Dead Cold Mystery Box Set 2

by Blake Banner

  “We’ve been here before, remember?”

  I shook my head. “Where have we been before?”

  “You see a hot piece of skirt and start sidelining me and cutting me out of the investigation. I don’t need it, Stone.”

  “That is not what is happening.”

  She raised an eyebrow at me. “Really? Didn’t I just sit and listen to you and Shelly Pearce arrange to go out to dinner to help each other in your mutual investigations?”

  I sighed again. “Dehan, it just pays sometimes to be nice, rather than go storming in with the attitude…”

  “Yeah? So how is your date tonight going to pay? By giving you Bob Shaw’s number?”

  “Okay, you made your point.”

  “Did I?” She sat forward and put her elbows on the desk. “I’m going to tell you something, then I’m going to ask you something.”

  “Okay…”

  “First, I guarantee that if—and it’s a big if, Stone—if you get any useful information from your date tonight, you will keep me out of the loop and act on it on your own, just like you did with Emma Girt in the Springfellow case[1], because… Ah! Forget it! But let me ask you a question, Stone. How difficult would it be—how much of a stretch would it be—for Shelly Pearce to become a suspect in this case?”

  I was surprised by the question and allowed it to show on my face. The best I could manage was, “Um…”

  “Let me tell you. She is the one person, after Bob Shaw, who was most likely to have access to Thorndike’s work. She was the person selected by the paper to investigate his death. Why? We don’t know. Why? Oh, yeah, because we didn’t ask her. Maybe you could ask her that on your date tonight. That is…” She held up both hands. “If it doesn’t screw up your date. I’d hate the investigation to get in the way of your date!” She made a labored face like she had suddenly realized something. “Huh! Maybe that’s why we are not supposed to date witnesses!”

  We sat staring at each other for a long moment. “Are you done?”

  She raised her eyebrow at me again. “I’m not sure I even got started yet, Stone.”

  “You want to finish?”

  “No, I’d rather you explain to me what the hell you think you’re doing dating a witness who is a potential suspect.”

  I nodded. “Okay, I get it. I take your point. Now let me answer.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “First, it is not a date. Okay? A date implies a sexual or romantic element. There is nothing like that here.”

  “Oh, come on, Stone! How stupid do you think I am?”

  “Let me finish. Second, there is a chance that Shelly Pearce has information about Dave Thorndike that she is not sharing. If that is so, the easiest way of getting that information is for me to be friendly with her. Third, please have sufficient trust—and respect—to know that I would not have an affair with a witness, much less a potential suspect.”

  We stared at each other for a moment. She shook her head. “You were coming on to her, Stone.”

  “No. She was coming on to me. I was flirting.”

  “Great. Can you be objective about this woman?”

  “Of course I can, Dehan!”

  She pointed at me, and I was surprised to see real anger in her face, “The minute your feelings for this woman start to affect your judgment in this case, you come clean. And I will be watching. And if you try to cut me out again I will apply for a transfer. You understand me?”

  I watched her a moment before I answered. “Bring it down a notch or three, Carmen. I have no ‘feelings’ for this woman, one way or another. I don’t plan to cut you out and my judgment is clear. We’re good, partner. There is no issue here. Trust me.”

  She grunted and studied my face a moment without humor. “You want to know what I read while you were arranging your date?”

  “It’s not a date.”

  “You want to know?”

  “Sure, hit me.”

  “Don’t tempt me. I got like ten or fifteen minutes to scan his last few features in the paper. Several of them mention Senator Carol Hennessey. And his last article was about her, and allegations that are going around the web of corruption and shady deals. It’s not much to go on, but it seems he may have been developing an…” She hesitated. “An interest in her.”

  I pulled over the articles and looked at them. “No kidding.” I started scanning the first page. “I vaguely remember something about her and her husband, back in the late ’80s or ’90s. A real-estate deal in California or something. Didn’t somebody die?”

  “I don’t recall. I was a kid in the ’90s. But there seems to be a lot of shady stuff in her past. It may not be related, but I figure there’s a chance he decided to go into it in more depth. We should ask Shaw about it. Even if he didn’t know the exact nature of the investigation, he must have know what it was about in general terms.”

  She went quiet and I looked up. She was staring at me fixedly.

  “What?”

  “You should ask Pearce about it tonight.”

  “I will. Believe me, Dehan, she’ll be so bored and disappointed by the time we’ve finished the meal she’ll never want to see me again.”

  “Sure. Just ask her, will you?”

  “I will. Now will you give it a rest?”

  We spent the next fifteen minutes reading through the articles in silence. Dehan had been right. Dave Thorndike did seem to be developing not so much an interest as a near obsession with Senator Carol Hennessy. And it wasn’t hard to see why. If half the allegations against her and her husband were true, they made the Mob look like a bunch of schoolgirls. And the curious thing was that, when I checked on Google, I could not find a single successful libel case brought by her, or her husband, against any of their accusers. In fact, I couldn’t find any libel cases, period; successful or otherwise.

  I frowned at Dehan, whose face was still hidden behind her laptop. “These allegations against her, they really damaged her career. She had a shot at the Oval Office.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But she never brought a libel suit against anybody.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “I think this is important. It’s damn good work, Dehan.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I sighed noisily and went back to reading. Eventually, the desk sergeant buzzed to say that Bob Shaw had arrived. Dehan went to get him and I went to get coffee, feeling vaguely uncomfortable.

  SIX

  Dehan was waiting outside interrogation room number 3 as I approached. She had her hands in her back pockets and her hair tied in a knot behind her head. She smiled at me with her mouth, but frowned with her eyes. I handed her a coffee.

  “Ready?”

  She took it with her left hand and gently punched my shoulder with her right. “Yeah. Sorry.”

  I shook my head and opened the door for her.

  Bob Shaw looked up and smiled uncertainly as we came in. He was in his late sixties, but still ruggedly handsome. Dehan sat and I placed a coffee in front of him. “I’m not sure what it is. The machine says coffee, but who knows?”

  He glanced at it and then at me. “Isn’t this one of those rooms where you grill suspects?” he said. “Am I a suspect in some crime?” He was grinning, but the question was serious. “I spent the better part of forty years investigating the police. I know how you operate.”

  I smiled and sat. “The police have changed a lot in those forty years, Mr. Shaw. Today they watch us more closely than we watch you.”

  He barked, “Ha!” picked up the coffee and peered inside. “What is this? It looks like my piss after I drank too much agave beer down in Mexico.”

  “Maybe they found a way to synthesize it, because that is pretty much what it tastes like. Mr. Shaw, you are not a suspect in any crime. We just need to ask you some questions about David Thorndike.”

  He looked at me and chuckled. Then he gave Dehan an appraising once-over. “Okay, shoot.”

  “Do you know what happened to
Dave’s laptop and the article he was working on?”

  He shook his head and looked slightly bored. “Really? After ten years? That’s your question? They asked me that at the time. I told them I had no idea. He never showed it to me and he sure as hell never gave it to me.”

  I nodded. “I figured, but you have to ask, right?”

  He shrugged and pulled a face.

  I ignored him and went on. “I know he told you nothing about the article, I know he never showed it to you, I know all that. But I want you to tell me what he did tell you.”

  “Nothing!” He spread his hands, raised his shoulder and his eyebrows.

  Dehan smiled and snorted. “Bullshit.”

  He kept the same expression but turned it to face her.

  I said, “It’s bullshit, Mr. Shaw, and you know it. You would never have approved an investigation without knowing at least the basics. You knew something. And I know for a fact he called you at least once to tell you it was finished and he expected a Pulitzer. Now you know very well, as a reporter yourself, that there are little bits and pieces in what he did tell you that, when you put them together, add up to something!”

  He sighed and started bouncing his head around. “Okay, okay, point taken. I’m just not all that comfortable sharing information with cops, know what I mean? You guys have a way of taking facts and distorting them for your own ends.”

  Dehan snorted again. “Unlike reporters.”

  “Hey!” He pointed at her. “Not on my papers, sugar! We were never yellow press. The Times, the Tribune, they might indulge in a bit of truth massaging and distortion of perspective to suit their political agendas. Not the NYT. We told it how it was and we took the consequences. And we always made sure our facts were solid.”

  I nodded. “Okay, so we operate the same way. Now, what did he tell you? What, in general terms, was the story about?”

  He sighed, examined the coffee one last time, and finally started to talk.

  “Dave had got a bee in his bonnet. And I think he was onto something. We had talked about it a few times over a drink. A couple of his articles had touched on it, and he was pretty psyched about the evidence he had got together so far. He was a damn good investigator. So he came to me and said he wanted to go undercover and start to dig deep.”

  Dehan said, “Into what, Bob?”

  He looked surprised. “We on first name terms now? Do I get to call you Carmen, Carmen?”

  She smiled.

  He snorted. “Sweetheart, I was shooting acid and challenging the establishment before your daddy had his bar mitzvah. Don’t try and play me. Into what? Into Senator Carol Hennessy. Her name, and her husband’s, were and are linked to a whole raft of dubious business deals: tax evasion, illegal exports, facilitating arms sales to oppressive regimes and governments that harbor terrorists. And as for suspicious deaths, you go online and you can download a PDF file with forty-eight names of people who died in suspicious circumstances after crossing her path.”

  He sat back, placed both hands palm down on the table and studied them for a moment. “Now I guess it’s forty-nine.” He sighed. “I’m not saying that it’s all true, but hell! I never saw anyone who attracted so much shit. Even Nixon didn’t attract this much controversy. And Dave had a nose, you know what I’m saying? He had an instinct. He’d start digging and ferreting and scratching away, and if there was something hidden, he would find it. Man, it was like dowsing! He just knew when there was something hidden. And he became pretty much obsessed with the Hennessy story.

  “So I told him. Go for it. I’ll back you up. That was pretty much the last I ever heard from him. I had no idea where he was or what he was doing. That was the arrangement we had. I knew he would produce the goods. He was the best reporter I ever worked with, or ever knew for that matter. And believe me, I knew the best. But he was something special.”

  Dehan had been listening carefully. Now she asked, “What happened?”

  Bob Shaw sucked his teeth for a moment, then said, “He went off the radar for a few weeks. Then he called me one evening. He said he was really excited about the story. It was his best work ever.” He nodded several times. “And if he said that, believe me, it was good. He was talking about getting the Pulitzer, about rocking the establishment. He was even saying the shock waves from what he had would be so far-reaching it could lead to constitutional change regarding the accountability of congressmen. And Dave wasn’t one to say that kind of thing without good cause. Whatever he had…” He shook his head. “It wasn’t dynamite, it was an atom bomb.”

  I was frowning. “In less than two months? An investigation like that would take months.”

  He nodded. “I know. I would have expected six months at least. That kind of investigation is painstaking, and he was meticulous. More than most. But that was what he said. He was wrapping it up, and it would be cataclysmic in its impact.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I told him to bring it in and let me see it. That was when he told me he was in fear for his life. He was afraid that somebody was on his trail and intended to kill him. Given the nature—and the subject—of his investigation, I was inclined to take him seriously.

  “Next thing, I heard he’d been found murdered. Him, and forty-eight other people who had crossed Carol Hennessy’s path.”

  Dehan gave her head a twitch. “That’s quite a story.”

  “Yeah, that’s what he thought. And I wish you or the Feds would dig into this woman’s background, her and her goddamn smarmy husband. But that ain’t ever going to happen because the establishment looks after its own.”

  Dehan shrugged. “You may be right, Mr. Shaw. I wouldn’t know. But if she killed Dave Thorndike, we will take her down.”

  He made a face, “Yah, yadda yadda.”

  She ignored him and plowed on. “We have a witness who says that a couple of days before he was killed, his laptop and his papers had gone from their usual place on his dining table where he worked.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “Really?”

  “Yes, now, if he didn’t give them to you, who else would he trust enough…”

  He was already shaking his head. He went to speak, hesitated, then creased his eyes and shook his head again.

  I said, “Who, Mr. Shaw? You thought of somebody and dismissed them. Who was it?”

  He hunched his shoulders and screwed up his face. “Nah… I thought maybe his lawyer. They were pretty close. I mean, as close as anybody ever got to Dave, you know what I’m saying? And in as much as he trusted anyone, he trusted him. But I can’t see it. It doesn’t make any sense, he would give him the story and not me…?”

  I nodded. It made perfect sense to me. “What was his layer’s name, Mr. Shaw?”

  “Oh, jeez…! Uh…he was Chinese or Korean or something. Korean. What’s that name—all Koreans have the same name, you know? Uh, Lee. Lee something. Or something Lee. They always have their names the wrong way ’round too. I don’t know if he was Lee something or something Lee.”

  Dehan grunted. “Would you have this on file anywhere?”

  He shook his head. “Nah. But Shelly will. Shelly will remember him. She knew him.”

  Dehan looked sour and asked, “Any idea what became of him? Who he worked for?”

  “No idea. I just heard Dave talk about him sometimes. I never met the guy. Like I said, you’re better off talking to Shelly. She moved in the same circle. It was a bit too rarified for me,”

  I frowned at him. A bell inside my head rang a quiet alarm. “Rarified?”

  “Yah! You know, in my day it was different. You were an editor in my kind of paper, you unleashed your hounds and they did their worst. Today it’s different. Editors have to rub shoulders with the mayor, senators, governors, ambassadors, princes, and oil barons. That was never my style, but Shelly excels at it.”

  “Are you telling me that Shelly knows Carol Hennessy?”

  “Sure. They all know each other. Shelly, Hennessy, Lee, the mayor… Th
ey all move in the same circle. That’s what I’m saying. It’s the way it works.”

  Dehan drew breath and looked at me. Shaw barked a laugh and cut in before she could speak. “Draw your own conclusions, detective. I drew mine a long time ago. I’ve always done the right thing. It’s the way I was raised. You were probably raised the same way. But heroes are heroes because they do things decent people are too scared to do. I’m a decent man, but I ain’t a hero. When Dave was murdered, it took the fight out of me. I hadn’t the stomach for it anymore.” He looked at me. “They’re there, Stone. They’re there, in their manor houses and their towers of glass and steel, and their palaces. They run the show. They buy and sell people, they send them off to war, to be exterminated in their thousands and millions. They experiment on them, they enslave them, they send them down mines to die, men, women, and children. And they don’t give a damn.” He flapped both hands at me. “I ain’t big enough to go up against them. I’m old and they scare me. And Shelly…” He shrugged and shook his head. “Is there anything else?”

  I sat and chewed my lip for a moment, then turned and looked at Dehan. She shook her head.

  I said, “No, thank you, Mr. Shaw. You’ve given us plenty to be thinking about.”

  He went to stand, but paused and looked at Dehan. “You’re a beautiful young lady, in the prime of your life. Be smart. Don’t go up against this woman. She’ll destroy you. She won’t think twice. She probably won’t even know your name.”

  She stared at him.

  He stood and then grinned at me. “You? You’re old and ugly like me. We get rubbed out, who cares, right?”

  He laughed out loud. I smiled and stood. We shook hands and he left, leaving the door open behind him. I turned to face Dehan. She was sitting with her ass on the table and her arms crossed, watching me. We stared at each other for a long moment, thinking. It was a habit we both had which used to unsettle other people, but it helped us think.

  Finally, she said, “Should be an interesting meal, Stone.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I think so. I think Shelly Pearce might know more than we first thought.”