Dead Cold Mystery Box Set 2

by Blake Banner

  “And around and around we go... I seem to remember once before we had too many suspects. And that time the answer was staring us in the face, too. OK, we’ll leave Akachukwu, Mr. Oni, to meditate on his future for a while, and go and have another talk with Lynda and maybe Jack.”

  I went to stand but she was giving me a funny look. “You mind taking this one on your own, Stone?”

  I frowned at her. “Why?”

  “You said before that you wanted to review Rosario’s case file. You keep saying we’re missing something that is staring us in the face. I think you’re right, and I think it has to do with Rosario. If you don’t need me, then I’d like to review her case, in detail. Maybe the thing we are missing is in that file.”

  I stared at her for a long moment, then said, “I need you.”

  She looked momentarily startled.

  I smiled. “But I agree you should review her case. Call me if you find anything.”

  She watched me stand and leave, without answering.

  In the car, on the way to Lynda’s house, I kept going over in my mind how she had seemed when we spoke to her. She hadn’t looked like a woman who had been beaten up in the last few hours. The absence of bruising didn’t say much. Men who are in the habit of hitting women soon learn to strike where it doesn’t show. But it was a different kind of bruising that was missing with Lynda: a bruising of the mind and soul, a latent fear that you can see in the eyes, that tells you she has grown accustomed to wincing and cowering. It was a bruising I had seen in Mary Irizarry, but not in Lynda Graham.

  When I got there and rang on the bell, she opened the door almost immediately. She looked surprised to see me. She also looked up and down the road to see where Dehan was.

  I smiled. “I’m on my own, may I come in?”

  “Course! You want a grog? Or are you on duty?”

  “I’m on duty. I don’t want anything, thank you. Can we sit down, please, Lynda?”

  She gave a little frown. “Sure. Go ahead.” She gestured at a chair and we both sat.

  “Lynda, if I take you down to the station, and have a female police officer, or a doctor, examine your body, will they find bruises?”

  She sighed and made a face like I was being a pain in the ass. “No. Has Mrs. Paglieri been on at you? Look, the party went on a little too long, things got a little wild…”

  “I thought you didn’t remember…”

  She closed her eyes. “All right, you caught me. I’m sorry. My delightful neighbor complained. Two very polite coppers came around, asked us to keep it down. By that time, the boys had already left.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s it.”

  I felt a wave of irritation and fought to control it. “Come on, Lynda! Do I look stupid? What car does Jack drive?”

  She closed her eyes again and sighed. “This is so fucked up. He drives a clapped out old BMW…”

  “What color?”

  “Black. He phoned me. It was late, I don’t know, around one I guess. It was at the same time as that bitch next door complained. He wanted to know if the guys had left. He could hear the music and Luis and Sebastian laughing. He got mad and said he was coming ’round. I told him not to. Then the bionic bitch said she’d called the police. So that was all kind of a downer? And Seb and Luis left. Two minutes later Jack turns up, like a fucking, raving lunatic, and starts shouting at the door. I knew the cops were coming, so I dragged him inside. He was still shouting his fucking head off when they arrived. I mean, where does he fucking get off? He’s not even my boyfriend.”

  “So what happened?”

  “They told us to keep it down. I told them we would. They left, and after a while Jack left.”

  “How much of a while?”

  She shrugged and sagged. “I’m just shit with time, you know? I guess it might have been about two? Half two?”

  “Two or two thirty. He didn’t hit you?”

  “He wouldn’t fucking dare!”

  “You should have told us this when we first spoke to you, Lynda. It is not smart lying to the cops. Have you seen Jack since?”

  She shook her head. “No. I think he’s kind of ashamed?”

  I stood. “How old are you, Lynda?”

  She looked surprised at the question. “Twenty-seven, why?”

  I reached for the door. “Because it’s about time you started growing up?”

  Her cheeks went pink and I stepped out into the sunshine, feeling unreasonably mad.

  It was a short walk to Jack’s house. All the way, I tried to imagine him holding a gun and shooting Sebastian through the window of the Toyota that night. Sexual passion of one sort or another is the prime motivation for murder—it always has been and always will be. Sex and murder go together like oysters and champagne. And in some ways Jack fit the bill better than Akachukwu—at least for my money. But, I thought sourly as I turned into his street, the fact was that nobody really fit the bill in this case. It was all wrong. The whole damn thing was wrong.

  There was a beaten-up old black BMW parked outside his house. I rang the bell and for good measure rang two more times. There was no reply. I peered through the window, but it was hard to see anything clearly. It was when I went back to ring again that I noticed that the wrought iron outer door was not locked. I opened it using my pen and hammered on the inner door with my knuckles. I had a look around. There was no one to see me, so I took out my Swiss Army knife, selected the screwdriver and, with a firm thump, inserted it into the lock and turned. The lock gave and I opened the door. I stood a moment in the small hallway. It was very still and very quiet.

  “Mr. O’Brien?” There was no reply so I called louder, “Mr. O’Brien?”

  There was still no reply, not a sound in the whole house. The door to the living room was on the left. It was ajar and I eased it open all the way with my foot. My stomach lurched and I turned away, struggling not to vomit. The stench was overpowering, but worse than the smell was what was lying on the carpet in the middle of the floor. I went outside and steadied myself, taking deep breaths. After a moment, I pulled out my cell and called Dehan.

  “Yeah.”

  “I need you here, at Jack O’Brien’s house. We need a crime scene team, the ME, and a meat wagon.”

  “O’Brien’s dead?”

  “If he’s not, he’s got real problems. He’s been disemboweled. It’s the ugliest thing I ever saw, Dehan. It’s bad, real bad.”

  “OK, I’m on my way.”

  SIXTEEN

  I stepped inside again and forced myself to look at the grotesque mess on the floor. His body was bent back at an impossible angle, achievable only because all of his abdominal muscles had been severed. Everything that should have been on the inside, was lying on the carpet: a ghastly gray-pink mess, covered in dry, black, clotted blood, and crawling with bluebottles. I tried to ignore the surreal madness of what I was seeing. Tried to read the crime scene instead. What had happened here? What had been the sequence of events?

  The iron gate was unlocked. It had not been relocked. That suggested something that had happened at speed. Somebody had rung at the door. He had come and opened it and whoever it was had entered quickly, forcefully, without bothering to close the gate. Jack would have backed into the house. His attacker would have followed him. What next?

  The front door would have swung closed. They are in the entrance hall. Jack is backing away, into the living room. His attacker follows. Jack is big, and tough, a rugby player. For him to be backing away, that means his assailant is either bigger, or armed. Hard to be much bigger, so I go with armed. If he has a gun, he now swaps for a blade. A very sharp blade.

  I stopped, analysing the scene, ignoring the nausea I was feeling, scanning the room. The chairs and lamps were not overturned. The TV was not disturbed. Nothing – nothing – was disturbed. The attack was swift, brutal, and utterly deadly. There was no fight. This big, tough, British rugby player just stood there and got killed.

  So if the at
tacker had a gun, he put it away, pulled a blade—what blade? Considering the distance, considering Jack’s size and strength, considering that he didn’t even get to try and defend himself, it’s either a samurai sword or…

  Or a machete.

  A machete, up the sleeve of a jacket or a coat, dropped into the hand, one step, one swipe, and Jack was disemboweled. And then beaten brutally—and unnecessarily, because he was already dead—to end up in that horrific position, broken, practically bisected.

  His voice came back to me. One of the last things he’d said to us when we’d come to see him: “…Never mind what you’d do to me… it’s what the hard nuts ’round here would do to me. I been warned…”

  The hard nuts ’round here.

  I looked at the door that led down to the cellar. It was open. I went and hunkered down and, as I looked closer, I saw traces of dirt on the carpet. Using my pen, I eased the door open. The light was on and the smell of cannabis was strong and unmistakable. But I knew we wouldn’t find any down there. Whoever had cut Jack down, had also taken his plants. I wondered how many he’d had. Twelve? Fifteen? Twenty? Anything between twenty and fifty grand’s worth on the street. And he thought the hard nuts would not object to that. He didn’t realize, they weren’t hard. They were just greedy, and placed no value on human life. They’d have killed him for a hundred bucks, let alone fifty grand.

  The distant wail of sirens reached me. I peered at the bare wooden steps. There was dirt that had been spilled from the plants, but there was also a layer of dust, and in it the prints left behind by heavy boots. At a guess, a size twelve or thirteen. A tall man. A big man.

  I stood and stepped away from the cellar door, staring hard at the dirty, old carpet, visualizing the track to the door, and a guy carrying marijuana plants back and forth. Outside, cop cars started arriving. Through the living room window, I saw the urgent pulse of the red and blue lights. I went to open the door.

  Dehan was there, walking toward me. Uniforms were spilling from the vehicles, a sergeant was telling them to seal the area around the house, the gurney was being unloaded from the wagon. Frank was suiting up, so were Joe and his team. Dehan said, “What?”

  I shook my head. “Brace yourself. It’s ugly. He’s been practically cut in half.”

  She suppressed a wince. “He didn’t deserve that.”

  “No. Don’t go in just yet, I want to talk to Joe.” Joe was moving toward us with his guys. I beckoned him to follow me through the front door and called to the sergeant, too. Dehan was close behind, listening. I talked as I went, pointing at the floor. “I think the killer took a number of marijuana plants from the basement out to a vehicle. At a guess, he must have done the trip at least six times, probably more. He’s spilled dirt on the stairs and then trodden in it. So he has left boot prints all the way along. I need to know his shoe size, the make of his boots, and if he was alone or there was somebody helping him. Sergeant, start knocking on doors. Somebody saw him loading up a vehicle with cannabis plants.”

  “I’m on it, Detective.”

  The team went to work on the basement steps and the carpet. Frank came in as we moved out of the doorway. He stood in the entrance to the living room, staring down at the horrible, inhuman mess on the floor.

  “I can honestly say I have never seen anything quite like this. In all my years…”

  Dehan looked and turned away. Her skin had turned a pasty gray color. I said, “You need to step outside?”

  She shook her head.

  “Come, I want to have a look upstairs.”

  We climbed the steps to the upper floor. There was a small landing, a john, and two bedrooms. The back bedroom was jumbled with everything from boxes to bicycle parts. It seemed to be an improvised storeroom which didn’t yield much in the way of information. The front bedroom was also chaotic, but was clearly where he slept. The bed was rumpled and unmade. The sheets looked overdue for a wash. There was a TV on a bookcase at the foot of the bed, several dirty plates on the bedside table by the door, a couple of empty beer bottles, and a couple of dirty glasses. All, plates, bottles, and glasses contained butt-ends of what looked like joints. We moved into the room and Dehan stood looking around. “Where the hell do you begin? What a slob!”

  On the far bedside table I saw what I had not seen downstairs. A telephone. It was a hunch, not even that, a vague feeling: I saw them, him and Lynda, shouting at each other, both drunk, both mad, both caught up in their toxic, dependent, over-emotional relationship. I stood staring at the phone but seeing the scene play itself out, and spoke aloud.

  “He didn’t hit her. To be honest, Dehan, my gut tells me she’d be more likely to hit him. When he left her house the night before last, he did one of two things. Either he went to Angela’s house and killed Sebastian…”

  She interrupted me. “Which would mean he had a gun, and knew they were going there…”

  I nodded. “Or, he came home. They are both drunk, both hooked on each other, both making each other unhappy, but needing each other…”

  I sat on the bed and pressed the messages button. There were six new, and three saved. The new ones were all people asking for dope. He must have been doing a good trade. The first of the saved messages was from Friday night, more precisely, two fifty on Saturday morning. It was Lynda, crying, speaking with that wet, swollen voice of alcohol-induced tears.

  “Jack baby, are you there…? Please pick up, lover boy… don’t be mean. Look, I’m sorry… just…”

  The message was cut short. I looked at Dehan. We had both heard it. Just before it was cut short, Jack’s voice, with that same wet, sobbing sound, saying, “Lynda, I’m here, darlin’…”

  Dehan sighed. It was a big, depressed sigh, and she followed it up with a heartfelt, “Fuck…”

  “He was here talking to Lynda while Sebastian and Luis were getting shot.”

  She shook her head. “I never really believed… What a waste, Stone.”

  I nodded. “A stupid waste. He was a nice guy.” We stared at each other for a long time. Neither of us said anything, but we were both thinking it, and we both knew we were thinking it.

  She turned and made for the bedroom door. I stood and followed. At the bottom of the stairs, I paused to look one more time at what was left of Jack O’Brien. They were preparing to load him onto the gurney, and that was something I couldn’t watch. Dehan was standing in the open doorway, breathing deeply. I was about to join her when Joe came up beside me.

  “John, I can’t be sure till we get this all back to the lab, but we may have something here.” He hesitated. “Is this related to Sebastian and Luis’ case?”

  I nodded. “I think so.”

  “I know Frank was kind of mentoring Sebastian, so we’re giving this…” He shrugged. “An unofficial priority.”

  “I appreciate that, and I know he will, too. What have you got?”

  “By the looks of it, he had over a dozen plants down there, and there are two sets of footprints, his and somebody who appears to have removed the plants.”

  “Good.”

  “Whoever that was seems to have been a very large man, and there is something distinctive about his boot print. I am pretty sure I can trace the manufacturer, but more important than that, John, is that because of the way he walks, he has worn down the heel in a distinctive way. In addition to that, at some point he has trodden on a nail or a piece of glass, or something sharp, and it has etched a unique mark into his heel. This kind of wear and tear can make a shoeprint as unique as a fingerprint.”

  Dehan had approached us from the door. She frowned. “You can tell all that from the prints in the dust?”

  He smiled. “No, but you should have a look down there. A lot of dirt was spilled around the area where he had the plants under the lamps. He left some very clear prints, and we can work them up at the lab. I’ll send you the pictures ASAP.” As an afterthought, he added, “The guy you have in custody, send me his boots and I’ll run a comparison on my own
time.”

  “I’ll have them sent over to you now. Thanks, Joe. I appreciate that.”

  I went outside, sat on the hood of one of the patrol cars, and made the call. When I was done, I crossed my arms and stared at Dehan. She had her hands in her front pockets, she was chewing her lip and kept standing on tip-toes.

  I said, “He told us he’d been warned. You remember that?”

  She nodded.

  I jerked my head at the house. “Somebody is trying to make a reputation for himself. I’ve never seen that before, disemboweling somebody like that for growing weed. That’s new.”

  “I agree. It also makes clear that our initial theory is a total washout, which narrows our suspects down to Akachukwu and Ed Irizarry.” She sighed and gave her head a little sideways twist, like I’d asked her a question and she didn’t know how to answer. “We have a lot of reasons to be thinking about Akachukwu right now, and his alibi, as far as I am concerned, isn’t worth a drunken promise…”

  “A drunken promise, Dehan? That’s very poetic.”

  She ignored me. “But then again, as for Ed, that has one big plus for me.”

  “It ties in to Rosario’s murder. Somehow. We don’t know how.”

  She was nodding as I spoke. “Plus, Stone, the only motive Akachukwu has for killing the boys is if he’s sweet on Angela, and frankly we have zero evidence to support that notion. All we know is that he was looking for Moses because he has some kind of grudge. But there is zilch connecting him to Sebastian or Luis.”

  I thought about that for a while, then shrugged. “I agree with you, but the case against Ed Irizarry, if it can be dignified with that name, is almost as weak. We have no motive for him at all. All we have is a series of bizarre coincidences.”

  She made a face. “But he has made it clear that he had some kind of grudge against Sebastian.”