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

She was giving me a weird, searching look. “What work?”

It was a 25-minute drive, though it took a little longer because of the lunchtime traffic. Most people think of the Bronx as a place of ghettos, prostitution and crime. They are right; much of the Bronx is like that, but not all of it. Riverdale is one part of the Bronx that is definitely not a ghetto. And that was where Sadiq Khan had his house, on West 232nd street, opposite Seaton Park. It was a green, leafy suburb of large, luxurious houses and small mansions. It wasn’t Oyster Bay, but it wasn’t Hunts Point, either.

Sadiq’s house was a three-story, oddly angular building painted an unpleasant shade of sage green. It was set back from the road beyond a sweeping lawn. I could see a C Class Mercedes and a Citroen Clio in the drive. Something told me the Clio was his wife’s.

I pulled in and parked in front of them. I killed the engine and we climbed out. Dehan peered through the windows at the front and I rang the bell. There was total silence apart from the sporadic singing of the birds.

If they had kids, they’d be at school. Maybe his wife was shopping, but if she was, why didn’t she take her car? And why was his car still in the drive? And if both cars were in the drive, why was nobody answering the door?

Dehan wandered back to me with her hands in her back pockets. “There’s nobody at home, Stone.”

I shook my head and pointed at the Merc and the Citroen. “Nobody is answering. That’s different. Besides, I think I hear somebody shouting, or calling out, don’t you?”

She raised an eyebrow at me. “Yeah, I thought I heard a woman shouting ‘help’.”

“Good, me too.”

I went around to the kitchen door at the back, smashed the glass with my elbow, and reached in to unlock the door. It grated on the shattered glass as I pushed it open. Dehan had her piece in her hand as she followed me in. The glass crunched under her boots. It sounded really loud in the stillness.

The living room was empty. There were no pictures on the walls, no ornaments, no bookcases. There was a gray carpet, a gray sofa, a vast glass and brass coffee table and a TV the size of a cinema screen. A curving staircase, also carpeted in gray, led to the upper floor. We climbed it, listening for some sound, some sign of life. There wasn’t any.

We came to a landing. The door to the bathroom stood open, and I saw a mug with four toothbrushes in it. I touched Dehan’s shoulder and pointed at it. She nodded. She looked a little sick. The first door we opened was obviously one of the kid’s rooms. It was painted pastel blue and there was a princess bed with a lace net hung over it. Mrs. Khan and her two daughters were sitting on the floor. The girls were wearing school uniforms. Their ankles and their wrists, like their mother’s, were bound with duct tape, and they had duct tape over their mouths. Their eyes were huge and they looked terrified.

Dehan put her piece away and I showed them my badge. Then I knelt and cut the tape from their wrists and ankles. As Mrs. Khan pulled the tape from her own mouth, she started crying and shouting at me in a language I didn’t understand.

I held her shoulders and said, “Mrs. Khan, listen to me. Listen. Detective Dehan is going to take you downstairs. Do you understand? And she is going to call an ambulance. Go with her. Take the children and go downstairs.”

She was incoherent, and the kids, taking their cue from their mother, also began to cry. Dehan gathered them up and led them down to the living room. I went to the master bedroom.

He was there, if you could call it him. The bed was saturated with blood. He was naked and badly bruised all over. His body was a pasty gray color because he had pretty much been exsanguinated, but you could see large, yellowish patches where the bruises would have been. His face was grotesquely disfigured and he had several teeth missing. He was also bound hand and foot with tape, as the rest of his family had been.

The blood had come from a single wound. He had been castrated. His entire penis and testicles had been removed and lay next to him on the bed.

I took my phone and dialed the captain.

“Stone. What news?”

“Khan has been murdered and castrated at his house in Riverdale. You’d better talk to the local precinct to sort out jurisdiction. Then we’ll need a CSI team and a meat wagon.”

“Stone…?”

“Yeah.”

“What the hell is going on?”

“Looks like we are running out of people to prosecute.”

“Can you even get to the bishop now?” He sounded mad.

I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “Sure.”

TWENTY

With that almost maternal care that seemed, on the surface, so at odds with her brash manner and her aggressive attitude, Dehan had sat them on the sofa, wrapped them in blankets, and made them hot, sweet tea. When I got down, the three were shivering with shock and clinging to each other, crying.

I gave Dehan a nod and we stepped into the kitchen.

“They’re on their way. He’s in the master bedroom. They did a job on him. He was castrated…”

For a moment, she almost looked mad. She stared into my face, but her eyes made little shifts, like she was trying to read my features. I gave her a blank page. After a moment, she said, “Completely different to Father O’Neil’s murder.”

“Yes.”

“This was vengeance.”

“Looks like it.”

“Or punishment…”

I nodded. “Or punishment.”

She