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

“It was cold. He had a fire burning, yet her drapes were open. He was drinking whiskey and reading his journal. Somebody or something disturbed him. He set down his journal and brought his empty glass to the kitchen, then, presumably, made his way to Agnes’ house. There they drank wine and she shot him, with a suppressed Sig, while the drapes were open.”

“It is odd. I see where the ADA is coming from. We need Robles’ phone records, and hers, see if she called him. If we can establish that she called him over the weekend, that will help narrow down time of death. I’ll get on that.” As an afterthought, she added, “The lab has his cell.”

She walked away dialing and I made my way up to the next floor, to the bedrooms and the bathrooms. There was a landing that ran from front to back. At the far end, the passage made a dogleg and a further flight rose to the attic.

There were three bedrooms. Two were clearly guest rooms and had signs of having been used occasionally, perhaps by his Mediterranean family-oriented family. His room, the master bedroom, had red satin sheets on the bed, a Spanish translation of a Stephen King novel on the bedside table and an electronic clock with an alarm set for six AM. In a laundry basket he had some dirty linen, including more sheets. These were in black satin.

I checked his wardrobe and found a handful of good, off the peg suits, several pairs of Levis, several cashmere sweaters in dubious colors, and lots of expensive shirts. His shoes were real leather and hand made. There was nothing else.

I explored both bathrooms. There was nothing of interest there, either. I sat on the stairs and thought about that, and decided that, like Agnes’ house, the absence of anything interesting was interesting in itself. Downstairs I could hear Dehan talking. When she had finished, I rose and made my way down. She met me at the foot of the stairs. There we stood, staring at each other as I sucked my teeth.

“If they were lovers, Dehan, and I am not saying they weren’t, they had a very sterile, clinical relationship. There is no sign of his presence in her house, and no sign of her presence in his house. Where the hell did they have sex? Unless they had a third dwelling somewhere, where they used to meet up and get all their primal urges out of their system, these kids were not involved with each other. Not in any meaningful sense of the word.”

She was staring at me with narrowed eyes. “I know,” she said. “I was thinking the same thing. But if they weren’t involved, why the hell did she kill him?”

I shrugged. “There is always the other Big Motive.”

“Money?”

“What else? Or, it may not have been her. Gutierrez assumes it was her because she has vanished, but we haven’t got the prints back yet. We don’t know if her prints are on the gun or not.”

“That’s true. She may have vanished because she’s dead.”

I sighed and shook my head. “But that does present us with a different problem. When people kill for money, or power, it tends to be premeditated and more or less carefully planned. When people pump other people full of lead, drop the weapon and run, that tends to be a killing motivated by rage, jealousy, vengeance—sex. Something that makes you temporarily lose control.”

She slapped me on the shoulder. “Let’s go talk to Frank, drop in on the lab while we’re there.” She opened the door and we stepped out into the icy morning again. “Did you look at the lock at Agnes’ place?”

“Yup.” I thrust my hands in my pockets, we made our way down the castle steps and started walking back toward the car. “It wasn’t forced. And as Jose was not actually at his own house, that means either, A, the killer was a third party and Agnes let him in, or B, it was Agnes.”

“Him or her.” She said it after a long silence as she walked around the car with her hands in her pockets, her shoulders hunched and her collar up, then sniffed. We climbed in and slammed the doors. I turned the key and the big old engine roared into life.

“We should also remember,” I said, “that they are both academics. And academics are all more or less crazy.”

She was nodding as I pulled away and headed toward White Plains Road. “This is a guy who sits down in front of the fire, with a glass of single malt, and reads about batteries.”

We took it easy and, twenty minutes later, we found Frank in his office, behind a steel desk, going through papers. He looked up as we came in, frowned and said, “What?”

Dehan sat without being invited. She still had her hands in her pockets and her shoulders hunched. I stayed in his doorway and smiled at him.

“Good morning, Frank. Jose Robles, multiple gunshot wounds to the chest, Stephens Avenue…”

“I know who Jose Robles is, John. I thought Gutierrez had that case. Surely it hasn’t gone cold already! I haven’t even sent him my results yet!”

“It’s the weather, Frank. It’s making everything cold. We got handed the case. What can I tell you? Or, more to the point, what can you tell us?”

He shook his head at Dehan across the desk. “It’s his wit that makes him so endearing.”

He finished shuffling papers and stood, went to an ‘out’ tray on top of a filing cabinet, took a manila envelope and handed it to Dehan.

“We haven’t got a sample of Agnes Shine’s fingerprints, but from samples taken from her office and her house, we have isolated some prints that offer an extremely high probability of being