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

I took a pull on my beer and she started dicing beef. “Whoever it was assumed, rightly or wrongly, that the cops would expect her to have had consensual sex with him. So he went to some considerable trouble to make it look as though she had not had consensual sex. That strongly suggests that whoever had sex with her, then killed her. We can reduce it to this: the killer did not want the cops to know that she had had consensual sex with him.” I paused until she nodded, then went on. “Now, the next logical step is that he assumes the cops will take for granted that, if she had consensual sex, it would be with him.”

She dumped the meat in the pot. It sizzled and she started stirring. Finally, she said, with a touch of impatience, “That follows, but again, it inevitably narrows it down to Mo.” She sighed. “Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless it was known, among a small group of people, that she was going to have sex with somebody else.”

I nodded. That made sense. “If the killer had told his friends she was coming to see him, for example.”

She turned the gas down, then rested her ass against the side and picked up her beer. “Mo is neglecting her. She knows he’s screwing Anne-Marie, she’s mad at him and frustrated. He’s not even providing her with a living. Maybe she connects with Greg on social media, Facebook, whatever. One thing leads to another and pretty soon she is arranging to go see him. She makes an excuse to Mo and Mel, she’s depressed and she’s going for a few days to see Ingrid and Alfredo. She goes to see Greg. They hit the sack and then something goes wrong. He kills her and tries to make it look like rape.”

I turned it over in my head. “That is pretty persuasive. There is no apparent motive, but it’s still persuasive.”

She held out her bottle and we chinked.

She poured a cup of rice into the pot and started stirring it in, coating the grains with the oil and herbs, and the juice from the meat. “Relationships,” she said, absently. “Pays to be single, huh?”

I watched her stir for a bit. She added the water and there was a big hiss. I sighed and spoke half to myself.

“I guess. Or at least make smart choices.”

Six

We set out before dawn and took the I-80, via Chicago and Nebraska. It was a grueling twenty-six-hour drive to Boulder, but because New York is two hours ahead of Colorado, according to my watch, we arrived twenty-four hours after we set out, at six A.M. We took it in turns, doing six-hour shifts, driving all through the day, watching the landscape turn flat and endless, and then through the night, watching the sky turn from blue to black. I reckon each of us got about five or six hours of uncomfortable, broken sleep. Dehan took the last leg, from Kearney to Boulder, and woke me just before sun-up at a service station outside town. We had a drowsy breakfast of pancakes and weak coffee while we watched the sky turn pale dark blue, and then pink, through the plate glass windows, to the slow, rhythmic swish of passing headlamps in the dawn.

After that it was an hour’s crawl up into the mountains along Sunshine Canyon Drive, among dense pine woods that sprawled for miles over steep slopes of yellow earth, partially covered in a thick carpet of brown needles. I drove while she napped, and at ten minutes after eight, we rounded a bend and entered Seven Hills. It was a small, shaded town nestled among wooded slopes that didn’t seem to have changed much since the Civil War. I could see why Alfredo had fallen in love with it. There was a broad main street with what looked like a general store, a post office and a saloon, with various other small businesses flanking them. Most of the buildings were either clapboard or log, with only the odd brick construction here and there. It only lacked the horses to make it perfect, but they’d been replaced by pickup trucks.

The Wagon Wheel Motel stood on the right, just before town. I pulled in to the lot out front and saw the sheriff’s Dodge was already there. I’d called him the night before to let him know we’d be here for breakfast. I killed the engine and sat for a moment looking at Dehan. She spoke without opening her eyes.

“Are we there yet?”

“Yup, and so is the sheriff by the looks of it.”

“OK.” She opened her eyes and stretched. We climbed out into a bright, frosty morning, breathing clouds of condensation into the cold air. Dehan stamped and slapped her arms while I grabbed our bags from the trunk, and we made our way up the wooden steps and into the warm lobby. It wasn’t what I had expected.

A big, iron, wood-burning stove stood on the left opposite a heavy reception desk made of hewn, highly polished logs. Beyond the stove, the room opened out into a comfortable lounge with a bar, a dining room and plate glass windows with panoramic views of the mountains. It was more like a hotel than a motel. Dehan went and warmed her ass by the fire while I checked us in. The landlord, who went by the name of Ned, was a portly man in his fifties with a blond moustache and complacent, pale blue eyes.

As I signed the register, I told him, “It’s a nice place. Business must be good.”

“We get skiers in the winter,” he said, “and wild-west enthusiasts in the summer. We do OK because we make the effort, but on the whole it’s pretty quiet around these parts.”

“How about Lefthand Canyon? That easy to