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

She nodded. “And how did Harrison know about the file? Arnav said we were the only people who knew about that.”

I wondered about that. Then I realized, when Mick killed Sean, Harrison must have burgled his house and wiped his computer. “There must have been a reference in his diary, or his papers, to the file he gave Arnav.”

“Do you think Sean died here, in this church?”

I nodded. “I think so. He died on his knees. The only way I can see that happening is if he was praying. Mick shot him while he was in prayer, dressed him as a vagrant, knowing he could make the case go cold that way, and threw him in the dumpster. Then he and Khan and Bellini murdered the girls.”

She was silent a while. “I guess so. A strange case,” she said again, and then, looking back into the churchyard, “We dug up the garden of the damned, and replanted it with oranges and azaleas.”

“Come on, Carmen, let’s get you cleaned up and go get that steak. And then maybe a few tequilas, purely for their medicinal effect, you understand.”

She pulled out the keys to my car from her pocket and said, “Oh, I can use some of that medicine, Stone. I can use some of that medicine!”

And we drove away, across the dark river, leaving the garden of the damned behind us, thinking now of good food, good wine, and home.

BOOK 4

LET US PREY

One

Even the mad dogs were panting in the shade, and the Englishmen were mopping their brows and sipping G&Ts. There was a fly on my desk that I was sure had died of heat exhaustion a couple of hours earlier. Every now and then, the electric fan ruffled its wings, but that was all the movement it was capable of. The technicians who’d come in to fix the air-conditioning were too hot to work, so we were trapped in a negative spiral of heat and eventual death by dehydration.

Dehan, who had her boots on the desk and her hair tied in a knot behind her head to keep her neck cool, said, “Edgar Gonzalez, known member of the Chupa Cabra gang, shot down in a drive-by outside his parents’ house on Irvine Street.”

She tossed it in the “not now not ever” box. We had unofficially established the criteria for investigating a case as A) having some remote chance of being solved, and B) that the crime was not itself a positive benefit to humanity as a whole.

I said, “Clive Henderson, on holiday from California, mugged and stabbed on Commonwealth Avenue.” I put it in the “maybe” pile. In this weather, a trip to California was appealing, even though the case hadn’t an ice cube’s chance in a supernova of ever being solved.

“So, what’s the deal with you, Stone?”

Dehan was leafing through another file. I reached for one and settled back to read it. I had no intention of answering a question like that, but she persisted.

“You ever been married? You got a long string of exes? You gay? What gives? Why do I never see you with a woman?”

I made my eyebrows climb my forehead. “Why do you want to know?”

“C’mon. We’re partners. I told you all about me. It’s your turn.”

I sighed. “Meth dealer shot outside the fish market on Food Center Drive.” I threw the file in the “not now not ever” pile. It satisfied both criteria. “I was married,” I said. “Seven years. It was enough.”

She studied me a moment, then carried on reading. “How long ago?”

“Five years.”

“Do you date?”

I sighed more loudly and said, “Yeah, I date this babe—she’s a lot younger than me, but she has a filthy attitude and she’s too nosy.”

She chuckled, and the internal phone rang. I picked it up.

“Stone.”

“Good afternoon, Stone, it’s the captain. Will you and Detective Dehan please come to my office?”

I hung up. “Come on, Nosy, get your butt out of that chair—the captain wants us.”

We climbed the stairs mopping sweat from our brows and knocked on his door. He told us to go in, and we did. His window was open, letting all the warm air in.

“It’s not the heat,” he said as we sat down. “It’s the humidity.” I’d never heard anybody say that before. As I drew breath to make a wisecrack, he said, “Have you ever heard of Karl Baxter?”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

Dehan echoed my shake. “No, sir.”

“He’s a private investigator, operates out of an office on Melrose Avenue.” He pulled a face and made a “so-so” gesture with his hand. “Moderately successful because he’s not too scrupulous about the kind of cases he takes. I’ve been looking into his background because he called me today to ask to have sight of a file on one of our cold cases.”

I frowned. “Has he turned bounty hunter?”

The captain shook his head. “No, there is no reward on this case.”

Dehan went straight to the point. “What’s the case?”

“Stephen Springfellow. Shot to death in his apartment on 155th Street. As usual, lack of forensic evidence and witnesses led to the case going cold.”

“We’ll have a look at the file and have a chat with Baxter. I’d like to know why he’s interested in the case.”

“Precisely. Whether it’s a personal interest, or a client’s interest, it could shed light on the murder.” He pushed a sheet of paper across the desk. I reached for it. It was Baxter’s address. “Normally does ‘wife watching’—” He made the quotation marks sign with his fingers. “—but he has been known to track down missing persons who were trying to keep a low profile. They have somehow tended to wind up in hospital or in the river after he finds them. Not that