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

you get on. I notice here on the list Saul Adebayo and Mohamed Eze. Would I be correct in saying that they were both black?”

“Yes, Detective. Is that relevant?”

“Yes, Mrs. Magnusson, it is. Because neither of them is a suspect. The reason that neither of them is a suspect is that neither of them is doing time in a maximum security prison for murdering a prostitute by cutting off her head. Lenny, on the other hand, is. He killed her, Mrs. Magnusson, because he was her pimp and she was stealing money from him to feed her heroin habit. Forgive me if I am a little brutal, but it seems to me that you need to face up to some facts and get real. Cuddly Lenny dos Santos had a rap sheet for violence going back to when he was a child. Now please, take that on board, assimilate it and give it some serious thought. Then please contact me and let me know if anything in his behavior toward you was unusual.”

She was very quiet. After a moment she said, “I see. I’m sorry. I will give it some thought.”

“Thank you.”

I hung up and looked across the desk at Dehan. She looked smug and had her pencil stuck in her mouth again. “Dumb broad, head full of crazy dreams.”

“Cut it out.”

“What did she say?”

“She wasn’t aware of him behaving in any particular way. He was big and noisy and cuddly. He could probably have gone in there with a chainsaw and she would have thought it was cute. What have you got?”

“Nine tomorrow morning. I booked us into the Kilburn Manor, in the heart of Malone. We’re in the Judge’s Suite.”

Mo’s voice intruded on us. “Course you did. Course you are.”

I smiled over at him. Dehan stood and grabbed her jacket. “We better get moving, I also booked us a table at the Riverside Steak and Seafood Restaurant. And it’s a five hour drive.”

“Sounds good.” I stood. “What are you doing tonight, Mo, anything nice?”

“Take a hike.”

We stepped out into the midday sun.

SEVEN

Malone should have been a nice town, and pretty, but it was hard to escape the feeling, as we entered the town on Route 11 and drove onto Main Street, that we had slipped into a Stephen King novel. There was nothing you could put your finger on: the Mobil gas station was perfectly normal, and yet wore a strange air of desolation in the gathering dusk. The family restaurant looked cozy and friendly, but its roof looked strangely outsized, and seemed to loom over the building. And as we approached the church tower, tall and very dark in the dying light, for a moment it looked to me like a vast, horned goat’s head on a long, thin neck. And where the sky glowed a faint, dark blue through its arches, it looked to me like the goat’s eyes.

“What is it about the northeast of this country that is so sinister at times?”

“You getting all freaky and weirded out, Stone?”

“Are you?”

“Nope. Cool-headed empirical realist, that’s me. Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necesitatem.”

“Is that the only thing you can quote in Latin?”

“Yup, but it applies: don’t let your imagination run away with you. It’s probably just the presence of the maximum security facility up the road, but you’re right, there is a kind of eerie feel to this town.”

I smiled at her. “Nothing a good, hearty meal and a bottle of wine can’t take care of, huh?”

“You bet…”

But she didn’t sound very convinced.

We passed the church, which was massive and made of dark gray stone, and turned left onto Clay Street, and at the end of Clay Street, half concealed among trees, were the steep, gabled roof and portico of Kilburn Manor. We climbed out, grabbed our overnight bags from the trunk and walked down the narrow path under the overarching shadows of the trees.

Kilburn Manor was in fact a B&B, but it was decorated and set up like a very luxurious old manor house. The manageress greeted us at the door and, as she led us up the stairs to our room, paused at practically every piece of furniture to tell us about its origins and its provenance. They were all antiques, she told us, including our vast, four-poster bed, which dated right back to the witch hunts.

We dumped our bags, showered, changed and went out for dinner to the Riverside Steak and Seafood Restaurant, which was just a short walk from the B&B. The walk confirmed the impression I had gotten from the car, that Malone was a strange and slightly desolate place.

On the way, Dehan linked her arm through mine as we walked.

“I think,” she said, “that what has complicated things has been Penelope. I think she’s like this charming whirlwind that goes storming through people’s lives, and it’s only after she’s gone that they realize how much disruption she has caused.”

“That’s a nice image.”

“And what we are seeing here is the evidence of where she passed through Jack, Helena and Grant’s lives, and because we are looking for evidence of a murderer, we think that is what we’re seeing.”

“Interesting.”

“But, much like the case of the arms in the lock up, what we are actually seeing has nothing to do with the murder or the killer. The killer was elsewhere, observing the scene, and his interest was not Penny…”

“But Helena.”

“Yup. Only in the lock up case, the killer had us seeing what he wanted us to see. In this case the killer is not that smart, he was just lucky. Penelope provided a kind of smoke screen, or at least a distraction,”

We had come to a bridge on the long, strangely desolate Main Street, where ancient, cast iron streetlamps with elaborate curls and twists stood