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

now, much of that is through the city where his speed is going to be limited to twenty or thirty miles per hour…”

“Until he hits the freeway, when his speed will increase to double that, assuming he sticks to the speed limit.”

“So we are looking in a circumference of about a hundred miles.”

“That is millions of acres of woodland…”

“Madison is a hundred miles away. The other bodies were found on the route to Madison…”

“Penelope again? Carmen…”

She shook her head. “No. It’s a red herring. Why didn’t he decapitate Stone? That box was intended for his head, but it wasn’t in it.”

He shook his head, frowning. “I don’t know…”

“What stopped him from cutting off his head? He told us what. He told us he was seeking redemption. It’s a long shot, sir, but if he abducted Stone intending to cut off his head, but then refrained from decapitating him, that has to mean that something during that brief period of five or six hours made him change his mind, right? What happened during that time? We don’t know, perhaps they talked, perhaps Stone got inside his head.”

“Perhaps...”

“Whatever it was, it means that the decision to bury him in a shallow grave instead of decapitating him came later. Which means he had less time to drive out and back, which places the woodland closer to home.”

“All right, that’s good.”

“Now, dense woodland within New York is mainly in the Bronx…”

Mo had gotten up from his desk and approached, listening to her. A couple of other detectives had stopped what they were doing to listen. She went on. “What have we got? We’ve got Pugsley Creek Park, Soundview Park…”

Mo snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “The Botanical Gardens! The Thain Family Forest. You got a river in that picture, the Bronx river flows right through it.”

“Yes!”

The inspector turned to the room and started hollering, “All right! I want every available officer in the briefing room in two minutes! Drop whatever you are doing! Go! We are organizing search parties! In the briefing room now!”

There was a flurry of activity as uniforms and plain clothes alike converged on the briefing room. Dehan did not join them. Her mind was racing and she was staring at her laptop, scouring a map of the Botanical Gardens, trying to put herself in the killer’s mind, asking herself not where she would bury a body, but where she would bury a body if she was this particular killer.

She found there were not that many places you could enter the park in seclusion. Logic dictated Stone was either conscious or unconscious, dead or alive. If he was unconscious or dead, he would have to be transported in some way. If he was conscious, he would probably be made to walk, with a gun in his back. Either way, most entrances to the park were on main roads with lots of public access, and the risk of discovery was high. The only access point she could find that was more or less remote was southbound on the Bronx River Parkway, just after the Williams Bridge, where a short road led down from the bridge to feed into the highway. There, there was a small patch of wasteland by the railway, at the very tip of the Botanical Gardens. There you could take in your van, park it in the cover of the trees and either walk your victim or push them in a wheelchair, down the secluded path where few visitors to the park would go, then veer off the track and in among the trees. And there, right there, was the river.

She grabbed her jacket and ran. She paused just a moment at the front desk.

“Maria, tell the chief I went to the north end of the Botanical Gardens.”

“Find him.”

“You bet your sweet ass I will!”

It was a short drive. She picked up the Bronx River Parkway on Storey Avenue, set the siren howling and hit a hundred going north. In less than five minutes, she was slowing to come off onto the Williams Bridge. There she did a ‘U’ and came down off the bridge onto the slip road, where she found the patch of wasteland and pulled off.

Late afternoon was shifting to evening. The shadows of the trees were long and dense in the copper light. She grabbed the flashlight from the trunk and set off at a steady jog along the path, keeping the river on her right and scanning the clearings for anything that was reminiscent of the photograph.

Soon the river began to recede and she was forced to slow to a walk and move in among the woodland, into the shadows and the dark, trying to keep the river in view. Darkness closed in. The hum and hiss of the traffic faded until the only sound was the croak of the frogs and the lap of the water, and her own feet treading on the dead leaves and the dry twigs underfoot. The failing light and the heavy shadows made it increasingly hard to identify the clearing, but in her mind, the large oak tree was vivid and she knew that when she saw it, she would know it.

But she didn’t see it. She pressed on, going ever deeper into the forest, following the course of the river, keeping the water at roughly the distance it had been in the picture. But as she moved on, the ferns grew more dense, the trees more massive and more thickly grouped, the terrain ever harder to negotiate, until eventually she was trudging ankle deep through mud and sludge, clambering over giant roots, unable to see more than a few yards ahead of herself. Finally she stopped and realized that she was completely lost, and it was totally dark.

She played the flashlight around the trees. Even if she had seen