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

“Would you bring us a pot of coffee, please? Oh, and a plate of cheese and ham sandwiches. Thank you.”

“Of course, sir.” She bobbed and left.

Dehan was reading and didn’t look up, but she smiled and said, “You don’t know if you don’t ask, right?”

“That what I thought.”

Dr. Meigh had been right. The bulk of what was in the notebooks was incomprehensible. Even where words were used, they didn’t seem to make any kind of ordinary sense: Consequently energy density denotes volume necessary to store X energy (Wh/Liter)…

Or: …power density as power/area shd b correlated to area available on the electrodes leading to W/cm².

I sighed and looked over at Dehan. She seemed to be engrossed. I read aloud: “Internal resistance and V0 are derived from slop and y-intercept respectively. Did you know that?”

She didn’t look at me. “Really? Mo must have a lot of internal resistance then. I don’t know how much we are going to learn from this, sensei. We may as well be reading ancient Greek.”

“I think we are.”

There was a knock at the door and the maid came in with a large tray. She placed it on the table and unloaded it. On an impulse I said, “Did you make the sandwiches yourself?”

“I did, sir. I wasn’t sure if you’d like mustard and pickle, so I brought them along separately.”

I smiled. “That’s very thoughtful. Agnes said you make the best sandwiches.”

She looked startled, but her face lit up. “She did? That’s so kind of her. That was a long time ago. Back in the early fall! We hardly ever make sandwiches, ordinarily.”

“Well, she still remembers them.”

“That’s so kind of her. Thank you, sir.”

She gave a little curtsey, backed out of the room and closed the door. I sat staring at the space where she had stood. I heard Dehan’s voice.

“You’re a sly old fox, Stone.”

“Sandwiches.” I turned to look at her. “As she said, not a thing Dr. Meigh would normally eat, especially with doctor guests. It might have been afternoon tea, or, in early fall, a picnic. What do you think?”

“I think you should focus on the research and stop chatting up the staff.”

I logged the fact under ‘curious’ and went back to reading the illegible and trying to understand the incomprehensible. The enterprise was a predictable failure, until I came to two notebooks which had ‘Analysis’ written on the front cover.

It took an hour, but I worked my way steadily through half a plate of sandwiches, half a pot of coffee and a detailed discussion comparing various different types of battery. It concluded that lithium ion (LI-ION or LIBs) were the ones with the highest potential for future development and, in a second notebook, detailed all the weaknesses of the LIB and where they needed to be improved. Then, quite suddenly, the discussion stopped.

I tossed the two notebooks in front of Dehan. “They’re worth reading. You come across anything on how the LIB can be improved?”

“Probably, but if I did it was incomprehensible to me.”

“Nothing in plain English?”

“No, but I found a few emails in plain Spanish.”

“Really?”

She made a face. “Nothing much, to some guy called Paco Robles. Maybe his brother. Mostly he’s complaining about the States, people aren’t friendly, food is crap, yadda yadda, but here he says there is this girl who hangs around with him all the time. ‘She’s a pain in the ass, but she and her friend who is called like the duck, Donald, adore me, they go everywhere with me, but most Saturday nights I go out alone to a club in Chelsea, at 250 West 26th Street, after my colleague, ‘la colega’, it’s like, ‘the chick’, is in bed. Then I have a great time picking up chicks.’” She looked up at me. “Explains why his sheets are clean. He’s been busy messing up somebody else’s.”

“This stuff must have been gathered up in a hurry.”

“Yeah. Anyway, we came looking for industrial espionage evidence and found more crime of passion evidence.”

I gave a smile that was rueful. “Looks like I’m going to have to take you dancing, Detective Dehan. It will be almost like old times.”

“I can’t wait.” She didn’t sound like she meant it.

At twelve thirty, we heard the party leave the house. From snatches of their conversation, I gathered they were going to La Piccola Liguria for a family luncheon.

I stood and went to the window. Across the lawn I could see the driveway. There was a couple with two kids of about ten and twelve getting into the Jaguar. Beyond them, I could see a white Audi reversing out of a garage. There was a man with his back to me. He seemed to be in his late forties, with short, black hair and a dapper suit. The Audi stopped and Meigh got out. They kissed and she handed him the keys. He said something to her, they both laughed and she ran into the house while he got behind the wheel. A moment later, she came out again, wearing a scarf. She got in next to him and they drove away, to the Piccola Liguria. A family. A happy family approaching Christmas.

After that, we worked on for another three hours and at the end of it we had found nothing of interest, other than his email to his brother. Dehan photographed it on her cell, on the grounds that it was not research and was therefore not covered by the confidentiality agreement, and I stood to get my coat. I also pressed the bell to call the maid.

She entered as we were putting the notebooks back in the boxes. I smiled at her.

“What’s your name?”

“Cynthia, sir.”

“Cynthia, I am going to tell Dr.