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

“I don’t know. The wine glasses have coasters, everything is neat and tidy, and yet she has blown eight holes in her twenty thousand dollar suede chair. And she has used a silencer.”

“How the hell do you know that? There’s triple glazing…”

“A fact which she would have known. But the penetration, from a 9mm Sig, there would have been deeper penetration into the chair, I think. The silencer reduces the velocity of the bullet.”

I crossed the landing to the bedroom. The drapes were closed. They too were a dark green, and thin cracks of green light glowed down their sides from the park woodland outside. The bed was made and uncreased. I went into the en suite bathroom. There was a shower cubicle, but no bath. The towels were all folded and clean. There was a shower gel scented with lime and lavender, and an anti-frizz shampoo for extra body. And there were a lot of other things I had started to find in my own bathroom since I had married Dehan.

I stepped out of the bathroom and saw Dehan with her arms crossed, leaning against the doorjamb, looking down at the bed.

“I know what you mean,” she said. “There is no disorder.”

“The only disorder is the killing.” I thought a moment. “The killing, and the fact that she is missing. We may find she’s a little OCD when we talk to her workmates.”

“Mm-hm. I think you’re right.”

“This place has nothing to tell me, Dehan. Which, in itself, says something, but I’m not sure what yet. Let’s take a walk and see what his house has to say.”

We stepped out into the cold, still air and walked, hunched into our coats, the two hundred yards back up the road to Jose Robles’ house. This house was, again, peculiar. The first floor was made of raw stone, like big rocks cemented together, then filed down so they were flat. It was indescribably ugly. A flight of steps, which looked like something out of a medieval castle, rose to the front door, not directly, but across the façade of the house; and that front door was not at ground level, but on the second floor. The third floor and the attic were all clapboard, like the back of the house.

As we approached, breathing great clouds of condensation, Dehan, whose nose and cheeks had turned red under her hat, said, “Do you think these houses were designed in the ’60s, and the architects were all high on acid?”

“It would explain a lot.”

We turned in off the sidewalk and headed for the stairs. Just to the left of them was a double garage. I stopped, took hold of Dehan’s elbow and pointed. She stared, then looked me in the face and emitted a high-pitched laugh, which she kept going all the way up the steps to the front door. The reason for her laughter was the white BMW 320 which was parked outside the garage.

She opened the door and we went in. The front door gave directly onto the living room. It was a style that in the late ’60s and early ’70s would have been considered modern. The walls were paneled in tongue and groove, the fireplace was stone and the furniture was all low and leather, though none of it was of the class or quality of Agnes’ stuff.

There were many lamps, of all kinds of shapes and sizes, mostly pretentious and all of it expensive. There was a large coffee table in the middle of the floor that seemed to be made out of hunks of driftwood, and there were books, lots of them, stuffed into every available nook and cranny. Most of them were in Spanish, but a good number of professional reference books were in English. Open on the table was the Journal of the Electrochemical Society. I picked it up and had a look at what he was reading: The Development and Future of Lithium Ion Batteries, by George E. Blomgren. It didn’t mean much to me. I put it back down and continued looking around. He had a well stocked bar, and there was a lot of soot in the fire.

I pointed at the alcoves on either side of the fire, where cabinets and shelves had been put in. “Unlike her, he has photographs.”

She moved over and started looking at them, muttering, “Yeah, Agnes didn’t have any. That was odd.”

I went and hunkered down by the fire. I took the poker from the stand and started poking around in the soot. There were still a few hunks of blackened wood that had not burned completely. I stood and looked at his collection of bottles. He had Tio Pepe dry sherry, Martini, Gordon’s Gin, Beefeater, Glenfiddich Scotch whiskey and Johnny Walker Red Label.

Dehan spoke suddenly, still looking at the photographs. “Looks like his family. That looks like his mother and his father and a bunch of friends. They’re cooking paella out in the country. That guy has to be his brother.”

I stood and looked over her shoulder. “Why?”

“Looks like him, and he’s in these pictures too. The Spanish are Mediterranean, they are very family oriented. Look, see that pretty girl there? She looks like me. That’s his sister.”

I ruffled her head and told her she was cute, and made my way across the large room into the kitchen. There was no door separating the two rooms, it was just another space, sectioned off.

A heavy crystal tumbler stood beside the sink. I picked it up and smelled it. It smelled of whiskey. I opened the dishwasher. There was nothing inside it. He had a big, silver fridge and beside it a wine rack. Like Agnes’, it held two dozen bottles in it, mainly red, all from Rioja or Ribera del Duero in Spain.

I leaned my ass against the work surface and crossed my arms. Dehan