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

He was rigid. He didn’t look complacent anymore. “We are all booked up till tomorrow.”

“Is there another hotel?”

“The Saloon is full. Perhaps Gold Hill...?”

Dehan grabbed the key from my hand and moved toward the stairs. “C’mon, Stone. Forget it. If you don’t snore, I promise not to bite.”

She stomped up the stairs and I scowled at Ned again. “You get me a room by tomorrow or pal, I’m coming to sleep at your house.”

“Tomorrow.”

I followed Dehan up the stairs and down a long passage with wooden walls and a deep red carpet. She unlocked the door like she was disemboweling it and pushed in. The room was nice. It was big, with a big, solid bed and a stone fireplace with the logs set and ready to light. There was an en suite bathroom, a chair and a desk, but there was no couch.

I closed the door. “I’m sorry, Dehan. I clearly told him, you can check the reservation…”

She gave me that same impossible-to-read expression. “Hey, I’m not contagious. Just keep your shorts on and we’ll be fine. I promise to respect you in the morning. Help me take my boots off.”

We left our clothes on and climbed under the bedclothes. The last thing I remember before I slipped into unconsciousness was Dehan’s sleepy chuckle as she said, “If my Uncle Ben could see me now…”

I awoke to the sound of the shower. A glance at the window told me it was about midday. The hiss from the bathroom faded to a trickle and died. Then there were those odd bathroom noises: the rattle and slide of the shower-cubicle door, the clunk of the bathroom cabinet opening and closing, the muffled flop of a bath towel being unfurled and dropping to the floor. I smiled. For some reason I couldn’t fathom, the sounds were oddly comforting.

She stood in the door with a a white turban on her head, a white towel wrapped around her body and an idiot grin on her face. She looked shiny and scrubbed.

“How was it for you?” she said. “Did the earth move?”

“Cut it out.”

“I gotta say, Stone, it wasn’t like my girlfriends said it would be. I think you need to work on your technique.”

I threw a pillow at her and she indulged in what you could only describe as a locker room laugh. She threw it back and said, “Go shower, big boy, so I can get dressed.”

Twenty minutes later, we returned to our table by the fire and had a couple of local craft beers and a hamburger each. The peaches and cream waitress asked if we’d like some Colorado oysters while we waited for the hamburgers. Dehan frowned. “Oysters? In Colorado?”

“They ain’t really oysters, Miss, they’s…”

She giggled and I said, “They’re bull’s balls.”

Dehan looked her square in the eye. “Oh, no, I’ve had more than enough of that for one day.” Then she grinned at me. “Huh, Stone?” Peaches and Cream flushed and scuttled away squeaking.

“Dehan…”

She pointed at me. “You know what, Stone? Here’s what I don’t get…”

I shifted uneasily in my chair. “What?”

“She’s been coming to these parts since she was a kid. She knows people here. She isn’t going to just turn up. She has to have told somebody she’s coming, right?”

“Agreed.”

“I get the impression her in-laws didn’t even know she was coming.” She shook her head and shrugged. “She came by train, but how was she getting from Boulder to Seven Hills? Bus? Car rental? Was somebody picking her up?”

I nodded. “That would make sense.”

“Because if she had arranged to be collected from the station, whoever collected her…”

“That’s our man.”

“So we need to see her credit card records, her emails, her Facebook, phone, Whatsapp… all her communication for the month of June and early July to see who was meeting her.”

I took out my phone and dialed the captain while she kept talking.

“So here’s how it looks right now. She’s unhappy in her marriage. Mo is neglecting her. She wants to confide in her mom, but we’ve seen her mom sees the world through rose-tinted glasses and she doesn’t want to know about problems. She turns to Anne-Marie, only to discover that Anne-Marie is screwing her husband, and the birth of her baby, instead of bringing Mo back to her side, seems to have driven him further away…”

The captain’s voice spoke in my ear.

“Stone. How’s it going?”

“We might be making progress, Captain. Listen, we need to see Kathleen Olvera’s credit card and phone records, Whatsapp, email, Facebook—the whole package—for the months of June and July, 2012. And any other messenger and social media she may have been using. The sheriff here is happy to give us free reign, but the deal is we take the case off his hands.”

“Fair enough. I’ll see to it.”

“Thanks.”

I hung up. Dehan kept talking.

“So she’s looking for a friend. Isaac…” She blew out through her teeth and shook her head. “Isaac is the husband of the woman who is sleeping with her husband. It’s like an unspoken rule. If she seeks consolation with him, she has to sleep with him. She doesn’t want that. So she ends up connecting with Greg. They talk several times, probably on Facebook, and she tells him what’s happened. He tells her to come out and stay with him for a few days. She agrees…”

The hamburgers arrived. Peaches and Cream’s cheeks were still prettily pink. She told us to enjoy and hurried away.

Dehan sank back in her chair. I said, “OK, that all sounds very plausible, but we have two problems here. One, why would she tell Mo she was going to see his parents? It would take one conversation between him and them to reveal she