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

all watch each other die, and if he didn’t do it, the Sureños would, or the Jersey Mob.”

I searched for words, but it was like she had said, there were no answers, no explanations. There was nothing I or anybody else could say. I watched her attack her steak with a kind of controlled fury. She chewed, swallowed, sipped her wine.

“He was in hospital for six weeks. He didn’t want to come home. Every time he looked at Mom, his heart was filled with shame and humiliation. Her heart was broken. She had been violated, and her husband, her man, and her daughter had watched it happen. Mick Harragan had not only destroyed them physically, he had broken their souls and destroyed our family. On the twelfth of June, 2005, my dad died. Three weeks later, my mom died. I promised them, I literally swore on their graves, nobody would ever do that to me. Nobody would ever break me or take my soul.”

I sat staring at the half-eaten steak on my plate. My mind was racing, trying to get a grip on all the implications, on what it meant. I said, “Kirk?”

“Downstairs, in the car, keeping watch.”

“That’s why you knew where he lived.”

“I’d been hunting for Harragan for a long time.”

“They are dead now, Dehan, both of them.”

She smiled. “Yeah, I was robbed of that right, but I guess Maria Garcia had earned it.”

“It’s over.”

“Is it?”

“You have to let it go.”

“You promised…”

“I am not going to dump you! We’re partners. We are more than partners. Hell…!” I gestured at the table, the food, and the wine. “But for your own sake, you need to let go. They are dead!”

“On Saturday. the fifteenth of January, 2005, Sean O’Conor was executed, dressed as a tramp and thrown in a dumpster on Lafayette. Just around the corner, just down the road from my parents’ house, Alicia vanishes on the same night. And on that same night, Mick Harragan comes to my parents’ house and rapes and murders my family. Do you think that is all coincidental?”

“No.”

She reached in her pocket and pulled out some folded A4 papers. As she opened them, I saw they were the emails and the list. She turned to the last page and put it in front of me.

Padraig O’Neil

Sadiq Khan

Robert Bellini

“Do you remember what Father O’Neil said to us just before he left?” I nodded. She went on, “Because I have it branded on my memory, verbatim, ‘…what when it is the police doing the murdering and the raping? Who do you call then?’ He was talking about Harragan, and you know it.”

She was right.

“Harragan is dead, Dehan. So is Kirk.”

She held my eye a long time. Finally, she said, “So are my mom and my dad, and my cousin Alicia, and so probably are those twelve girls in the photo.” She put her finger on the list. “But Father Padraig O’Neil, Sadiq Khan, Robert Bellini and ‘H’ are not.”

Eleven

She stayed the night in the guestroom. I didn’t sleep well, and by six I had showered and gone down to make coffee. I found her sitting at the kitchen table staring into a cup of coffee.

“It’s hot. I heard you and made a fresh pot.”

I poured myself a cup and rested my ass against the sink. “No bacon this morning. What’s wrong, you don’t love me anymore?”

She didn’t smile, but seemed to study me for a minute.

“Do I need to regret telling you what I told you last night?” I shook my head and drew breath to answer, but she interrupted me. “Don’t give me a clever, evasive answer, Stone. Be straight with me.”

“Have I ever been anything else?”

“No.”

“I’m not about to start. You don’t need to regret it. I’m not going to ask for you to be transferred, or for a different partner. I like working with you. But I am going to make something real clear, so there is no mistake and no confusion. We are cops, we are not vigilantes, and it is our job to catch suspects, not punish bad guys.” She just kept watching me. She didn’t answer or react. “I am trusting you, Dehan. Don’t betray my trust. Don’t put me in a position of having to choose.”

“I won’t.”

She stood and started making breakfast. I heard the hiss of the bacon in the pan, and smelled the rich aroma on the air.

“But you’re wrong about one thing, Stone.” She said it as she was cutting bread and putting it in the toaster. “We are not vigilantes, that’s true, but we are not cops, either.” She turned to face me. “We are people, hot-blooded, living, people.”

Roberts and Levine, the firm Sonia worked for, was on First Avenue, near the corner with East 64th. It occupied the two top floors of an unassuming red brick that was only four stories high. But the inside left you in no doubt about what league they were in. The reception was small and cozy, and all the available wall space was taken with photographs of Roberts and Levine, and their senior partners, drinking champagne with various presidents and film stars, as well as the heads of the main Manhattan ‘Families’.

The receptionist cocked her head on one side and smiled in a way you just knew she practiced in front of the mirror at home, and said, “She’s in a meeting right now, but said you should go right on up anyway.”

I frowned. “She’s in a meeting, but she wants me to go up?”

“That’s what she said.”

I took the elevator to the third floor. There were just two offices and a girl sitting at a desk. She gave me the same smile as the girl downstairs. Maybe they practiced together. I told her who I