Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [story read aloud .txt] 📗

I spent the damned weekend with a chick who wanted me to pay attention to her.’ ‘Oh, OK, Mr. Norris, don’t worry, we’ll give you an A anyway!’ It doesn’t happen that way.”

“So what happened?”

“I went upstairs to get away from her and Nigel…” He froze. His face flushed with anger. “Did he leave yet? Did you hear him leave?”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Stay focused, Chad. What happened?”

He took a deep breath and bit his lip. “OK! So I went upstairs to get away from Celeste and Nigel, in my own house, I went upstairs to get away from their incessant yammering! And the damned TV! I guess she spent the day here and in the evening I came down, they had opened a bottle of wine and I had a glass. She goes up to the john and while she’s up there, Nigel starts telling me I should know when I am onto a good thing. I am not likely to find a girl as good and loyal as Celeste. She really loves me, I should take more care of her, yadda yadda yadda. Bottom line, if I am not careful, she will find somebody else.”

“Was he saying that he was interested in her?”

He burst out laughing. “Nigel? Nah! Nigel is gay. He likes sailors with striped shirts and big mustaches. Isn’t that right, Nigel?” There was a little gasp from the door, the stamping of feet and the front door slammed. “Son of a bitch was at the door all along.”

I sighed. “So what did he mean, she would find somebody else?”

He nodded several times. “I know, right? She’s eating here, she’s sleeping here, she’s watching my TV, using my utilities, and all the while she’s fucking some other guy. So I took her phone and I started looking through the messages. And I see there is this guy…” He thought for a moment. “Rod? Rod, yeah, and he is sending her all these messages about how hot she is and how he wants to do this to her and that to her…”

Dehan said, “And how was she responding to these messages?”

He stared hard at her, with eyes that were almost calculating. “That was the smart thing, right? She didn’t respond in kind. Her replies were all short. But, each one of them had something to encourage him. She was enticing him to believe that there could be something between them, if…”

“If what?”

“I told you at the start. Chicks like Celeste are predators. They’re out hunting for a guy who will solve their problems. If she was going to sleep with him, she wanted something in return. She wasn’t a hooker, but she was a whore.”

“Did you confront her with the messages?”

“You bet your sweet ass I did!”

She stared at him for a long moment. “Watch your mouth there, Chad. What happened when you told her you’d looked at her phone?”

“At first, she was mad and started screaming at me that I had no right to check her phone. But then when I started reading the stuff this guy had written to her, she started crying and apologizing. I asked her how many other guys she was screwing around with. She said she wasn’t screwing around with anybody. It was just this guy, it was a game, she was going to tell him to get lost…”

I scratched my head. “Chad. You need to explain this to me. You say she was not your girlfriend. You were just friends with benefits. Yet you got mad when you discovered she’d been cheating on you. You have a big bust up and I’m guessing you kicked her out…”

He gave a small laugh and looked down at the carpet. “Not exactly.”

“Not exactly? What does that mean?”

He shrugged. “The bust up was kind of hot, and you know… Make up sex is the best. She spent the night again, we chilled in the morning and then she went home around midday.”

I scratched my Adam’s apple for a bit, trying to visualize the scene. It wasn’t all that hard. “Did she contact you again during the afternoon?”

“Yeah, she sent me a couple of messages.” He shrugged. “You know, the usual stuff, she loved me, that kind of shit.”

Dehan said, “What about Rod?”

He shrugged. “What about him?”

“Did she say she was going to dump him? How did you leave that? You were pretty mad at her because of him.”

He stared at a couple of walls for a bit, like he was embarrassed. “Yeah, she said she was going to tell him to lay off. She wasn’t into him anyway. She’d been kind of stringing him along for a laugh.”

“So do you know him? Do you know who he is?”

He shook his head. “Nah, she said he was some guy she knew. I never met him. Anyway, she said she was going to tell him to leave her alone.”

I narrowed my eyes and shook my head. “It never occurred to you that this guy might have been the one who killed her?”

His face went a pasty, yellow color. “No…”

Dehan stared at me. “Can you believe this guy? Ivy League.” She looked back at him. “You seriously expect me to believe that you saw those sexually explicit messages, you saw that she was teasing him and giving him the come on, and the night after you force her to break it off, she disappears, and you didn’t connect the dots? You did not see that there was a possible, probable, connection between her disappearance and breaking off with this guy!”

He shook his head. “No… She stopped coming around. I thought maybe, even though we’d had the make up, she’d had enough. Maybe it was just over and that was like the grand finale. Plus, I thought maybe she’d hooked up with this guy