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

Meigh that you were extremely helpful, and very charming with it.” She blushed and bobbed and thanked me very much. I gave what I hoped was a paternal smile and said, “You know Dr. Shine has gone missing.”

“Yes, sir, but I don’t really know anything about it.”

“You probably know more than you realize. You know that Dr. Meigh, Detective Dehan and I are trying to clear her name. We feel that she has been wrongly accused of the murder of Dr. Robles.”

I could feel Dehan’s eyes burning into the back of my head, but I ignored her. Cynthia’s eyes were wide. I said, “I had hoped to have a chat with Patricia—with Dr. Meigh—before leaving, but it seems I’ve missed her. So maybe you can help me a little more before we go.”

“I’d be glad to, Detective, if I can…”

“You see, it’s essential we find Agnes soon, before she does anything…” I let the words hang there a moment until Cynthia nodded once, slowly. “So, maybe you can tell me when was the last time that she visited Dr. Meigh?”

She frowned hard. “Well, it’s hard to say, exactly. You see, she used to come over most Saturdays, sometimes Friday, and the last Saturday she was here was the Saturday before she…” She hesitated a moment, then concluded, “Before she went away...”

“You see? That is so helpful. Obviously she’d stay till Sunday, they’d have a picnic…” I laughed. “All the usual stuff.”

She was beginning to look troubled, like she knew she was being pumped and the doctor would be mad at her for talking to me. She nodded. “Yes, she always spent the weekend here.”

I slipped her ten bucks and my card, and winked at her. “You have been very helpful, Cynthia. If you think of anything at all, however small, which you think might help us to find Dr. Shine before she does anything foolish, you give me a call, anytime, night or day. Got it?”

She nodded and we left.

In the car once again, Dehan, looking more like a wool elf than a wood elf, we backed out onto the road and started the slow, freezing drive back toward the Bronx. She crossed her arms and her ankles and stuck out her bottom lip in thought.

“Well,” she said, “that was surprising.”

“We came looking for one thing, and we found three different things instead.”

She looked at me from under her eyebrows. “Three?”

“Number three, I grant you, was a negative find, but, one.” I held up my thumb. “We found that Dr. Jose Robles did in fact have a sex life.” I held up my index finger. “Two, we found that he pursued it while Agnes was country housing at the weekends with her exalted friend, Patricia Meigh; and, and, no less important than those two interesting facts, Dehan.” I held up my middle finger. “We found that there was absolutely nothing remarkable about Dr. Robles’ research. In fact, there was a bit of that research missing.”

She smirked a little smugly. “We also found something else. I said, ‘three’ like that because I counted four things.”

“Four?”

“We also found that Dr. Meigh lied to us when she said she was not that close to Agnes. She was close enough that they got together every weekend to go sailing and have picnics.”

I nodded. “Indeed, Little Grasshopper, indeed, we found that too. And that is very important.”

“You think she’s hiding Agnes?”

“It possible, isn’t it?”

“You think Cynthia will come through?”

“No. I did my best, but I don’t think so.”

“Oh, you did better than that. Poor kid’s knees were knocking with the post-pubescent hormonal riot that you unleashed inside her.”

“Where do you learn to say such horrible things, Dehan?”

“From reading your books.”

“So, what have we got?”

“May I?”

“Please do.”

“Jose and Agnes got into this very intense relationship based on emotional dependency. He was dominant and she was subservient. The most important aspect of this difference was that she depended entirely on him, whereas he had this insatiable need to have lots of people dependent on him. That need drove him to seek out other people, like Hays and possibly Am Nielsen.”

“OK.”

“Now, the thing is, their relationship is completely Platonic. We don’t know if it’s him or her or both of them who don’t want it, but we do know it ain’t happening. We also know that he may be hitting the sack with Alicia Cobos and that Saturday nights he is going to a club where he has lots of fun. Does Alicia go with him? We don’t know.”

“We’ll have to ask.”

“Now, my theory: Agnes wants their relationship to progress to the next level. She wants a full blown romantic relationship with him. But he only gets turned on by women who are not subservient.” She held up a woolen hand. “Don’t interrupt. He enjoys the power of dominating, but he only gets horny with women who don’t need him. That’s why he can’t with Agnes, but he can with Ali and he can with the hookers—nobody is less emotionally dependent than a hooker, right?”

“Right. You have changed your mind about Alicia?”

“Jury’s out. Anyway, Agnes gets to hear about his Saturday night capers, probably from Alicia. She calls him to her house, confronts him with it, and he follows their usual routine and humiliates her. But this time, the pain of rejection is too much, and she shoots him. The moment she realizes what she has done, she panics, jumps in her car and drives to her friend Patricia, who hides her and her car.” She turned and looked back over her shoulder at the receding road. “She is probably in that house right now.”

I thought about it for a while, trying to visualize her in some kind of ménage a trios with Meigh’s husband. It didn’t really work.

“Questions: what