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

was familiar. I struggled to focus, but my sight and my mind were still foggy and I sagged back.

Rage and frustration welled inside me, but I fought them down. Rage would not help me now. My body was incapacitated. The only weapons I had were my mind and dialogue. I had to start a dialogue.

“Thank you for letting me see you.”

The figure took a couple of steps and came into the room, standing at the top of the steps. I kept talking.

“I didn’t recognize you at first. You were always in the shadows, but I had a hunch it was you.”

It might have been my imagination, I still felt oddly dissociated, but for a moment I had the sense that the words had struck home. Vanity wanted to be satisfied. How had I guessed? I smiled.

“It was a process of elimination. There were mistakes you made…” I made a show of hesitating. “Don’t get me wrong. If I hadn’t come along, you’d probably have got away with it. But I am pretty good at this, and the people you were pointing at…”

I left the words hanging and shook my head.

The figure turned and descended the steps, disappeared momentarily from view, then loomed over me, looking down into my face through the black veil. The image was grotesque: tragic, infantile and terrifying. The voice, when it came, was, like the face, twisted and distorted with pain and hatred.

“I made no mistakes.”

“Come on! Lenny? Way too obvious. And right from the start, the first thing I thought about Lenny was, ‘He decapitates women, not men!’ And then only in a rage. No, he had no beef with…”

Again I left the words hanging and struggled to focus on the tortured face behind the black veil. The red lips moved. “Jack.”

“Did you love him?” There was no reply. I pressed on. “Or did you hate him? Or was it both?”

“You are not here to understand. You are here to set me free.”

The long, delicate fingers reached out to test the tension of the wire across my throat. I spoke quickly, trying not to sound desperate, and failing.

“Then why the mourning dress? Isn’t that a message? Aren’t you trying to tell me something? Who’s it for if not me? Who else is going to see it?”

The pale eyes stared at me for a long moment, then whispered, “Me, me, me.”

The figure turned away and walked around the trestle bench where the wire was connected to the pulleys. I saw the delicate hand reach down and take hold of a white, plastic handle to which the wire was attached. There was an urgency in my voice that was bordering on panic.

“Whatever you did, right? Whatever you did, it was never enough. However much you shone, it was never enough; never enough to catch his eye and make him stop and notice! You were invisible! You could have left him. You could have left him a hundred times. But you kept coming back to him. But he never really saw you.”

A sad smile. A smile that had given up asking for compassion, and was now willing to turn away and allow the most brutal cruelty. The fingers closed on the banal, plastic handle. One pull, I knew, would pull the wire with horrific force through my throat, slicing cleanly through tissue and bone.

“Tell your story! A jury might understand. It would not be the first time a man like that had been killed for his arrogance and his cruelty. If you can secure a sympathetic jury…”

“You know nothing of my story. Like everyone else, all you see is him.”

“I am trying to see you. I am trying to hear you. Tell it. Tell your story! You have the skill, haven’t you? Isn’t that what you do?”

“You are patronizing me.”

“No, I am showing you how to walk away from the biggest mistake of your life. You are a wordsmith. You can weave magic with words. Make people understand how destructive a man like Jack can be. Make them understand how he destroyed lives, how you had no choice in what you did.”

“You don’t know what you are talking about.”

“How do you know that? Do you know me? What do you know about me? Jack I can understand. You knew him intimately! But me? You know nothing about me. And yet you are willing to destroy me. For what?”

“You don’t know anything about my relationship with Jack. Nobody knows anything about my relationship with Jack.”

“You keep saying that, but the way to make me understand, the way to make everyone understand, is not this. It’s words! Tell your story. The world will be fascinated.”

“It is too late for that. I tried to do it. It didn’t work. You only know half the story, Detective Stone.”

“Tell me the rest. Help me to understand.”

“Stop.”

I drew breath, closed my eyes. I didn’t want to show fear, but I could hear my breath shaking. The voice in my ears was quiet, reasonable, relentless.

“It is time to die now. Make peace.”

“I know you were in love!”

“Past tense?”

“I know you still are. But I know you were not in love with Jack! I know you grew to hate Jack. I know that the other love was—is—all consuming! I know you would do anything for that other love! I know it drove you to kill, and not just once. There have been others, haven’t there? And now you feel you are trapped in hell, inside your own mind, and there is no way out and no redemption for you. I know that, and I know other things too. I do understand and I can help you to find a way back, but you have to talk to me. You have to tell your story!”

“You are wasting time. Make peace,