six

Gregorio was