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

after all. That can happen. You meet to break up and you end up getting together. I didn’t find out she’d been killed for a few weeks. By that time, I’d moved on, man. I didn’t really think about it.”

“You’re a piece of work, Chad. You’re a real piece of work. So did she tell you she was coming over Sunday night or not?”

He shook his head. “No, she just sent me a couple of messages in the afternoon saying she loved me. And that was the last I heard from her.”

I asked, “Did you answer those messages?”

“Yeah.” He looked embarrassed again. “I told her I loved her too.”

Dehan gave him a look that might have withered a sequoia. “Don’t worry, your secret is safe with us. Nobody will ever know you pretended to be a human being once.”

She made a question with her face and showed it to me. Had I any more questions? I shook my head and stood.

“Your father was right, Chad. Focus and commitment are two sides of the same coin. But they aren’t the answer to life’s problems. The real secret is knowing what to focus on. If you focus on being a cheap shit all your life, then cheap shit is what life is going to give you. Enjoy your evening.”

FOUR

We spent the evening reading and digesting what little there was of the original report, and next morning, on the way to the station house, we took a detour to the corner of Colgate Avenue and Lafayette. It had rained heavily during the night and the roads were wet. The semi-wild riverbanks in Soundview Park were saturated and muddy, so we pulled on our rubber boots in the car and headed down the cycle path.

I didn’t know what I was hoping to learn from the exercise except, on some intuitive level, I guess I hoped to get a feel for her last few days. To a lot of cops, especially the later generations reared on IT, that might sound like horse manure. Maybe it was. I don’t know how the human mind works, but I do know that, with me at least, the whole process of working out who done it, and how, happens in some dark place in my unconscious. And right then, my dark unconscious wanted to have a look at the place where she washed up. So that’s what we did.

Dehan had brought the file with her, and some plastic envelopes for the photographs. We stood on the foot path, where it bends and then forks, located the spot on the bank and counted out sixty paces, going west and slightly north. There, the grass and undergrowth gave way to a small section of stony beach with a boulder at one end, maybe five feet by three. It was up against that boulder that her body had been found. I stood there, ankle deep in water, with the slight drizzle speckling my face, and looked around. Dehan was watching me, like she was wondering what I was doing. I might have told her, if she’d asked, that I had no idea.

She came a bit closer, looking at the file. “The ME said she was strangled. Bruising to her neck was extensive, so her killer probably had very strong hands. There was no water in her lungs, so she was put in the river post-mortem. She was definitely in the water for several days, possibly a week or more. She was probably thrown in upstream some place.”

I nodded at her. “Oh, I am quite sure she wasn’t killed here.” I stuck my hands in my pockets and looked upstream, toward the construction site and the cold, black ribbon of water that ran beside it. Where had she come from? I said:

“There aren’t that many places you can get access to the river up there. At the moment, I can’t think of any.” I shrugged one-shouldered. The drizzle trickled in through my hair and down my neck. “A corpse, hundred and ten, hundred and twenty pounds, is very hard to move around, even in dry conditions. What have we got up there? Industrial lots, fenced off from the road on one side and from the river on the other. It was raining. Assuming our killer could somehow manage the almost impossible feat of getting the body over those two fences, he now has to maneuver it through wet, slippery, overgrown undergrowth to be able to drop it into the river…”

Dehan was watching me and nodding slowly. She added, “Not only that, he must have weighted her down, too. Corpses float for a long time before they finally sink. If she was in the water for a week, that means she was weighted down until the current finally broke her free and dragged her here.”

I grunted. “That’s quite an achievement. All that without getting noticed, picked up on CCTV or without setting off any alarms.” I took a deep breath and sucked my teeth. “What else have we got up there, Dehan?”

“Westchester Avenue bridge. But that’s fenced off too, and there would be a lot of traffic. The risk of being seen and reported would be very high.”

“After that, it’s the railway and Starlight Park, by the depot on East 177th. But by then, the river is narrow and shallow.” I shook my head. He had to dump her at, or south of, Starlight Park. And I can’t, for the life of me, think of a place between there and here where he might have done that without having to get through chain-link fences and dense undergrowth while carrying or dragging a hundred weight of dead body.” I looked at her, wiped the drizzle from my eyes and said, “If I was looking for a place to dump a body, within a short driving distance from the Watson Gleason Playground, I’d come here.