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

sweet on her, but now she’s been murdered, and you can’t spare ten lousy minutes to help the cops find her killer? You had a grudge.” I shook my head. “You had some reason for turning hostile against a girl everybody else describes as an angel. What happened, Greg?” He didn’t answer. I pointed at him. “You’re still my man for picking her up at the station.” I smiled. “Have a good day, and thanks for your valuable time. You’ve been helpful.”

We climbed back in the car and slammed the doors. Dehan muttered, “Prick,” and I fired up the engine. I saw him in the rear-view mirror, watching us as we pulled out of the ranch.

We rolled slowly back through the town and I turned left onto Lickskillet Road. We bumped and bounced down the track till we came to Lefthand Canyon Drive, where I turned left and drove slowly, among the growing shadows on the hills and the pine woods, for about four miles. Just before the road turned north, I saw a ramshackle building on the left, set back about thirty yards, half in among the trees. It was made mainly of wood, with a tall, rickety, gray stone chimney that ran all the way down to the ground on the right-hand wall. There was a broad porch at the front and an open garden, where you could see all the ground had been churned up, and the grass and weeds crushed, by vehicles entering and leaving. I pulled over and climbed out to have a look. There were shutters closed over the windows and when I tried the door, it was locked. I walked down the side and put my hand on the stone chimney. It was cold.

As I came back to the garden, Dehan was approaching from the other side. She shook her head. “Nothing. You think this is it?”

I shrugged with my eyebrows. “It looks like a shack, and it’s where he said it would be.” I didn’t say anything for a moment, looking around, listening. It was real quiet. You could feel the evening gathering, and even the birds were silent. I asked, “You think there’s anything in it?”

She made a face. “Kathleen as a dope smoker? Not really.”

“How about Kathleen coming to her sister’s rescue?”

“Oh man…”

I rested my ass on the trunk of the car and stared at the old ramshackle building.

“What we still haven’t got, Dehan, is a concrete reason why she came here, or why she lied about where she was going. Let me rephrase that. We don’t know where she was going, what her purpose was in going there, or what made her lie about it. All we have is that she lied to her mother and her husband about going to see Ingrid and Alfredo, and she turned up a week later, ten miles away from their house, beheaded, ill-concealed in the woods.”

Dehan sighed and ran her fingers through her thick hair. “So, how would that work? Her sister gets in with bad company. Cannabis is legal in Colorado, but it’s not in New York. Maybe they had a bit of business going, with Pat selling the produce back east. She gets into trouble with them. Who knows? Maybe they were giving her merchandise to sell and she kept the proceeds, didn’t pay, spent it on coke—whatever. They want their money. They’re going to come to New York to collect. She convinces Kathleen to come to the Shack and pay them off, plead for time—again, whatever. Point is, they are mad and they make an example of her.”

“It’s plausible. It’s no less plausible than Greg raping her. We need to come back when they’re open.”

She nodded. “Maybe your man Ned knows what their hours are.”

I smiled. “You think?”

“You never can tell with these clean-living, God fearin’ country folk, Stone. They often have dark secrets.”

The sun slipped behind the trees. Suddenly, there was a sharp chill in the air and the sky seemed to darken. I shifted my ass off the trunk and moved toward the driver’s side.

“You know what they have here, Dehan, as well as bull’s balls?”

“What’s that, Stone?”

“Bison steak.” I climbed in and slammed the door. Dehan got in beside me. I fired up the engine and she turned on the heater. “You ever had a bison steak, Dehan?”

“Nope, but I reckon bison steak is something I could get pretty intense about. I propose a shower, a craft beer followed by a bottle of good wine, and a couple of bison steaks. I think that might be mighty helpful in stimulatin’ them there gray cells.”

“Well, I’s inclined to agree, ma’am, bein’ partial to a beer an’ a bison steak myself.”

And we drove off, into the sunset.

Ten

They had pulled the drapes in the dining room and built up the fire. It was agreeably warm and, looking across the table at Dehan, who was holding her beer and gazing at the burning logs, it was easy to forget we were working and imagine we were on holiday. I was vaguely surprised that the idea of being on holiday with Dehan did not strike me as odd.

She took a deep breath and frowned. “Here’s the way my mind is working, Stone. Our suspect pool is small.” She dragged her gaze away from the burning logs and looked at me. “We have an unknown possible at the Shack, or we have Greg. Whichever way you turn it, we end up with the same result.” She raised her shoulders. “I just can’t imagine that we are going to come up with another suspect. It’s either Mr. X, or it’s Greg.”

I dragged my mind back from the strange places where it had been wandering and thought about what she had said.

“I agree.”

“So we need to eliminate either Mr. X or Greg.”

“Getting hold of