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

He leered at me as he was led past.

Turner scowled at me. “Make yourself available, Detective.”

“Screw you, Special Agent!”

He ignored me and walked out.

We were silent for a moment. Then the captain said, “Stone, professionally I cannot condone what you have done. But I get it, and I will back you all the way.”

I stared at him.

“Where is she, Captain?”

Twenty

I sat on the steps of the church. The drizzle had turned to freezing rain. The wet blacktop beyond the grass pulsed with red and blue over a silver sheen. The meat wagons had arrived, and the gurneys made a grim procession, driven by men and women in glistening masks, ferrying the dead out of the church, while the Feds set about the business of minutely analyzing the crime scene.

I was staring at Dehan’s phone. I had one hour and fifty minutes. I hadn’t a single lead. And with every passing minute, the chances of finding her alive diminished. I kept asking myself, where was she going? Why had she left the observation room?

I flipped to her call register. Five minutes before I’d finished the interrogation with David, she had received a call from a cell phone. If it had been Zak or Peter, she would have put her head in the door and told me. The fact that she hadn’t meant it was either private or she didn’t think it was important. Somebody she’d met recently? A guy she’d given her number to? But if she didn’t think it was important, why did she leave the observation room? I tried to visualize Dehan walking out of an interrogation to talk to a guy. It didn’t work. That wasn’t the Dehan I knew…

And so I kept going, around and around in circles.

I looked over at Newman, talking to a Fed.

“Captain!” He approached me across the muddy grass. I showed him the phone. “This number called Dehan five minutes before she was taken. Two gets you twenty it’s a prepaid, unregistered phone, but can you have it checked anyhow?”

He nodded and reached for his cell. “Sure.”

I scrolled down through her calls as he walked away. I could hear him saying, “Yeah, trace a number for me, will you…?”

There was no record of that number having called her before or of her calling that number. So the chances of the call being related to some private, personal matter were slim at best. Which meant it was a call related to work, to this case…

Slowly, as the rain fell on the gleaming cars and vans and the blacktop, and the icy air crept off the river and felt its way into my muscles and my blood, the clear, simple reality began to dawn on me. This son of a bitch was all about showing you things the wrong way around. His game was to take the obvious and show it to you so that it looked like the opposite of what it was. The photograph was classic. That photograph was like a picture of him. It represented everything that he was about. Everything was the wrong way around and focused on the wrong person. That was him. That was the essence of how he operated.

All along, the focus had been on David. All along, the picture had been framed around David, with him as the focal point. But who was the photographer? Who was holding the camera and focusing the lens? Who had created the picture in the first place? Somebody nearby. Somebody clever. Somebody disciplined and organized. Somebody who was almost a mirror image of David.

I stood and walked to Turner, who was standing by one of the bureau vans.

“You got a computer I can use?”

He looked at me like I was a piece of shit somebody had failed to clean up. I sighed.

“Detective Dehan will die in less than two hours if I don’t find out where she is. I may have an idea, but I need a computer. Will you let me use one or not?”

He made an ugly face that even his mother would have wanted to slap. “I’m busy.”

I put my hand on his shoulder and leaned real close to his ear. “Turner, if you don’t give me a computer, first I am going to blow your testicles off. Then I am going to sue you for Detective Dehan’s wrongful death. I will take your job, your house, your car. I will break up your marriage, and I will make sure your kids hate your miserable guts for the rest of their lives. I will not stop, I will not desist, until I destroy you completely.”

I pulled back a little so he could look into my eyes and know that I meant it. He stared at me. I wasn’t shit anymore. Now I was a freak. I was moving up in the world. He leaned into the van and said, “Jerry, give me my laptop.”

He typed in his password and handed it to me. “I’ll check the history. Don’t do anything you might regret.”

I held his eye and tried to suppress the rage that was building inside me. “Right now, Special Agent Turner, you need to be worrying about whether I am going to do something you may regret. Stop waving your fucking dick around and get on the case.”

I took the computer into the church and started searching the land registry. It didn’t take long before I found what I was looking for. Peter Smith had a second house, on Jackson Avenue, in the Bronx. I knew the street. I knew the house. It was rough. Not what you would expect from Peter.

I went to call the captain, but he was coming for me. I said, “There is a chance she is at this address. We need