Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (A Dead Cold Box Set) by Blake Banner (read with me .TXT) 📕

could get a DNA profile on him. That murder was totally out of character with Angela’s killer. It was obviously a frame.”

They both looked embarrassed. The inspector nodded. “The results came back. It was Jimmy’s DNA. As you predicted.”

I shrugged. “Jimmy Fillmore was a nice guy who was a little simple. Like Wayne and Teddy, he had a thing about Hispanic women. But unlike Wayne and Teddy, he didn’t want to kill them, he just wanted to sleep with them. He didn’t have much success, he was described more than once as the kind of guy you just didn’t notice, so, often as not, he resorted to prostitutes. This was something that both Wayne and Teddy knew.

“So they paid Noelia, perhaps Zena—who knows?—to keep the contents of the condom.” I turned to Dehan. “You wondered why I asked where the semen was on Cherry’s clothes. Her skirt was rumpled up under her ass. There was no way the semen could have got there unless it was placed. It was stupid to go to the trouble of not leaving prints, then leave his semen and not dump her in the river, as he had done with all his other victims.”

The inspector sighed. “We should have seen it.” He frowned. “But why Jimmy? Why pick on Jimmy Fillmore?”

“It was one of those unfortunate coincidences, a series of unfortunate events, if you like. Wayne came to New York from Arizona, maybe he was running, maybe he was drifting, maybe we’ll never know. He said he didn’t like New York, but something made him stay. That something was that he happened to meet a fellow traveler, Teddy, somebody who shared his own peculiar fantasies. Another thing we will probably never know is whether either of them had killed before, or whether it was their friendship that gave them the impetus to turn their fantasies into reality. But one of the things that struck me was that, when I asked Teddy if he knew Wayne, he said he had never met him. It stuck somewhere in the back of my mind. Yet Wayne talked about Teddy as though they were old friends.” I sighed. “I was very slow to see that, even though it was staring me in the face.

“Trouble was, by then it had become urgent for me to find Jimmy, because I was aware that if Wayne and his invisible accomplice had set Jimmy up for the frame, obviously, they would have to kill him before we got to him.”

Dehan raised both hands. “Slow down. You still haven’t explained, why Jimmy in the first place.”

“Yeah…” I sighed again. It had been a couple of days, but my bruises still ached and I still had a throb in my head. “Jimmy was a surprisingly complex character, and he was invaluable to Wayne and Teddy. To most people he was the classic Mr. Cellophane: Mr. Invisible. That was how Pam described him, and how Teddy described him. But when you did stop to look at him, he was good-looking: He had those big brown eyes that so many women find attractive, and—and this was crucial—he was sincere and vulnerable. He was a fantasist, a dreamer, but he had no malice in him. He was one of life’s natural victims. And that was very appealing to one particular type of young woman.

“We’ll never know exactly how it went down. But at some point Teddy or Wayne, or both of them, realized that Jimmy was a magnet for those very girls that they were attracted to—that they fantasized about killing. Girls who would disdain Wayne’s brutishness and Teddy’s middle-aged, uncle-ish looks, would find Jimmy adorable. They would want to mother him. So they began to encourage it. Those were the photographs we saw. Friendly, fun evenings at the local family bar.

“And Wayne fancied himself as a bit of a natural psychologist. Maybe he did have a low, cunning grasp of people’s most basic motivations. So my guess is he began to encourage Jimmy’s fantasies and even feed them. And Jimmy began to pass these on to the girls. Remember, these girls came from sheltered backgrounds and were very naïve. If Jimmy told them his dad was a TV producer making him work his way through college, and Teddy and Wayne backed him up and vouched for him, they might well believe him. It wouldn’t be hard then to lure them in to a trap.” I shook my head. “Where they would never follow Wayne or Teddy—to an apartment, to some rendezvous—they might follow Jimmy, in all his simple innocence, without question. He was quite simply a perfect bait for the kind of girls that Wayne and Teddy liked to prey on.”

Dehan nodded. “You kept asking me if Wayne was attractive. I kept on saying, to some women he would be, but not to the Angelas and Rosarios of this world. Jimmy was cute, he lacked something, but like you say, to a nice, maternal family girl, he could be attractive.”

“Four things clinched it for me at Jimmy’s apartment: the fact that Jimmy shot himself with his left hand, which was simply impossible; the fact that none of the trophies in the box related to Rosario or Sonia, the two glasses…”

The inspector cut in: “They had, as you suspected, Wayne’s prints on them.” He frowned. “And Frank said to tell you there was rum in his belly.”

I nodded, “And the lipstick.”

Dehan narrowed her eyes. “You keep talking about lipstick. What is it with the lipstick?”

I smiled. “One of them, Wayne or Teddy.” I shrugged. “Perhaps both, was fixated with kissing and lipstick. We will eventually find the true trophies, and they will be the lipsticks. Maybe then we’ll get a real idea of how many girls they killed between them. All the girls had extensive bruising on their lips. Even Noelia, who was not the perfect profile for them, had her lipstick