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

But she wept disconsolately for a full two minutes, and every time she tried to talk she dissolved in tears again. Eventually we had a car drive her home and she promised, among sobs, that she would think about it and see if anything came back to her. I didn’t hold out much hope.

Downstairs I dropped into my chair and sat staring at the ceiling. Dehan rested her ass against the desk and looked down at me, chewing her lip. She said, “How did you know Rosario went to the bar alone on Friday?”

“I didn’t, but it seemed a likely possibility. Pam was cramping her style and she wanted to know this guy.” I shrugged. “And let’s face it, somehow she wound up alone with the killer.”

She tilted her head and made a face. “Good call.” Then she added, “It’s ten.”

I nodded. “We’ll go and see Frank, give him the tooth and the hair.”

“What do you think?”

I rubbed my face with my hands. “If it’s him, if he’s our guy, our magnetic, charismatic Don Juan didn’t make much of an impact on Pam.”

“She described him as average: just a guy.”

I sighed. “Caucasian, average height, non-descript dark hair, jeans or similar, perhaps a pale shirt.” I snapped my fingers. “I just know I have seen that guy, somewhere. It was either in the States or in Europe.”

“Could it be Wayne? Caucasian.” She gave her head a shake. “Dark hair…”

“Wayne Harris is anything but nondescript. He’s six four if he’s an inch. He’s built like a barn door and he has presence. You know he’s there.”

She nodded. “That’s true enough.”

I frowned at her. “Is he attractive?”

She looked surprised, then raised an eyebrow at me. “You getting jealous in your old age, Stone?”

“No, I’m serious. Is he an attractive man? We are speculating that our guy has a kind of magnetic charisma, right?” I shrugged. “You’re a woman. Has Wayne got that kind of magnetism?”

She thought about it as though I had asked her to contemplate vivisection. After a moment she shook her head. “You’re asking the wrong person. I detest guys like Wayne. He reminds me of Mick Harragan[1]. But I guess some women find that kind of dangerous, uncompromising guy exciting. He might lead them to take a risk, yeah.” She shook her head again. “But, Stone, much as I would love to pin this on Wayne, like you said yourself, he is hard to ignore, he is not nondescript, he has fair hair, and once again, why would he implicate himself by putting himself at the scene?”

I nodded, sighed and shrugged. She was right, and I had no answer to her questions.

She smiled without humor. “C’mon Sensei, let’s go talk to Frank. Then we can swing by Teddy’s, then my internal clock tells me it will be time for a burger and a beer—and a think.”

I stood and grabbed my jacket. “Rittoo Glasshopper, you are growing wise beyond your years.”

And we made our way out into the bright morning.

SIX

“My hands are full with the recently dead.”

Frank made this statement without looking up as he lifted the liver out of a cadaver that lay folded open like a book, from sternum to groin.

“Literally, not figuratively,” I said, frowning from the doorway into his chamber of horrors.

“What do you want, John?”

“Just for you to notice me once in a while, Frank. Is that too much to ask?”

He nodded, squinting at the scales and made a note. “What does he want, Carmen? Please make him go away. I am overworked.”

“DNA.”

“Oh, God.”

“It gets worse,” I said, pulled one of the chairs from the bench and sat. “I think we have a serial killer. If we are right, his MO means he could have been operating for years without anybody noticing, and he could still be at large. It’s urgent. Very urgent.”

He stared at me for a moment, then went and pulled the lungs out of the cadaver and weighed them too. Dehan placed the hairbrush and the tin with the tooth in it on his bench. “We need the DNA from these two samples, and then we need you to run them and see if they match any victims pulled from the river since May 2016.”

He made a note of the weight of the lungs. “Is that all? You don’t need the name and address of the second shooter on the grassy knoll?”

I shook my head. “Didn’t you hear? That wasn’t Kennedy in the car. It was his double. Kennedy was abducted by aliens from the twenty-third century.”

He put the lungs and the liver back where they belonged and sighed heavily. “Do you know what my wife said to me last night when I got home? She said, ‘Who the hell are you?’ My kids had grown up and left home. I never knew.”

He peeled off his gloves. I said, “He’s preying on young women, Frank. He rapes them and strangles them, then dumps them in the river.”

“Everyone who gets murdered gets murdered, John. It’s always a bad thing. Where are the samples?” Dehan showed them to him. He nodded. “OK, label them for me. I’ll get to them just as soon as I can.” We stared at him without moving. He stared back, first at me, then at Dehan. “I’ll get to them just as soon as I can, today! I won’t have lunch. Happy?”

I smiled. “You’re a good man, Frank. You deserve a better wife. One that hasn’t got Alzheimer’s.”

Dehan shook her head and bent to label the samples. “That is so inappropriate, Stone.”

Frank ignored me. “Don’t expect a report. I’ll run the results on my own time and give you a call if I get a match from the Jane Does. The official report will follow.”

“I appreciate it.”