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

didn’t answer. She just stared out the window at the passing landscape. Neither of us spoke for about half an hour. Then she suddenly said, “Yes! Fine! That’s what I meant! What would prompt you to search for further decapitated bodies?”

I offered her my most innocent face and shook my head. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. Call it a hunch.” Then I sighed and shrugged. “There are a couple of things I don’t get, Dehan. None of the suspects is quite satisfactory. There is always something that is not quite right. If Alornerk was so driven and so passionate about Helena that he was prepared to set up this elaborate murder, and not leave a trace, why the hell did he then give up on her without a fight? And the same goes for Lenny. It takes huge motivation do commit a murder like this. Yet, immediately after the killing, our murderer vanishes into thin air.”

“OK, I get that, but how does that lead you to more bodies?”

“It doesn’t, exactly, but, to use your terminology, I have a feeling I can’t shake of an observer. It may well be somebody we have already spoken to, one of our suspects, or somebody else. All I know is that this murder was put together in a very conscious way, and once it was done, the killer just seems to have vanished, walked away. That doesn’t make sense. To my mind, the killer should either have made an attempt to take Helena for himself, or herself, or he should have killed again. So I want to look for…” I searched for the word. “I want to look for the killer’s footprints, some evidence of their presence. It may be a wild goose chase, but it is one more thing we can do to try and find evidence of his or her presence.”

She nodded. “OK, I hear you, that does actually make sense.”

“It’s like, you know you read in books that somebody is walking along a dark road and they can feel somebody’s eyes watching them. It’s fanciful, stupid, but I can feel this person’s presence, as though they are watching us conducting this investigation, and I keep going through our suspects, looking at each one, examining them in my mind, and each time I think, ‘No, not him,’ or ‘No, not her,’ I get this feeling that I have missed something.”

“I never heard you talk like that before.”

“Maybe you’re rubbing off on me.”

“You could do worse.”

“No argument from me. I’d lay money though, Dehan, that the killer is right there, among our group, watching us.”

“Don’t forget we still have the list of other pupils, Stone. We have to go through them.”

I nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

ELEVEN

Next morning the deputy inspector agreed to give us a couple of officers to work methodically through murders reported in Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut and New York during the period 2014 to 2016, in which the victim was badly mutilated and in particular where decapitation was involved.

While they set to on their task, we got hold of the telephone records for Penelope, Connors Communication and Grant Shaw, for the month of October, 2014. As it turned out, we did not need to request them because the original investigating detective had already done that and they were in the file.

I sighed at the discovery and shook my head at Dehan. “When are you going to start thoroughly digesting the file before we start our investigation, Dehan?”

“When you start setting good examples for me, Sensei.”

She made a second copy at the photocopier, dropped a wad of papers in front of me and we set about examining them.

The first thing we looked for was the call Jack received on Thursday, October 7th, at around one PM. It wasn’t there on his office phone, but it was there on his cell. It came through at twelve fifty. The only problem was, it wasn’t Penelope’s number. It was a number I was not familiar with.

I looked at Dehan across the desk. “He got the call on his cell at ten minutes before one, but it wasn’t from her.”

She nodded. “I’m looking at it, but go back a bit. This number calls him on a regular basis. The previous evening at six PM. The previous morning at eleven and then again at one. The day before that it called him… one, two… four times. And the day before…” She leafed through several pages. “Every damn day.”

I turned over a couple of pages to Sunday and Saturday. “Weekends too.”

We stared at each other a moment. She said, “He can’t have had two women going at that level of intensity…”

I was shaking my head, reading her thoughts. “But it’s not two, because, where are her calls?”

I reached for her records and Dehan did the same. “Son of a gun.”

I nodded. “It’s her. She changed her damned number after he was killed.”

Dehan was on her phone. I stood and went to look out the window, trying to think. I could hear Dehan’s voice behind me. “…Detective Carmen Dehan, NYPD, I have an inquiry… No it doesn’t require a court order. I just need to know about a number…” She recited Penelope’s current number. “It’s registered to a Penelope Peach. I need to know when she acquired the number…” She waited a moment, then said, “Thanks,” and hung up.

I turned to face her.

“Friday, October 8th. Whatever else she is, she ain’t smart.”

“You got that right. Listen, I’m going to talk to her. I want to know why she lied about calling him, what they talked about and what happened after she called. I might bring her in…”

She was frowning at me. “Stone, this is very incriminating. We need to interrogate her.”

“I know, but let me talk to her first, Dehan. Trust me, we are