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

out of the elevator and crossed the lobby toward a parking lot that was bathed in the cool, dark blue light of dawn.

“So Peter Gunthersen is who, her brother?”

I offered her my most smug grin, which is pretty smug. “No, Little Grasshopper, her husband. And they were never divorced.”

“Yeah, well done, Stone, because the case wasn’t complicated enough. It needed to get more complicated. Go you.”

We turned right onto the Camino Real, headed toward Belmont, San Carlos, and Redwood City. At that time of the morning, the road was practically deserted.

“It may simplify things, Dehan.”

“You don’t do this before coffee, Stone. You do it after coffee.” I smiled and she was quiet for a bit. Then, she said, “So you’re thinking the gig was just a gig, but maybe there was a promise of more well-paid work. So she contacts loser Stephen and says, ‘let’s get back together, I’m going to be in the money,’ and goes to New York to see him. The Sureños were on the street because the Sureños are everywhere, but jealous hubby Peter bursts in on them. Punishes and kills Stephen, shoots his wife, and then, in remorse, takes her away with him.”

I shrugged. “It has a certain simple elegance to it.”

“It has. Let’s see how it stands up to coffee.”

Peter Gunthersen’s auto repair shop had its own parking lot, which it shared with Katy’s Breakfast Bar. The sky had turned from dark blue to gray, and I was on my second coffee and croissant when Peter rolled onto the lot in his white Ford pickup. Dehan paid and we stepped out to greet him as he climbed out of the cab of his truck.

“Good morning. Peter Gunthersen?”

“Yuh, why? Who are you?”

I showed him my badge. Dehan didn’t show him hers because she was still stuffing blueberry pie into her mouth and licking her fingers.

“I’m Detective Stone, and this is my partner Detective Dehan, from the NYPD.”

“New York?” He narrowed his eyes. “Little out of your territory, ain’t you?”

“We wanted to ask you about your wife.”

“Tasha? Why? What do you want with Tasha?”

Dehan swallowed and frowned at the same time. “Tasha? Who’s Tasha?”

He looked confused a moment, then his face cleared. “Oh, you mean… my wife, Tamara.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said. Who is Tasha?”

“Natasha is my partner. We’ve lived together for over two years now. I just think of her as my wife.”

“What about Tamara?”

He puffed his cheeks and blew. “Can we go inside? I got a ton of work to do.”

He unlocked the steel blind and rolled it up, walked in, and switched on the lights. Then he came back to us and rested his ass against a half-dismantled truck.

“Look, to be honest, Tammy was real cute, I mean real cute. The kind of chick it’s hard not to fall in love with. But being blunt, she was a slut. She would sleep with anything in pants, or a skirt, if she thought it was going to get her where she wanted to be.”

“And where was that?” It was Dehan.

“Hollywood. That was the one thing that drove her in life: Hollywood. She was going to Hollywood, and nothing was going to stop her.”

“So, you’re not a movie producer or a director… why’d she marry you?”

He shrugged. “She was young. We were both real young. We talked about moving to L.A. I guess she thought I could help her get away from her parents and move south.”

I asked him, “What happened?”

“Her parents died in a car accident. She inherited the house and found this agent, Shaw. You spoken to him? Suddenly, she didn’t need me anymore. So she said she wanted a divorce.”

I scratched my chin. “But you’re still married.”

He sighed. “Yeah, it got complicated. I was crazy about her. I didn’t want a divorce. I wanted her to see sense and come back to me.” He gave a dry, bitter laugh. “Now I wish I had given her the damn thing. I ended up asking her for one, but she just disappeared. Anyway, back then, I really believed I could persuade her to stay with me. I was a damned asshole.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “So tell me about Stephen Springfellow.”

You don’t often see pure hatred on a person’s face, but that was what I saw then in Peter Gunthersen’s expression.

“That low-life motherfucker. What do you want to know about him?”

Dehan said, “I’m just thinking about dates. We know she was involved with him 2012 through 2013. You were married at that time.”

“Yeah, we were married, but I had moved out. She was stringing me along—maybe we’d get back together, she needed to straighten out her head and decide what she wanted, all that shit. Turns out all the while she’s living with that son of a bitch.”

Dehan shook her head. “That’s got to hurt. You must have really hated the guy.”

“He was fucking my wife—what do you think?”

I changed the subject. “What do you know about Geronimo dos Santos?”

He shrugged. “Not a lot. I know he employed her to do a gig at some fancy party. She reckoned it was going to make her rich. She called me. She was begging me to give her the divorce. She said she was getting married… She was going out east to New York to see Stephen.” He frowned. “Wait a minute… You guys are NYPD. What’s happened?”

Dehan sucked her teeth. “Did you agree to the divorce?”

“No, not straightaway. I was mad at her.”

I sighed and scratched my chin, trying to fit the pieces together in my head. “Did you follow her out to New York?”

“No. To be honest, I’d had enough of her. I was about ready to sign the papers, but I never heard from her again.” He