Knife Edge (A Dead Cold Mystery Book 27) by Blake Banner (most inspirational books of all time .TXT) 📗

so far as to say that I suspect that they did, but I am far from certain they didn’t.”

“But with what motive, Stone?”

“Blackmail?”

“But Emma Mitchell already dismissed that possibility…”

“Sure, but what happens if Lee insists? What if Lee had, as Mitchell suggested, an accomplice—an older person who is egging him on, pressuring him? What if he keeps coming back to Mitchell, telling him he has more evidence of his infidelity? Or evidence of some sort that could jeopardize the future clinic? And what if he will not desist? What if Leroy’s emotional problems are eating away at their happy family? What if the Mitchells are seeing their idyllic setup slowly crumbling under Leroy’s relentless assault?”

“Jesus, Stone…”

I drove in silence for a moment, with the leafy suburban street drifting by outside.

“It only takes the smallest variation in her story for it to work,” I said. “The kids are screaming and shouting out in the yard. That’s something Marcus and Lea never did before. Maybe Lee has hurt Lea in a fight, and Brad, who has had his fill of Lee, goes out into the yard and bursts into the shed. I don’t know what he finds there, but it’s enough to drive him into a rage. I don’t want to dot the Is and cross the Ts, because I am not proposing this as a theory. All I am saying is that given enough of the right provocation, I can see Brad doing something crazy and justifying it as protecting his family.”

She puffed out her cheeks and blew. “Hell, I guess you’re right, but...”

“I’ll tell you something else I am not one hundred percent convinced about.”

She turned to face me. “That Mitchell and Wagner never hit the sack together?” I nodded. “Yeah,” she sighed unhappily. “I guess you’re right about that too.”

Seven

Dehan called the chief and told him we needed to talk to him. When we got to the stationhouse we climbed the stairs to his office and rapped on the door. Inspector John Newman was sitting behind his desk and laughed as we came in, as though we had made a comic entrance. “Ah!” he said, “The dynamic duo! How are we? John, Carmen! Please, sit.”

We sat, and he sat beaming at us. I half expected him to get up and start mixing drinks. Instead he said, “What can I do for you?”

“This morning we received new evidence on the Mitchell case.”

He frowned. “Mitchell, rings a bell…”

“2014, six years ago, a girl and her adoptive brother murdered in a garden shed in their backyard. Parents were inside having breakfast, but came out when they heard screams. They found the kids, one with her throat cut, the other stabbed in the back. A third kid, the girl’s natural brother, was found hiding under a tarpaulin. He went into catatonic depression and has not spoken since.”

He’d started nodding when I mentioned the kids in the shed. Now he said, “Yes, I recall something. You have received new evidence? Any good?”

“We’re not sure yet, but we have spoken to both parents.”

“They were, if I recall, academics? Liberals, active in the community…”

Dehan answered. “She’s a doctor of sociology. He’s a doctor of psychology. They are both Dr. Mitchell, so they never know which one you’re talking to. You say, ‘Dr. Mitchell!’ And they both go,” she made an idiot face, “‘What? What?’”

Chief Newman gave an indulgent chortle. “So what was the new evidence?”

I said, “That the adoptive child, Leroy, had been attempting to blackmail Dr. Brad Mitchell. He claimed to have information and photographs that showed Brad was having an affair. That information, at this stage, seems not to have much substance. But after talking to both the Mitchells, and the alleged lover…”

Dehan cut in, “Another doctor, also of psychology, she runs Brad Mitchell’s clinic in White Plains.”

I nodded. “Right, after having spoken to all three of them, and seen the house where the murder took place, the problem we have is this:” I shrugged and spread my hands. “It seems the only people with opportunity to kill the kids are either Emma Mitchell, Brad Mitchell, or both of them. They also have means, and, if there is anything in this blackmail story, Brad Mitchell might have had motive too. The only other possibility is that there was a sixth person in the house, and for some reason the Mitchells are protecting him.”

He blinked at me a few times. “Yes, I see. The two parents and the three children, and then a sixth person.” He gazed at the ceiling a moment. “That’s unlikely though, isn’t it?”

Dehan answered. “I don’t know if it’s unlikely, sir, but so far there is absolutely nothing to indicate there was anybody else there, and we have no candidates to be that sixth man.” She glanced at me and made a gesture of mild helplessness. “All we have is a pretty weak possible motive in the blackmail angle.”

The chief gazed at her a moment and explained, as though to himself, “It might just explain his killing Leroy, but it does not explain his killing Lea, his own flesh and blood.”

“Exactly.”

He looked at us both in turn. “So, what do you want from me?”

I answered. “We have one witness. Only one. And that is Marcus Mitchell, who is currently locked in his room suffering from chronic catatonic depression. He is not receiving treatment and his mother will let nobody go near him but his nurses and his father. Apparently they employed several therapists in the beginning, but when those therapists tried to help him work through his experience, she fired them.”

His eyebrows rose up on his forehead. “So she has him trapped in this catatonic state?”

Dehan said, “That’s about the size of it. You have to wonder if she is just being overprotective, or if it suits her that the only witness is mute.”

He grunted, picked up his pen and examined it for a moment, then put it down like it was less interesting than he had expected