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

“Tell me.”

“You’ll agree that everything we have found since we’ve been here has pointed in one clear direction.”

“Probably. What is that direction?”

“Tammy connected with G. Sanders, he made a proposition to her involving his multimillionaire friend, and she saw the opportunity of making a lot of money and winning her loser boyfriend back.”

I pulled a face and nodded. “That is a fair summing up.”

“What’s doing my head in is, how do we get from Californian multimillionaires to Sureños in the Bronx?”

I sighed. “With any luck, Dehan, your computer is about to answer that question for us.”

Ten minutes later, we climbed in the car, and Dehan opened up her laptop to check its progress. She grinned. “We’re in. Let’s get back to the hotel and see what we got.”

Seven

We brought the laptop to my room, and she sat cross-legged with it on my bed. She rattled at the keyboard, staring at the screen. “What you got in that minibar, Sensei? Take a girl out for a meal like that, you got to round it off somehow.”

I found two whiskey miniatures and emptied them into two tooth mugs. I put one on the bedside table and sat next to her on the other side of the bed. She sipped, muttered, and rattled.

“Okay, here is the list of guests for May and June 2015…”

“It’s going to be the last week of May. By June 14, she was already dead in New York.”

She nodded. She scrolled and she sipped again. After five minutes, she shook her head. “I have been through May five times, Stone.” She passed me the laptop and stood up. “You look. I’m going to have a shower.”

She picked up her whiskey and walked into my bathroom. She left the door ajar, and I saw her jeans drop on the floor, followed by her shirt. I heard the water and got up to sit myself in the chair at the desk at the foot of the bed, where I could not see the bathroom door.

I also scrolled through the list five times. There was no sign of G. Sanders. I stood, stared out the window at the lights of San Mateo, and sipped my drink. I considered the possibility that Shaw had got the name of the hotel wrong. But that wasn’t credible; he had read it straight off the screen. Which left only one explanation: the client had given Shaw a false name.

Dehan stepped out of the bathroom. Her hair was wet and hanging loose, and she was buttoning up her shirt. She stared at me for a long moment.

“He gave Shaw a false name.”

I nodded. I walked to the screen and pointed. “I think it’s this guy right here.”

She was watching me from the bathroom door. “Geronimo dos Santos, right?”

I smiled at her. “You had the same thought.”

“Pseudonyms. People always use either their own initials, or one up or one down.”

“Can we get any more information on him?”

“Oh yes. What do we want to know?”

She sat at the computer.

I said, “How did he pay?”

She typed, then said, “Credit card. AMEX Black.”

“When did he check in?”

“May 24. Checked out June 5.”

“We need some way to connect him with Tammy. Seems every step we take forward, we wind up in the same place. Let’s get some sleep, Dehan. We’ll brainstorm over breakfast.”

“Yeah. I’m beat.” She stood and drained her tooth mug. I opened the door for her, and she stood staring me in the eye for a long time.

I said, “What’s on your mind?” and was surprised to hear a catch in my throat. She made a fist and gave me a gentle punch on the chest.

“G’night, Stone.”

I took another whiskey from the minibar and lay on the bed staring at the laptop. I felt troubled and wasn’t sure why. I was tired, but I couldn’t sleep. Eventually, I got up and sat at the computer. We knew practically nothing about Tamara Gunthersen, so I decided to check what I could find in public records. It probably wouldn’t be any use, but you never knew what you were going to find when you started digging, and at the very least, it might get me to sleep.

As it was, it woke me up. After half an hour of trawling through databases, I hit on something unexpected. I almost went and woke Dehan, but something held me back. Breakfast was soon enough.

Tamara Gunthersen was not born Tamara Gunthersen; she was Tamara Polachova. Which meant she either changed her name for some reason, or, more likely, she was married. I trawled a little further and found that she had married in 2011, to one Peter Gunthersen of Page Street in Friendly Acres.

And that really complicated things. Or maybe it made them more simple. I drained my glass, fell on the bed, and went to sleep.

I was up and showered by six thirty and went to wake Dehan. She was already up, but her eyes looked tired. She said, “You sleep?” I made a “so-so” gesture with my head. She nodded. “Me too. What you want to do today? I was thinking about dos Santos.”

I shook my head. “Let’s go get breakfast in Friendly Acres.”

She followed me to the elevator. “Why?”

“Because there’s a nice coffee shop that opens at six, right next door to the Friendly Acres Auto Repair Shop.”

She shrugged and nodded once, then spread her hands as we stepped into the elevator. I could imagine her father making exactly those gestures. She said, “Sure, why not? You should have said so.”

“The Friendly Acres Auto Repair Shop belongs to Peter Gunthersen. I thought maybe we could talk to him.”

“You dreamed this? God spoke to you in a dream?”

“I told you, I couldn’t sleep.”

We stepped