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

of pupils. I had this nagging that said there was somebody manipulating the situation, making us see what he wanted us to see. It began to dawn on me when I left the station and went to see Penelope. Peter’s background was in computer graphics and special effects. The gesture of the head in the cool box inside a UPS package had all the hallmarks of a man trained in special effects.

“I drove past his place on the way to Penelope’s and saw that he was at home—or at least somebody was—and it registered in my mind that his house was very close to Underhill College. But what hadn’t registered yet was that I had seen his name on the list of pupils at her class. And the one thing that stopped him being a prime suspect was that he had no real connection with her.

“Then it hit me in the hospital. You used the word ‘disciples’ and it registered. His name. I saw it clear as day in my mind. Peter Heseltine, and I knew that he had let me go, not to redeem himself, but because he was placing Helena firmly in the frame because he planned to kill her.”

“That’s what I don’t get.”

I opened my eyes.

She had turned to look at me. “Why did he suddenly decide to kill her?”

“I can only guess. He was a deeply inhibited young man who had obviously developed an obsession with her on the occasions she used to go into the office and charm their pants off. His obsession grew, partly because he had to endure Jack daily flaunting his affair with Penelope, and partly when he plucked up the courage to join her class.

“He was so nondescript and so invisible that she didn’t even notice he was the same guy from her husband’s office, but he was in denial about that. We’ll know for sure when we interrogate him, but two gets you twenty he developed a fantasy in which she was secretly falling in love with him, and he was going to save her. Just like we said about Lenny, only in this case it was Peter sending her ‘messages’ through his stories, and taking her words of literary encouragement as words of encouragement in his fantasy. His stories were probably littered with phrases and situations about him and her, which she never saw for what they were. But all she had to do was scrawl ‘keep trying’ or ‘a very moving piece of work’ in the margin for him to believe that she was responding to his secret, coded messages and urging him on.

“Yet, after he had killed Jack and sent her the very powerful message, ‘I have set you free’, she disappeared from his life. She never went back to class and she never returned to the office. His dream came crashing down overnight. And he was far too emotionally crippled and inhibited ever to go to her house to talk to her in person. He must have been devastated.”

She nodded and cracked open a bottle of beer. “Then we came along, saying we had reopened the case, and he was suddenly looking at going to prison for the rest of his life for nothing. He had killed his boss for her, and she had just turned her back on him and walked away. His betrayed love must have turned very quickly to hatred and vengeance.”

“Exactly.”

She went indoors and came out after a while with a plate of steaks and started dousing them with oil and pepper. After a moment, she stopped and frowned.

“But what about the decapitated bodies that were found around Madison?”

“Again, we’ll have to confirm it in interrogation, but he was at pains to deflect suspicion in many directions, and it seemed to me that the killer had gone to some lengths to make it look like the possible work of a serial killer. So I wondered if he had killed again afterwards.” I paused, frowning at the sky, just beginning to turn copper and pink overhead. “In fact, if I am honest, Dehan, what I really wondered was whether the killer wasn’t actually a homicidal psychopath, using his obsession with Helena as an excuse to kill, who had then got a taste for it. What struck me was that the other two bodies had not had their heads dispatched anywhere by UPS. And notice that he never dismantled his cheese cutter.”

“Jesus, Stone.” She shook her head. “That would never have occurred to me.”

“It didn’t really occur to me, Dehan. It was just one possible ramification. If the killer wanted us to believe he or she was a psychotic killer, he might kill again using a similar MO.”

“But, secretly, it was because he was enjoying it.”

I shrugged. “I don’t think anyone kills in such an elaborate, inventive manner unless they are actually enjoying it.”

She took a pull on her beer and turned to toss the steaks on the barbeque. They sizzled and tall flames leapt from the coals and licked and seared the meat. The smell of burning aromatic herbs and barbecued meat wafted on the evening air.

I smiled. I watched her in silence, her slim legs and her elegant waist, and her long, black hair tied into a loose knot behind her neck, and felt myself healing inside.

“I love you,” I said.

She turned, surprised, and smiled, and her eyes shone.

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