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

She pulled on a thick coat, a brown and white angora wool hat and matching gloves, and we went to collect the keys to the properties. Then we made our way out into the ice-cold street. There was no snow, but what moisture there was on the roads had frozen and they had the brittle look of thin ice. We crossed to my ancient Jaguar—an authentic, right hand drive, burgundy Mark II from 1964, with leather seats and walnut trim—and climbed in. As we slammed the doors, shutting out the icy air, Dehan said, “I can see why Varou… the ADA.”

“Varoufakis.”

I fired up the engine and reversed out of the lot. Dehan was still talking.

“I can see why he’s not satisfied. A Sig Sauer Tacops p226, new, is going to cost you over a grand. It’s a serious pro’s weapon, favored by special ops units like the Seals and Delta Force. You can pick up a Glock 17, which is a damn good gun, for half the price. Or a Taurus, which is OK, for half that again. So what is Dr. Agnes Shine doing with a thousand buck weapon that isn’t registered to her, or anybody else?”

I turned from Storey onto Soundview and made a, “Hmmm…” noise. “Did you look at the photograph of him?”

“Which one?”

“The portrait.” She watched me but didn’t say anything. “He looks to me like the kind of man who might own an expensive gun. Possibly he wouldn’t own a gun, but if he did, he would buy an expensive one.”

“You can tell that from his portrait photograph?”

“Sure. You don’t believe me? What is the betting he drove a German car?”

“What…?”

“Come on, what do you think he drove?”

“I have no idea, Stone.”

“Audi are too common for him, likewise Mercedes, and VW. Porsche is out of his price range. BMW. The three-twenty, in…”

“Come on!”

“Wait—in white.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Not at all. He wears a pink shirt with a turquoise, cashmere sweater, and he has the collar on the outside. That kind of thing can tell you a lot about a man and his relationship with his mother: he is vain, showy, has poor judgment, bad taste, and he believes he is entitled to the best because Mommy told him so.”

She sighed and shook her head. “Anyway, OK, so maybe the gun was his. Still, it is odd that it was not registered.”

“Laws are pretty tight here. Still, I take your point, if he had one, you’d expect it to be legal. By the way, what did you think about the picture of him in the chair, shot?”

She leafed through them till she’d found it. She was quiet for a moment, examining it.

“Not a lot. They’d been drinking. He has a glass of wine beside him.” She leafed through them again and looked at another picture. “There is another glass on the table beside the sofa. They were both sent for fingerprinting, and the bottle.”

“What’s the wine?”

“The wine?”

“Yes, what is it? California, Chile, French…?”

She peered at the picture. “It looks like… Bogle Vineyards, 2016. Is that important?”

“California. It might be, Little Grasshopper.”

“Whatever… It was sent for fingerprinting too. What else? Nothing much. Why? Am I missing some cigarette ash or something? Are you going to identify the killer by the texture of the burned paper?”

“That vitriol which is drooling from your lips, Detective Dehan, will come back to burn you in the ass. We are here.”

I pulled into Patterson Avenue and, as we crossed into Compton and Stephen, we were suddenly in a country village somewhere in New England. I smiled. “I love these little corners of the Bronx, don’t you, Dehan? You’re in this vast city, with millions of people around you, and yet you could be in rural Maine.”

She cocked an eyebrow at me. “Is this what they call being whimsical, Stone? Are you feeling whimsical today? You haven’t got a craving for tinned peaches and oysters, have you? Tell me you’re not pregnant.”

I chortled good humouredly and slowed outside a large, clapboard house on three floors plus an attic, with yellow tape across the porch. The house was part of a row of four that were all oddly grotesque, but somehow managed to be attractive. Everywhere about them was a superabundance of foliage from the woodland in the park at the back of the houses.

“That’s his house, right?”

“Uh-uh. Hers is the first on the left, after the trees, about two hundred yards down.”

Agnes’ house was, like all the houses on Stephens Avenue, peculiar. It was set behind a chain link fence and gate, beyond a large lawn that must have been thirty yards long at the very least, and a good fifteen yards across. Like Jose’s house, it was clapboard, but seemed to be put together from bits that were left over from other clapboard houses.

It had a gable roof and also a flat roof, an arch over a carport, a chimney that ran all the way up the outside of the house, right beside the front door, and a flight of six substantial stone steps up to that door. I was still trying to work out how the fireplace could be next to the front door when I noticed a broad flight of wooden steps going up to the second story, on the outside of the carport. It was like something from the Picasso school of abstract architecture.

Here, too, there was yellow tape across the chain link fence, and also across the front porch. We climbed out, and the slam of the car doors echoed across the icy morning. A couple of ravens, scared by the reports, flapped darkly away toward Pugsley Creek Park. The lawn was well-tended, the frosty grass was short and was obviously mowed