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

I nodded. “All our immediate neighbors. Yes, we’ll do that. How we proceed thereafter, sir, depends very much on what we find regarding how the media reported the case.”

He leaned back in his chair. “That makes perfect sense, detectives. Well done. I won’t hold you up any longer. Good work.”

As we left he was reaching for the internal phone. As I closed the door we heard him saying, “Ah, Detective Ibanez, could you come up and see me for a moment…”

We passed her on her way up. She and I made a point of ignoring each other, but Dehan said, “Going to see the Inspector, Ibanez? Say hi from me.”

She didn’t answer.

We worked through lunch, Dehan read every article she could find on the case, and contacted the major TV news networks for any footage they had where the murder was reported. Meanwhile, I sent out a request to the neighboring PDs and sheriff’s departments for missing persons reports on Hispanic females in their early to mid twenties, reported missing in late May or June, 2016.

After that it was a matter of trawling, painstakingly, through the NamUs database. Ibanez had not exaggerated. There were approximately one hundred thousand cases of missing women over the age of twenty-one, and an extra two thousand three hundred people reported missing every day. My search criteria were pretty narrow, but even so there were thousands of files to work through.

By eight o’clock that evening I was beat. I rubbed my eyes, crunched my vertebrae and looked at Dehan, who was leaning back with a pencil in her mouth, reading from the screen of her laptop.

I shrugged and shook my head. “I haven’t found her. I need food and a bottle of wine.”

She nodded for a while, still reading. Then she yawned and stretched, reached forward and switched off the computer. “Me too.” She rubbed her face with her hands and stared at me. “It was not reported, Stone. However Wayne Harris came by that information, it was not through the press.” We stared at each other for a long moment, then she summed it up. “Either he has spoken to somebody who was there and told him what happened, or…” She shrugged and I nodded.

“He was there.”

THREE

By the time we got home it was almost nine o’clock. Dehan put a couple of pizzas in the oven while I pulled a cork from a bottle of wine, then fixed a couple of martinis, extra dry, while the wine breathed. As I placed her drink on the bar, Dehan said, “So, Sensei, how do you want to play it?”

I thought about it. “First drink, then dinner, then bed.”

“Where’s your red nose, Mr. Clown?”

I carried my drink to the sofa, kicked off my shoes, stretched out and spoke to the ceiling. “I say we don’t rush our fences. Wayne ain’t going anywhere anytime soon.” Dehan came over, nudged my feet aside with her ass and sat on the arm of the sofa. I looked at her. “He’s playing it like he has a strong hand. Maybe he has, but we can bluff. I don’t want to give him a deal if I can avoid it.”

She nodded. “So, before we go back to him we try to find out who she is. Then take it from there.”

I nodded. “I think that makes sense.”

There was a ping from my phone. She retrieved it from my jacket pocket and handed it to me.

I thumbed the screen. “Emails,” I said. “Whaddaya know. Philadelphia PD and Boston PD.” I pulled myself into a sitting position and read: “Reported missing June first, 2016, Sonia Ibarri of Buttonwood Avenue, Maple Shade Township in Philly. Twenty-two at the time of her disappearance.”

Her eyebrows rose up. “Sounds promising, if that’s the right word.”

“Hmm… We’ll find out tomorrow.” I went to the next email. “Boston PD. Rosario Clemente, twenty-three at the time of her disappearance. Reported missing Sunday twenty-second of May, 2016. One week after our victim was killed. Also a good candidate. Neither of them is called Angela.”

Dehan shrugged. “It could have been her grandmother’s cross. Could be a family heirloom. They both sound like they could be our girl.”

“We’ll go see them tomorrow, have a look at some pictures, and hope we don’t have to show them any of Angela.”

She nodded gravely, then gently punched my knee. “C’mon, big guy. Pizza’s ready.”

* * *

Next morning Dehan phoned ahead to Alicia Clemente, Rosario’s mother, and the Ibarris while I made breakfast, and by nine we were on the road to Boston. It was a three hour drive, but we didn’t talk much. We were in a somber mood. One hour in, Dehan, looking out at the woodlands and fields around New Haven, said, “It’s hard to know what to hope for. You hope for a positive ID to be able to lay her soul to rest, and give some closure to the family. But you hope for a negative too, so you can give them some hope.” She turned to look at me, with her aviators hiding her eyes. “We want truth and we want hope. It’s a tough break when the truth robs you of hope.”

There was no answer to that, so we drove on in silence.

At twelve we pulled into Deadham, in Norfolk County, on the southwest border of Boston. Their house was a large, attractive clapboard affair on Crowley Avenue, and backed onto a magnificent old Catholic church. I couldn’t help wondering who on the town council had named the streets. Probably the same person who called the town ‘Dead Ham’.

I followed Dehan up the stone steps to the porch and she rang on the bell. It was opened almost immediately by an attractive woman in her late forties or early fifties. She had made no effort