Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [reading in the dark TXT] 📗

“Detectives Stone and Dehan,” he said, “Of the NYPD.” It wasn’t a question. He raised the tape for us to pass through.

I said, “We’re supposed to be on holiday.”

He grinned. “Not anymore, you’re not. Right at the top. Heads up: it’s not pretty.”

We stepped through the door into a narrow hallway. The staircase ascended the left wall and on the right, a passage led past two doors to a small kitchen at the back. We climbed the stairs to a small landing on the top floor. There, a woman in a white, plastic suit frowned at us and said, “Who are you?”

“John and Carmen Stone. DI Green sent for us.”

“Oh,” she said. “The Americans. He’s in there. Try not to throw up, at least not in the room. It’s a crime scene.”

She squeezed past us and we stood back to let her by. Harry appeared at the door and stepped out to shake our hands. “John, Carmen, let me prepare you before you come in and have a look.”

I nodded. “I’d appreciate that. What’s going on, Harry? We were on our way to the airport.”

He nodded and sighed. “I know, and I do apologize, but it will all become clear. John, I think you could be a real help to us on this.” He glanced at Dehan. “No offense intended at all. But John has seen this before. He knows all about it. Go on in and have a look, John. Be prepared. It’s not pretty.”

The Brits have a genius for understatement. ‘Not pretty’ was a young woman in her mid twenties, naked, laid out with her hands nailed to the wooden floor. Her legs were spread, suggesting she had been raped, there was the handle of a kitchen knife protruding from her left, fifth intercostal where she had been stabbed through the heart and her belly had been cut open from her solar plexus to her pubic bone, post mortem. There was also a piece of paper over her face with the end of a meat skewer sticking out of it.

The crime scene guys—the Brits call them SOCO—were dusting, examining and photographing the room. I had a quick look around. There wasn’t much to see at first glance. A white IKEA sofa, a chair to match, a coffee table and a large, flat screen TV. She was lying between the sofa and the TV. A door beside the sofa appeared to lead to a bedroom. I approached her head and hunkered down to look at the paper. The meat skewer was stuck through it, apparently into her eye. Somebody said, “Don’t touch that, please.”

I looked up at Harry. He was leaning on the doorjamb. Dehan was standing next to him, frowning at the body. I said, “The eyes were perforated?”

He nodded. “Both eyes.”

“Post mortem?”

“Yup.”

There was writing, something printed on the paper. I knew there would be, and I had a pretty good idea of what it would say, but I had to inch around to read it. Harry said, “It says what you think it says.”

I read aloud, “And them good ole boys were drinking whisky and rye…”

I frowned, sighed and stood. “Who is she? Is she an American?”

“Don’t know. No idea who she is.”

Dehan jerked her head toward the bedroom door. “What about her ID?”

I smiled at her. “The Brits don’t carry ID.”

She raised her eyebrows and smiled. “No shit?”

Harry gave a small laugh. “Not since the ’50s. They keep trying to force us, but we love to be awkward. So far, we have no indication of who she is. We’re tracking down the landlord…”

“Who called it in?”

“Neighbor downstairs, noticed her mail and her milk hadn’t been collected.”

She nodded, then, after a moment, shrugged. “So what’s the deal?” She looked at me. “You’re asking if she’s American. She has part of the chorus to American Pie stuck to her eye… why are we here? More to the point, why is he here?” She pointed at me.

Harry went to answer and I said, “Let’s go downstairs.”

Harry nodded. “Yeah, come on, we’ll go to the Blind Beggar.”

Dehan winced at him. “Really?”

He glanced at the girl nailed to the floor. “Yeah, sorry. The beer’s better than the White Hart. Let’s go.”

We followed him down the narrow stairs and out into the late August afternoon. Overhead, heavy clouds were beginning to gather. He pointed to the unmarked VW and we climbed in, slammed the doors and headed at speed down Sidney Street, back toward Whitechapel Road.

“You probably don’t notice it,” he said as he drove. “You haven’t been here for what, fifteen years? The capital is changing. Everybody’s leaving.” I looked out the window. It seemed to me that London’s eight million inhabitants were all out at the same time.

Dehan spoke from the back seat. “Are you sure about that?”

He laughed as he pulled up at the lights. “There are far fewer Europeans, and fewer refugees too. They’re leaving in droves because of Brexit. And a lot of the Muslim population, they’re worried that a far right government, hostile to Muslims, might come to power. They are seeing France and Germany as more welcoming, and Spain.”

The lights changed and we crossed over and parked beside an old red brick Victorian pub with white stone embellishings, tall chimneystacks and elaborate scrolls around the date 1894 right at the top.

The door rattled and clanged as we pushed inside. The public bar was almost empty. The walls were paneled in dark wood, there was an open fireplace, a long, highly polished bar with rows of big, wooden beer pumps, and a ginger cat sitting beside them, licking its paws.

We found a table and Harry went to the bar to get three pints of bitter. Wile he was gone, Dehan gave me a once over and said, “If