Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [reading in the dark TXT] 📗

She nodded and started picking her way to the right a bit. I followed and we came out onto a sloping bank of mixed rocks, sand and moss that descended steeply for about eight or nine feet to a small knoll, roughly oval, about twelve or fifteen feet long and six or seven feet across at its widest point. It was surrounded on three sides by tall grass and shrubs, but on the far side it sloped gradually down to a rocky inlet in the river. Dehan pulled out the pictures of the crime scene. “That’s it, there,” she said, and we scrambled down to the knoll.

She stood a moment examining the pictures again while I peered over her shoulder. She pointed ahead, to the edge of the grassy lip. “Her body was over there, face down, with her right arm pinned underneath her and her left arm kind of flung out toward the river.” She shook her head. “I can’t make out any drag marks…”

I turned and looked back, in the opposite direction. “He probably rolled her. That’s why her arm is pinned. If you drag a body you have to do it from the feet, otherwise they are almost impossible to move. If Wayne was telling the truth he would have been over there, in those bushes.”

I pointed up at a patch of undergrowth about thirty feet away. Dehan turned, looked where I was pointing and nodded. She said, “So right now I am asking myself, if… if Wayne has knowledge of the crime scene and the position of the body, that was not made available to the media, what’s to stop us from promoting him to prime suspect?”

I shrugged with my eyebrows. “I was wondering the same thing.”

She echoed my eyebrow-shrug with her shoulders. “The only thing I can think of is that, if he was the killer, he would have to be really stupid, seriously stupid, to draw attention to the fact that he was here at the time of the murder. And he struck me as a lot of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.”

I scratched my chin, still staring at the area where Wayne had said he’d been lying, getting stoned and looking at the night sky. He would have had a perfect view of the events. I sighed. “Agreed. He’s not stupid, at least not in the sense of having a low IQ.”

I clambered up to the spot, lay down and looked up at the sky. I called down to her, “What did Ibanez make of it?”

Dehan was quiet for a bit, leafing through the file. “She didn’t really come to any firm conclusions, but she speculated that the most likely explanation was that Angela, if that was her name, was a prostitute and was killed by her pimp or a client.”

I winced, sat up, leaned my elbows on my knees and stared down at her. “Did she offer any reason for that remarkable hypothesis?”

She kept reading and eventually said, “Well, if you can call it a reason, she says there doesn’t seem to be any other explanation for why she would be at a place like this at that time on a Saturday night. She quotes some statistics: that a Hispanic girl murdered and raped in the Bronx in a lonely place of these characteristics is most likely to be a prostitute…”

She stopped reading and stared at me. She looked mad. I agreed. I felt mad too. “So basically she had no evidence and assumed because she was an Hispanic girl out late on a Saturday in the Bronx she was a whore.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

I sighed and stood up. “This is not Hunts Point. It’s one of the safest areas in the Bronx. Not just the Bronx, in New York. Whatever her statistics may say, the chances of finding a prostitute working this district are practically nonexistent.”

“Plus, look at the way she was dressed. What was her line, Miss Demure? A flutter of the eyelashes is extra?”

I laughed. “Mmm…sounds appealing.”

“Funny.”

I joined her on the knoll. “Did they check NamUs?”

“There is no mention of that.”

“Let’s go talk to Detective Ibanez. I think this is a case of the same old same old, Dehan. A woman nobody cares about killed by a guy nobody cares about. You go through the motions, you don’t get an immediate hit off the databases, so you file it under Don’t Give a Damn and let it go cold.” We started climbing back up the bank. I spoke over my shoulder as we climbed. “And let’s look at women who were reported missing around that time. It will be tedious, but I reckon if we can get some idea of who she was, we’ll get some idea why she died, and who killed her.”

* * *

You could tell Detective Veronica Ibanez liked to think of herself as bad ass. She didn’t wait for us to find her, she came looking for us. She was small, all her movements were quick and she chewed gum like she was in a hurry to get it chewed. She shouted to me as we walked into the detectives room. “Yo! Stone! You want to talk to me?”

She said it as she walked across the room with her chin stuck in the air.

I smiled and frowned at the same time. “How’d you know?”

She arrived at our desks as I was pulling off my jacket. She had her hands in her jeans pockets and was chewing furiously. “Inspector told me you was looking at the Westchester whore…” She grinned and made a small noise that wanted to be a laugh but never made it. “I figured you’d wanna talk to me, get my view.”

“Yeah. Grab a chair.”

“I prefer to stand. I get restless sitting down. Whacha wanna know?”

Dehan sighed, dropped