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

long, black hair into a knot. I felt a sharp pang of loss. I got out of the car and drew breath to shout after her. But she passed out of the glow, into the shadows, and soon after that, she turned onto Rhinelander Avenue and I saw her raise her hand to hail a cab. I had been too slow, and now it was too late.

I sat on the hood of my Jag, staring at the empty glow of the avenue at the end of the gloomy tunnel which was my street. My mind was still and quiet. It seemed to be empty of thought, but I heard myself mutter, “What happened in Goa…?”

Nothing happened in Goa.

I climbed the stairs to my house, let myself in and poured myself a whiskey.

Nineteen

The call came a little after two AM. I was still up, sitting in my chair with a third glass of whiskey in my hand, staring at the cold, empty fireplace. The ringing roused me from dark thoughts and memories. I reached for my phone and saw it was Frank.

“Yeah! Hi…”

“Sorry to wake you, John, I thought you’d want to know. I’m here with Joe, all the results are in…”

“No. I was up. I’ll come right over.”

“You were up?” He sounded curious.

“Yeah, long story. See you in ten minutes.”

It was just half a mile from my house to the Van Etten building, and at that time there was no traffic, so I made it in less than ten minutes. I found them both in Frank’s small office, drinking coffee laced with whiskey out of paper cups. I’d had an idea that’s what they’d be doing, so I put my contribution of half a bottle of Irish on the table and pulled up a chair.

“What have you got?”

Joe poured me some coffee, laced it, and handed it to me.

“First of all, the boot prints at the scene of Jack O’Brien’s murder: they were made by the boots you had sent in, which places your man Akachukwu at the scene of the murder, removing the cannabis plants.”

I nodded. “That’s good.”

“Yeah, but there is more. What we hadn’t spotted on the first, cursory glance, was that there was blood on the boots, on the soles and on the uppers. The blood is in the prints he left behind, in the dust, and still in the stitching and the overlaps of the boots. Naturally, the blood is a match for O’Brien. Those boots were not only at the scene of the murder, removing the cannabis, they were there at the time of the murder, removing the cannabis.”

“That is damn good work, Joe.”

Frank sipped and said, “I can confirm what we already assumed, that he was killed by a single slash of an extremely sharp blade. Something like a samurai sword or a razor sharp machete. He was then beaten, probably kicked, and his spine broken, but that occurred postmortem.”

I took a swig. “Poor bastard.”

Frank nodded. “Not the nicest way to go. Now, to make your life a little more complicated, the DNA you sent in on the mug, it was a match for the DNA found in Rosario Rojas. Whoever drank from that cup, also raped Rosario.”

I gave an unhappy laugh. “So both are almost certainly guilty of a crime which is not killing Sebastian Acosta.”

They both grunted and we all drank.

“Logic dictates that one of the two was there that night.”

Joe leaned down into his bag and extracted a folder. He dropped it in front of me. “There are all your results. I don’t know if it helps, but the slugs that were removed from Sebastian, Luis, and the car are not a match for the slugs that were removed from Angela’s hall and Moses’ leg. Those two were .45s. Moses was lucky that slug had traveled through a door before it hit him. It might have done a hell of a lot more damage otherwise.

“The slugs that killed Sebastian and injured Luis were .38s.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t mean they weren’t fired by the same man, it just means they came out of a different gun.”

I sat tipping my coffee one way and another. “If you wanted to kill somebody, as a punishment, not for expediency, but to bolster your reputation as a badass, and you owned a .45, would you use your .38 for the job?”

Joe shook his head. “I’d take the biggest, baddest gun I had.”

Frank nodded. “And I have to tell you, what whoever it was did to Sebastian is what they used to call a cowboy. That was back in the days of Dutch Schultz and Bumpy Johnson. If you did a cowboy on somebody, you shot them dead and you just kept shooting until you’d emptied the magazine. You weren’t just killing them, you were destroying them, and their reputation.”

I nodded several times. Joe topped up my cup, so it was now whiskey stained with coffee. “At least you’ll have enough for a search warrant. You may find the cannabis plants. You’ll have trouble making anything stick with Irizarry, though. He’ll claim they had consensual sex, and proving he strangled her is going to be hard. The prints they lifted back then were no good. It’ll be down to the DA persuading the jury.”

I frowned. “How about the prints on Angela’s neck? You get anything there?”

He shook his head. “He was wearing gloves.”

I shrugged. “That’s not a problem. When the jury hears about Jack, they hear Moses’ and Angela’s testimony, and me and Dehan swear we saw him there moments after she was attacked, they’ll know what conclusion to come to.”

They both nodded, then they both frowned. It was Frank who voiced it, though.

“Say, what gives with you and Dehan?”

I raised an eyebrow. “This again?”

“Come on, John. How many