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

mind…” He stabbed at his forehead with his finger, his eyes and his nose swollen with crying. “In her mind she was still a child!”

Mary sighed. “She begged Olga not to tell us. She didn’t want to worry us. Monday she had heard nothing. She was sick, not knowing what to do. Tuesday she phoned me, crazy, out of her mind. So we called the police and we told them what had happened. They wrote it all down and we never heard nothing more.”

Dehan took a deep breath and shook her head. “And your sister died, Mrs. Ibarri?”

“On the thirty-first of June. Exactly one month later. Her heart just broke, you know? She had the high blood pressure.”

I knew it wasn’t Angela, because Sonia was still at home with her parents when Angela was murdered, but I asked the question anyway, with a sinking feeling that I knew what the answer was going to be. “Where was your sister’s house, Mrs. Ibarri?”

“In the Bronx, the nicer part. Virgil Avenue, in the Castle Hill area. Not by the PJs...”

I nodded. “I know it. Mrs. Ibarri, Mr. Ibarri, the girl we have found is not your daughter. The girl we found died before your daughter left home. But we are going to make inquiries and see if we can find out what happened to Sonia.” I shrugged. “Sometimes people do crazy things, then they feel bad and they don’t know how to make it right. So they don’t call, time goes by and every day it gets more difficult…”

She nodded. “Thank you. If you find her, tell her we’re not mad. We just want to know she’s OK.”

“Of course.” I paused a moment. “Mrs. Ibarri, may we have a photograph of Sonia?”

“Of course!”

She stood to go and get one.

I hesitated and added, “It’s a long shot, but there is a DNA database…” They both stared at me. “It’s for all sorts of people, not just criminals and deceased people.” Even as I said it I was aware how lame it sounded, but I pressed on. “Would you happen to have anything of Sonia’s, a lock of hair, a hairbrush…?”

Nelson nodded. He stood and went upstairs. Mary went to the fireplace and took a photograph from the mantelpiece. We both stood and she gave the picture to Dehan. I looked over her shoulder. It showed two pretty girls on a beach, laughing and waving at the camera. They were similar, but one was slightly older. Mary said, “She’s the younger one. The one on your right. She was visiting her sister in California. Her sister wants to be an actress, so she went to Los Angeles five years ago.”

I studied her face and she looked away. “What’s her name?”

“Annabel.”

“You get to see her much?”

She made a face and shook her head. Dehan took a picture of the photo on her phone and handed it back. “We’ll let you know as soon if we find out anything, Mrs. Ibarri.”

Nelson came back down the stairs on slow, heavy feet. He was holding a hairbrush. I took it and examined it. It still had thick, black hairs caught in the bristles. I glanced at them both. “Has anybody else used this brush?”

“No, only Sonia. That was her brush. We’ve kept everything, just in case.”

I pulled a plastic evidence bag from my pocket and slipped the brush into it. I looked at each of them in turn, wishing I could say something, give them some hope, but I couldn’t.

“Thank you both for your help. We’ll be in touch.”

They saw us to the door and we stepped out into the failing light of evening.

We had missed the rush-hour traffic, so it was a slightly less than two hour drive back to Haight Avenue as dusk turned to evening, and evening closed in and became night. Once we were out of town, on the open road, Dehan said suddenly, “I hear what you said to Mrs. Clemente, there are so many Hispanics in the Bronx, the fact that her daughter and Angela happened to be within half a mile of each other may look to us like a coincidence, but it’s not necessarily a coincidence.” She shrugged, spread her hands. “It’s like, how many white, Caucasian women were within half a mile of… I don’t know, Sharon Tate, when she was murdered, right? I get it…” She sighed. “But I have to tell you…”

“Dehan.”

“What?”

“I think we are looking at a serial killer.”

She sighed again, deeper. “I knew you were going to say that. That’s why you asked for the DNA.”

I nodded. “We need to look for young women found downstream. We’re going to find them.” I shook my head. “No, that’s wrong, we have almost certainly already found them. We just don’t know it yet. We’ll give Frank the samples tomorrow. We’ll get a hit.”

“Jesus…”

“It’s days like this,” I said, “I wish I’d become a geologist.”

She stared at me in silence for a while and then started to laugh. “Isn’t that what they call nominative determinism? A geologist called Stone! That would be something, wouldn’t it!”

I looked at her and laughed. “I should have been called Ewan D. Pen.”

She giggled like a child. “Or, I. B. Fuzz.”

“Or, I. M. Porker.”

She laughed out loud and we continued in that vein for a good ten minutes, getting gradually sillier, until Dehan was curling up in her seat and wiping tears from her eyes. It wasn’t that funny, but it was a release from the gloom of the day. After a bit we lapsed into silence again and the headlamps and the oncoming traffic outside the car acquired an almost hypnotic rhythm.

Suddenly she said, “What are we saying, that we have a weekend killer? Angela on Saturday the 14th, Rosario on the weekend of the 21st, and