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

it, and, on closer inspection, there was an area of the quilt that had been slashed.

Dehan had hunkered down and was looking at a large kitchen knife that lay on the carpet. There was a substantial amount of blood on the blade. She spoke as though to herself.

“Brave girl.”

I nodded. “That is the blood of our killer.”

She looked up at me. “You think it was Humberto after all?”

There was the sound of a siren outside and after a moment, the door opened. I went down the stairs to meet the paramedics and pointed them in the direction of the living room. The CSI team was close behind them. I greeted Luis, the team leader, and pointed up the stairs.

“In the master bedroom. There is a knife. The blood on the blade is a top priority. It belongs to the assailant who just attempted to murder the owner of the house. The prints on the handle belong to the owner’s daughter, so you’ll want her prints for comparison.”

“Gotcha.”

“The assailant escaped through the back garden. I have two officers out there now, but we are going to need to go over it with a fine-toothed comb.”

He gave me the thumbs up and made his way upstairs with his team. We returned to the living room, where a paramedic was bandaging Humberto’s arm. Paul was on the sofa next to Sylvie with his arm around her. He looked at me with bitterness in his face.

“You see what you’ve done, Detective? You couldn’t leave things alone…”

“Can it, Paul. I’m sick of hearing that crap. We don’t leave murders uninvestigated just because it happens to suit you and Sylvie to ignore them. Are we clear on that?”

He muttered something and turned back to Sylvie.

“I need to know what happened to Humberto. I need to know what he saw in the garden. Can you ask him? Can you make any sense of his answers?”

He turned to Humberto and spoke to him in Portuguese. Humberto’s face took on a look of awe and horror.

“Santa Maria Plena di graza, aclamando auxilio, deu! Deu! Auxilio! El Diavolo Incarnato com punhal sanguino mi atacato o jardam. Eu lo abatido il suo punhal. Humberto luta! Luta! E il diavolo corre! Corre!”

Suddenly, he was laughing his braying laugh and bouncing up and down. The paramedic turned to me.

“Detective, he should really go to the hospital.”

I nodded and looked at Paul. “What did he say?”

He sighed. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense. He says that Sylvie was screaming for help. He equates her with the virgin Mary. There was a devil incarnate with a dagger that attacked him in the garden. He defeated the devil and knocked the dagger from his hand. They fought and the devil fled.”

“He knocked the dagger from the devil’s hand?”

“That’s what he says, but it could all be a fantasy.”

“Yeah, you said that before about him. Maybe if you listened more and judged less, Paul, you might learn something about your son.”

“I don’t need to take that from you, Detective.”

“No, you don’t, but you’d be wise to. You want to go to the hospital with him?”

“Yes.”

“There will be an officer with you. Paul, Humberto is not a suspect in this investigation, and I am trying really hard to keep you and Sylvie from the top of my list. My advice to you is stop trying to hide things from me, quit this stupid conspiracy of silence, stop behaving like you’re guilty. Don’t screw it up.”

He got up and they left with the ambulance crew.

When they’d gone, I sat and watched Sylvie a moment. She was quiet, leaning against her daughter.

“Sylvie, I hope you’ve been doing some thinking. Because all your efforts to keep what happened a secret have been to no avail. All you’ve done is delay things, and in delaying them, made them worse. You could have been killed today, and it was only the courage of your daughter that saved your life. But I hope you realize that in saving you, she put her own life at risk. You are damned lucky that today you are not the mother of two dead children.”

She closed her eyes and seemed to shiver. Mary looked at me in horror. I pressed on. “Sooner or later you have to confront the truth, Sylvie. Sooner or later you will have no choice but to face up to the reality. You may as well do it now, because the longer you delay, the tougher it’s going to be.”

In my peripheral vision, I sensed Dehan sit in the armchair. She was watching me as hard as she was watching Sylvie.

“Sylvie, look at me.”

She opened her eyes and looked at me. There was resentment, and maybe even hatred in her eyes.

“Did Humberto attack you tonight?”

It was barely perceptible, but she shook her head.

“Do you know who did attack you? Did you recognize your attacker?”

She closed her eyes and turned away from me. She was not going to talk.

Behind me, the French doors opened and an officer put his head in. “Detective, we found a knife.”

I turned to Dehan. She was frowning. I smiled. I said to the uniform, “Go upstairs and inform the CSI team leader, will you?”

To Dehan, I said, “Let’s take a look.”

We stepped out into the garden. Thirty or forty feet away, we could see the glow of a flashlight, and we made our way toward it. As we got closer, we could see there was a circular patch of grass illuminated by the torch, and at its center there was a large hunting knife with a rubber grip and a serrated back to the blade.

We hunkered down to look at it. Dehan said, “He obviously likes this kind of knife. But two gets you twenty he