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

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?”

I sighed. “Katie, I am sorry. I really am. What can I say? Life isn’t fair. It never was. The fact is that you can get it right a million times, and life goes on. You get it wrong once and you spend the rest of your life living with the consequences.”

She gave a small smile you could describe as rueful. “He contacted me because he had tracked down Jack O’Connor’s only surviving daughter. At first I told him to leave me alone, but he was nothing if not persistent. Relentless might be a better word. In the end I agreed to talk to him.”

Dehan was frowning. “Things must have happened pretty fast.”

Katie turned to her and seemed to study her face for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. They did. Dave was a pain in the ass, but he was a fascinating pain in the ass. He was intense, really intense. When he focused his mind on something it was…” She stared at the wall, shrugged, shook her head. “It was like his mind was eating that