Knife Edge (A Dead Cold Mystery Book 27) Blake Banner (10 best books of all time TXT) 📖

forward until his head was on the tabletop, making a painful keening sound. Dehan stood and left the room. I waited, watching him, wondering if any person could put on such a convincing act, or if what I was seeing was for real.

The door opened and Dehan came back in with a cup of water and a box of tissues, which she placed in front of Mitchell. She put her hand on his shoulder and spoke softly.

“We can do this later, Dr. Mitchell, but we really urgently need to know where Dr. Wagner is.”

He looked up at her and his face was wet and shiny. “You can’t think that she…”

“We don’t think anything, Dr. Mitchell. But your wife has been murdered and Dr. Wagner has disappeared. We don’t know what’s happened, but it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if she didn’t kill your wife, she might well be another victim of the killer. So either way, we need to find her.”

He swallowed and nodded. “Yes.” He nodded some more. “Yes, of course. It’s just so hard to take in. And poor Marcus… What am I going to do?”

“You could start,” I said, “by telling us the true nature of your relationship with Dr. Wagner.”

He stared at me with a slack mouth for a long moment, then took some tissues and blew his nose and wiped his eyes.

“When I married Emma, we both agreed that there were likely to be other people over the years. True fidelity is hard to come by, and when you find it, often enough it is false. So when Emma has had affairs, I have ignored it, and when I have had affairs she has turned a blind eye. We agreed that we wanted each other as partners, as a family, but we also acknowledged that sexually we both needed variety. It worked for us.”

Dehan frowned. “But Dr. Wagner was something more than that.”

He sighed. “Yes, Margaret was somewhat more than that. The problem with Margaret was that I fell in love with her, and she fell in love with me, but then…” He held my eye a moment and then turned to Dehan. “Then Emma became infatuated with Margaret too, and Margaret enjoyed all the attention and the flattery and she and Emma ended up having a brief affair.”

Dehan sat. “Wow, way to keep things simple.”

“Keep it in the family,” he said, with a hint of bitterness. “In the end the affair with Emma ran its course, but my relationship with Margaret never quite ended. We have a lot in common, we genuinely enjoy each other’s company.” He sighed. “Anyway, that’s why we found it so funny when Lee tried to blackmail me.”

I grunted. “But the repercussions for you professionally, and for the clinic you were planning, could have been severe if the nature of your relationship with Dr. Wagner had been revealed.”

“Yes.” He blew his nose and took a second tissue to wipe his eyes and dry his cheeks. “That’s true, and it did worry me some. But I have always been with the Duke of Wellington on that score, publish and be damned. I have nothing to be ashamed of, and frankly I think it’s time society grew up a little.”

“Did your wife and Dr. Wagner see it that way?”

“Emma did, certainly. It is also true that we were both wealthy in our own right. But Margaret had fought her way to eminence from near poverty. She had a lot to lose, particularly as regards the clinic.”

Dehan said, “If backing for the clinic had failed, or if it had been shunned by the celebrities it was aimed at, it would have hit her hard.”

“Yes.” He nodded.

“So you decided to pay Sonia off.”

He didn’t answer. He stared down at the tabletop. Finally I told him, “We found the photographs.”

He seemed not to hear, but started talking.

“After Lea was killed, after Lee was killed, she revealed the full extent of what she had on us. We got together, Emma, Margaret and I, and we discussed it, and we decided that the best thing to do was to make Sonia an offer, but make her understand that as far as Emma and I were concerned, we didn’t give a damn if she published the pictures or not. We were doing it to protect Margaret, but we were only prepared to go so far in order to help her. It seemed to work, because for six years we hardly heard from her.”

He paused, shaking his head. I said, “But a few weeks ago she tried to hike the price, and you said no.”

“Yes, how did you know that?”

“It made sense. That’s why she came to me with such an innocuous picture. It made little sense that Lee would try to blackmail you with a picture like that. But once she gave it that spin, that it was the blackmail that provoked the murder, we had to look into it. Then, when I saw the pictures she had on her laptop, it made me wonder why she had picked the least damning of all the pictures she had, to show me. That only made sense if she was putting a shot across your bows. A warning. Go with the price rise or face the consequences.”

He drew a shuddering breath. “Yes, that was about the size of it. We were paying her monthly, but when she heard that the clinic was going ahead, she decided she wanted an increase.”

Dehan gave a small grunt. “So Dr. Wagner, who had the most to lose in all this, took it upon herself to go to Sonia and shoot her dead.”

“I find that very hard to believe. Margaret is a strong woman, but she is also kind and humane.”

I scratched my chin, feeling vaguely uncomfortable. “Did you know, Dr. Mitchell, that Dr. Wagner had a gun?”

“Yes.” He gave a small nod, still staring at the tabletop. “I bought it for her. New York is a dangerous city, and our business, though it