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

had sex. She was besotted, if not with him, with the idea that he could somehow set her free, talking about eloping together to California to live in the desert. And he was half out of his mind with the fact that at his age, he had somehow seduced an attractive eighteen-year-old girl. Instead of telling her that things had gotten out of hand and he had to break it off, he nurtured her dream, knowing as he must that he would never leave his wife and kids, and he could never make it come true. It made grim and depressing reading.

The last one said that they had to stop using email. It was too risky, and he wanted her to delete all the emails she had sent him, and the ones she had received from him too. He was going to buy a burner and they could call each other and use Whatsapp to communicate. It would be better, he said. In her reply she promised to do that, and promised also to send him some ‘special’ photographs.

I put them down and looked up at Dehan.

She shook her head. “Why didn’t she delete the emails?”

“For the same reason he never got rid of the phone. They are a memento, a trophy even.”

“I guess. So they spent the next six months having an affair. His DNA will almost certainly be on the sheets. He is ruined. His life is finished. Even if he doesn’t go to prison, he has lost everything.”

I nodded.

She went on, “And he has gone right to the top of our list of suspects.”

I chewed my lip at her for a while, then went to throw the bison steaks onto the griddle which was at risk of catching fire. They sizzled noisily and I turned back to Dehan and sipped my wine. “You’re thinking that he found out about Chad and killed her.”

“It’s about the oldest and most reliable motive known to man, and woman.”

“Lenny and Chad, and Celeste in the middle, two-timing both of them.”

“Which one is the killer?”

“Take your pick.”

She thought about it for a moment while I turned the steaks. Then, she said, “My money is on Lenny. Lenny killed Celeste.”

TEN

I had called Frank, the ME, and Bob, the head of the CSI team that had examined Celeste’s room. They had both gone home, but agreed to see us first thing in the morning. First thing in the morning, for them, was six AM. So at five-fifty AM the next day, we were pulling off Seminole Avenue in the darkest hour before the dawn. We found a parking space, killed the engine and made our way to Frank’s office: a small pool of light in an empty building in semi-darkness. Bob was there with him. They were drinking coffee out of paper cups. They both looked up as we pushed into the lab.

Frank made the expressionless face that for him was a grin and said, “When newlyweds start getting up before six in the morning, that is a bad sign.”

Dehan grabbed a chair and said, “This from a man who gets all his social interaction from corpses.”

Frank raised an eyebrow and I sat, so we were all gathered around his desk.

“They often have more to say than the living, believe me,” he said, “But my point is, what has you two up and about at this hour of the morning? Usually it’s just weirdoes like me and Robert.”

She pulled Celeste’s laptop from her bag and handed it to Bob. As she did it, I said, “For now, this has to stay very quiet between you, us and Deputy Inspector John Newman. It is not urgent the way other cases might be urgent. This started out as a cold case, the murder of Celeste Reynolds, but it has pretty quickly become clear that the case did not go cold through lack of evidence…”

Bob was frowning hard. “What do you mean?”

“It went cold because the detective investigating it was suppressing evidence: he hid evidence, failed to look for witnesses and didn’t follow up on obvious leads. In a sense, that was fortunate for us, because as a result, he failed to find her laptop. He looked for it in her room, but didn’t find it, because it was boxed up in her boyfriend’s basement, and he never interviewed her boyfriend.”

Bob looked squeamish. “I dread to ask what’s on it.”

“At first glance, it looks like a brief exchange of love letters. The evidence is pretty strong that the emails come from the investigating detective, but we need proof from your tech guys that the original email address is his, and that the new email address is also his.” I paused and held Bob’s eye. “Obviously, Bob, if we have a detective who has murdered an eighteen-year-old girl he was having an affair with, that is something that has to have the highest priority. We don’t know if he is doing the same thing to some other girl right now.”

He sighed, nodded, drained his paper cup and picked up the computer. “I’m on it, I’ll give it to the nerds right away.”

“And, Bob? The sheets you took from her room? The semen on them might be his. It also has to take priority. I need to get you a sample of his DNA somehow…”

He shook his head. “Lenny Davis is in the system. You’d be surprised how many are. They are profiled for purposes of elimination, and the profile stays in the database. You’re probably there yourself.”

He got up and left the office, taking the laptop with him. Frank said, “You are determined to make my life a misery.”

“It can’t be helped, Frank. If Lenny had sex with Celeste in her bedroom, it puts him very firmly in the frame…”

“You don’t need to tell me, John.