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

in just about every way you can name. In fact, there ain’t no way in which he ain’t a son of a bitch!”

Dehan smiled at him. “Try to be more specific, Isaac. Help us out. Give us some examples…”

“Oh, I can give you examples, and plenty of ’em. Starting right back when we was kids.” He pointed at the wall behind him with his thumb, like that was where they had been kids together. “I am older than him, but he was smarter than me. I don’t mind recognizing that. He’s smart. But he always used his brains to get the better of me any time he could. If I had something, that was enough for him to want it more, and take it from me.”

Dehan was nodding. “I had a sister like that.” She shrugged. “But as we got older we learned to get over it. Now we’re friends.”

“With all due respect, ma’am, you’re lucky. Mo and me never learned to be friends. I tried! Ingie, that’s my mom, she beat it into us most every day. Why, she made my ass bleed with a switch more’n once for fighting with Mo. So I tried, but he always had some way of turning things so I was the one who got punished.”

I gave a rueful laugh. “It was always going to be you and Kath, right? But he took her away from you…”

His eyes went wide. “How’d you know that?”

Dehan was smiling. “We’re cops, and it was kind of obvious from what you were saying.”

His face went sullen. “When their dad died, and they come up to Seven Hills to get away from things for a bit, Kath had turned fifteen and she’d become real cute. Pretty as anything. But she was broken up with her dad’s death. Mo saw his opportunity and got right on in there. It ain’t that I didn’t care for her. I did. I could see she was real upset, but I didn’t have the words the way he did. He just seemed to know exactly what to say and when to say it. I knew he was just playin’ her, and she was none too smart, I guess. He just wrapped her ’round his little finger and she fell hook, line and sinker.”

He opened his hands and laid them palm down on the table again. “People always said that me and Kath would end up together coz we was the less smart ones. We was good friends, always hung out together in the summer.”

He frowned at each of us in turn, as though he was trying to work out whether we understood him or not. After a moment he shrugged, like it didn’t really matter. “Pat and Mo was the smart ones. They used to talk and laugh a lot about stuff that me and Kath thought was dumb. They used to pick on us and take the Mickey, called us stupid. But that summer it all changed. I think he’d decided he was moving to New York, and he was going to use Kath to get there.”

Dehan asked, “Why not Pat if they got on so well?”

“Coz she was smart, and she knew what he was about. She liked him, but she wouldn’t never trust him. Kath was sweet and simple, and after he seduced her, she would’a done anything for him.”

It was making sense. “So what happened that summer, Isaac?” He looked at me. “Where did the depression come from if she loved him so much?”

His cheeks and his ears colored. You could see the anger in his face. “I think she began to realize what kind of a man she had married.”

“What made her realize that?”

He looked embarrassed and glanced at Dehan. “Personally, I think there ain’t many things on God’s Earth as beautiful as a woman who is with child. And Kathleen, when she was with child, was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen…” He paused to steady his breath. There were tears threatening to spill from his eyes. “But Mo, even though it was his child, didn’t see it that way. And once she was pregnant, he lost interest in her.”

Dehan was frowning. “Was he ever cruel or violent to her?”

Isaac shook his head. “No, never nothing like that. He was always kind to her, and attentive. He’s smart that way. Always charms everybody, even when he don’t need to. But he wouldn’t sleep with her.”

Her frown deepened. “How do you know that?”

He held her eye for a long moment. There was a rage building in him and I realized in that moment that he could be a very dangerous man when riled. He said simply, “He told Anne-Marie.”

I raised an eyebrow. “That’s a pretty intimate thing to be sharing with your sister in-law.”

He turned his direct gaze on me. “I told you, he always wanted what I had.”

Dehan snorted. “He started moving in on Anne-Marie.”

“For all his being so smart, he couldn’t get a job, till I got work on a construction site. I put in a word for him and pretty soon we was both workin’ and making decent money. We all lived close by. Pat and Mel was on Commonwealth Avenue, just across the road from me and Anne-Marie, and Kath and Mo was at the back, on Rosedale. And for a bit there, it was good. I even thought maybe he was learning to be a decent person. An’ that just shows you how darned stupid I can be. Soon as the summer started, and it started getting hot, that work was just too much for him. He kept turning up late, bunking off early, making excuses…” He shook his head. “You just can’t do that in this kind of job. Two strikes and you’re out. I told him, this is unskilled labor, boy! There’s a whole line