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

“OK, shoot.”

“I need to know what vehicles are registered to Samuel Reynolds.” I gave him the address and hesitated.

He said, “That’ll take five minutes. Anything else?” I was silent so long he eventually said, “John? You there?”

“Yeah, Mike, find out also what vehicles are registered to Leonard Davis, would you? Just email me the results to my personal email.” I gave him Lenny’s address, thanked him, promised we would get together soon and hung up. Then I sat there five minutes, drumming my fingers on the wheel and thinking. Eventually I climbed out of the car and saw Dehan coming out of the station house door. She hunched her shoulders against the cold and the drizzle and loped across the road on long, slim legs. She looked up into my face. My phone pinged. I opened the email and read it.

I said, “Samuel Reynolds has owned his white Toyota pickup for the last six years.”

“You’re not going to believe this,” she said, as though I hadn’t spoken.

I said, “I think I might, though.”

“After two years, the number is still assigned to a burner, Stone. It hasn’t been used since that night, when it was used to call Celeste. But I nailed the location where the call was made from.”

I smiled. “See? This is why I married you.” She didn’t laugh. Neither did I. I said, “It was made from here, at the station house, wasn’t it?”

She didn’t say anything, she just nodded. “How did you know?”

“Because Samuel called her from the landline at the house. So why would he call again, minutes later, from a burner? Also…” I showed her the email on my phone. “Lenny Davis has owned a cream Cherokee Jeep for the last four years.”

SEVEN

She looked away and ran her fingers through her wet hair.

“Stone, this is starting to look like a lot more than concealing evidence to protect a friend.”

“I know, but we shouldn’t jump to conclusions yet. Lenny is a jerk, but he’s also a good cop. One thing is protecting Sean from an escalating family tragedy, but Lenny as a killer? I find that hard to believe.”

“The evidence is staring us in the face, Stone. Two blocks from where we’re standing, he turns left onto Rosedale and two minutes later, he parks at the playground.” A cold breeze moved down Fteley Avenue and she fingered a strand of damp hair from her eyes.

I didn’t answer straight away, then I sighed. “It’s circumstantial. He owns a white truck, so does Samuel, so do thousands of other New Yorkers. The call was made from the station house, but that doesn’t mean that he made it.”

“If not him, who?”

“That’s not proof, Dehan. It makes Lenny a prime suspect, up there with Samuel, but it’s not proof.”

She frowned at me. “Well, what do you want to do?”

“We need to talk to the inspector…”

She nodded. “I agree.”

“But before we do that, I want to go back to the Reynolds and see if we can locate Celeste’s computer. There is no mention of it in Lenny’s report. It has to be somewhere. Maybe she didn’t have one, but that’s unlikely. If she did and we find it, then we might strike gold with her emails.”

She didn’t look happy, but she nodded. “OK.”

We climbed back in the car and followed the route that Dehan had suggested. It was, like she’d said, fast and easy. Only, instead of going all the way up to the playground, we turned right for three blocks on Watson and then left into Beach Avenue. Dehan sighed as I pulled up outside the house, spread her hands and shook her head, like she’d been having some long, internal dialogue with herself.

“I’m going around in circles. You’re right, anyone could have made the call and got to either the Reynolds’ house or the playground in just a few minutes. But, like you yourself also said, Samuel had already called her on the landline. And Chad called her from his phone, so why would either of them then jump in a car, drive down to Storey Avenue, call her on a burner, and drive up to the playground? It doesn’t make any sense!”

“I agree, it doesn’t make sense, Dehan. But we need to take baby steps here and not jump to conclusions. For a start, we don’t know for a fact that it was Samuel who called her on the landline. We only know that somebody called her from the house.” I shrugged. “Plucking a theory at random from thin air, maybe Helen called to warn her that Samuel was in a rage and had gone after her! Perhaps Samuel went to the station house to talk to Lenny, to ask him to intervene because he believed Chad was leading Celeste down the path of perdition. Lenny couldn’t help, so Samuel called Celeste and said, ‘Wait for me, we need to talk.’” We stared at each other for a long moment, then I went on. “I’m not saying that’s what happened, I’m saying we need to be very careful that we are sure of each premise before we accept it as a fact. Right now, we don’t know who used the burner.”

She nodded. “OK, yup. You’re right. Let’s go get that computer.”

The slam of the doors sounded somehow damp in the gray afternoon light. Dehan followed me to the door of the ugly cube of a house and I rang the bell. It was Helen who opened it for us. She stood a while, smiling, her eyes appearing to see things we could not. She was in her early thirties, blonde, and could have been pretty but for the expression on her face that said, however far you searched, you would never find her.

“Hi, Helen,” I