Dead Cold Mysteries Books 5-8

by Blake Banner

  “Really? It was that serious?”

  She looked sad and nodded down at her hands on the table. “I think so, Detective Dehan. I was aware that he had lost all interest in me. He shared more with Jackson and Bob than he ever did with me. To be honest, when I found out he’d been shacked up with that bimbo…” She looked Dehan square in the face. “I was mad. I was really mad. But I can’t say I was surprised.”

  I asked, “Did he stay in touch with this monk, Ananda?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Dehan bit her lip for a moment. “How about before? When did he first make contact with him?”

  Samantha nodded. “Yeah, I think they may have exchanged a couple of emails before the trip. I’m pretty sure they did, because he chose Anuradhapura deliberately.”

  I made a note on my pad and as I was writing, I asked her, “What connection, if any, did David have with Arizona?”

  “Arizona?”

  I looked up. She was staring at me.

  She shook her head. “None whatever, as far as I am aware. Why?”

  “During January and February, 2008, he made two trips by car to Arizona. I am wondering if you would know what took him there.”

  “That was during the time he had gone ‘dark’ as he used to call it. He was investigating his article, so anything he did during that time would have been directly related to his article. If he went to Arizona, then you can be sure that Arizona had something to do with what he was writing about.”

  I flopped back in my chair. A sudden, blinding realization had exploded through my numbed brain and I was kicking myself for not having seen it sooner. Dehan was saying, “So, as far as you are aware, Arizona had no special significance for Dave.”

  “No, not at all. I had never heard him mention Arizona. As I said, it must have had something to do with his article.”

  We talked a little longer, then Dehan walked her out and I returned to my desk and sat thinking about what Samantha had said. I could see it with perfect clarity, but in that moment it made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

  A minute later Dehan came back and dropped into her chair.

  “I think we have it, Stone. I think we are closing in.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Looks that way.”

  “We going to Arizona?”

  “I think so, but not yet.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  I shook my head and chewed my lip. “I don’t know. Something doesn’t fit. Something is all wrong.”

  NINETEEN

  “What? What is wrong?”

  “Call the Jetavanaramaya temple, Dehan. Contact them, talk to this Ananda Sri Pannasiha. I want to know what he and David discussed for two weeks that seemed to galvanize him into this investigation of Senator Hennessy. I’m going to go through these notes of his and see if I can get some idea of what made him suddenly decide to go to Sri Lanka and explore Buddhism.”

  “Got it!”

  While she searched for the number, I started working my way through his notes. They were mainly in a diary and two A4 notebooks, plus any number of loose sheets and paper napkins that had been stuffed in at various points.

  I opened the diary. There were a lot of quotes about Buddhism. Several times he had written down the question whether Buddhism was a religion or a philosophy. One entry, dated the 31st of December, 2007, asked, “If Buddhism does not acknowledge the existence of an absolute God, an absolute, ultimate judge, then how can there be good and evil? How do we decide what is right and what is wrong?”

  He must have been a howl at the New Year’s party. Another entry, scrawled on an undated paper napkin said, “Kama is conditioned not only by our actions, but above all by our intentions. So our dying thoughts acquire a huge importance as it is they that will condition the nature of our next birth.”

  There followed several pages of brief, almost illegible notes, names, dates, phone numbers. If all else failed, they would all have to be followed up.

  The last entry in the diary was, “‘Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.’ Hamlet to Rosencrantz, scene two act two.”

  I looked up at Dehan. She had the phone to her ear and was bouncing a pencil up and down on its eraser. She jerked her head at me like, ‘What?’

  “He was having some kind of existential crisis.”

  “I thought you had to be either Jewish, French, or Russian to do that.”

  “You’re being facetious.”

  “I am? They won’t answer the phone. It makes me mad when people don’t answer the… Oh, yes, hello, is that… Yes, good evening. Is it very late…?” She looked at me. “What time is it in Sri Lanka? I didn’t think.” Then back to the phone, “Hello? Hello? I’m calling from New York, in the U.S.A… Excuse me?” She gave a nervous laugh and looked at me again. “He’s laughing. Hello? My name is… Yes, hello. My name is… Excuse me? No… no… I am looking for…” She sighed. “Thank you, you too. I am looking for Ananda Sri Pannasiha…” She smiled. “Yes! You know him! That’s great! Can I speak to him…? Hello? Hello?… What? No, wait!” She slammed down the phone. “Son of a bitch!”

  I smiled. “I guess it’s about ten or eleven at night over there. What happened?”

  “I have no idea. The guy was real sweet. I am pretty sure he was speaking English, at least most of the time. He was delighted to hear me mention Ananda. For all I know he may have been Ananda! Then he blessed me, said something I didn’t catch, and hung up.”

  “Maybe try again when it’s not almost midnight. You probably got the poor guy out of bed.”

  “Yeah, but I tell you what. I’ll start with an email, then follow up with a call tomorrow.”

  “Makes sense.”

  She started typing. “What’s eating you? Why does it matter that he was having an existential crisis?”

  “I’m not sure. There’s something else. Something that has been right in front of our noses from the start and we have been ignoring it.”

  She glanced at me and carried on writing. “What?”

  “Something Samantha said. She said that if he went to Arizona while he was…”

  “Dark.”

  “Yeah, dark, it meant it was directly related to his investigation—to the article.”

  She shrugged and made a face. “Yeah, we pretty much knew that.”

  “Yeah, but then she stressed that when he was working on an article, nothing else mattered. Everything he did while he was working on an article was related to that investigation.” I flipped back to my notebook. “Here it is, ‘…anything he did during that time would have been directly related to his article.’”

  She paused and frowned at me. “Yeah, so?”

  I shrugged. “So he chooses that time, when he was supposed to be obsessively focused on an article, to start a live-in relationship? And not just any article. The article of his career.”

  She flopped back in her chair. “Son of a gun.”

  “And these notes.” I flicked them with the back of my fingers. “Practically everything I have seen so far is quotes from Shakespeare and Buddha about the nature of morality.”

  “Katie.” She scratched her head. “Cherchez la femme… There is always a damn woman involved.”

  “Shit!” I slammed my hand into my forehead. “I am so goddamn stupid!”

  Mo at the desk across the aisle looked up and smiled blandly at me. “No argument from over here.”

  Dehan scowled at him. “Butt out and get a life, asshole!”

  He wheezed a laugh and withdrew into his file.

  She turned back to me. “What?”

  I pulled the list of K’s supposed victims from the file and tossed it across the desk at her. “You said we should go through them. You were right.”

  She glanced at it. “Jack O’Connor.”

  I pulled my laptop over one-handed and started typing five-fingered. Dehan said, “I got it.” She rattled at the keyboard and sat back. After
a moment, she started reading.

  “Johnathan Joseph O’Connor, accountant for the Clearwater Real Estate Development Company. Blew the whistle on his employer and was going to testify against them, and also the Hennessys. Word was he was going to reveal large-scale tax evasion and also had information regarding the alleged suicide of Victor Fosberg, which some conspiracy theorists were calling a murder, and attributing to Hennessy, claiming she had had an affair with him.

  “O’Connor, his wife Kathleen, and youngest daughter Penny, aged eight, were found shot to death in a presumed house invasion. His wallet was taken along with her purse and jewelry, and their safe had been busted open…” She took a deep breath, made a “Pffff…” noise and looked at me. “Eldest daughter, named after her mother, Kathleen, managed to escape and was later adopted by her mother’s sister. She was aged twelve at the time, and that was in the year 2000. Which would make her about twenty-eight now.”

  “It’s her, isn’t? It has to be; and that was why David hooked up with her. And she’s our anonymous informant.”

  “Shall we bring her in?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I want to know how much she really knows about his article. But above all, I want to know why she concealed the fact that she was Jack O’Connor’s daughter.”

  I reached for the phone and started to dial one-handed. She grabbed it and pulled it away from me. “I got it.”

  She dialed and I scowled. She shrugged and gave me a fake smile. “It’s quicker… Hi, Katie? It’s Detective Dehan. Hi, good, not bad, listen, we have a couple of questions which we need to clear up… Nah! Just routine really, but it has to be done. Could you come in and see us? I know it’s a pain but it would be a real help. This lunchtime? That would be great. Thanks Katie.” She hung up. “I’m such a nice person.”

  Mo snorted across the aisle. “In what universe?”

  “Go screw yourself, Mo! Nobody else is going to!”

  I looked at my watch. It was almost twelve. “Okay, Dehan, walk me down to the deli and we’ll grab an early lunch. Help me think this through.”

  She pulled on her jacket and hung my coat over my shoulders. I heard Mo snigger but ignored him and we stepped into the bright, cold morning. As we started to walk down Fteley Avenue toward Banyer Place she began to talk.

  “Okay, back in 2007 Dave Thorndike makes contact with a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka. This monk somehow, for some reason we cannot fathom at the moment, puts Dave onto K.”

  I nodded. “All right. And with any luck, tomorrow we will have a slightly better idea of how that happened, when Ananda answers your email.”

  “We hope. Okay, now, whatever Ananda told Dave, it must have been pretty hot because almost as soon as he got back to New York he was off. He got his apartment, hooked up with Katie, and within a couple of weeks took his first trip to Arizona. That is a very busy two weeks.”

  “It sure is. We then have a period of… let’s see. Say he gets back to New York on the 20th or the 21st, there is a period of about a month where he is presumably working on his article. He then takes a second trip to Arizona…”

  Dehan took over. “And when he gets back he’s real excited. He contacts Bob Shaw and he contacts Lee. He tells them this is the biggest thing since Watergate, he’s going to get the Pulitzer and they’re going to have to change the constitution. He is high. He’s euphoric.”

  “Good, now let’s take the next steps one at a time. What happens next?”

  “He tells Katie that he is married and she dumps him. She goes to stay with…wait a minute…!”

  “The landlord assumed it was her sister. Clearly it was a friend, because her sister was killed along with her parents.”

  We stopped walking and stared at each other for a moment. Then she shrugged and we carried on. “I guess. Okay, so then she comes back to collect her CDs and books, yadda yadda, and he meets up with Lee who claims A, he’s pissed that Dave is cheating on Samantha and B, there is no merit to his story, and he decides to distance himself from him.”

  “Okay, but in a minute I want to go back to that yadda yadda.”

  “I miss something?”

  “Maybe, but carry on, you’re doing good.”

  She grinned at me. “Uh-uh, Sensei, Superman is doing good. I am doing well.”

  “Smart ass.”

  “So, Friday night, Katie goes to dinner with some guy at a restaurant. That night we know from the landlord that somebody arrived. Dave let them in, and next morning the landlord found him dead.”

  “Okay. Now, meantime, when we started investigating—that is, after we questioned Katie, Samantha, Shelly, and Lee—two things happened. First, we received an anonymous letter introducing K, Hennessy’s hired killer, and second, Lee turned up less than twenty-four hours after we’d spoken to him…”

  “Having avoided seeing us from the start.”

  “Correct. And wanted to change his story. The change is to shift suspicion onto Katie, and stress that Dave’s article had no merit and contained no real evidence.” We had reached the deli and we stopped outside the door. I looked down into her face. “Can we, from what we know so far, from the facts that we have, can we begin to construct a workable theory?”

  She turned away from me and stepped into the shop. The mechanical bell clanged over the door and I followed her in. There was a smell of smoked meats and cheese and freshly baked bread on the air. Dehan asked for two beef on rye and the Italian guy behind the counter asked why I always came in instead of her. To me he said that if I sent her for the sandwiches we’d get bigger, better sandwiches. Everybody laughed except Dehan, who told him to take a hike.

  After a noisy five minutes while he made up our order, we stepped into the street and started walking slowly back toward the station.

  “The answer to your question, Sensei, is that we can make a theory, but not an hypothesis.”

  “Christ! I created a monster!”

  “Hear me out. We still have to make a lot of assumptions. We don’t know what the connection is yet between Ananda and K. I might be able to guess, but the fact is we don’t even know if there is a connection. We can guess that Dave was going to Arizona to interview somebody, and we can guess that it might be K. But the closest we can get to a theory, in my opinion, is that Dave connected with K somehow and Hennessy had him killed.”

  I grunted. She had told me no more than I could have worked out for myself, if my brain had not been fogged by painkillers and pain.

  “What’s your theory about Ananda?”

  “It’s a reach, Stone, but you know that all the traditional martial arts grew out of Buddhism, right?”

  I nodded.

  “In Japan they are still very closely associated with Zen Buddhism. It wasn’t uncommon for warriors, especially the samurai, after a life of killing, to withdraw and become Buddhist monks. Now, it is just possible that K, after he retired, sought guidance and teaching from a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka.”

  “That might explain those notes of David’s about morality and right and wrong. It wasn’t his existential crisis, it was K’s.”

  “Right. And like you said, Pakistan is not a million miles from Sri Lanka. If K was in fact Adrian Philips, he may have been there seeking some kind of spiritual redemption, and that same need for redemption may have driven him to contact the NY Telegraph and Dave in the first place. In which case, Ananda may have been a kind of go-between.”

  “That makes a lot of sense, Dehan. That is very good. Thank God you’re thinking. Okay, let’s see what Katie has to say. And maybe we’ll get a useful reply to your email tomorrow.”

  “And then, Arizona! Road trip! You think the Inspector will go for it?”

  “With this arm? This time we fly. Yeah. I think he hasn’t much choice.”

  “Even better. So what’s the problem with my yadda yadda?”

  “When Katie went back for her CDs and books, the article and his laptop were already gone.”

  She stopped dead and stared at me. Then
she sighed, shook her head, and started walking again. “So what’s special in Arizona, in the way of food?”

  “A lot of corn and black beans, and chimichangas.”

  She looked at me in mild disgust. “Corn and black beans? Seriously?”

  “And chimichangas.”

  “Great. No bison steaks?”

  And we pushed our way back into the station.

  TWENTY

  Katie arrived as we were finishing our lunch and we had the sergeant show her up to interrogation room three, where we joined her five minutes later. We offered her coffee but she declined and said, “I would really like to get this over and done with, detectives. I have a great deal to do.”

  I nodded, said, “Sure,” and we sat opposite her. I had a slim manila file with me and I opened it. I pulled out the list of names and slid it across the table to her. She studied it a moment, shrugged, and looked me square in the eye.

  “So what?”

  “Why did you lie to us? You told us you had no idea what Dave was working on.”

  She buried her face in her hands and sighed. After a moment she ran both hands through her hair and flopped back in her chair. “I didn’t lie to you. Not exactly.”

  Dehan snapped. “Not exactly? Not exactly doesn’t cut the ice! We are not playing games here, Katie. This is a murder investigation. Not exactly telling the truth is lying!”

  Katie flashed her an angry glance. “No, Detective Dehan, it’s not!”

  Dehan stabbed at Jack O’Connor’s name on the list with her finger. “Are you Kathleen O’Connor? Are you this man’s daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you want us to believe that you didn’t know Dave was investigating his murder?”

  She shook her head. “Of course I knew.”

  I spoke quietly. “Level with us, Katie. Keeping information from us is not going to help anybody.”

  She sat for a long moment, staring down at the tabletop, just giving her head little shakes. Finally, she looked up at me with weary eyes. “Can’t you understand that all I want is to have this man out of my life? He lied to me, he used me, and then he thought he could just have me. I turned and I walked away. Why is he still in my life?”