Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (A Dead Cold Box Set)

by Blake Banner

  I sighed. “We have two, maybe three key people here.” I lifted my hands and looked at them, like I was positioning pieces on a board. “We’ve got Steve. He can’t help us because he’s dead, and in any case, I don’t get the feeling he knew anything until it was too late. Tammy told Gloria Steve had asked her to go back with him, but I don’t believe that. It sounds to me like Tammy was making all the running. She was the one who was suddenly excited and talking crazy, making plans.”

  Dehan nodded. “I agree. So the question is, what happened to make her excited?”

  “What happened was the two other people, Mr. G. Sanders and the mystery millionaire. The mystery millionaire can’t help us because right now we have no idea who he is, and we have no immediate way of finding out. Which leaves us Mr. G. Sanders.” I paused, staring at Dehan’s face. She stared back. It was something we did sometimes to help us think. “And when you think about it,” I said after a moment, “Everything starts with Mr. G. Sanders.”

  “Yup. So we need to go and talk to the Hyatt Regency.”

  I scowled. “They will not be cooperative.” I opened the door and got in. “Let’s go prod them, see what they do.”

  She got in next to me. “Then I want to eat, overlooking the Bay. What was that place we ate at when we were on the Nelson Hernandez case?”

  I smiled and fired up the big V8. “The Epic Steak House.”

  As I pulled out into the traffic, she said, with a kind of casual air, “I think an epic steak might just inspire us. What do you think?”

  “I think we are going to go and poke the security manager at the Hyatt and see what he does, and after that we are going to go and have a couple of epic steaks.”

  “You’re the man, Stone.”

  “I am the man.”

  Six

  We stepped through the glass doors into a set from Mad Max—the hotel. Everything was brown and brass and seemed to be the wrong shape for what it was. It was as though Salvador Dali had designed it during his steampunk period. We eventually worked out where the reception desk was and approached it through giant spheres and cubes that turned out to be cubicles where people could sit and talk, and probably make dimensional shifts. A bank of elevators like brass bullets vaguely reminded me of a gigantic church organ.

  A guy with a name tag that said “Pierre,” but who was probably called Bobby Brown, smiled at Dehan and said, “Meh ah ’elp you, mademoiselle?”

  She leaned on the desk with her elbows and gave him a wink. “Yeah, we are police officers, and we would like to talk to the head of security.”

  He looked at her the way a man looks at a glass he thought contained fine old whiskey, only to discover it was a urine sample. He gathered his dignity about him and used the internal phone. A couple of minutes later, a man of about fifty with Navy Seal written all over him came striding across the lobby. It is hard to stride sedately, but he managed it. His face smiled at us while his little blue eyes calibrated us.

  “Don’t show me your badges,” he said as he took Dehan’s hand in both of his. “You don’t come to the Hyatt,” he added, laughing and shaking my hand warmly, “to see cops flashing badges. Come to my office.”

  He led us through the vast space, past gigantic orbs and blocks that served no apparent purpose, to a brown door in a brown wall. He opened it and let us in. His office was not designed by anybody who had been abusing chemicals. It was Swedish functional in vinyl and aluminum.

  He sat behind his desk and said, “May I see some IDs?”

  We showed him our badges. He took them and examined them meticulously, then stared at us as though he had uncovered a serious crime. “You’re from New York.”

  “We are here at the invitation of the local PD, Mr…”

  “Major. Major Payne.”

  “Major Payne, we are investigating a homicide in New York, and one of the victims had links with San Francisco. May we…?”

  I gestured at the chairs opposite his desk. Dehan didn’t wait for a reply. She pulled out a chair and sat. I followed suit. He handed back our badges.

  “What has this to do with the Hyatt Regency?”

  “We believe one of your guests may have been one of the last people to see her alive.”

  “And what do you want from me?”

  “We would like to contact that guest.”

  “Out of the question.”

  Dehan scowled at him. “You could be harboring a criminal, Major Payne.”

  “In the first place,” he snapped at her, like he was telling a private to drop and give him twenty, “you are outside your jurisdiction! In the second place, all you have is that you think our guest might have been one of several people who saw your victim! Third, I have no obligation whatsoever to give you private and confidential information unless you have a court order!”

  “All we are asking for, Major, is a little cooperation, and we will undertake to be very discreet. The guest is not at your hotel at present, as far as we are aware. The events we are talking about occurred two years ago.”

  “What you are asking for, Detective, is the address of one of our guests. And I am not going to give you that without a court order. If you have enough evidence to convince a judge, then he will give you that order and I will give you the information. If you haven’t, he won’t and neither shall I. Now, you are wasting my time, and your own. I think it is time you left. You are not welcome here.”

  Sometimes you come across a person in life who, if there were any natural justice in the universe, you would be allowed to smack in the mouth, drop into a turbo blender, and feed to your cat. But there is not natural justice in the universe. We have to make our own, and sometimes it doesn’t work out. You just have to smile and take it.

  I smiled sweetly and said, “Thanks for your time, Major. I know you did your best.”

  We stood and I reached for the door. Dehan hesitated and stopped. “Major, I just have one last question.”

  He sighed and looked at her.

  She went on. “How come—when you were promoted to major—how come you didn’t change your name? I mean, Captain Payne I get, but Major? Major Payne? Seriously…?”

  He gave her a look like a one-eyed cat licking piss off a nettle and snarled, “Get the hell out of here.”

  As we crossed the vast lobby back toward the door, she gave me a look that was almost frightening. “I am going to bust this son of a bitch.”

  “How are you going to do that, Dehan?”

  “Just watch me.”

  When we got outside, the sky had turned crimson over the rooftops and night was closing in from the east. As I crossed the sidewalk and opened the driver’s door, she said, “Pop the trunk.” I did as I was told, and she pulled out her laptop. She climbed in next to me and said, “Stay here for a bit, will you?”

  She switched on the computer. I watched her a moment, then asked, “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to hack the son of a bitch.”

  I was surprised and my face said so. “You can do that?”

  “It’s not as hard as you might think.” She typed for a bit, muttering, “When you’re not a dinosaur. First we put the wireless card in monitor mode…” She typed some more, “Then I need to start airodump-ng.”

  “Airodumping?”

  “Yeah… Okay!” She showed me the screen. It had gone black, and there were several columns of numbers and codes.

  She squinted. “See, this one has the lowest value, so I’m going to guess that’s our boy. Now I need to break the WPA2 encryption… and I am in his network.”

  “You are?”

  “Yeah. I am going to lock onto his AP—” She was typing again as she spoke. “—and capture his password hash. I’ll force him to reauthenticate by bumping him off his AP with a deauthenticate sent with the airoreplay-ng command…”

  “Airoreplaying?”

  “Uh-huh…” She wasn’t listening, but after a few moments, she smiled. “Okay, Stone, let’s go eat. It may take a fe
w hours, but when we get back we will have his WPA2 password and we’ll be inside his network.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She had a big, stupid grin on her face as she climbed out of the car and raised her hand to hail a cab.

  “It means we can check every guest they’ve had for the past however many years they have been computerized.” A yellow cab had pulled up in front of her.

  “Oh…”

  I locked the Mustang and followed her into the cab.

  We ended up at the Osso Steakhouse—good seafood and large slabs of meat. It was about right for what we both needed. We worked our way through a couple of dishes of mussels with an ice-cold Chardonnay and then two medium-rare eight-ounce steaks with french fries and no damned salad. With that, we had a superb Convento San Francisco. We followed the steak with a cheese board, espresso, and Bushmills in a cognac glass, no ice. We didn’t talk much. We just ate and drank and smiled.

  Not bad for a Tuesday evening.

  It was a mild, pleasant evening, and only a mile to walk back, downhill along California Street. She walked with her hands in her pockets, staring at her boots. I enjoyed looking around at one of the prettiest cities in the world.

  “You know what’s doing my head in, Stone?”

  “Tell me.”

  “You’ll agree that everything we have found since we’ve been here has pointed in one clear direction.”

  “Probably. What is that direction?”

  “Tammy connected with G. Sanders, he made a proposition to her involving his multimillionaire friend, and she saw the opportunity of making a lot of money and winning her loser boyfriend back.”

  I pulled a face and nodded. “That is a fair summing up.”

  “What’s doing my head in is, how do we get from Californian multimillionaires to Sureños in the Bronx?”

  I sighed. “With any luck, Dehan, your computer is about to answer that question for us.”

  Ten minutes later, we climbed in the car, and Dehan opened up her laptop to check its progress. She grinned. “We’re in. Let’s get back to the hotel and see what we got.”

  Seven

  We brought the laptop to my room, and she sat cross-legged with it on my bed. She rattled at the keyboard, staring at the screen. “What you got in that minibar, Sensei? Take a girl out for a meal like that, you got to round it off somehow.”

  I found two whiskey miniatures and emptied them into two tooth mugs. I put one on the bedside table and sat next to her on the other side of the bed. She sipped, muttered, and rattled.

  “Okay, here is the list of guests for May and June 2015…”

  “It’s going to be the last week of May. By June 14, she was already dead in New York.”

  She nodded. She scrolled and she sipped again. After five minutes, she shook her head. “I have been through May five times, Stone.” She passed me the laptop and stood up. “You look. I’m going to have a shower.”

  She picked up her whiskey and walked into my bathroom. She left the door ajar, and I saw her jeans drop on the floor, followed by her shirt. I heard the water and got up to sit myself in the chair at the desk at the foot of the bed, where I could not see the bathroom door.

  I also scrolled through the list five times. There was no sign of G. Sanders. I stood, stared out the window at the lights of San Mateo, and sipped my drink. I considered the possibility that Shaw had got the name of the hotel wrong. But that wasn’t credible; he had read it straight off the screen. Which left only one explanation: the client had given Shaw a false name.

  Dehan stepped out of the bathroom. Her hair was wet and hanging loose, and she was buttoning up her shirt. She stared at me for a long moment.

  “He gave Shaw a false name.”

  I nodded. I walked to the screen and pointed. “I think it’s this guy right here.”

  She was watching me from the bathroom door. “Geronimo dos Santos, right?”

  I smiled at her. “You had the same thought.”

  “Pseudonyms. People always use either their own initials, or one up or one down.”

  “Can we get any more information on him?”

  “Oh yes. What do we want to know?”

  She sat at the computer.

  I said, “How did he pay?”

  She typed, then said, “Credit card. AMEX Black.”

  “When did he check in?”

  “May 24. Checked out June 5.”

  “We need some way to connect him with Tammy. Seems every step we take forward, we wind up in the same place. Let’s get some sleep, Dehan. We’ll brainstorm over breakfast.”

  “Yeah. I’m beat.” She stood and drained her tooth mug. I opened the door for her, and she stood staring me in the eye for a long time.

  I said, “What’s on your mind?” and was surprised to hear a catch in my throat. She made a fist and gave me a gentle punch on the chest.

  “G’night, Stone.”

  I took another whiskey from the minibar and lay on the bed staring at the laptop. I felt troubled and wasn’t sure why. I was tired, but I couldn’t sleep. Eventually, I got up and sat at the computer. We knew practically nothing about Tamara Gunthersen, so I decided to check what I could find in public records. It probably wouldn’t be any use, but you never knew what you were going to find when you started digging, and at the very least, it might get me to sleep.

  As it was, it woke me up. After half an hour of trawling through databases, I hit on something unexpected. I almost went and woke Dehan, but something held me back. Breakfast was soon enough.

  Tamara Gunthersen was not born Tamara Gunthersen; she was Tamara Polachova. Which meant she either changed her name for some reason, or, more likely, she was married. I trawled a little further and found that she had married in 2011, to one Peter Gunthersen of Page Street in Friendly Acres.

  And that really complicated things. Or maybe it made them more simple. I drained my glass, fell on the bed, and went to sleep.

  I was up and showered by six thirty and went to wake Dehan. She was already up, but her eyes looked tired. She said, “You sleep?” I made a “so-so” gesture with my head. She nodded. “Me too. What you want to do today? I was thinking about dos Santos.”

  I shook my head. “Let’s go get breakfast in Friendly Acres.”

  She followed me to the elevator. “Why?”

  “Because there’s a nice coffee shop that opens at six, right next door to the Friendly Acres Auto Repair Shop.”

  She shrugged and nodded once, then spread her hands as we stepped into the elevator. I could imagine her father making exactly those gestures. She said, “Sure, why not? You should have said so.”

  “The Friendly Acres Auto Repair Shop belongs to Peter Gunthersen. I thought maybe we could talk to him.”

  “You dreamed this? God spoke to you in a dream?”

  “I told you, I couldn’t sleep.”

  We stepped out of the elevator and crossed the lobby toward a parking lot that was bathed in the cool, dark blue light of dawn.

  “So Peter Gunthersen is who, her brother?”

  I offered her my most smug grin, which is pretty smug. “No, Little Grasshopper, her husband. And they were never divorced.”

  “Yeah, well done, Stone, because the case wasn’t complicated enough. It needed to get more complicated. Go you.”

  We turned right onto the Camino Real, headed toward Belmont, San Carlos, and Redwood City. At that time of the morning, the road was practically deserted.

  “It may simplify things, Dehan.”

  “You don’t do this before coffee, Stone. You do it after coffee.” I smiled and she was quiet for a bit. Then, she said, “So you’re thinking the gig was just a gig, but maybe there was a promise of more well-paid work. So she contacts loser Stephen and says, ‘let’s get back together, I’m going to be in the money,’ and goes to New York to see him. The Sureños were on the street because the Sureños are everywhere, but jealous hubby Peter bursts in on them. Punishes and kills Stephen, shoot
s his wife, and then, in remorse, takes her away with him.”

  I shrugged. “It has a certain simple elegance to it.”

  “It has. Let’s see how it stands up to coffee.”

  Peter Gunthersen’s auto repair shop had its own parking lot, which it shared with Katy’s Breakfast Bar. The sky had turned from dark blue to gray, and I was on my second coffee and croissant when Peter rolled onto the lot in his white Ford pickup. Dehan paid and we stepped out to greet him as he climbed out of the cab of his truck.

  “Good morning. Peter Gunthersen?”

  “Yuh, why? Who are you?”

  I showed him my badge. Dehan didn’t show him hers because she was still stuffing blueberry pie into her mouth and licking her fingers.

  “I’m Detective Stone, and this is my partner Detective Dehan, from the NYPD.”

  “New York?” He narrowed his eyes. “Little out of your territory, ain’t you?”

  “We wanted to ask you about your wife.”

  “Tasha? Why? What do you want with Tasha?”

  Dehan swallowed and frowned at the same time. “Tasha? Who’s Tasha?”

  He looked confused a moment, then his face cleared. “Oh, you mean… my wife, Tamara.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said. Who is Tasha?”

  “Natasha is my partner. We’ve lived together for over two years now. I just think of her as my wife.”

  “What about Tamara?”

  He puffed his cheeks and blew. “Can we go inside? I got a ton of work to do.”

  He unlocked the steel blind and rolled it up, walked in, and switched on the lights. Then he came back to us and rested his ass against a half-dismantled truck.

  “Look, to be honest, Tammy was real cute, I mean real cute. The kind of chick it’s hard not to fall in love with. But being blunt, she was a slut. She would sleep with anything in pants, or a skirt, if she thought it was going to get her where she wanted to be.”

  “And where was that?” It was Dehan.

  “Hollywood. That was the one thing that drove her in life: Hollywood. She was going to Hollywood, and nothing was going to stop her.”