Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set) by Blake Banner (best ereader for academics .txt) 📕

Again the deep breath, the drifting gaze, a slight smile. “I don’t always seem to be the same person.”

“Do you remember the trip to Geneva?”

“I saved up for that for a long time. I had money saved too, from when Mommy died.”

“You went to a clinic.”

“It was there or the U.K. I preferred Geneva. It seemed… cleaner.”

“You understand that changing your sex does not change your identity.”

She nodded. Then she shrugged. “But sometimes, changing your identity can change your sex.”

I turned to Dehan, who was sitting very quietly. “Get a couple of the guys, will you?” She nodded and stood. I stood too and looked down at Sandy. “Cyril Browne, Sandy Beach, I am arresting you on five counts of murder. You do not have to say anything, but anything you do say may and will be taken down in evidence and used against you in a court of law.”

Epilogue

The snow was coming down heavier. Through the window I could see the sidewalks blanketed in pristine white. There was not a soul on the streets and the cars looked like icing sugar castellations fringing the roads. The fire was burning in the grate and the room was warm and fragrant of roasting chicken. I turned as the back door opened and Dehan came in, stamping and puffing, with her shapeless wool hat on her head and a big, brown box in her arms.

“I always think,” she said, “that a Christmas tree should look like a badly wrapped Christmas present. Over the top.”

She grinned at me as she kicked the door closed, approached and dumped the box on the sofa. “Mine’s a martini, plenty dry. And put some tunes on, will’ya? I like that playlist with Bing and Santa Baby. It reminds me of my dad. He loved all that…”

All this was said breathlessly as she opened the big carton and started pulling out armfuls of tinsel, intended for the big tree that stood by the window.

I went to my laptop, on the breakfast bar, and started searching while she pulled off her hat and coat and started hanging the first baubles. We were quiet for a moment. Then she stepped back, gazing at the big red ball she’d just hung, and sighed.

“I’ve been over it in my mind several times, Stone. I still don’t get how you knew, so early on, that Sandy was Cyril.”

The laptop started singing, “Booboom, booboom, booboom, booboom…” I went over to the sideboard and started mixing a martini, dry.

“I didn’t know until later, but I suspected. The first thing that alerted me was the fact that the killer had made no effort at all to hide his identity, his fingerprints and his DNA. If he had been caught immediately among the guests, or on CODIS or IAFIS, you just put it down to being stupid.” I handed her her drink. “But he wasn’t anywhere to be found. So that meant he wasn’t stupid. And if somebody who isn’t stupid is so brazen about their identity as to leave their prints and their DNA at a rape and murder scene, that can only mean they are extremely confident that they will never be found.”

She sipped and shrugged. “Put like that…”

“It was also pretty obvious to me from the start that it had to be Cyril. In your words, Dehan, entia non sunt multipilicanda praeter necesitatem.”

“Yeah, go on, throw it in my face!”

I smiled and poured myself a Bushmills. “So the question I was wrestling with pretty much from the beginning was, what had Cyril done to be so confident his DNA and fingerprints would not trap him? Merry run up to Christmas.”

We toasted and sipped. I went and sat, enjoying the sight of her dressing the tree.

“Logically, it had to be something so radical that it was tantamount to a total change of identity. A change that would make any detective discard the possibility that he had raped and murdered her, out of hand. Becoming a woman would obviously do that. I confess, the idea was so extreme that for a while I couldn’t accept it myself. That was why I was so keen to meet his sister and find out about his childhood.”

The tree was taking shape as she draped a long string of gold tinsel from the top down in a wide spiral.

“What we found in Elk Grove seemed to confirm my theory, such as it was at that stage. He and his mother had been very close, like any mother and son. But he had then witnessed his mother die, if not at the hands of his father, certainly as a result of his father’s rage. The experience had been deeply traumatic, and, as you saw yourself, his sister’s tender mercies were not exactly therapeutic.”

Dehan turned and nodded. “No, she seemed bent on destroying his identity, his self esteem and his independence.”

“We’ll never know for sure, but I suspect her father was a bit like that. The best way to control people is to destroy their belief in themselves. Poor Cyril had his belief in himself so deeply damaged that he turned to his dead mother to try and heal him. Consciously or unconsciously—probably both—he tried to follow her. In his words, he was trying to ‘come home’.”

“Come home to his mother.”

I nodded. “It’s an expression that is full of symbolic meaning. He wants to return to his mother, he wants to return to a place that is safe, where he is loved and respected. The years following his mother’s death, until he was finally able to leave home, must have been hell: a constant, systematic destruction of his self esteem, being told day in and day out that he was an incompetent fantasist.