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

She was staring out the window at the passing lights. “You know what I like?” She turned to face me. “I like moussaka. You like moussaka?”

“I love moussaka, but how long does it take to make?”

“Couple of hours.” She looked away again.

“We’d be eating at ten. We have to get up early.”

“Maybe when we get back. I fancy making a moussaka. I make a good moussaka.”

“Yeah, that would be nice. When we get back.”

After a moment I glanced at her again and saw her reflection in the window, smiling. “What’s funny?”

“Us. We’re like an old, retired couple.” She turned to look at me and put on the voice of a Hollywood Jewish mama. “Boiny, watcha wanna eat, Boiny? You want brisket? I could make you some brisket. Or you want we should go out to a restaurawnt?”

I laughed out loud and we both lapsed into a comfortable silence. Outside, Halloween was in the air and the vendors were already out roasting chestnuts on the sidewalks. They’d be there till after Christmas. Christmas. The tinsel and the lights were already in the shop windows, and it wasn’t even Halloween yet.

I said suddenly, “My wife wasn’t like that.” She turned to look at me, trying to hide her surprise. “It was more a case of what take out do we get. And eventually what take out I would get on the way home.”

“Did she work?”

“Yeah. She had a career.” I couldn’t keep the irony from my voice. “As a part-time receptionist at the dentist’s surgery on Morris Park Avenue. She had a five-minute commute on foot every morning.”

“You never had kids.”

“Uh-uh. She didn’t want to limit her career options.”

“You bitter?”

I shook my head. “I look back sometimes, and I can’t understand how I ever got into that situation in the first place, what induced me to marry her...”

We were quiet again. She sat watching the storefronts, with their bizarre mixture of broomsticks, black, pointed hats, orange pumpkins, and Christmas trees, as they sailed by.

“I’ve never been married, Stone. But I’ve seen a lot of people get married. Some, a very few, stay together. Most get divorced and then marry again.” She paused, thinking. “It seems to me that most people fall in love with, and marry, people who are all wrong for them. And the people who are just right for them, don’t turn them on.”

“Yup. You got that right.”

I pulled up in front of the house and she climbed out and went up the stairs ahead of me, stamping her feet and clapping her hands, billowing condensation from her mouth like a tall, slim dragon. I let her in and she headed for the kitchen while I turned on the lamps and pulled the drapes. Her voice came to me from inside the fridge.

“Shall I make a risotto? It’s quick and it’s nice on a cold night.”

I smiled to myself. “Sounds good.”

“You got sweet potato? I’ll put sweet potato in it. You ever put sweet potato in risotto? It’s nice.”

“I never did.”

“You going to open some wine?”

I went into the kitchen and chose a bottle. I pulled the cork and left it to breathe on the table, then took two beers from the fridge, cracked them, and handed her one. I stood watching her chop onions for a moment.

“The zipper…”

She gave me a funny look. “As a come-on, it lacks subtlety.”

She scraped the onions off the board and into a pot with olive oil. They hissed and sizzled and after a moment, the warm, fruity smell reached me. She started cutting a red pepper.

“Kathleen’s zipper. It had been ripped and broken. That was what made the sheriff suspect rape.”

She nodded. “Yeah, that surprised you this morning.”

I shrugged. “I have never raped anyone, but If I was going to, I wouldn’t bother with the zip if she was wearing a skirt, would you? I’d just pull up her skirt.”

She stared at me a moment, then carried on chopping red peppers. “Huh…!”

I went on, “Which means that for some reason, the killer wanted to make it look like rape. Yet, according to the rape kit, she had had sexual intercourse. The sheriff assumed, as he was meant to, that it was non-consensual. Where does that lead us?”

She stared at me with a face like brain-ache. “That she’d had consensual sex…”

I nodded. “But whoever killed her wanted us to believe it was non-consensual. What would make a killer want the police to think his victim had not had consensual sex?”

She threw the peppers in and started chopping tomatoes. “To deflect… but…” her voice trailed away.

“In the killer’s mind, he has made the association sex-equals-killer, and he assumes the police will do the same. So he wants the police to connect the sexual intercourse with an unknown rapist, when in fact it is a known sexual partner. He also knows that by dumping the body in a remote canyon, the semen will quickly become contaminated, so it will not lead the police back to him. They will look for a rapist.”

She stood stirring the mixture and shaking her head.

“There are a couple of big problems with that theory. A, it leads us directly to Mo and we know that it can’t be Mo. B, it assumes a level of forensic knowledge that, frankly, I don’t believe Mo is capable of. And what’s more, C, we know from Mrs. TMI, Kath’s mother, that Mel insisted on using a condom.”

I was quiet for a moment, visualizing the scene. “Tearing at a zip is difficult, awkward. Pulling up a skirt is easy. Also, there was evidence of pre-mortem blunt force trauma to the head. If she was knocked unconscious…”

She turned from the pot to look at me. “Why struggle