Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set)

by Blake Banner

They both stared at me and Dehan said, “His parents’ death.”

  I nodded and asked Father Cohen, “Did you know them back then?”

  “I had just left the seminary. I was about twenty-five. I grew up around here. That’s why I requested this posting. The church is only twenty-five years old, and when they started construction, I spoke to the bishop…” He waved a hand at me. “But you don’t want to know about all that. My point is that we, my family, we knew the Brownes. Most everyone knows each other around here. My father had married a Catholic girl from the neighborhood and we all—well, if we weren’t friends, we were acquainted.

  “They were good people, very devout. Old school.” He nodded after he said it, as though confirming that old school was a good thing. “I can’t say that I knew them well enough to give you a psychological insight into Cyril, but I do remember the accident. It was tragic.”

  “I believe he was in the car.”

  He studied my face a moment and looked vaguely queasy. We had reached the center of the common and he stopped. “Yes,” he said, “but I’m afraid there is more to it than that. Shall we sit a moment?”

  He gestured at a bench a few paces away by a small copse. We moved to it and sat. He took a deep breath and started to speak.

  “Peter was the father. He was a strong man in every sense. Mary takes after him. They were very alike. But above all, his faith was strong. He was somewhat severe in his ways, but he was devoted to God and to his family. He worked hard and provided well for them. His wife was…” He sighed a sigh that was full of regret. “His wife, Marion, was charming, vivacious, happy, but of very poor judgment. And Peter—well, Peter hadn’t the imagination, the wisdom, what you will—he lacked the smarts, if you like, to provide her with the kind of joyful life she needed. We are all different, and where his frugal, Spartan existence was enough to fulfill him, it was not enough for her, and we all watched her wilt. She needed, poor woman, just a little more joy in her life.

  “Sadly, tragically, she met a man who was only too willing to provide that joy. She began to see him while Peter was at work and the children were at school. This man, I forget his name, worked on the local paper. He was a man of few morals, and the few he had he tended to neglect. He spent much of his time in bars and worked often from home. So Marion began to visit him there, at home—would that it had been in the bars! May God forgive me for saying so!”

  He fell silent, looking at the trees and up at that perfect blue sky. Eventually he gave his head a small shake. “Marion didn’t drink. They were both teetotal, she and Peter. But on that fateful afternoon, this man had encouraged Marion to have a drink, and she had yielded. One drink led, as it so often does, to another, and she had become drunk. She lost track of time and the time to return home and collect the children from school had come and gone. Thank the Lord Mary was of an age to have her own key. She was a sensible, responsible girl, she collected her brother and saw him safely to the house.

  “At five thirty, Peter returned home and found that his wife was not there. These were the days before everybody had a cell phone. He came to the church, assuming she was here, but nobody here had seen her, and so he went to his neighbors next door. There, his long time friend told him bluntly that his wife was having an affair and she was at that very moment no doubt at this man’s apartment. I don’t know if what his friend did was right or not, but we had all suffered too long in silence watching him being cuckolded.

  “Peter went insane. Why he put young Cyril in the car, we shall never know. Perhaps he thought he should not leave the children alone. Mary stayed with the neighbors. Why not Cyril? Perhaps he had it in his mind to hold up to her the full extent of her treachery, to shame her, to ‘guilt trip’ her, in the modern usage. Whatever the case, he took Cyril and went to this man’s apartment.

  “There, on the sidewalk, in full view of everybody, he screamed at his wife, called her a… Called her names I shall not repeat, but which you can imagine. Then he physically manhandled her into the car. She, for her part, was screaming at him that he wasn’t a man, that he was a sissy, that she was sick of him, all manner of horrible things. Then they took off at high speed, went across an intersection without stopping at the lights and were rammed from the side by a truck. They were both killed instantly and the boy witnessed the whole thing from the back seat.”

  We sat for a moment without speaking. There was quiet, sporadic birdsong in the trees above my head.

  “You tell it as though you witnessed it.”

  “There were a handful of us who followed him. We were afraid of what he might do, that he might do something he would later regret…”

  “You were here in Elk Grove? That’s quite a coincidence.”

  “Oh no, not at all.” He smiled. “We have a long tradition in my family of spending Halloween together. It’s quite a thing around here. I omitted to mention, it was Halloween. That’s why he initially came to the church. He thought she might be helping out…”

  I sat staring at the grass between my feet. Dehan stood and walked away with her hands in her pockets. Father Cohen frowned at her and then at me. “Is that significant?”

  I smiled. “It might be.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  Dehan had started walking in a wide circle, staring down at her boots. On a sudden impulse, I said, “His mother, Marion, she didn’t quite fit in. She wasn’t from the neighborhood, was she?”

  “Oh, no. No, she wasn’t.”

  Dehan had stopped and was watching me with narrowed eyes. I sighed. Father Cohen was frowning at me. I said, “She was a New Yorker, wasn’t she?”

  “Well, in a sense, yes. Her family hailed from the Bronx. But they had moved west when she was young. I forget where they went to. It wasn’t far from here. Oh, yes!” He snapped his fingers. “Reno. She spent most of her childhood in Reno, then they moved to Sacramento and finally Elk Grove. Apparently the crime rate in Reno was quite high, and they were looking for a better environment for their daughter. Tragic how it played out in the end. Tragic, and not a little ironic.”

  I thought for a moment, sucking my teeth. “What paper was it that this guy worked on?”

  “The Elk Grove Herald. They ran the full story, which must have been very distressing for Mary. The journalist was fired and left town, I believe. I can’t imagine that any of this is very helpful to you, Detective.”

  Dehan was still staring at me. I said, “More than you can imagine, Father. You have actually been extremely helpful.”

  We left him finishing his morning constitutional and crossed the common back toward Mary’s house. The birds were still chattering, but seemed too lazy to get a real conversation going. As we approached the car, Dehan stopped in her tracks and spread her hands. “Halloween? Seriously? He sees his parents killed on Halloween? What are the odds, Stone? There is no way that is a coincidence.”

  I pressed the button on the key fob and the car bleeped. “So if it isn’t a coincidence, how do you explain it?”

  “I can’t. It can’t be done.” She approached the car and got in, slamming the door. “This case is full of meaningless coincidences. Coincidences that don’t mean anything.”

  I laughed. “That would be a meaningless coincidence.”

  “And you want to tell me how you knew that his mother was from New York?”

  “I could smell another meaningless coincidence.”

  I pressed the ignition and pulled away, turned left onto Foulks Ranch Drive and then left again onto Elk Grove Boulevard. Dehan scowled.

  “Where are we going?”

  “As soon as you find it on your phone, the public library.”

  She did a lot of swiping and typing and after a moment said, “It should be coming into view right about now. It’s on the crossroads.”

  We were approaching a large intersection that looked more like a few buildings scattered in a woodland than the heart of a town, but this was the center of Elk Grove, and o
n the far side, on the right, was a large, modern building that claimed to be Elk Grove’s public library.

  “You going to do another one of those things where you don’t tell me anything? Why are we at the public library?”

  “Not at all, Dehan.” I pulled over and parked. “We are at the public library because I want to have a look at these people. I figure if they ran a full report on the incident, then there is probably a photograph of the Browne family.”

  “Yeah, OK, I kind of got that, but why? What do you want to see a photograph of them for? Where is your mind going, Stone?”

  I stared out the windshield and sighed. “I need to see them, get a feel for them. How are we going to find out where Cyril is, if we haven’t got a sense of who Cyril is?”

  I climbed out of the car and started toward the entrance to the library. I heard the door slam behind me and Dehan mutter, “I know where my mind is going. Out of itself.”

  Ten

  We had sat in the quiet, spacious library, with the gentle, California light leaning in through the tall windows, making long, glistening ghosts out of the dust particles that lingered in the air. Now and then a distant echo would disturb the silence: a muffled cough, a book dropped on a table in another part of the building, a door opening briefly to allow in the hum of a passing car. Dehan had sat next to me, leaning against me with one arm on my shoulder, and we had read the article together. It didn’t add anything to what Father Cohen had told us already, except the name of the journalist, Jose Rodriguez, who had been summarily dismissed following the incident.

  There had been several photographs of the family as a whole and of the individuals that comprised it. They, the family, were described in the article as God-fearing, long standing members of the community. The journalist had managed to imply that Marion’s childhood in Reno was somehow responsible for her lamentable behavior, and that though her death was a tragedy, the kids were somehow, in the long run, better off without her. The real shame was that Peter had not survived with them.

  I had stopped reading after a while and sat staring at the photographs. There was a close up of Cyril, aged five. He had dark hair and sad eyes in a gaunt face. He was thin and bony, and you somehow got the feeling he was sensitive. Books would definitely have figured in his life, and I wondered if in different circumstances he might not have become a poet.

  Mary, his sister, had been prettier back then, when she was younger. She gazed, smiling out of her portrait photo, as though toward a happy future. Even then, at fifteen, there was a strength about her, both physical and of character, a determination perhaps that any sign of weakness would be labeled ‘nonsense’ or a ‘fantasy’, and dismissed. I guessed that was how she dealt with her own loss and grief. That was the way she stayed strong.

  A third photograph showed the whole family in their backyard. Cyril was in the foreground, on a tricycle, squinting at the camera in the sun. Mary was standing behind him, holding her father’s arm in both of hers. There was something proprietary about the gesture, which he echoed by placing his hand gently on her forearm. Like him, she was tall, with a strong, heavy body. He didn’t smile at the camera, rather he seemed to assess it and judge it through narrowed eyes. His wife, Marion, stood slightly apart from them, resting her backside on a garden table. She had a pair of aviator sunglasses perched on her head. Like her son, she was squinting at the camera, half smiling. The similarity with her daughter was striking, except that she was of a finer build, more delicate, like her son. Mary had inherited her father’s physical strength and ‘big bones’, Cyril his mother’s sensitivity.

  I had sat like that, staring at them, for a good fifteen minutes, letting my mind roam and wander, until Dehan nudged me and said, “What now, Sensei, you want to grab a coffee?”

  I glanced at my watch. It was eleven o’clock. “Let’s go and have lunch in Reno.”

  Her eyes went wide and her jaw set. “See?” She said it loudly and it echoed. “You’re doing it! You are!”

  Somebody went, “Shshsh!” and Dehan repeated in a hoarse whisper, “You are doing it, Stone! Tell me why we are going to Reno!”

  I grinned. “In the car. And if you can’t learn to behave, this is the last time I bring you to the library.”

  “Funny. You’re really funny.”

  We left amid scowls and returned to the car. I threw her the keys and climbed in the passenger seat and as she got behind the wheel I said:

  “I don’t know, Dehan. I’m kind of groping in the dark, but like you said, these coincidences can’t be coincidences: his mom’s from the Bronx, she’s killed on Halloween, he disappears on Halloween, Sue dies on Halloween…” I closed my eyes, trying to grasp a thought. “Somehow, in some way, he is trying to follow his mother. So, at the moment I am just following them.”

  She glanced at me and started the car. “Reno…?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She pulled away. “What for?”

  “You picked up, like I did, that Cyril felt oppressed and controlled by his sister, right?”

  “Yeah, I got that.”

  She turned into Elk Grove Florin Road and we started moving north.

  “Bear with me. I’m trying to fit my thoughts together here. It’s like we have two camps: Mary and her dad, strong and controlling, knowing what’s best for everybody and trying to keep order; and in the other camp Cyril and Marion, more sensitive, weaker in some ways, but needing to get away and be free. She breaks out by having an affair with a boozing, amoral journalist. He breaks free by physically escaping. In a sense he’s following his mother’s footsteps backward. Like he is trying to get her back, by going back to her somehow. Does that make any sense?”

  She made a skeptical face. “Kind of…”

  “When he tried to escape from his sister’s control, get away from her, where did he go?”

  “New York, where his mother was a kid. OK, I get it. But it doesn’t hold up, Stone. Sue died on Halloween. The same night his mother died. So is he trying to get back to her, or is he punishing her for abandoning him?”

  I sighed and recited the facts for the thousandth time, trying to see the pattern hidden in them: “He disappears from New York and returns home in a panic, claiming he’s being framed for Sue’s murder. Framed by whom? And why? We don’t know. Then he goes to Europe.” I sucked my teeth a moment and gazed out at the pretty town that was slipping by. “I have a problem with that, Dehan. I am not sure, but I think he would’ve needed a visa to go to Europe. We need to look into that. But I do know for a fact that he couldn’t just stay there. He would need papers, a work permit, all that. So he must have come back.” I looked at her. “Where did he go? It’s just a hunch, but it seems to me that, whether he is punishing her or trying to get back to her—or both—his mother plays a big part in his motivation. Did you happen to notice that there was a certain similarity between Xara, his sister and his mother? Xara and his sister are bigger boned and heavier, but the likeness is there.”

  She had her bottom lip stuck out and she was nodding.

  “OK, Sensei, I hear you. So you think he might have gone to Reno.”

  “‘Think’ is putting it a bit too strongly. It’s a hunch I’d like to explore.”

  She was quiet for a bit, then said, “We could sure use his financials right now.”

  I grunted. “I have a feeling we are going to find that Cyril Browne’s financial records stop suddenly ’round about the time he left New York.”

  She looked at me sharply. “Based on what?”

  I thought about it. “Based on his character, on his meticulous planning…”

  “Planning? So you think he’s the guy again?”

  “I don’t know yet who the guy is.”

  “Yet…”

  “Let me think for a bit.”

  “You want a pipe and a violin?”

  “That would be nice, thank you.”

  We didn’t talk much after that. We rolled the windows down and enjoyed the gentle sunshine
as we moved through Sacramento and then turned east and began the slow climb toward the Sierra Nevadas. All the way I kept turning my idea over and over. It was, as Mary would have said, absurd, a fantasy. Equally it made sense and equally it was impossible to prove.

  Almost impossible to prove.

  As we climbed higher, the temperature began to drop and after about an hour we had to close the windows. Past Auburn, the landscape changed and we were suddenly surrounded by rich woodland rolling over peaks as far as the eye could see. And by the time we had passed Colfax, the I-80 had narrowed to one lane each way and the woodland had become a dense forest that seemed to close in and enfold us.

  There, I snapped myself out of my reverie, pulled my cell from my pocket, found the number for the Washoe County Sheriff and called. After talking to a couple of people, I was eventually put through to Undersheriff Sarah Pfeninger.

  “Good morning, Undersheriff Pfenninger. My name is Detective John Stone, I am with the NYPD. We are trying to track down a suspect in a murder investigation, we’ve been making inquiries in Sacramento, and we think our man may have been in Reno at some time. He may even still be there now.”

  “OK, Detective Stone. How can we help?”

  I tried to put a nice smile in my voice. “Well, first off, we don’t want to tread on local law enforcement’s toes. So this is partly a courtesy call.”

  “Much appreciated.”

  “But second, we’d like to know if the sheriff’s department has any record of our man…”

  “Where are you?”

  “On the I-80, just going through Gold Run on the California side of the border.”

  “What’s your man’s name?”

  “Cyril Browne, originally of Elk Grove.”

  “When do you think he was here?”

  “Early November, 2006, or some time after that. Sorry I can’t be more precise.”

  “You’re about an hour out, a little more if you stick to the speed limit. You know where we are? 911 East Parr Boulevard. Put it in your SatNav. Ask for me at the front desk. I’ll come down for you. Meantime, I’ll make some inquiries. Send me a picture and I’ll put out a BOLO.”