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

Dehan nodded and reluctantly extracted a hand from her pocket to take the envelope. “Obviously,” she said.

“What can I tell you?” He sighed. “The gun, a Sig Sauer Tacops p226, an unusual choice for a crime of passion. Based on the prints, it was fired by the person we assume to be Agnes Shine. We can say with absolute certainty that the person who fired the gun was a frequent visitor to Agnes’ office and her home, almost certainly her. She also handled the bottle and one of the glasses found at the scene.”

He dropped back into his chair. “What else? There is very little else. He was shot eight times at close range. He could have died from any one of the wounds, which perforated his liver, his stomach, his lungs and his heart…”

I leaned my shoulder on the doorjamb. “But the one that killed him was the one to the heart.”

“Indeed.”

“So I guess you haven’t examined the contents of his stomach.”

He managed to scowl and raise an eyebrow at the same time. “Can you think of a reason why I would have?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I’d like to know what he had for his last supper.”

“You’re serious.”

“I am.”

“Anything else you’d like me to waste the taxpayers’ dollars on?”

“No… I’d be curious to know if he’d had sex before getting shot, but my other questions are for Joe.”

He frowned. “Really? I don’t know what you’re looking for, John, but I have seen many crimes of passion in my time and this murder is entirely consistent.”

“Almost. Have a look in his belly for me, will you?”

“What do you mean, ‘almost’?”

I smiled. “Well, there’s the gun, and then there’s the sequence of the shots.”

Dehan turned in her chair to stare at me. The expression on her face was an echo of the one of Frank’s. He said, “Sequence? What sequence?”

Dehan shrugged. “What sequence, Stone?”

“The shot to the heart, the one that killed him, was also the first shot.”

“Excuse me?”

“None of the other wounds bled anywhere near as profusely. The first shot stopped his heart pumping. So the first shot, delivered with a suppressed Sig Sauer p226—the pro’s choice—hit him in the heart and killed him.”

Dehan blinked a lot. Frank sighed. “Is there anything else you’d like to tell me? The person who pulled the trigger on that gun has a ninety-nine point nine percent chance of being Dr. Agnes Shine. Now go away, please.”

I smiled and looked at my watch. “We’d better leave before I upset him. We need to go and see Dr. Meigh, and on the way I need to call Joe.”

Frank shrugged. “Joe’ll tell you the same thing.” To Dehan he said, “I only work with him. You married him.”

On the way out, I tossed Dehan the keys. “Let’s go see Dr. Meigh.”

She climbed behind the wheel and I got in the passenger seat and called Joe at the lab as she pulled out of the lot and onto Morris Park Avenue.

“Yeah?”

“Joe, it’s Stone. Listen, I just got handed the Jose Robles case.”

“OK, how can I help?”

“I need you to have a look at his sheets.”

“His sheets?”

“Yeah, from his house. He has some dirty sheets in his linen basket, also the stuff on the bed, pillows, duvet, everything.”

“I’m looking for signs of sexual activity?”

“Exactly. And, while you’re at it, the same with the bedding from Agnes Shine’s place.”

“OK, I’ll get a team over there.”

“And Joe, I also need you to look for traces of saliva on the glasses. I want to know who drank from them.”

“You got it.”

I hung up and Dehan said, “We don’t know who drank from those glasses?”

“Not for a fact, no. In fact, the outstanding feature about this case is Agnes Shine’s absence. Gutierrez assumed she was there because Jose Robles was at her house. Now Frank has added a series of fingerprints to the equation, which we assume were made by her. But we don’t know for a fact that she made them, do we? And I keep coming back to the same thing: we cannot find even a remote trace of a motive. There is no indication that Agnes and Jose were anything but friends and colleagues.”

She screwed up her brow and made a ‘hmmm’ noise. “I don’t know, Stone. This may be what in Spanish they call looking for five legs on the cat. The cat got four legs, not five.”

“Yeah, I know, Occam’s Razor. But frankly, I’m having trouble finding even three legs on this cat. At risk of taxing the metaphor, this cat walks like a duck and quacks like a goose. I keep playing this movie in my head. He’s sitting there, in front of the fire, sipping his single malt, reading about batteries, and what happens? The phone rings or somebody knocks at the door.”

“It might have been a prior arrangement.”

“It might have been. In any case, he leaves his magazine open and he takes his glass to the kitchen.” I turned to her. “Did you notice the kitchen? It was spotless. There weren’t even dirty plates in the dishwasher. But he leaves the glass by the sink and he walks the two hundred yards to Agnes’ house…”

Dehan started talking, staring ahead through the windshield.

“She lets him in, they sit in this very formal way, with the whole sofa between them, sipping a glass of wine each. Then she gets up, goes to the bedroom, takes this gun from somewhere and shoots him, eight rounds, in a kind of frenzy.”

“Yeah, the kind of frenzy where the first shot scores a bull’s eye.”

She sighed. “You’re right. The rage does seem to come out of left field for no particular reason.”

“If I was