Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (A Dead Cold Box Set)

by Blake Banner

  Dehan rang the bell and stood looking at me with flushed cheeks from the cold wind. Her hands were plunged in her pockets, and she was bouncing on her toes.

  “I love this weather,” she said. I shook my head, and she said, “No, seriously. It’s honest, real.”

  “The weather is honest and real?”

  She nodded and the door opened. There was a woman in an apron and carpet slippers. She had permed silver hair and a face that said she was broken but coping. We showed her our badges and told her who we were, and she ushered us toward her living room, telling us to come in out of the cold.

  She sat us down at a dining table that she had set for tea and went into the kitchen, calling, “Robert! The detectives are here!”

  She came in with a kettle and poured scalding water into a teapot, while soft feet came down the stairs. A man with a bracket of soft hair around the back of his head and a sage-green V-neck sweater came in. He was smiling and had reading glasses hung around his neck. He held out his hand, and we rose to shake.

  “Sit down, sit down. Marion has made an event out of this. She is hoping you will finally put us out of our misery one way or another.”

  Marion returned from the kitchen, and we all sat again.

  I smiled at Marion and said, “I’m afraid not. But we may”—I stressed the word—“have found a lead that will help us to find out what happened to your daughter. We are reviewing a number of cold cases, and it seems your daughter’s disappearance may have some connection.”

  Marion was holding the teapot halfway to Dehan’s cup. Her expression was eloquent. It said that unendurable anxiety can become endurable when it becomes your everyday experience. She gave a small sigh and poured the tea.

  “Is she dead, Detective Stone?”

  Honest and real, like the weather. “We don’t know, Mrs. Holly. That is what we need to find out. Right now, I’d like to know what Lynda was like as a person, about her relationship with Hank, and about the days leading up to the bike rally that weekend in Connecticut.”

  Robert drummed his fingers on the tabletop, and you could tell he was biting back tears. Dehan, in one of those surprising moments of tenderness she displayed sometimes, put her hand on Marion’s shoulder and said, “I know this hurts, Marion. Don’t give up hope. We are here to help you.”

  Marion clung to her hand, and tears welled in her eyes. I turned to Robert. There was nobody there to hold his hand. I am not given to moments of tenderness, but I was moved to lean forward and put my hand on his shoulder. He nodded and we sat in silence for a moment, listening to the interminable rain pattering on the patio, as though we were honoring the dead.

  Marion sighed. “Where do I begin? She was a sweet, adorable child. Full of spirit, mischievous, but with a great, kind heart. Then she hit fifteen and, like a lot of kids, she went a bit wild. She started going to parties, coming home late, drinking. I think she smoked pot a few times. We tried talking to her, but she just didn’t want to hear what we were telling her.”

  Robert cleared his throat. “We made an appointment with a child psychologist. She told us we were crazy and we should go. She said she was fine and just having a bit of fun. We did go…” He glanced at his wife. “The psychologist told us we should maybe give her a bit more space, not become her enemy but go along with her a bit, then reel her in gently. She said a lot of kids went through this rebellious phase, then settled. We tried that.”

  “How did that work?” It was Dehan.

  Marion made an uncertain face. “I think it was working. She introduced us to Hank, which was something. Robert didn’t like him to begin with, but they started working out their differences, didn’t you?”

  Robert nodded, then gave a small laugh. “Hank liked to appear the tough guy, but it was more an act than anything else. What he really wanted in life was a family.” He looked at me. “He was an orphan, you know? Grew up on the mean streets. I know something about that. He put on a big display to protect himself, but when we opened our arms to him, he began to soften, stopped showing off, was nicer to Lynda. Confessed to me in private that he was thinking of leaving his gang and asking Lynda to marry him. May God forgive me, I advised him to wait.”

  Marion shook her head. “No, Robert, you were right. She would have run a mile. As it was, the nicer he became, the more she started getting bored! A marriage proposal right then would have had her running for the hills!”

  Dehan was giving me that “well, whaddaya know?” look. I gave her my “I can’t help always being right” look. I asked Marion, “Do you think she was bored enough of Hank to go off with somebody else from the gang?”

  It was Robert who answered. “Yes. To be honest, I do. But she would have come back home first.”

  Dehan frowned. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because she had just got her bike license, and we were going out that week to get her her first bike, a Yamaha 250. She was out of her mind with excitement. She wanted that bike more than anything in the world.”

  Dehan narrowed her eyes. “I hate to be brutal, but these are Hell’s Angels. They’re all about bikes. Is it possible somebody made her a better offer?”

  Robert surprised me by smiling. “That’s not brutal, Detective. It’s a smart question. But the answer is, it was the bike she had chosen, partly because she loved it and partly because her friends in the club had advised her on it. She really wanted that bike. Only reason she wouldn’t come back for it is if she couldn’t.”

  Honest and real. The rain had stopped, but an icy wind was bowing the evergreens in the back garden. The bare trees, the skeletons with nothing left to lose, they withstood the wind better.

  I asked him, “Have you got a photo of Lynda?”

  Marion got up and went to a dresser. She came back with an album. Dehan chose a picture and snapped it on her phone, then Whatsapped it to me. She was average height, fair-haired, pretty, cute, and, by the way she was laughing, bubbly and fun. If you looked a little close, she also had “trouble” tattooed in invisible ink over every part of her laughing self.

  “One last thing,” I said, still looking at the photo on my phone. “Would you, by any remote chance, have Lynda’s fingerprints? Or a sample of her DNA anywhere?” I looked at them, and I could see the dread in their faces. I shook my head and smiled. “It is purely a routine question.”

  They both shook their heads in silence. They knew I was lying.

  Outside, Dehan rested her ass on the hood of my car. The wind was dragging her hair across her face again, so she tied it in a knot behind her head and squinted at me.

  “Hank is just a nice guy with a small character flaw where he beats up girls?”

  I knew we weren’t moving till we sorted this out, so I said, “Humanity is made up of seven and a half billion unique individuals, Dehan. And however much I may want to say what you want to hear, that won’t change the fact that you cannot classify human beings according to type. You should know that better than anybody.”

  I opened the car and got in, slamming the door behind me. Knowing what I meant by that would be a physical need for her, so she would have to get in to find out. Then at least we could drive and argue. She walked around the car and got in, frowning at me.

  “What exactly do you mean by that?”

  I fired up the car and moved off.

  “Come on!” I said, as though she was being slow. “You are a mass of contradictions! Everything you do, say, and feel is contradicted by something else you do, say, or feel. You are like Newton’s third law.”

  She wanted to get mad but wasn’t sure what Newton’s third law was. “Is that the one about every action…?”

  “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

  She was silent, nonplussed for a while. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to be offended or not.”

  “Of course not, Dehan. I would never say anything intended to offend you. I am just pointing out that you yourself are a profoundly contradictory perso
n. If you can be full of contradictions, why not Hank? Maybe think less about what people should be, and more about what they actually are.”

  She was silent for about five minutes, so I tossed her my phone and said, “Give Hank a call. Ask him to come in.” She looked a question at me, and I said, “There is a damn good chance he killed Lynda, don’t you think?”

  She made the call, and he said he’d be there early afternoon.

  Eight

  We had time for a quick bite of lunch, and Hank arrived at two. He looked worried. We showed him into an interrogation room and sat him down. As we sat opposite, he asked, “What’s going on?”

  Dehan surprised me by taking the lead.

  “Just a few details we need clearing up, Hank.”

  “What kind of details?”

  She was pensive a moment, looking at the tabletop. “Well, for example, the fact that you were considering asking Lynda to marry you.”

  He shrugged and frowned at us in turn. “So what? It was twelve years ago, and her dad advised me not to. He was probably right. She was so crazy right then, she would have dumped me on the spot. Who told you that, anyhow?”

  I got in before Dehan could answer. “The thing is, Hank, it seems you were pretty close. Closer than you really gave us to understand. It was quite a surprise to me to discover that you were pretty tight with her dad. Her parents liked you.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. They were cool. She didn’t deserve them.” He suddenly screwed up his face. He looked frustrated. “What’s your point? I liked her. I was pretty serious about her. She had nice folks. So what?”

  “Okay, Hank, let me level with you. You tell me a story about how you are a badass Hell’s Angel, you got your bitch, you go to a rally and your bro comes on to your bitch, you fight like real guys. She ditches you and you ride off into the sunset. Plenty more bitches out there. Then I look into it and I find the substance of the story is true, but there are a few details that you left out. See, you are not such a badass, you don’t really think of her as your bitch, and your bro—well, you were actually thinking of leaving the Angels because you felt you had finally found that family you never had as a kid. Now, I have got to be honest…” I sat back in my chair and looked at Dehan. “My partner thinks you’re a scumbag who beats up on women. I don’t. The more I learn about you, the more I see you as a basically stand-up guy who was badly lost but had the balls to find his way.”

  He gave me a look that told me I could stick my opinion of him where the sun don’t shine. “Gee, thanks, Officer Stone.”

  I ignored him. Dehan stepped in. “Thing is, Hank, even if you are the stand-up guy my partner thinks you are, this new, gentler image of you has exactly the opposite effect from what it should have. Because it gives you one hell of a motive for killing her.”

  His face and neck flushed red. He half stood and his chair fell back. “I have just about had enough!”

  Dehan was on her feet. “Sit down!”

  “I left Lynda at that goddamn rally with that motherfucking asshole, Zak!”

  I got to my feet. He watched me walk behind him and pick up the chair. I said quietly, “Sit down, Hank.”

  He sat. I sat and Dehan sat.

  “Zak tells me he was only trying to help you realize that you can’t trust women,” I said.

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “You didn’t tell me he was into Crowley.”

  He heaved a huge sigh and made a helpless gesture with his hands. “I don’t know. I figured you’d find out. You know? You’re coming at me from every fucking angle. You think Lynda is dead? When you came to my shop, you said I cut off her fucking arms and put them in Pete’s fucking lockup. Now you’re saying you think I killed her. What the fuck, man?”

  He had tears in his eyes. I felt bad for him, but I ignored my feelings. “How much were you involved in the whole ritual magic thing?”

  “Not.” He said it emphatically. “I got into the Angels for the bikes, and because it was the closest I ever had to a family. Zak was crazy about the whole Crowley thing. A lot of the bros were. They used to snort and have crazy rituals. They used to talk a lot of shit about going beyond the limits.” He gave a humorless laugh and shrugged. He glanced at Dehan. “Sorry, but a chick has three holes you can fuck. So how far past the limits are you gonna go? You gonna fuck her in the ear? Sorry, I got no time for that shit. Snort. Fuck. You don’t need to prance around in stupid robes and invoke the fuckin’ devil.”

  Dehan asked him, “Is that all they did?”

  “I don’t know.” He stared down at his hands between his legs. He looked unhappy. “It seems like yesterday sometimes. Lynda was a sweet kid. I really liked her. She was just a bit wild, but she didn’t mean no harm. I know what that is. Maybe I should have just picked her up and carried her away. I think of her involved in all that stuff and it kills me.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  He looked her in the eye. “I don’t know because I never went to one of his stupid rituals. But I heard they sacrificed chickens and drank their blood. I never believed it, but maybe it was true. Those guys were crazy enough to do it.”

  I watched him a moment. “Could they have progressed to people?”

  He blinked a few times. They were odd, soft blinks. A tear spilled from his eye, and when he spoke he sounded like he had a cold. “I sure hope not.”

  “Were you aware of any girls going missing during that time?”

  He wiped his nose and his eyes on the back of his sleeve. “I don’t know, Detective. I’m sorry. Most of the time we were drunk or stoned. Chicks came and went. All I can say is I wasn’t aware of that, but it is possible. If you’re asking me were Zak and his coven crazy enough to make a human sacrifice, I have to say yes. I think they were crazy enough. They did a lot of coke”— he made a gesture with his hand like he was showing me something on the table—“because they said it helped them to go beyond the limits. So if they went on a snort-fest and got into a crazy ritual, yeah. They could.”

  “What day did you leave the rally?”

  “It was Sunday late afternoon, early evening.”

  Dehan said, “The Sabbath.”

  “Where did you go?” I asked.

  “I went home. Called a friend in L.A., told him I needed to get away from things.”

  “An Angel?” Dehan asked.

  He shook his head. “Told me to go over. So I did. Ended up staying a while, then went to Arizona, worked with a mechanic there for a bit, till I got her out of my system. Then came back and set up my business.”

  “By bike, obviously.” He looked at me and frowned. “You left the rally, went home and then to L.A., by bike.”

  “Yeah, of course.” He stared at me a while, then at Dehan. “Do you even know she’s dead?”

  I shook my head.

  “This is all because of those damned arms?”

  I nodded.

  He pulled a face. “You’re on the wrong track. If Zak killed her, and I can’t see why he would, but if he did, he wouldn’t cut her arms off and put them in a fuckin’ lockup. Zak was all about sex and humiliation. All he ever wanted to do was get the biggest fuckin’ hard-on drugs could give him, and fuck and humiliate everybody around him. And he believed that Satan gave him the power to do that. Cutting off people’s arms…” He shook his head. “That wouldn’t do it for Zak.”

  He put his hands on the table and stared at them for a moment.

  “When I left, when I walked out of that tent and got on my bike, she was hugging him, holding him tight with both arms. He had his arm around her, holding a beer. And they were both laughing, like they thought I was having a jealous hissy fit and I’d be back in the morning.”

  “What were your last words to them, Hank?”

  He looked at me like the question surprised him. “I told her she was a fucking bitch and she didn’t deserve the family she had. And I told him he was no bro of mine, I never wanted to see his lying fuckin’ face again, and I
would never forgive either of them for what they done to me.” He was quiet for a moment, remembering, then added, “Some of the bros around the fire were laughing, but most of them was pretty serious.”

  “How serious is that, when a woman comes between two bros?”

  “It’s pretty serious.”

  We were quiet for a few moments. I glanced at Dehan. She said, “I’m done.”

  I said, “Thanks, Hank. You’ve been helpful. We’ll be in touch…” I left the words hanging.

  He stood and left without saying anything.

  I drummed the table with my fingers and absently studied Dehan’s face, waiting for her to speak.

  Eventually, she said, “It’s just stories. There is no way of checking if any of this is true. How do we know he left on his bike? How do we know he didn’t take a truck with a couple of bikes loaded on it? How do we know he didn’t leave with Lynda?”

  “His story fits with Zak’s.”

  She looked at me. “You like Zak?”

  “If Lynda is dead, there is a better chance Zak killed her than Hank. I think we can be sure she stayed with Zak Sunday to Monday. I reckon Zak’s jealousy over Hank was greater than Hank’s jealousy over Lynda. Hank lost a girlfriend. Zak lost a potential disciple. He is a narcissist and a woman hater. I’m going to ask the Feds to send over a profiler and discuss Zak, Lynda, and the arms. We could be looking at two completely separate crimes here.”

  “We could, but it would be one hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t it.”

  We spent the afternoon wading through reports from all over the U.S.A. between 2003 and 2006 involving missing girls who fit what we imagined was the killer’s victim profile, plus cases of dismembered bodies. It made grim reading, but nothing raised a red flag. I phoned Bernie at the bureau and asked him to arrange for a profiler to come see us.

  By six, I was beat and told Dehan I was going home. She said, “My car is at your place. I’ll come with you.”

  We drove in silence through the darkness. Artificial light, mainly amber with washes of red and green, leaned in through the windshield and painted her face with lurid colors. The rain had stopped, but occasional spits gathered on the glass like broken, liquid gems. The wipers gave a desultory squeak and a thud, and then rested again.