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

private army at his disposal. He’s probably a guy with a lot of self discipline. So he hires one of his mercenaries to stake Penelope out. His hit man reports back that there is a guy seeing her on a regular basis, so he has him follow Jack and kill him.”

“By cutting off his head with a samurai sword?”

We had come to the road and now climbed the steps to the porch and made our way through the bright lobby to the dining room. There the waiter showed us to our table and handed us a menu each.

“We know what we want,” I told him. “We’ll have the Prince Edward Island mussels to start with, and then the prime New York strip. And let’s have a half bottle of Las Pizarras with the mussels, and a Snowden Cabernet Sauvignon with the beef. You could open that now, to let it breathe.”

He gave a little bow and went away. Dehan was watching me with a small smile. “You dig all that, don’t you, Stone?”

I shrugged. “My father, he had an interest in wine. He and my mother used to go on wine tasting holidays. He was a good man, a bit cold and distant, but he tried to instill good values in me: honor, honesty, and an appreciation of good things.”

“Is there a punch line coming? Is this the ‘Orstrian’ one with blond eyelashes?”

“No.” I laughed. “His ancestors were English, and he really was like that. So, you were going to explain about the samurai sword.”

She rolled her eyes. “OK, well, it’s not as odd as it may seem. If a guy like Grant Shaw employs a hit man, there’s a pretty good chance he’ll be a mercenary of some sort. And a lot of those guys are into the martial arts in a big way. Kendo, Japanese sword fighting, is central to a number of Japanese arts, like Ikido, Budo generally. So the use of a sword may not be that odd after all.”

“It seems a little extravagant. He could have used a suppressed automatic…”

She was nodding before I had finished. “Yes, and that would have made sense if he had simply wanted him dead. Then he could have shot him at his house and be done with it. But that’s not what happened. He was drugged, kidnapped and killed while he was awake, by having his head cut off. Clearly the killer—or at least the guy employing the killer—wanted to make a statement.”

I nodded, then shrugged, then sat back so the waiter could deliver the Martinis. “All that makes sense, Dehan; what doesn’t make sense is that he delivered the head to Helena instead of Penelope.”

She sighed at her drink and sipped it. “That is kind of wrong, isn’t it? Unless…”

Her eyes became abstracted and she set down her drink carefully, as though she might spill it.

“Unless… OK, this sounds like reaching, but this guy is not only violent, he is also subtle and intelligent, OK?”

“OK.”

“So he wants to send a message to Penelope, but he also wants to claim her as his prize. He wants to own her—marry her. Obviously he knows that if he sends her her lover’s head in a box, it’s not exactly baubles and bangles and beads. What he needed is exactly the right degree of fear and horror to make her submit without making her run. So he sends it to the wife. That way he gets maximum publicity, ensures Penny hears about it, achieves maximum destruction of Jack’s reputation, but maintains enough distance so that Penelope can never be one hundred percent sure if it was him, or it wasn’t.”

“That is subtle.”

“Too subtle?”

“No… Well, we won’t know if it’s too subtle until we meet the man and talk to him, but on the face of it, I can see a man going to those lengths for a woman he is obsessed with.”

“What other options have we got?”

“Stephen, whom we know nothing about, a number of unknown quantities from her class…”

“Yeah, by all accounts she seems to have been a fascinating, captivating woman. It is possible one of her students became obsessed.”

“It certainly is. And then there is Helena herself.”

“Wow, yup, that is a definite possibility. Only…”

“Only everyone says they were deeply in love?”

She nodded.

“The biggest motive for murder known to man. Or woman, as Helena herself pointed out.”

“Huh… A kind of confession?”

“I don’t want to overstate it, Dehan, but it is a possibility. And there is another possibility which we haven’t considered so far.”

“Penelope.”

“Indeed. So far we only have her side of the story. The most convincing lies are the ones that are nine-tenths truth. It is not hard to imagine that everything she said about Stephen was true, except that it wasn’t Stephen she was falling in love with, it was Jack. If she was falling for Stephen, why has it taken them almost five years to get hitched?”

“That’s true. But wouldn’t she have killed Helena instead?”

“Not if it was Jack who rejected her. It almost feels like an act of spite, like a child who is forced to give back a toy she wants to keep, and smashes the toy so that the other child can’t have it either.”

“Yeah, I get that. Samurai sword?”

“Hmm, that’s tricky, though from a Freudian perspective, it is a pretty powerful symbol of castration.”

“Nnyeah… no.”

“Why?”

“Why not just cut off his balls? If you want to castrate a guy, and you’ve got something razor sharp in your hands, why waste your time on his head?”

“Fair point.”

An ice bucket arrived with a half bottle of white wine in it and while the wine waiter opened it, our mussels arrived. When the waiters were gone, Dehan said, “You hear about the clam who joined the Ocean Gym to