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

this evening. It will probably come to the station. It will probably have a date for the next killing, or something close.”

“How… how can you possibly know that?”

I glanced at her. “Wait. I’m thinking.”

I pulled up outside the precinct and ran up the stairs. Frank, who’d been keeping Peter happy for me, grabbed my arm. “He’s in interrogation room three, and he’s pissed.”

“Thanks.”

I pushed into the room with Dehan on my tail. Peter looked up. His eyes were bright with indignation. “Do you know how long…?”

I cut across him. “How long have you been wearing Spanish shoes?”

“What?”

“How long, Peter?”

“I don’t know…” He screwed up his face at me. I waited. “Since I was… About fifteen years. What in the name of heaven…?”

I closed the door. Dehan was looking at me like I was crazy. They both were. I pulled up a chair and sat down.

“I haven’t got time to fuck around, Peter. So forgive me if I am blunt. You are not a very nice person. There must be a few people at work who really don’t like you. I need to know who they are.”

“How dare you…!”

“Deal with it! Now tell me! Who?”

He went to stand. “I don’t have to…”

“Who?”

He looked flustered and a little scared. “Um… Johnson, Cohen, Brown…”

“Any others?”

“Not really…”

“Did any of them travel to California with you in 2005?”

He frowned. “No. I went alone.”

I was quiet for a while, thinking. I walked to the door, opened it, and bellowed, “Any messages for me?” A few blank faces looked and shook their heads. I closed the door and looked at Peter. “You know David?”

“David? What David? I know a couple of Davids.”

“From the Global Computer Shipping Company. They own the units…”

“Yes. We’ve exchanged the odd nod. He’s supplied me with my computers over the years. Odd fellow, but helpful.”

“Over the years?”

He shrugged and shook his head, “Ten, maybe more… fifteen.”

“Ever run across him in San Diego?”

“No…”

“L.A.?”

“No…!”

“You realize we can check, and if we find you’re lying, that will count against you.”

“In what? For God’s sake, Detective! What in the name of God is going on here?”

“Let me see your shoes.” He stared at me, and his face flushed. He looked as though he was about to get violent. I said, “Are you refusing to show me your shoes?”

He took a deep breath. “I am going to show you my shoes. Then I am going to go home. If you want to keep me, then charge me with something, but it had better be something more than wearing Spanish shoes or knowing David. Frankly, Detective, your behavior is bordering on the irrational.”

“Your shoes.”

He unlaced them, took them off, and slammed them on the table. I looked at them carefully and smelled the soles. I handed them back to him.

“Thank you, Mr. Smith. I apologize for the inconvenience. You can go.”

He stared at me in disgust. “You people. No wonder this country is going to the dogs!”

He put his shoes back on, and as he slammed out, a uniform leaned in. “Note delivered for you…”

I pushed past her and ran. I took the stairs a landing at a time and shouted at the desk sergeant, “Who delivered the note?”

He pointed at the door. “Kid—he just left, in a hoodie…”

I leapt out of the door into the gathering night as Dehan came clattering after me. It was raining. There was a young man, maybe a hundred yards away, hunched in a dark hoodie, passing through a pool of misty light cast by a streetlamp. I heard the sergeant shout, “That’s him!”

Dehan and I took off at a sprint down the wet road. The guy must have heard us coming because he looked back and started to run. We caught him at the corner and slammed him against the wall of the deli.

“I ain’t done nothin’! I aint done nothin’, man! Let me go!”

Dehan snarled, “You ain’t done nothing? Why’d you run?”

“You was chasin’ me! I ran!”

Dehan cuffed him, and I turned him around. He was about eighteen, black, and scared.

“Tell me about the note.”

He shrugged and glanced from me to Dehan and back again, wondering which one to be scared of. “I don’t know nothin’ about the note. Guy said to deliver it to the desk sergeant. That’s what I done. I never even read it.”

I wiped water from my eyes. “What’s this guy look like?”

“Average height. Jeans, dark hoodie. Big shades and a scarf around his mouth. He give me fifty bucks and said he’d be watchin’. If I didn’t deliver it, bad things was gonna happen.”

I sighed. “Okay, come on. You’re going to make a statement. Then you can go home. Uncuff him, Dehan.”

I left the kid in the hands of a sergeant who took his statement, and Dehan and I went back to have a look at the note. It was still sitting on the table in the interrogation room. It was a piece of A4 photographic paper, folded in half. On the outside it simply bore my name, but on the inside, taking up half the page, there was a photograph. It looked like a shopping mall at dusk taken from the parking lot. There was a brightly lit door and a woman walking in through that door, toward the shops. In the foreground there were several cars out of focus. There was a time and date stamp on the photograph. It had been taken two hours earlier, while I was on the phone to Peter. On the top half, above the photograph, there was printed, “Tick tock, tick tock…”

“Where is this place? Who is this woman?”

Dehan was thinking fast. “It has to be within two hours drive in rush hour