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

He managed to force a laugh and walked us to the door. I put the hat in Dehan’s head, raised my collar, and we made a run for the Jag. I slammed the hood closed and we climbed in and closed the doors. Warped through the water on the windshield, I could see Lee watching us from the door. I turned the key and gunned the engine, then watched him step into the house and close the door.

I reversed onto the wet road and we headed off, on our long, wet journey back toward the Bronx.

Ten

As we emerged from the upper-middle class, leafy perfection of Oyster Bay, the rain was like a funeral procession of giant, wet shrouds marching in across the sodden landscape from the immensity of the Atlantic. We followed Cove Road south as far as the North Hempstead Turnpike, then turned west, following the empty highway through tall pines and the naked skeletons of other trees I could not identify. We drove in silence until I said, “Questions.”

“I have a couple: why did he lie about Dave not discussing his work with him? And why did he want to avoid seeing us…?”

I made a face and sighed. “Those questions sound unanswerable, Dehan. But what happens if we change the interrogative particle?”

She laughed. “The what now? The interrogative…?”

“Interrogative particle. The ‘W’ word, what, why, where…”

“And whom?”

“Yes, and also whom.”

“Okay, I know you don’t like ‘why’. It’s too open, I agree. Let me try. What made him lie about Dave not discussing his work with him? Okay, you’re right…”

“Two things immediately become clear, don’t they?”

“Yeah, either he did discuss the article with him, and he didn’t want us to know…”

“Or they fell out over something. Something serious enough for Dave to break his rule of not meeting people while he was on a story,”

“And something, maybe, serious enough for Lee to kill Dave and take the story and the laptop.”

“So what is our next question, avoiding the very open particle ‘why’?”

She thought for a moment. “What did they fall out over, that could be that serious?”

I nodded. “Yes, that, and also, if he did take the laptop and the article, what stopped him from publishing it?”

She frowned at me and nodded. “It has to be worth a lot of money to the paper. The way Dave described it to Bob Shaw, it could be worth millions.”

We lapsed into silence again, hypnotized by the rhythm of the windshield wipers and the steady hum of the Jaguar moving ever forward through the long tunnel of winter trees, stark shapes twisted against the low ceiling of ash-gray clouds.

Eventually Dehan sighed. “You know how it is, Stone. It always comes back to one thing.”

“Sex?”

She looked at me a moment, then shrugged. “I was going to say love, but I guess they’re not so different in the end.”

“If we believe William James and Donald Symons, love is a powerful cocktail of neurotransmitters and hormones, primarily oxytocin, dopamine, estrogen, and testosterone, that drive the most powerful elements of love,” I glanced at her. “Attachment, partner preference, and sex drive. Dopamine can make a person very goal-driven, and testosterone can give a person the aggression and the focus to do almost anything to achieve that goal.”

She looked away into the gray light. “That has to be the ugliest view of love I ever heard.”

I smiled. “I’d have to agree with you. Unfortunately it’s a view that is backed up by a lot of hard science.”

“Doesn’t it miss something? Isn’t there a little more to it than that?”

“I think so…” I hesitated for a second. “But that’s another discussion, to be had over a steak and a bottle of wine or two. The point is, sex and love are part and parcel, at least where murder is concerned.” I paused a moment to think about what I was saying. “Mothers, siblings, even children, might kill to protect their family. But murder, that dark drive to kill, that is usually fuelled by the darker side of love, isn’t it? The desire to possess, to own, to dominate, they are all appetites that are woven into the sex drive.”

She was frowning at me, like she was four and I had told her that Santa Claus had just shot Bugs Bunny down a dark ally and stolen his money so he could get drunk at the local clip joint.

“What about nurturing, care, respect, honor, tenderness…?”

I smiled at her. “Hey, don’t get me wrong, Dehan. I’m not saying that’s all there is. I’m not even saying that’s what I believe. All I am saying is, as you know yourself, ninety percent of murders are committed for love. Love has a dark side, and that dark side is all about possession, ownership and domination.”

“I guess.”

I was silent for a bit. Outside, the rain had eased. The wipers had slowed to a steady sixty beats per minute. A voice in my head was telling me to change the subject, but somebody else seemed to be operating my mouth.

“Those other elements, respect, tenderness, I guess those are what we are capable of distilling from those darker drives.” I glanced at her and gave a small shrug. “There are things the mighty god of science has not yet explained, Dehan. Consciousness and love are two of those things.”

She studied my face for a while as we approached Little Neck Bay and crossed over the bridge.

“I guess we got a bit sidetracked, huh?”

“I guess murder is not mechanical. Murder is a huge step for any person. It’s the product of deep, powerful passions. There is no harm in having some understanding of those passions. Ronald Laing said that life was a sexually transmitted disease, and that the mortality rate was one hundred percent. He might have added