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

baby girl. She has to come back to the fold. He sends Samuel to go get her… That’s why she stopped to wait. Maybe she was planning to go back with him. Or, more likely, tell him to go take a hike...”

I interrupted. “Go back to the station, will you?”

She glanced at her watch. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I was hoping we could catch the inspector before he goes home.”

“Sure.” She waited a bit. “Care to share?”

“Yeah… I don’t know, Dehan. It’s a feeling. Chad opened up, he seemed to be sincere, but when I asked him what stopped him from going out to look for Celeste when she didn’t show up…” I shook my head. “It seems odd, doesn’t it? They are making up after a bad row, she has come close to cheating on him, he has come close to breaking up with her, but they got through it and now they’re fixing it…” I paused, visualizing it in my mind. “She’s on her way… She tells him, ‘I’m on my way,’ but when she doesn’t turn up, he doesn’t go looking for her. He just assumes she’s gone off with Rod. It doesn’t gel. It’s not congruent.”

She joined the traffic on Watson, headed east. It was a wet blur of lights through spattered drops. The wipers squeaked and thudded and we crawled slowly toward Rosedale.

“You asked him?”

“Yeah, he said, women are like that. Their feelings change from one second to the next. Nothing they feel is constant or real in any meaningful sense.”

She made a ‘maybe’ face. “Wow, that’s harsh, but he has a point. Not all women, but brother…”

“Carry on that way and you’ll have the Thought Police after us. I certainly don’t believe he has a point. But, be that as it may, Dehan, it doesn’t seem congruent to me. He accepted it too easily, after the fight and the make up sex, and her spending most of Friday and the whole of Saturday there, when she is late returning, he calls her—note that he does call her—and then, at the last minute, when she is actually on her way, he gives up because of a stupid generalization: Women are like that.”

We turned onto Rosedale and stop-started our way under the Bruckner Expressway. The rain grew heavier.

“It is odd,” she said, and then, “what are you suggesting, that he’s altered that part of the story because he went to meet her and found her with this Rod character? They had a fight and he killed her?”

“It’s a very tempting theory, unfortunately, it’s not what the witnesses saw.”

She was quiet for a while. We came out the south side of the bridge as the rain turned to a downpour. We turned right and crossed Soundview into Storey and moved slowly toward the station house as the rain drummed on the roof and pelted the windshield. She said, suddenly, “Well, hold on there a minute, Stone. What did the witnesses actually see?”

I stared out at the deluge, aware that she was glancing at me for some kind of a reaction. When I didn’t say anything she went on.

“They saw Celeste, real mad, shouting at some guy who seems to have got out of a white truck. They saw them argue. They saw him grab her shoulders. They saw her turn and leave, and him go after her. After that, everything was hidden by the dark and by the giant chestnut tree. We don’t know what happened after that point. As far as the actual killing is concerned, the witnesses saw nothing.”

NINE

Dehan pulled in front of the door to the station. I grabbed the Tupperware box from the back seat and ran through the rain up the steps to the main entrance with Dehan just a few steps behind. At the foot of the stairs that go up to the second floor, we bumped into Lenny, coming out of the detectives’ room. He stopped and stared at me a moment, gave Dehan a hostile glance and then said to me, “Look, uh, Stone, about earlier…”

“Don’t sweat it, Lenny.”

“No, I spoke out of turn. Just, you know, if it looks like somebody is questioning your integrity… You’d be the same, right?”

“Sure I would. No harm, no foul.”

“That’s big of you, man.” He slapped my shoulder, then paused to look at the box. He grinned, but his eyes were curious. “What’s that, your lunch box?”

Dehan’s presence at my shoulder was intense. I wondered if she was going to say anything, but she just stood and stared at Lenny. I gave a small laugh, held his eye and was deliberately misleading. I said, “We checked Celeste’s room. These are some of her belongings. We found her computer.”

His face hardened. “You found her computer in her room?”

“I figured you’d looked for it there,” I said. “But it’s always worth a second look.”

“I went over the room with the old man. I’d swear there was no computer there.”

I smiled at him for a moment, then said quietly. “No, we haven’t found anything in her room yet. This was at her boyfriend’s house, Lenny. She’d left it there.”

His voice was wooden. “Oh. What else do you hope to find there?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said you haven’t found anything… yet.”

“Oh.” I nodded once. “Traces of Rod. CS team should be on their way back to the lab by now.”

“…Rod…”

“Yeah, you don’t know about Rod, Lenny. He only emerged in the last day. I have to go and talk to the inspector, but hang around and I’ll put you up to speed, if you’re curious.”

He stared at me for a long moment, then shifted his stare to Dehan, then back to me. “Yeah,” he said in the same wooden voice. “I’ll do that. Catch you guys later.”

He watched us start up the