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

help me or I do it alone. But unless you plan to physically assault me and tie me to the bed, a thing I have frankly had just about enough of over the last couple of days, I am going to Helena Magnusson’s house and I am going to take her into custody. So get with the program, kid!”

“I swear! One of these days!”

“Shut up, Dehan, and help me get dressed.”

She glared at me, wrenched my clothes from the wardrobe and snapped, “Sit down!”

Ten minutes later, she was climbing behind the wheel of the Jag and I was getting in the passenger seat beside her. As we pulled out of the lot, I called dispatch and asked for backup. When we had turned onto the Hutchinson River Parkway and headed south, she said, “OK, talk me through this.”

I knew what was going to happen next, so I smiled at her and waited. She sniffed, gave her head a small twitch and went on.

“Helena Magnusson and Jack Connors kept up the public image of being very much in love and happily married. It was good for each of their public images. But in fact they had been growing apart for some time. He had been seeing Penelope for a while and they had been gradually falling in love. Helena had been seeing Alornerk, but for her it was more an act of revenge against a man who, or as you would say, whom, she still loved and was not ready to let go of, but who had betrayed her.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Shut up.”

I smiled. “You asked me to talk you through it.”

“Shut up. So, bit by bit, Jack’s relationship with Penelope turns from an affair, to infatuation, to being actually pretty serious, to the point where he is prepared to leave his wife and she is ready to dump the guys who have been keeping her. Somehow Helena finds out. Maybe she finds some texts, gets into his email, hears them on the phone, all of the above, or maybe it’s just good old female intuition. Whatever the case, she finds out, and she decides to kill him. One thing is having an affair, quite another is getting serious and planning to dump her and marry another, younger woman.

“So, when he calls to say he is going out to lunch, she knows that this is code for, ‘I am going to see Penny’ and she goes to wait for him. When he comes out of his office onto the street, she intercepts him. Maybe she tells him she knows where he is going, maybe she uses some other excuse, either way, neither of them wants a public scene, so he gets in the car. Once in the car, either alone or with the help of an accomplice, she knocks him out and drives him to their house. From there she takes him to their basement, where we are going to find the set up you described. She straps him down and cuts off his head.” She glanced at me. “Sorry if this is a bit close to home.”

“It’s fine. Go right ahead.”

“She then packages up the head and sends it to herself at the college, by UPS, where she will receive it in a very public fashion and thus become the victim and so the least likely suspect. Meanwhile, Alornerk, her accomplice, provides her with her alibi. The really brilliant part of the plan is that her alibi works on two levels. If the first alibi is busted, she has the perfect excuse, which also provides her with a second alibi. A plan worthy of a novelist of her caliber.”

“Question.”

“Shoot.”

“What about the other bodies? What made her kill them? Also, why did we find the bodies and not the heads? Why were the heads not mailed to anybody?”

She stared at me for a moment, then shrugged. “I guess we’re about to find out.”

“I guess we are.”

EIGHTEEN

We turned into West 122nd off Morningside Avenue with two patrol cars hot on our tails and pulled up outside Helena’s front door. I climbed out with care while Dehan bounded up the steps, leaned on the bell and hammered on the wood. The patrolmen stood on the sidewalk and watched us. I climbed the steps. Dehan looked at me.

“We need to get a warrant.”

I shook my head and pulled my Swiss army knife from my pocket. I hammered it into the lock with the heel of my hand and opened the door. “I think Alornerk is in here murdering her. And I thought I heard a scream.”

She looked down at the patrolmen. “You guys heard that?”

They shrugged. One of them said, “The traffic…”

I stepped into the hall with my badge in my hand and shouted, “Detectives John Stone and Carmen Dehan, NYPD! Helena Magnusson! Are you here? Ebba?”

There was utter stillness and silence in the house. Dehan had her weapon in her hand. I turned to the uniforms. “Hart, I want you on the door. Nobody comes in, nobody goes out. The other three, upstairs. Don’t touch anything. If you find a person, detain them and call me.”

“You got it, Detective.”

The other three climbed the stairs, weapons drawn. We moved into a formal drawing room. It was empty, tidy and clean. The cushions on the chairs and the sofa were all fluffed, the glasses and decanters were unused. There was no indication that anybody had been there in the last twenty-four hours.

From there we moved into the dining room. It was the same. The table was clean and polished. It looked like a room in a museum. We moved through it to the kitchen. It was modern, with a black and white tiled floor, a gigantic silver fridge, an island with a huge iron range built into it and a sofa and two armchairs up