Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [classic children's novels txt] 📗

sure it would help much anyway. In her eyes, I was a dinosaur. The only people she wanted kissing her ass were the “New Bloods.”

I was scowling at the boxes and wondering whether a Scotch would make me feel less sour, when Dehan came up and stood looking down at me. We had never exchanged more than couple of grunts and nods, so I shrugged and made a “whatcha gonna do?” face

Dehan was the best-looking cop in the 43rd precinct. She could have been a model. But everybody hated her because her attitude was as ugly as her face and body were beautiful. She was about five seven, built like a goddess with long black hair and black eyes, and had a face as sullen as a Monday morning hangover.

“So what did you do to piss her off?” I said.

She pulled out her chair with her foot and dropped into it, watching me, weighing me. “I forgot to leave my opinions at home.”

“They were attached to your attitude and you brought the whole lot in together, huh?”

“Yup.” She almost smiled. “What about you?”

“I’m a dinosaur.”

I pushed a box across the desk at her. “We’ll have to organize this somehow. By gravity, age, impossibility…”

She looked at the box but didn’t move. “Thirty years, huh?”

I took a handful and started leafing through them: two female arms found in a lockup; unidentified, naked body found in a refuse sack; severed head, later identified by dental records as…

I paused. The next file down caught my eye. I vaguely remembered it. I threw the stack on the desk and opened the Nelson Hernandez file. It was just ten years old.

“This one always interested me.”

She was reading but looked up. “Is it more interesting than Ruby Eldrige, a pimp and heroin dealer who was shot in an alley and had all his money and jewelry stolen?”

“You tell me. Nelson Hernandez, found in a back room in a house in Hunts Point, with four gang members who were also his cousins. They were all sitting around a table where they’d been playing poker. The cards were all dealt. They all had beer or whiskey, and there were bags of potato chips and little dishes of peanuts laid out. His four cousins had been shot point-blank with a shotgun, or shotguns. Nelson had also been shot, but he had also been decapitated and castrated, and his head and his balls were in the middle of the table.”

I looked up. Her eyebrows had risen, and she was almost smiling. “Ace and a pair.”

I did smile. “Yup, the losing hand. Somebody was sending a message. But it gets more interesting. There was no indication that any one of them had tried to defend themselves. They were all armed, but nobody reached for his weapon. And there must have been at least three or four triggermen, because the shots were all fired from directly in front of the victims, across the table. It’s hard to visualize.”

I stood up and backed up a bit. She watched me as I acted out the scene. I said, “We open the door, and all four of us come in holding shotguns.” I made the gesture and tramped like I was four men filing into a room. “‘Good evening gentlemen, continue with your game, nothing to be alarmed about!’ We troop around the table and take up our positions. And all the while these guys just keep on playing poker.” I made a gesture like I was shooting somebody with a shotgun. “Bam! Then we blow them away.”

We stared at each other a moment, and I sat down. “There was no money anywhere in the apartment, but they found a substantial stash of various types of narcotic.”

“Was the lock forced?”

I checked, shook my head, “Uh-uh. And the key to the apartment was found in Nelson’s pocket.”

“Weapons?”

“None at the scene, except the unfired weapons of the victims.”

She threw the file she’d been reading back in the box and leaned her elbows on the desk. “How about blood from the castration and the beheading?”

I pulled out the ME’s report and tossed it to her. She scanned it while I read. After a moment, she said, “Both the castration and the beheading were postmortem. There was minimal bleeding.”

“Lead detective was Sam Goodman. Now retired. It was suspected at the time that Nelson and his gang may have run afoul of the Mob, but a total lack of evidence or witnesses meant the case foundered.”

“Foundered…”

“Yeah. The other victims were Dickson Rodriguez, Evandro Perez, José Perez, and Geronimo Peralta. All cousins of Nelson’s, and Evandro and José were brothers.”

We spent the next hour studying the case and looking at the pictures of the crime scene. Eventually I called Sam and asked him if we could drop by to discuss the case with him. He was friendly and said to come right over.

She eyed my car for a moment but didn’t comment. I have a right-hand drive burgundy Jaguar Mark II from 1964, with 210 bhp. It is beautiful, elegant, and powerful, the way a car should be.

As we pulled out of the lot, Dehan put on her aviators to look at me and said, “A dinosaur, huh? What does that mean, you carry a magnifying glass and you’ve memorized six hundred different types of tobacco?”

I shrugged as I turned onto Storey Avenue. “It means I don’t kneel at the altar of technology. It means I’d rather see it with my own eyes than through a lens. I’d rather talk to the people involved and get a ‘feel’ for them than allow the machinery of the system to process them. So if you’re talking symbolically, then yeah, I guess I memorize tobacco and carry a magnifying glass in my pocket.”

I didn’t look, but I like to think she was