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

people, what is it, twenty? Thirty? More? He has a spiritual epiphany and just walks away from his past? ‘I’m not that man anymore, so I am not guilty.’ Hennessy goes down, D’Angelo goes down, whoever else is involved gets taken down, too, and he just smiles and walks away.”

“That seems unlikely, don’t you think?”

“Well, what are we going to do about it?”

I took a long pull on my beer and gave a big sigh. “Well, before we decide that, we need to have a clearer understanding of what the hell is going on. And we should get that when he gives us all this material tomorrow.” She drew breath to complain and I cut her short. “But! There are a couple of things that have me a bit confused. For a start, if we are assuming that he is Adrian Philips, and he has had this great epiphany, that would explain why he wants the whole story to come out, and why he wants some form of justice done. But what it doesn’t explain is—one, why he did nothing for ten years after David was killed, and two…” I stared at her and frowned. “How the hell he expects to get away with it! He says he’s willing to testify at trial. But if he does, and he is Philips, D’Angelo and Hennessy will recognize him. There must be British officers who can identify him. There must be photographs of him at his old regiment. Once Hennessy’s team set out to show he is Philips, they will find proof. He’s not stupid. He is anything but stupid. So how the hell does he plan to pull it off?”

She thought about it, staring at the table and making Olympic symbols with her drink. “I don’t know. He’s playing mind games. All his clever philosophical bullshit, but in the end all he’s doing is trying to get away with murder.”

“Like I said, Dehan, you’re probably right.”

“And how the hell did he know about your wounds? He gives me the creeps, Stone. This guy is weird.”

“He’s very observant. I wasn’t moving naturally. My arm was stiff…”

“And the heart?”

“Like you said, mind games. Either way, we take the material back and, if it’s as good as he says it is, it becomes a Federal case and we hand the whole thing over to the Bureau. And they get to decide what they want to do with ASP.”

“I guess…” She went to take a pull from her bottle and found it was empty. She sat forward and pointed at my glass. “You want another?” I shook my head and she made to stand, hesitated and then sagged back in her chair again.

“So who killed Dave?”

I nodded. “I have been sitting here wondering the same thing. We’ve been on this crazy wild goose chase.” I smiled in a way that was rueful. “Which makes Carol Hennessy rather appropriately the goose who is going to get cooked, but we are no closer to answering those simple questions which we started out with.”

She stood and went to the bar, and I sat staring at nothing, but seeing David’s astonished face looking at somebody who was holding his gun with a steady hand. Somebody ruthless, cold, and deadly accurate. Somebody who had killed him with a single, well-placed shot, and had then left the gun right there on the bookcase and walked away.

Without the article.

Dehan came back with another Bud and another pint of Murphy’s bitter, which she put down in front of me.

“If you don’t want it you can throw it in my face. But I ordered bacon sandwiches and fries, so I figured you’d want a drink. “

“Thanks.”

“So here’s what happened. Don’t interrupt. Just listen.”

“Yes, Memsahib.”

“2007, after a lifetime of killing, Adrian Philips has an epiphany and decides he wants to make things right. He turns to Buddhism as a way of dealing with his conscience or his karma or whatever you want to call it. But he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life in jail, so he stages his own death in Pakistan and moves to Sri Lanka, where he becomes a monk and calls himself Ananda Sri Pannasiha. And in this new identity, he does two things. One, he requests a transfer to the monastery here in Arizona, and two, he contacts Dave Thorndike of the New York Telegraph, a paper that is not afraid to get down and dirty and take on the big boys.”

“Good.”

“I said don’t. Now, thanks to the material that he is able to give Dave, Dave’s article progresses fast, and in February, he contacts Lee and tells him what he has. Lee freaks out and goes to Hennessy and tells her what Dave is going to do. Ordinarily, she would order Philips to deal with this kind of problem. But now Philips is the problem. The Asprin has become the Arsenic.”

“And now you are going to run into a problem.”

“Shut up. No I’m not. You were going to say, why would Lee kill Dave if Hennessy had already ordered Guzman to do it? Well, that’s simple. She’s a careful woman. She takes Lee’s information and she says nothing to him. She goes to D’Angelo and tells him to take care of it. He dispatches the order to Guzman.

“But meantime, Lee, keen to get in good with the powerful Hennessys, takes matters into his own hands.”

I nodded. “That’s possible. And the article and the laptop are not there because Dave has already given them to Lee, who now hands them over to Hennessy.”

“That was my big finale, and you stole my thunder.”

“Sorry. Do it again. I’ll pretend.”

“Take a hike.”

The bacon sandwiches arrived and I realized how hungry I was. We ate in silence until there was nothing left but crumbs on our plates, and she sat picking