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

held up her thumb. “One, if she was as hot and wild as they described her, she would have had to be very drunk to feel ill enough to leave the party where she was having so much fun, yet the scene Bob Smith described, that he saw through his window outside her apartment, does not fit a woman that drunk. She was coherent, unhappy, angry, but not drunk to the point of feeling ill.”

She raised her index finger. “Two, if she was so ill that she needed to leave the party where she was having so much wild, crazy fun, why did she let her visitor in? Why did she even open the door to him? If she was that ill, she should have been either throwing up in the can or comatose in bed. Fernando and Giorgio lied about her state and her behavior, Stone. And if they lied about that, we have to be asking ourselves, not ‘why?’, but, what are they trying to hide?”

Fourteen

We had collected a couple of beef sandwiches and a couple of coffees from the deli at the end of the road. Now we were sitting at our desks, eating and staring at each other. It was a habit we’d fallen into over the last couple of years. It freaked some people out and annoyed others, but it helped us think. Mo slouched past after a while and muttered, “Jeez, get a room, will ya!” Which made Dehan snigger.

I swallowed and shrugged. “We always come back to the same problem, the forensic evidence does not point to either Giorgio or Fernando.” She drew breath and I shook my head. “However clever and thorough your theory is, until we have some concrete evidence, it is just that, a theory.”

“So we pull them in, Stone. We separate them and we work on them, play them against each other until one of them breaks.”

“Pull them in on what grounds? The only thing we have them on is beating up Melanie, and she already told us she won’t testify.”

She grunted, sighed, chewed and stared out at the winter afternoon. Then she wagged a finger at me. “OK, Sensei, what about the cases in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona? We go through those files with a fine toothed comb.” She leaned forward with her elbows on the desk and pointed at me. “If we can link the cases, not just to Fernando but to each other, then we can threaten him with handing it over to the Feds.”

I nodded and smiled. “That’s nice. Tell him to roll on Giorgio or we hand it over to the Bureau…”

“Exactly, meanwhile we do the same to Giorgio.”

“There is something else.” I unwrapped my second sandwich and took a bite. “It’s been on my mind since the first time we visited Giorgio. He lives way above the means of a private art teacher. His furniture, the house, that’s all pretty expensive stuff. Same is true, though less so, of Fernando. Put that together with their visit to Tony’s nightclub, the way they were throwing money and coke about, and Tony’s refusal to go after them when they beat up one of his girls…”

“You’re right. That was weird. The Mob are not tolerant of that kind of thing. If they let it pass, there must be a reason.”

“The reason is coke. There was coke at the Halloween party and there was coke at Melanie’s party. I don’t doubt that Giorgio is serious about art and about teaching, but I have no doubt either that he makes his living selling coke and probably weed, and two gets you twenty part of the reason for his classes is to find customers and to distribute. This way he doesn’t attract attention and doesn’t need to challenge the gangs for a street corner.”

She grunted. “I like it. We don’t need to charge them. You go get Giorgio, I go get Fernando. We let them see each other being taken into separate interrogation rooms. Then we start to hit them: we’ve applied for a warrant to see their financial records, we’re looking at their phone records to see who they call on a regular basis, we don’t need a warrant for that, we know about Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, we are ready to hand the whole damn case over to the Feds if they don’t cooperate. Then we play them against each other, tell Giorgio Fernando’s cooperating and tell Fernando Giorgio is singing like a bird. If they are even a little guilty, they’ll crack.”

I nodded. “It’s very good, Dehan. It’ll work, but before we get started, let me ask you a couple of questions.”

“Sure, what?”

“One, why are you convinced it wasn’t Cyril?”

She flopped back in her chair and took a deep breath. “I guess,” she said after a moment, “his behavior. He had the whole plan set out, to move, leave his job, go to Europe… And then when Sue was killed, he just freaked and took his own life. That to me isn’t consistent with a man who has killed her, however crazy he is.” She paused, thinking. “You know? If he’d killed her in a fit of rage, I could understand the remorse and then suicide. But the careful planning followed by his chaotic behavior, culminating in his suicide. It doesn’t wash.” She shrugged again. “Also, Stone, his impotence. He couldn’t have raped her.”

I frowned. “But he could have consensual sex with her?”

“I think so. After the visits to Xara, if she was nice to him, I think so.” For a moment she looked exasperated. “But even if it was him, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, how would you ever prove it? Unless you go and tear down the East 2nd Casino Hotel and dig up the foundations, you will never have any forensic evidence.”

“OK, fair point. Now, last question, what if