Dead Cold Mystery Box Set 2

by Blake Banner

  Dehan gave a small, sad smile which dimpled her left cheek. “I guess he was, Isaac.”

  We all nodded.

  FIVE

  Isaac left and Dehan and I stood in the corridor outside the interrogation room staring at each other without speaking. Dehan was chewing her lip. As I drew breath to speak, she said, “One: Mo, Anne-Marie, and Isaac all have alibis for the week in which Kath was killed. Two: it’s looking very much like Kathleen went to Seven Hills to meet with Greg.” She held up her hand. “It’s not certain and we need to confirm it, but it’s looking that way. The fact that she apparently lied when she told Mel and Mo that she was going to see her in-laws suggests that she had some ulterior motive—at the very least, she didn’t want them to know she was going to see him.”

  “If she was.”

  “If she was. Three: unless somebody else pops out of the woodwork, he is as of right now our prime—and only—suspect.”

  I sucked my teeth for a second. “Prime, perhaps, but not only. There are also Mo’s parents. You never know what people are likely to get up to when they start doing God’s work.”

  She pulled a face and nodded. “That’s true enough. Either way, this all presents us with a problem.”

  I nodded and sighed. “Our prime suspects are all over in Lee County, Colorado.”

  “So what do we do, bat it back and say, ‘we think it’s this guy or maybe Alfredo Olvera and or his wife,’ or…?”

  I shook my head, “Dehan, we don’t really think it’s Greg Carson. We suspect it might be Greg Carson. I think it’s premature to send it back to the sheriff, casting suspicion on Greg, when all we have is Isaac’s notion that she may have been going to see him.”

  She nodded for a while before saying, “Yeah, that’s true. But I don’t see how we can pursue the leads we have without going to Seven Hills.”

  I glanced at my watch. It was just before seven P.M. The captain would still be there. I climbed the stairs with Dehan just behind me and knocked on his door. He smiled amiably as we stepped in.

  “Stone, Dehan, it seems like only this morning. Oh wait…!” He grinned facetiously. “It was! What can I do for you before I head home in five minutes?”

  I closed the door and leaned on the jamb.

  “We have interviewed all the available witnesses in the Kathleen Olvera case…”

  “Good work. And?”

  “Some new facts have come to light which the Lee County sheriff could not have obtained, because he never interviewed these witnesses.”

  “That makes sense, and it was, after all, the object of the exercise. So?”

  “The new facts point to one particular person possibly having been the last person to see her alive. She may, in fact, having been going to see this person, rather than her in-laws, as was previously thought. Trouble is, he is in Seven Hills, in Colorado.”

  The captain opened his mouth but Dehan was quicker.

  “Thing is, sir, we don’t think it would reflect well on the department if we kick it back so soon, with only a suggestion that it might, maybe, possibly be worth interviewing this person, because he might have something to do with it.”

  The captain shut his mouth again, then said, “Clearly you have talked this over and have something in mind. Let me say that you both know full well I cannot authorize an investigation outside our jurisdiction.”

  “We know that, sir. But perhaps you could talk to the sheriff, explain we have some leads which we are not sure of but need to follow up, and rather than keep knocking the case back and fourth, why not authorize us to talk to some possible witnesses in Lee County. If they prove good, we hand the case back to him, but if they just lead us back to the Bronx, no harm done.”

  He heaved a big sigh and glanced out the window at the quickening darkness. “It’s never easy with you two, is it?”

  Dehan shrugged and grinned. “I guess that’s why they’re cold cases, sir.”

  He picked up the phone and dialed.

  It was cold enough for us to exhale clouds of condensation when we stepped out into the night and headed for my car. As I unlocked it, I looked at her over the roof and said, “You want to stay over? If we push off around five or six, we should get there for breakfast.”

  “Best offer I’ve had all year.”

  We climbed in and the slam of the doors cocooned us from the cold outside. As we cruised along Bruckner Boulevard she asked, “Do we need any shopping?”

  I ignored the odd phrasing and glanced at her. “I think I have everything. Depends what you want for dinner.”

  She was staring out the window at the passing lights. “You know what I like?” She turned to face me. “I like moussaka. You like moussaka?”

  “I love moussaka, but how long does it take to make?”

  “Couple of hours.” She looked away again.

  “We’d be eating at ten. We have to get up early.”

  “Maybe when we get back. I fancy making a moussaka. I make a good moussaka.”

  “Yeah, that would be nice. When we get back.”

  After a moment I glanced at her again and saw her reflection in the window, smiling. “What’s funny?”

  “Us. We’re like an old, retired couple.” She turned to look at me and put on the voice of a Hollywood Jewish mama. “Boiny, watcha wanna eat, Boiny? You want brisket? I could make you some brisket. Or you want we should go out to a restaurawnt?”

  I laughed out loud and we both lapsed into a comfortable silence. Outside, Halloween was in the air and the vendors were already out roasting chestnuts on the sidewalks. They’d be there till after Christmas. Christmas. The tinsel and the lights were already in the shop windows, and it wasn’t even Halloween yet.

  I said suddenly, “My wife wasn’t like that.” She turned to look at me, trying to hide her surprise. “It was more a case of what take out do we get. And eventually what take out I would get on the way home.”

  “Did she work?”

  “Yeah. She had a career.” I couldn’t keep the irony from my voice. “As a part-time receptionist at the dentist’s surgery on Morris Park Avenue. She had a five-minute commute on foot every morning.”

  “You never had kids.”

  “Uh-uh. She didn’t want to limit her career options.”

  “You bitter?”

  I shook my head. “I look back sometimes, and I can’t understand how I ever got into that situation in the first place, what induced me to marry her...”

  We were quiet again. She sat watching the storefronts, with their bizarre mixture of broomsticks, black, pointed hats, orange pumpkins, and Christmas trees, as they sailed by.

  “I’ve never been married, Stone. But I’ve seen a lot of people get married. Some, a very few, stay together. Most get divorced and then marry again.” She paused, thinking. “It seems to me that most people fall in love with, and marry, people who are all wrong for them. And the people who are just right for them, don’t turn them on.”

  “Yup. You got that right.”

  I pulled up in front of the house and she climbed out and went up the stairs ahead of me, stamping her feet and clapping her hands, billowing condensation from her mouth like a tall, slim dragon. I let her in and she headed for the kitchen while I turned on the lamps and pulled the drapes. Her voice came to me from inside the fridge.

  “Shall I make a risotto? It’s quick and it’s nice on a cold night.”

  I smiled to myself. “Sounds good.”

  “You got sweet potato? I’ll put sweet potato in it. You ever put sweet potato in risotto? It’s nice.”

  “I never did.”

  “You going to open some wine?”

  I went into the kitchen and chose a bottle. I pulled the cork and left it to breathe on the table, then took two beers from the fridge, cracked them, and handed her one. I stood watching her chop onions for a moment.

  “The zipper…”

  She gave me a funny look. “As a come-on, it lacks subtlety.”

  She scraped t
he onions off the board and into a pot with olive oil. They hissed and sizzled and after a moment, the warm, fruity smell reached me. She started cutting a red pepper.

  “Kathleen’s zipper. It had been ripped and broken. That was what made the sheriff suspect rape.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, that surprised you this morning.”

  I shrugged. “I have never raped anyone, but If I was going to, I wouldn’t bother with the zip if she was wearing a skirt, would you? I’d just pull up her skirt.”

  She stared at me a moment, then carried on chopping red peppers. “Huh…!”

  I went on, “Which means that for some reason, the killer wanted to make it look like rape. Yet, according to the rape kit, she had had sexual intercourse. The sheriff assumed, as he was meant to, that it was non-consensual. Where does that lead us?”

  She stared at me with a face like brain-ache. “That she’d had consensual sex…”

  I nodded. “But whoever killed her wanted us to believe it was non-consensual. What would make a killer want the police to think his victim had not had consensual sex?”

  She threw the peppers in and started chopping tomatoes. “To deflect… but…” her voice trailed away.

  “In the killer’s mind, he has made the association sex-equals-killer, and he assumes the police will do the same. So he wants the police to connect the sexual intercourse with an unknown rapist, when in fact it is a known sexual partner. He also knows that by dumping the body in a remote canyon, the semen will quickly become contaminated, so it will not lead the police back to him. They will look for a rapist.”

  She stood stirring the mixture and shaking her head.

  “There are a couple of big problems with that theory. A, it leads us directly to Mo and we know that it can’t be Mo. B, it assumes a level of forensic knowledge that, frankly, I don’t believe Mo is capable of. And what’s more, C, we know from Mrs. TMI, Kath’s mother, that Mel insisted on using a condom.”

  I was quiet for a moment, visualizing the scene. “Tearing at a zip is difficult, awkward. Pulling up a skirt is easy. Also, there was evidence of pre-mortem blunt force trauma to the head. If she was knocked unconscious…”

  She turned from the pot to look at me. “Why struggle with the zipper if she was unconscious…?”

  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 get to from here?”

  He frowned like he didn’t like the question, and didn’t understand why I would ask it. “Well, that ain’t far as the crow flies, but unless you’re a crow,” he laughed like that was funny and I pretended I thought it was, “you got to go pretty far out of your way, up to Gold Hill, and then take a dirt track. Otherwise you have to go down to Boulder and take Lefthand Canyon Drive. Some trekkers go there…”

  He shrugged and gave me a look that said he didn’t like talking about Lefthand Canyon.


  “Not a place you’d recommend, huh?”

  “It’s a place you’d only really go if you had a particular reason. And most folks don’t have a particular reason for going there, if you see what I mean.” He pointed through to the bar. “Sheriff Watson’s wait’n’ on you in the lounge. I took the liberty of putting you upstairs instead of one of the cabins. You’ll find it’s more comfortable in the cold weather. I’ll take your bags up, if you like.”

  I told him that was mighty civil of him and turned to Dehan. “Watson awaits us, dear fellow. Shall we…?”

  She gave me a look you could only describe as baleful. “You know the only thing I hate more than people who joke on freezing, early mornings in the Rockies after a twenty-six-hour drive?”

  I smiled. “Nope.”

  “Neither do I.”

  The sheriff was sitting at a table by a vast log fire where they seemed to be burning a whole tree. He was an amiable-looking man in his early sixties, with intelligent eyes and the easy manner of a man who makes a point of rarely being in a hurry. He stood as we approached and held out his hand.

  “I saw you arrive and took the liberty of ordering you some coffee and some of Elsie’s blueberry pancakes. I never come this way without stopping for some of Elsie’s pancakes.”

  We shook hands and thanked him, and sat. The warmth of the fire was welcome. A bright-eyed girl with peaches and cream skin delivered our second breakfast and told us to enjoy it in a way you just couldn’t refuse.

  As I buttered a pancake, I said, “Sheriff, I want to reassure you that we don’t plan to encroach on your jurisdiction. We just want to clarify a couple of points with some people who might be witnesses and then we’ll be on our way. If the case turns out to be yours, we’ll hand it right back.”

  He smiled throughout my little speech and then gave his head a little shake.

  “I know what your homicide statistics are for the Bronx, Detective Stone, because I took the trouble to look ’em up. But I don’t suppose for one moment that you looked up the figures for Lee County.”