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

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