Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #2: Books 5-8 (A Dead Cold Box Set) Blake Banner (read out loud books txt) 📖

“Bob Shaw. You think he might have the article?”

“It’s possible. But The New York Telegraph has always had a reputation for publishing high quality, controversial journalism. It has been traditionally anti-establishment, whoever the establishment was. So you’d expect that if he had the article, and David was killed for it, he’d publish it. The added controversy of the murder and a posthumous Pulitzer wouldn’t do the paper, or him, any harm at all. But…”

“If there were powerful enough interests involved, they might have taken out David and silenced his editor.”

“Again, it’s a possibility we need to explore. Right now all we have is theories.”

“So, the New York Telegraph?”

I stood and grabbed my coat from the back of my chair. “Appropriately located at 5 Penn Plaza.”

We took the Bruckner Expressway, through steady, heavy rain, and for the second time that day, crossed 3rd Avenue Bridge. After that, it was left onto Columbus and a slow crawl south all the way to West 30th. We didn’t talk much. We just watched a bobbing sea of colored umbrellas jostle each other and occasionally make suicide runs through the slow moving river of traffic, lit up with red, green, and amber lights, like Christmas for fishes. Three more lefts found me a parking space outside the bank at 5 Penn and we pulled up our collars and tried to dodge the raindrops in a hundred yard dash to the big glass and brass entrance of the green marble lobby.

The paper had its offices on the fifth floor. We stepped out of the elevator into a sober, mahogany and brass lobby that was as busy as Grand Central Station. I made my way to the reception desk and showed my badge to a pretty woman in a blue suit.

“Detectives Stone and Dehan. We’d like to talk to the editor in chief.”

She winked at me with long lashes. “I’ll see if she’s available.” She picked up the phone and pressed a button. “Usually it’s attorneys who want to talk to her. Cops not so much. Yuh, Al, I got two cops here, Detectives Stone and Dianne, they want to see Ms. Pearce…” She raised her eyes to me. “He’s just checking if she’s free.”

I frowned at her. “Ms. Pearce? What happened to Bob Shaw?”

“He retired, couple of years ago.” Then, to the phone, “She’s free? Okay, thanks, honey.” She pointed at a large glass door in a long glass wall, through which we could see what looked like hundreds of people sitting in small cubicles, talking on the phone and typing furiously, often at the same time. “She says you got five minutes. Through that door, right to the end, you can’t miss it.”

We elbowed our way through the busy, noisy room till we came to a glass-fronted office at the end. Inside there was an attractive woman, sitting behind the desk in an elegant burgundy suit with a white blouse. She was talking on the phone and waved us in as I pushed open the door. She pointed at two chairs opposite and said into the phone, “Take responsibility, Emma. Just do it. If they sue, they sue. Just be damned sure of your facts. If they sue us, I want to eat them alive in court. So I need you to be right and I need you to know that you are right. Deal with it.”

She hung up and we showed her our badges. “Detectives John Stone and Carmen Dehan, Ms. Pearce.”

She glanced at the badges, then at our faces, and said, “Tell me you are here to arrest me and rescue me from this goddamn paper.”

I smiled. “I’m afraid not. We just need to ask you a couple of questions. In fact, it was Bob Shaw we wanted to talk to.”

She raised an eyebrow at the edge of her desk and ran her finger along it, like she was reading Braille. “Bob? Bob’s retired. Can I ask what it’s about? If it’s to do with the paper, it’s to do with me.”

I sensed rather than saw Dehan lean back in her chair and cross her arms. I said, “Do you recall the murder of one of your reporters, about ten years ago? His name was David Thorndike.”

“Sure, I remember it. Dave was a damn good reporter. I covered the case for the paper. What about it?”

I looked at her with renewed interest. “Were you friends?”

She snorted. “Dave had no friends. Good reporters don’t. We knew each other. I respected him. That’s about as far as it went.”

“You remember he was working on a story at the time…”

“That’s why he was in that god-forsaken apartment in the Bronx. If you ask me, it’s what got him killed.”

“Really? Okay, I’m asking.”

“Dave had a real reputation. He and Bob were about as close as Dave ever got to anybody. Bob had a lot of respect for Dave as a reporter. He had proved himself time and again. But Dave was really jealous and really secretive. He played his cards close to the chest…” She paused and gave me a slow, deliberate once-over and smiled. “Real close to the chest, Detective Stone. You know what I mean? So Bob and Dave had come to a kind of understanding. Dave told him in very basic, limited terms the general area of his investigation, and Bob either approved it or not. If he approved it, that was pretty much the last he heard about it until the story was ready. He said it was his way of protecting himself, Bob, and the story.” She shrugged. “Only somebody like Dave could get away with something like that, because he had such a damned good track record. He produced one controversy after another and his facts were rock solid. Made a fortune for the paper.”

I shrugged. “So what was special