Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [classic children's novels txt] 📗

YOU’D HAVE DONE BETTER TO LEAVE ME SLEEPING.

The Crime Scene team turned up within twenty minutes and did a thorough sweep of the house. It didn’t take them long. By half past nine, they had established that he had picked the lock, which I logged as one of his skills, he had gone directly upstairs, written on my mirror, come down, left the note carefully on the mat, and left. Careful observation had shown traces of a muddy shoe print under where the note had been. It was not my shoe or Dehan’s, and there was no trace of shoe prints anywhere else in the house, ergo he slipped plastic covers over his wet shoes and left the note when he left.

Frank, the team leader, paused at the door as they were leaving. “We’ll get a good DNA sample from the blood. The only question you have then is, is it his blood? You going to be okay? You want me to send a car from the precinct?”

I shook my head. “No. I don’t want to scare him off. Let him grow confident.”

“Your call.”

He went down the stairs. There was a volley of car doors in the wet night, and they pulled away. I watched their red taillights disappear and turned to Dehan, who was standing behind me with her arms crossed, shivering slightly.

“You want me to drive you home?”

She shook her head. “You going to kick me out without feeding me? What kind of man are you? After all I’ve done for you.”

I closed the door. “I need more than takeout.”

I went to the kitchen, found a bottle of Turnbull Cabernet Sauvignon, 2013. I’d heard it was exceptional, so I opened it and poured two glasses. She watched me do it and said, “You’re supposed to let it breathe.”

I raised my glass to her, and she chinked hers against mine.

“Let us be grateful, Carmen, that we are still breathing. It can breathe while we drink.”

She laughed suddenly. It was startling. “You’re a riot, Stone. You’re cool. Let me see what you’ve got.” She opened my fridge and started rummaging in my cupboards. “Let’s have spaghetti. You like spaghetti? I’ll make spaghetti.”

She made spaghetti and we finished the bottle. It was better after it had breathed.

Dehan had the spare room. I put the dead bolt on the back door and wedged a chair under the front door. I more or less slept, but if I slept seven hours, I woke up seven times imagining I’d heard something. It was probably wind and rain. But seven times I got up to check, and to look in on Dehan to make sure she was okay.

As soon as I saw the sky turning gray, I was able to fall asleep properly. But I caught an hour and a half at most, because at half eight, Dehan was cooking bacon and making coffee again. I groaned and dragged myself to the shower.

As I sat, she put a plate of fried eggs, bacon, and toast in front of me, with a large cup of black coffee.

“Lots of protein this morning, Sensei. How many times did you get up last night? I counted seven.”

“Seven.”

“The bureau called.”

I frowned at her.

“Your phone was on the table. It rang. The screen said Bernie. I answered. It was the bureau.”

“What they want?”

“They’re sending over Dr. Fenninger at eleven to talk to us and review what we have.”

“Good. Thanks, Dehan.”

She sat opposite and smiled. “God. I feel like your mother.”

Special Agent Anja Fenninger was neat, petite, and aggressively efficient in a way that only neat, petite women can be. She arrived bang on eleven with blonde hair and a luminous smile and said that she believed that if you were in time you would always be on time. Or it may have been the other way around. Either way, she was both. I looked for signs of rain on her neat blue jacket and her blonde hair. There weren’t any, and there was no mud on her shoes either. Neat, petite people can do that, effortlessly.

We found a conference room and sat around the table.

“What makes you think you’re dealing with a serial killer?”

I outlined the investigation so far and highlighted the point about the arms. “It’s hard to get around. If the killer was trying to dispose of the body and get rid of the evidence of the killing, then A, why didn’t he do with the arms what he had successfully done with the rest of the body? And B, what prompted him to leave the arms in a place where he must be sure they would be found before long? Add to this the fact that that particular unit seems to have been chosen over the others, and it looks as though we may be dealing with an organized serial killer.”

Agent Fenninger listened very carefully, not looking at me but gazing abstractedly at the table. When I’d finished, she blinked once and said, “I agree. Couple of things I want to clarify first, though. Profiling, in any field, is descriptive and not prescriptive. That is so much more so in the case of serial killers, because we know so little about them. Some psychologists suggest that there is actually no such condition as a serial killer. However, what we can do, and we do it rather well, is describe what we have seen and what seems to be typical so far.” She gave a small laugh, as though somebody had just suggested something stupid. “That does not mean that serial killers are somehow required to follow the rules that we at the bureau have laid down.”

I nodded. “Understood.”

“Having said that…” She leaned back in her chair and said