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

I frowned and raised a hand to stop her. “How do you know this, Sonia?”

She nodded, as though she agreed with the question. “Leroy was so traumatized his memory was pretty vague, but he witnessed everything. Also, the medical examiner and the investigating detectives pieced it all together that way, by the position of the bodies and where the wounds were. And it all made sense. It was the only way it could have happened.”

She paused, gathering her thoughts.

“Several of the neighbors called the cops when they heard the screams and shouts. I think there was a couple of them the cops were interested in for a while, but they had alibis and in the end they figured it went down the way they said, they killed each other and left poor Leroy alone in the world.”

“You didn’t adopt him?”

“I couldn’t. I live alone and I work long hours. There was no way I could afford the money or the time to look after a traumatized kid of eight.” She shook her head, confirming the impossibility. “No, he went to the orphanage. But not for long. The Mitchells had read about the murder, they live in the Bronx, and they offered to adopt him. They changed his name. Dr. Mitchell, Brad, said it would help him to reinvent himself after the trauma, but I believe it just sounded less black to them than Leroy.”

“What can you tell me about the Mitchells?”

“They are both academics. They lecture at NYU, he is a psychiatrist, I think, and she is in sociology or women’s studies or something like that. Anyhow, there was a lot of debate and discussion about whether a white family should adopt a black kid. Brad accused the orphanage of instigating apartheid through the back door and said he would sue them and have them shut down, so they agreed to approve the adoption and Leroy went to live with them about six months after the murder.”

I cleared my throat and scratched my head. “Was he seeing a therapist of any sort at that time?”

“Yes, the court appointed a child psychologist to see him on a regular basis. Ms. Simone Robles. He saw her once a week to begin with, but it was less than that, about once a month, by the time…”

She hesitated. She looked away, blinking.

“Let’s stay with his move to the Mitchells for now. He was what, eight, nine?”

“He was still only eight.”

“How did he get on with the Mitchells? They had children of their own?”

She nodded. “They were very nice to him, and at first he appreciated that. They were good, kind people, especially Emma. With Brad, even though he was a good man, you always felt he was doing what he was doing out of a sense of principle, or obligation. He believed he should be doing it, so he did it. But with Emma…,” she smiled, “with her you felt it was more from the heart. She was warmer.”

“They had kids?” I asked again.

“They had two kids, a little younger than Leroy. There was Marcus, who was about six or seven, and Lea, who was four or five.”

“And how did Leroy get on with Marcus and Lea?”

She nodded several times, looking down at the Formica top of the table. Eventually she said, “They got on well. He was maybe too keen to please, too excitable, but the whole family was kind and patient and tolerant, and very slowly he began to settle down into the family. Marcus was real kind to him, called him his brother. Everything was fine, or at least it seemed to be fine.”

“You mean it wasn’t? Was there something you didn’t know about?”

She heaved a big, heavy sigh. “I don’t know. For four years he seemed to be happy, in as much as he could be. But when he turned twelve, in August 2013, his attitude started to change. He started talking a lot of stupid crap about blacks and whites, about how black men were better and stronger than white men, about how white women preferred black men—I don’t know where he was getting that stuff, but it began to worry me.”

“He was in touch with you, obviously.”

“He used to come visit with me. Sometimes he’d stay the weekend. We used to write WhatsApp messages to each other. He loved his aunt,” she smiled, “but when I told him he was talking a lot of BS, and that God made all men and women equal, he told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. That made me unhappy. I told him I did not want him talking like that in front of the Mitchells. He promised me he wouldn’t, but I didn’t really believe him.

“I spoke to Emma about it once, and she told me not to worry about it. She said he had had a very traumatic experience and it would take him years to deal with it and come to terms with it. What he was doing with all that racist rubbish was to try and find his own identity, his own sense of self, and for that he would have to go through a lot of garbage. She was a wonderful woman, Detective Stone.”

“So what happened?”

“Just about a week after we talked, I got a phone call from Emma. She told me Leroy had been killed, and so had her little girl, Lea. Marcus had not been hurt,” she jabbed at her body with her fingertips, “physically, but he was in a bad state of shock and he was being seen by a psychiatrist.”

The story was new to me. I had vague memories of having read something about it, and hearing talk at the stationhouse, but I had not retained any of the details. I frowned. “How were they killed?”

“It was Sunday, June 13th. Brad and Emma had been sitting drinking coffee after breakfast and the kids were playing in the backyard.