Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #2: Books 5-8 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [readnow TXT] 📗

But, I thought sourly as I turned into his street, the fact was that nobody really fit the bill in this case. It was all wrong. The whole damn thing was wrong.

There was a beaten-up old black BMW parked outside his house. I rang the bell and for good measure rang two more times. There was no reply. I peered through the window, but it was hard to see anything clearly. It was when I went back to ring again that I noticed that the wrought iron outer door was not locked. I opened it using my pen and hammered on the inner door with my knuckles. I had a look around. There was no one to see me, so I took out my Swiss Army knife, selected the screwdriver and, with a firm thump, inserted it into the lock and turned. The lock gave and I opened the door. I stood a moment in the small hallway. It was very still and very quiet.

“Mr. O’Brien?” There was no reply so I called louder, “Mr. O’Brien?”

There was still no reply, not a sound in the whole house. The door to the living room was on the left. It was ajar and I eased it open all the way with my foot. My stomach lurched and I turned away, struggling not to vomit. The stench was overpowering, but worse than the smell was what was lying on the carpet in the middle of the floor. I went outside and steadied myself, taking deep breaths. After a moment, I pulled out my cell and called Dehan.

“Yeah.”

“I need you here, at Jack O’Brien’s house. We need a crime scene team, the ME, and a meat wagon.”

“O’Brien’s dead?”

“If he’s not, he’s got real problems. He’s been disemboweled. It’s the ugliest thing I ever saw, Dehan. It’s bad, real bad.”

“OK, I’m on my way.”

Sixteen

I stepped inside again and forced myself to look at the grotesque mess on the floor. His body was bent back at an impossible angle, achievable only because all of his abdominal muscles had been severed. Everything that should have been on the inside, was lying on the carpet: a ghastly gray-pink mess, covered in dry, black, clotted blood, and crawling with bluebottles. I tried to ignore the surreal madness of what I was seeing. Tried to read the crime scene instead. What had happened here? What had been the sequence of events?

The iron gate was unlocked. It had not been relocked. That suggested something that had happened at speed. Somebody had rung at the door. He had come and opened it and whoever it was had entered quickly, forcefully, without bothering to close the gate. Jack would have backed into the house. His attacker would have followed him. What next?

The front door would have swung closed. They are in the entrance hall. Jack is backing away, into the living room. His attacker follows. Jack is big, and tough, a rugby player. For him to be backing away, that means his assailant is either bigger, or armed. Hard to be much bigger, so I go with armed. If he has a gun, he now swaps for a blade. A very sharp blade.

I stopped, analysing the scene, ignoring the nausea I was feeling, scanning the room. The chairs and lamps were not overturned. The TV was not disturbed. Nothing – nothing – was disturbed. The attack was swift, brutal, and utterly deadly. There was no fight. This big, tough, British rugby player just stood there and got killed.

So if the attacker had a gun, he put it away, pulled a blade—what blade? Considering the distance, considering Jack’s size and strength, considering that he didn’t even get to try and defend himself, it’s either a samurai sword or…

Or a machete.

A machete, up the sleeve of a jacket or a coat, dropped into the hand, one step, one swipe, and Jack was disemboweled. And then beaten brutally—and unnecessarily, because he was already dead—to end up in that horrific position, broken, practically bisected.

His voice came back to me. One of the last things he’d said to us when we’d come to see him: “…Never mind what you’d do to me… it’s what the hard nuts ’round here would do to me. I been warned…”

The hard nuts ’round here.

I looked at the door that led down to the cellar. It was open. I went and hunkered down and, as I looked closer, I saw traces of dirt on the carpet. Using my pen, I eased the door open. The light was on and the smell of cannabis was strong and unmistakable. But I knew we wouldn’t find any down there. Whoever had cut Jack down, had also taken his plants. I wondered how many he’d had. Twelve? Fifteen? Twenty? Anything between twenty and fifty grand’s worth on the street. And he thought the hard nuts would not object to that. He didn’t realize, they weren’t hard. They were just greedy, and placed no value on human life. They’d have killed him for a hundred bucks, let alone fifty grand.

The distant wail of sirens reached me. I peered at the bare wooden steps. There was dirt that had been spilled from the plants, but there was also a layer of dust, and in it the prints left behind by heavy boots. At a guess, a size twelve or thirteen. A tall man. A big man.

I stood and stepped away from the cellar door, staring hard at the dirty, old carpet, visualizing the track to the door, and a guy carrying marijuana plants back and forth. Outside, cop cars started arriving. Through the living room window, I saw the urgent pulse of the red and blue lights. I went to open the door.

Dehan was there, walking toward me. Uniforms were spilling from the vehicles, a sergeant was telling them to seal the area around the