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

“Again?”

“What time did he arrive?”

“I told you. I don’t know the exact time. It was about…” She sighed. “It was about three hours ago, maybe more.”

“What did you talk about?”

“I told you already! He wanted to know why I’d lied. He wanted to know why I changed my phone. I told you already! Do I need a lawyer?”

“It’s up to you. You’re engaged to a big shot, call him.”

Her face said that wasn’t an option and she covered her eyes with her hands, then ran her fingers through her hair. “I want to cooperate, but you are making it so hard, Carmen.”

“Where is Stone?”

“I don’t know!”

There was a knock at the door an a uniform poked his head in. “Detective, the Chief wants to see you.”

“OK, I’ll be right there.” The uniform left and Dehan turned back to Penny. “I’ll be back. Meantime, you’d better do some serious thinking, Penny, because your story does not wash. I am going to keep coming at you and I will not stop until you tell me where Stone is.” She leaned forward across the table. “And if you have hurt him…”

She left the sentence unfinished, stood and stepped out into the passage. The deputy inspector met her outside the door.

“Just heard. Look, Carmen, I’m sorry, none of the apartments belong to Grant Shaw. There are a number of private owners, a couple of banks, investment companies. I’ve emailed you the list. But none of them are traceable to Shaw. Besides which, the officers have drawn a blank. They’ve gone over the building from the roof to the cellar. The neighbors were all cooperative and helpful. They have found nothing. It’s a dead end.”

She stared at him for a long moment, then shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense. He has got to be in that building. He didn’t leave. Nobody saw him leave. His car was still there.”

“He is not there, Carmen. Focus. John does not need a wife right now. What John needs is the best damn detective at the 43rd. Now focus! If he is not there, where is he?”

She rubbed her face with her hands, took a deep breath, stared at the wall, then the ceiling, then at the inspector.

“OK. Baby steps: he is not there, so he is somewhere else. Nobody saw him leave, so he left without being seen. Right?”

“Right.”

“So we need to be looking at people that left the building during that period, during that window, but were either not seen or not recognized. Stone left, or somebody left with Stone, during those two hours, and somebody saw him, without realizing what they were seeing. Right?”

“Exactly!”

“Security cameras!”

“Good! Go and get it.”

She turned and pushed back into the interrogation room. She went to the table and leaned across, looking deep into Penelope’s eyes. “I need to know exactly what time Stone left your apartment.”

“I don’t know exactly…”

“He left here about ten, half an hour to get to you, maybe forty minutes to reach your apartment. How long were you talking?”

“Not long, maybe twenty minutes or half an hour.”

Dehan turned and bellowed, “Sergeant!” A sergeant poked her head around the door. “Take Ms. Peach to a holding cell.”

She pushed out of the room again and made her way to the inspector’s door. She pushed in without knocking and he looked up at her.

“Sir, the security camera footage from eleven AM and for the next hour. We need the elevator and the lobby. And hell! Anything else they have. But if he left the building, he will show up on that footage.”

“I’ll call. You go. But Carmen…”

“I know, sir. We are looking for someone… or something… that does not look like Stone… I know.”

FIFTEEN

She drove fast, back along the route she had taken earlier in the unmarked Dodge Charger with the siren howling to the fading afternoon. She screeched to a halt outside Penelope’s block and ran into the lobby. The porter was waiting for her with the security guard and led her to a small room in back, behind the desk. As they went, Dehan was talking to the security guard.

“I want the ninth floor. I want the landing, I want the elevator and I want the lobby, ten minutes to eleven o’clock through to twelve noon. Everyone who comes out of the block. One of those people who comes out is my partner.”

“Yes, ma’am. We don’t have cameras on the landings. But when your inspector called I started going through…”

The porter interjected, “I told you your partner never came out, Detective.”

“That’s the truth, ma’am, there ain’t no sign of him. I have the photograph your boys brought around earlier, and he never came out.”

“Did anybody come out? Anyone moving furniture, laundry, carpets…?”

“Nothing like that. Three people come out in the time you’re talking about, well, six, to be precise. We had…” He reversed to the beginning of the footage. “Ten minutes after eleven. This guy who’s come to collect a visitor of Mrs. Graham’s, on the seventh.”

There was a slightly distorted image of a man perhaps in his early thirties entering the elevator, pushing a wheelchair with an old woman in it. A moment later, they disembarked and he wheeled her across the lobby and out into the street.

“Then half past eleven, Mr. Hofstadter and a friend of his got in. I thought at first his friend might be your partner. He’s about the right size and build. But…”

He trailed off and shrugged. The porter said, “Mr. Hofstadter’s been in the building twenty years…”

Dehan peered at the image and decided it was inconclusive, but unlikely. The guard went on. “Then we got eleven fifty-five. Mrs. Petersen from the fifth floor and her sister. We can keep looking…”

“I want copies of that footage…