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

waiting and I swear it’s killing me. I need to hear what you say and what you think… Don’t go.”

I studied him a moment. “We won’t keep you much longer, Mr. Reynolds. Just a couple more questions. After Celeste left that night, none of you heard from her again?”

He started sobbing again and Samuel said, “No. Not till the police—well, Lenny—told us she’d been found, down by the river.”

I looked at Samuel. “You said you had new evidence, Samuel.”

His expression didn’t change, but he drew himself up, and there was a challenge in his eyes. “I got tired of waiting for nothing to happen, and I went and talked to Chad.”

“When was this?”

“This morning. I told him I thought he’d killed Celeste. He said I was crazy and I ought to be careful making that kind of accusation. Threatened me with all his lawyer talk. I told him I wasn’t scared and maybe we should have the whole thing aired in court. He said I was probably stupid enough to do that, and I said that maybe I was. That was when he told me.”

“Told you what, Samuel?”

“That she was seeing other men. He said they were both getting tired of each other. He was finding her boring, he said. That they were never serious about having a future together, and that she was seeing at least one other man.”

“How did he know that?”

“He said he caught her sending text messages to some guy.”

“Did he know these men?”

He shook his head. “He said he didn’t. But I reckon he killed her ’cause he was jealous, and now he’s just covering up, pretending he don’t care. I’ll tell you something, he has a wild temper. He can get real mad.”

I sighed and glanced at Dehan. She gave me a nod. I said, “OK, I think what we need to do now is go and study the file, and we may need to get back to you again after that. Do you still have Celeste’s things?”

Her father said, “Her room is just as it was the day she left. We haven’t had the heart to do anything with it.”

“We may need to go through her things at some point, so if you can just keep that room locked for now.” I looked at Dehan and we both stood.

The old man said, “You should talk to Lenny. He knows all about it.”

“You and Lenny friends?”

He nodded. “Sure. We go back a long way. We grew up in the same street. I was older than him, taught him his way around.” He laughed. “Ask him. He’ll tell you. ‘You know old Sean Reynolds?’ He’ll know.”

I smiled. “I’ll be sure to talk to him.”

Samuel let us out onto Beach Avenue and closed the door behind us. I noticed a cream Toyota pickup truck parked outside the gate. The rain had stopped, but odd, icy drops were still falling from fat, low-slung gray clouds, propelled by sporadic gusts of wind. We walked in silence toward my old, burgundy Jaguar. Rusty, wet leaves had gathered in drifts around its spoked wheels and, though it was only five in the afternoon, the lights were coming on in the windows down the street, and headlamps were reflecting wet across the blacktop.

As Dehan stood by the passenger door, she asked me, “You want to grab some coffee and pull the file?”

I nodded like I was agreeing, because my mind was on something else. Then I shook it and said, “No, I already pulled the file. It’s on the back seat. I want to take a five or ten minute walk down Gleason Avenue and have a chat with Chad. I think we should see just how formidable his temper really is.”

TWO

We walked among the eclectic jumble of clapboard and red brick that is Gleason Avenue, with the cold, desultory breeze creeping around our ankles and feeling its way into gaps and openings in our coats and sleeves. Heavy traffic, homeward bound, hissed over wet asphalt, or waited rumbling in long lines at the traffic lights which gleamed off shiny, wet chassis and lay like spilled, luminous liquid among the puddles.

We went three blocks and came to the Watson Gleason Playground, skirted on all four sides by giant chestnut trees. Opposite the entrance to the playground, there was a large, red brick building. On the corner there was a grocery store, and above it apartments. I pointed at the windows and said, “The only witness Lenny could find lived in that apartment up there.”

Dehan looked surprised. “How do you know?”

“When I pulled the file, I had a quick read.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You were getting coffee. I didn’t want to distract you.”

“Jerk.”

We dodged through the traffic and I rang on the bell beside a bright, red door. Dehan was still making a question at me with her face. I smiled. “You were talking to the inspector. I found the file, leafed through it and had a quick look, happened to notice there was only one witness. Don’t get touchy.”

“Don’t cut me out.” She poked me on the chest. “You know it makes me mad.”

The door opened to reveal a plump woman in her late twenties or early thirties. She had thick, black hair in a big halo around her head and huge brown eyes that were itching to laugh. She seemed to be dressed in amorphous brown cloth bags and leaned on the doorjamb chewing gum.

“You cops? I was just going to the store.” She made it sound like ‘sto-wa’.

I smiled back at her eyes and that made her grin. “We won’t keep you. Are you Remedios Borja?”

“Not if you’re gonna arrest me.”

“We’re not.”

“Then that’s me. You got me.” She laughed as though she’d made a joke.

Dehan made a strange