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

the black glass behind Dehan’s head. For some reason, they were making me sleepy. I really wanted to go home and sleep. I sighed. “We have to start eliminating suspects.”

She gave a humorless laugh. “You may want to rephrase that. And speaking of which, the lab phoned. The soap was mixed with chicken’s blood. There were no prints anywhere. The shoe print on your mat would be a man of about five ten to six foot. The tread belongs to a fairly uncommon shoe. It’s European and you’d have to buy it online or go to Europe.” She was leafing through pages in her notebook. “Gallardo. A Spanish shoe. Handmade, real leather, they have a website—gallardo.com.”

I typed it in and looked at their shoes. They were nice. I memorized the tread.

“Maybe, Dehan, maybe at last we have something.”

Twelve

I dropped Dehan at her apartment and then passed by the shopping mall to get a bottle of Floradix liquid iron. When I got home, I checked the back door was bolted, poured some liquid iron into a tumbler, and went out on the porch. The road was silent but for the gentle patter of drizzle on the leaves. Nothing moved except the leaves of the evergreens bowing gently in the icy breeze. The gleam of the streetlamps on the wet blacktop gave it a feeling of desolation. I wondered if he was out there, watching me. I carried my glass down to the sidewalk and stood looking first one way, then the other, scanning the small front gardens, identifying each car by owner. There was nothing I could see that was out of the ordinary.

I went back up the steps to the porch, where the door stood open. I smelled the liquid iron. It was awful. I bent and carefully spilled it all over the porch. Then I went inside to make myself a steak and sleep the sleep of the babes and angels.

I was in bed by ten, and by four seconds past, I was asleep. I slept deeply and solidly for five hours. At three I woke up, and for a couple of seconds I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming or not. My front doorbell was ringing incessantly. I heard a car door slam and the rising pitch of a car pulling away, then fading. I pulled on my pants, slipped my automatic in my waistband, and went downstairs. There was a note on the mat, and the bell was still ringing.

I cocked the gun, stood to one side, removed the chair, and opened the door. Nothing happened. The bell was still ringing. I peered outside. There was nobody on the porch and nobody visible in the street. There was a toothpick wedged in the bell. I pulled it out and the ringing stopped. I examined it to see if it had been chewed. It hadn’t.

I closed the door, got my surgical gloves from my jacket pocket, and picked up the note. I sat in my armchair and read it.

Well, Detective Stone, here we are at last. It has been a long time coming. I confess I had given up. Your colleagues twelve years ago were anything but persistent. They were no mach for me and, ironically, I found that demoralizing. That bestial hunger, that daemon that dwells within me, fell into a long slumber. But now I realize it was simply waiting for it’s moment of destiny, an opponant worthy of my genius. And here you are, finally, ready to do battle. I shall not disappoint you.

The Beast is awake and hungry, be prepared.

I read it over several times, assimilating the elaborate wordiness, the slightly infantile attempt at archaic English, the misspelling of “match” and “opponent,” and the misused apostrophe in “its.” I scanned it and saved a copy on my computer, printed a copy, and put the original in an evidence bag, then called the precinct for a crime scene team to come over.

They arrived fifteen minutes later, and after I’d chatted to Frank—the team leader—for five minutes, I told them to help themselves to coffee and lock up when they were done. Then I sent Dehan a Whatsapp telling her I wouldn’t pick her up in the morning, and went back to bed to sleep another four hours.

Next morning, I had a couple of messages waiting for me when I got to my desk. The first was an email from the San Diego PD, with several attachments. Detective Ramirez had heard that I was looking into unsolved dismemberment cases, and had remembered one from the summer of 2005. He had taken the trouble to dig it out and send it to me.

I printed it and read through it. There wasn’t much. Some workmen had found a torso in the wasteland near the MCAS Miramar airfield. It was female and the arms, legs, and head had been removed. As with our arms, whoever had done it had some skill, though not perhaps the skill of a surgeon. The rest of the body was never found. There was practically no forensic evidence, and they were never able to go any further with it.

I looked at the date. The torso was found Monday, July 18. Exact time of death was impossible to determine, but decomposition was in its earliest stages. The body being out in the open air, that would suggest it had been there only a very short time.

I checked the calendar for 2005. I didn’t need to, but it pays to be thorough. The eighteenth was the Monday following the third weekend.

The second message was from the sheriff of Lyman County in South Dakota. He didn’t know if it would be of any interest to me or not, but a few years back, 2012, they had found some human remains just outside Oacoma. It seemed to be a woman’s skull. Judging by the work that had