Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #2: Books 5-8 (A Dead Cold Box Set) by Blake Banner (types of ebook readers txt) 📕

at the table. The kitchen was strangely still and silent after her outburst. I looked at Dehan. She shook her head.

“Thank you, Mrs. Irizarry, you have been very helpful. We are very sorry to have brought you this news.” We stood and Mary stood with us. Ed continued to stare sullenly at the table, like it was the table’s fault he was such an ass.

Dehan went on, “We may need to contact you again, but we’ll try to trouble you as little as possible.”

Ed snorted and Mary showed us to the door through the dark house where dark blue light was beginning to tint the glass in the windows. We stepped out into the wild chatter of the dawn chorus. The door closed behind us and I went and leaned on the car, gazing at the sleeping street under a sky that was turning from midnight blue to gray. The Irizarry house was the only one with lights in the windows. Unlike the squabbling birds, the people of Herring Avenue had not yet started stirring from sleep.

The car bleeped and flashed and I climbed in to the muffled dark. Dehan got in behind the wheel, fired up the engine, and switched on the headlamps. I said, “Evergreen Avenue. It’s past the station, on the right, before the river.”

“I know where it is.” She pulled away. “Doesn’t get any easier, huh?”

“Nope.”

We drove in silence for a while. Then, she asked, “Why do women stay with guys like that?”

“I’ve often wondered. If you asked her she’d probably say, when he’s nice he’s great, and he makes her laugh. Maybe she figures the financial security makes it worthwhile. Or maybe it’s some kind of Stockholm syndrome.” Then I added with a sour twist, “Or maybe she wouldn’t know who to be, if he wasn’t there to tell her.”

She was quiet for a moment, then said, “Wow.”

“Mornings like this, Dehan, I wonder if Captain Jennifer Cuevas wasn’t right when she advised me to take early retirement.”

She looked at me like I was crazy. “Seriously?”

“If I am married to my job, my job is Ed and I am Mary.”

She laughed and we drove on in silence through the dawn, toward Soundview, toward a woman who was probably still sleeping, unaware that her life had, in the last few hours, disintegrated; unaware that her son was dead, unaware that nothing would ever be the same again.

Dehan’s voice broke into my thoughts. “What do you think happened?”

“Hmm?”

“Their group of cuchi cuchi friends. It broke up, they lost touch, stopped having cuchi cuchi parties…”

We pulled onto the Bruckner Expressway and started accelerating west. A hint of copper touched  the sky from the east as the sun crept over the horizon. I spoke almost without thinking, expressing a feeling rather than an idea. I said, “Rosario was killed.” I sighed. I felt unaccountably depressed. “That is the starting point. Rosario was killed. That spoiled their swinging scene, the Irizarrys moved, lost touch with their old cuchi cuchi friends. But the boys stayed in touch. Maybe they stayed in touch with Angela, too. And now, fourteen years later, Sebastian has been killed, maybe twenty feet from where Rosario was.” I looked at her face and she glanced at me. I said, “And Ed and Mary know that’s significant for some reason. This is a cold case, Dehan, no doubt about it. A cold case that just started getting hot.”

Four

The information I’d received from the Jacobi had Sebastian Acosta’s mother listed as Susanne Mackenzie. We stood outside her house now, on Evergreen Avenue, and stared up at the door. It was a red brick house on three floors, with a flat roof and a chimney. The bottom floor was a basement and a garage with a ramp leading down to it from the sidewalk. Nine steps led up to a veranda and a front door that had been completely closed in with white wrought iron railings and a white, seven-foot, wrought iron gate. Above that was another floor with three sash windows. The drapes were all closed.

We stood for a good ten minutes on the steps, ringing at the outside bell. Eventually, one of the drapes on the upstairs windows opened a few inches, then closed again. I rang some more and after three or four minutes, the door opened and a tall woman in her forties stepped onto the veranda. She was a redhead. Her skin was very white, with a spray of freckles over her nose and cheeks. Her hair and her green eyes said she had only just woken up. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, and nothing on her feet. She had a good, athletic body and an intelligent face, but somehow she wasn’t attractive. You got the feeling she didn’t want to be.

She looked at us both through the railings. “Are you cops?”

We showed her our badges. “I’m Detective Stone, Ms. Mackenzie. This is my partner, Detective Dehan. Why do you ask if we’re cops? Were you expecting us?”

“No…” She sighed. “Maybe. Is it about Sebastian?”

I nodded. “May we come in?”

She opened the gate and stood back. “Is he OK? Has he done something?”

I studied her face a moment. All I saw was anxiety. “We’d better go inside, Ms. Mackenzie.”

Her eyes flicked over my face, then looked at Dehan. She led us indoors to an open-plan living room and kitchen. She sat on the sofa. Dehan sat next to her. I glanced around the room. There was one plate in the drying rack by the sink, and one glass. There were three low bookcases with a wide variety of books: fiction and works on psychology and sociology, feminism and civil rights. A bottle of bourbon, a quarter full, stood by a photograph of Sebastian.

I sat in the armchair. She was staring at me. I