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

the body away to dump it. Both of those scenarios require him to be driving a vehicle.”

“Yeah… But Remedios said he arrived on foot.”

“Actually, what she said was that suddenly he was there. If he had come down Gleason, walking, she would have seen him arrive. But if he came out of Rosedale, where Richard and Jack say they saw the truck, parked in the shadow of the trees, then it is possible she wouldn’t see him till the last minute, stepping out of the shadows.”

She nodded. “Uh-huh…”

“So at that point I decided…”

“Wait, at what point? Are we still talking to Remedios at her door?”

“Yes, of course.”

“At that point you have already decided he had a truck parked down Rosedale. You have to be kidding.”

I frowned. “Well, it was logical, Dehan. Either he abducted her or he killed her on the spot. If he had killed her on the spot, he wouldn’t leave the body there and come back to collect it. So in both scenarios, he had to have a vehicle. The logical place was on Rosedale.”

“OK.”

“Then I got to thinking about the neighborhood, which Remedios had described as ‘nice’. And it struck me as odd that Lenny hadn’t found any witnesses. Put that together with the fact that the phone records were missing and I began to wonder if Lenny was trying to hide something. I didn’t suspect…”

“It was just a possibility worth exploring.”

“Precisely. So now we have a telephone number we can’t trace because we have no phone records—and in any case, Lenny tells us it’s a burner—and we have a truck which, had we not come to canvass the area ourselves, would also have gone undiscovered. A truck which was probably used to dispose of Celeste’s body. Two years ago, it would have been a goldmine of DNA.”

“Why would Lenny want to hide evidence like that?”

“Close the question and the answer will leap out at you.”

“What would make Lenny conceal… OK…”

“Reynolds makes a big thing of the fact that he and Lenny were friends and grew up on the same street and they are members of the same Catholic church. Lenny plays it down, but he went out of his way to stress to me how much he hated giving the old man the news of Celeste’s death: his oldest daughter diagnosed as schizophrenic, his wife died in childbirth, then the very child whose birth killed his wife was murdered and he, Lenny, had to tell him…”

A waitress arrived with our burgers and told us to enjoy them. I picked up one of the fries and put it in my mouth and asked Dehan, “Have you seen a white pickup recently?”

She frowned with the burger halfway to her mouth, dripping ketchup. “Yeah…”

“With tools in the back.”

She nodded. “Yeah…” Her face cleared and she put down the burger. “Holy… Samuel.”

“Samuel. When he got back from all his shopping.”

Dehan’s gaze became abstracted. “Celeste has reached that age. She has a crazy sister, a crazy dad and a crazy brother. Plus God alone knows what dark feelings of guilt about having killed her mother. She hits puberty and her hormones turn her life into a living nightmare.” She flopped back in her chair and looked at me, still holding her burger. “So she becomes that nightmare and starts making her dad and Samuel’s lives nightmares, too. It is a lot more than either of those two simple souls can cope with and the home environment soon becomes totally toxic. After two or three years of this, she and they are all fit to explode. Dad seeks refuge in his religion and his belief in family. Hell, it was probably the original cause for his angina and his high blood pressure. And Samuel is left with the whole burden of the family’s deepening tragedy.”

I smiled. “You should write those rrue crime stories, Dehan. I’m right there, living it.”

I bit into my burger and wiped my mouth and fingers with a paper handkerchief.

She looked at me resentfully. “Shut up. The situation becomes intolerable when she starts sleeping around. She is, to coin a phrase, adding sin to insult. On that weekend, she comes in having spent practically two whole days and nights out. They confront her, she refuses to talk to them and storms up to her room. But then, not content with having spent Friday and Saturday night in sin, she now tells them she plans to spend Sunday night in sin, too. She walks out. Samuel cannot take it. He calls her and tells her he is coming after her in the truck. She certainly doesn’t want Samuel turning up at Chad’s house and humiliating her, so she decides to confront him at the playground and tell him to leave her alone. Chad turns up in his white pickup, parks on Rosedale and the rest is history.

“Except that a week later, her body is washed up on the banks of Soundview Park. Lenny is called to the scene and recognizes Celeste. He talks to Sean and Samuel, learns about the fight, checks the phone records and talks to Richard and Jack, and puts the pieces together. This is going to be the final blow for Sean. The one member of his family he has left, whom he depends on entirely, is going to prison for the rest of his life for murdering his daughter. It will kill him. So, to protect his friend, he suppresses the evidence and lets the case go cold.”

“Admirable,” I said through a mouth full of burger. “So how do we go about proving any of this?”

She stared at me a moment, then took a big bite out of her burger and we both sat chewing and staring at each other.

“Fob a shtart…” she said, maneuvering the words around her food, “we need to find out