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

him. It had to be. What surprised me was the suicide note, and the phony cowboy speak. He was from Colorado. It should have come naturally to him.”

THIRTEEN

Her cheeks, which were already pink from the cold, flamed red. She wrenched the hat from her head and glared at me. “No!” she said. “No! No! No! You did not know. You are lying!”

I shook my head. “It had to be. Who else would have had a gun like that? He told us the first time we met him. No, it was always going to be Am Nielsen.”

I opened the car door and climbed out. She got out the other side and flakes of sleet began to settle on her head. She slammed the door. “Why didn’t you say so?”

I shrugged. “Because it wasn’t proven and I thought your theories were brilliant and worth exploring.”

I started across the road and she fell into step with me. “You thought they were brilliant? Seriously?”

“I did. The only thing you never quite nailed was how she got the gun. For that you had to come back to Am Nielsen, which left the door open. If he provided the gun, wasn’t it more logical that he shot him? He had a better potential motive than Agnes, the temperament for it, and then there was that first shot, straight to the heart. Occam’s razor, remember.”

“Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necesitatem.”

“That is so hot when you do that.”

“Stop it.”

“I always had trouble imagining the Agnes that had been described to us pulling a gun, even in jealousy. But I had no trouble at all visualizing Am shooting somebody. He was what you might describe as morally ambiguous.”

“You might describe him that way. I’d describe him as an asshole.”

We climbed the steps and made our way to the detectives’ room. On the way, I stopped at the desk.

“Maria, did Mohamed turn up to make a statement?”

“Sure did, lover boy. Gomez took his statement.”

I thanked her and followed Dehan. She dropped into her chair and threw her hat and her gloves on the desk. I sat, with the movie still playing in my head. She watched me a moment, chewing her lip.

“We got Mohamed’s statement.”

She continued to bite her lip a moment, then said, “So where the hell does this leave us, Stone?”

I nodded at her as though she’d said something I agreed with, then pulled over the file and looked through the photographs. When I’d finished, I pushed them over to her, took out my cell and called Joe.

“Yeah, Stone. We didn’t find anything down here. We got some partial tire tracks. We’re making casts of them now, but I don’t hold out much hope. What can I do for you?”

“My money is on a Land Rover.”

“You are such a dude. If they are, you have to buy me a bottle of scotch.”

“Listen, do me a favor, will you? Check the Sig again for partials, however small. I want to know if Am Nielsen, the guy we just pulled from the river, I want to know if he fired the gun, then wiped it and pressed Agnes’ hand onto it. I know it’s a tall order, but just see if there are any wiped partials on the gun.”

“I’ll have a look, but it won’t be anything you can take to court.”

“It’s more for my own curiosity, Joe, to confirm or deny a theory.”

“OK.”

“And I’m sending his phone over to you. He wiped everything but his suicide note. See what you can retrieve, and get me the prints off the screen. I want to know the last person who typed on it.”

“Gotcha. Hang loose.”

“Yeah, you too, Joe.”

I hung up and sent the file to the printer, which started to churn out pages. Dehan was sulking. “I need a holiday in Goa.”

I grinned. “You wanna Goa again?”

“That’s not even a joke, Stone. It’s a dinosaur joke.”

I shook my head. “No, this is a dinosaur joke. How do you ask a dinosaur to supper?”

“Oh Lord, no!”

“Tea, Rex?”

“Oh Lord, please, no.”

“Why can’t you hear a pterodactyl using the bathroom?”

“Oh good grief!”

“Because the ‘p’ is silent.”

She laughed in spite of herself and threw her hat at me. Then she became serious. “You don’t believe his note, do you?”

“That’s putting it a might strongly. But there are one or two things that still trouble me.”

“Like what?”

“Like the wine.”

“What is it with the wine? You’ve been fixating on the wine since the beginning.”

“He was a wine snob. More precisely, he was a Spanish wine snob.”

“We established that. That’s why he didn’t drink the wine.”

“Correct, but there are two inconsistencies here. One is that Agnes knew that he was a Spanish wine snob, and she would not have provided California wine. Every bottle of wine in her kitchen was Spanish.”

“So Am brought it with him, as an offering.”

“And what do you think Agnes would have said when she saw it? If he wants to ingratiate himself with Jose Robles, bringing the wrong wine is not the best way to do it, and she would have told him that.”

She made a face. “OK, that is odd.”

“But odder still is that.” I pointed at the photographs. “Look at his glass.”

She picked up the picture of Robles in his chair and squinted at it. “Son of a gun…! The glass is almost empty.”

“Look at her glass.”

“A little more, but not much.”

“Now look at the bottle.”

“Son of a bitch! It’s two thirds empty.”

“So who’s been drinking the wine?”

“What does it mean? There was somebody else there? But why would somebody else drink their wine, Stone? It doesn’t make sense.”

“No, it doesn’t make sense.”

The internal phone rang. Dehan snatched it