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

need a roast chicken and a bottle of good wine. We need to talk this whole thing through.”

She grunted and sat back in her chair with the look of someone who was relenting but didn’t want to.

“OK,” she said, “but you are not to start cutting me out, Stone, or I swear I will kick your ass from here to Morris Park!”

I smiled at her. “Yeah, yeah, promises, promises…”

Ten

We started with a couple of dry martinis while we waited for the smoked salmon and avocado salad and half a bottle of Alsace Gewurztraminer. Dehan scorned the roast chicken in favor of an Argentine steak seared over hot coals and I went with half a chicken roasted in a terracotta dish with baby onions, carrots and potatoes. With that we shared a bottle of 2016 Domaine Jeannin-Naltet, Les Nagues Premier Cru. It was rich and bold enough for Dehan’s steak, but had enough dark fruits for my chicken.

We didn’t talk much while we were eating, beyond making appreciative noises about the food. When we were done we ordered a cheese board, black coffee and a couple of old Bushmills, no ice. Dehan sipped her coffee and took a pull on her whiskey, then sat savoring it and watching me.

“How long,” she said, “have you known or suspected that Leroy killed his mother. Because I have to tell you, Stone, it never crossed my mind.”

I made a face that was somewhere between apologetic and pensive. “Pretty much since I read the report. We’ll never know, and I am not about to call Frank out, but I think he dreamed up the whole berserker story to protect the kid. A black kid from a broken family in the Bronx, accused of killing his own mother, is going to have a tough time of it, whether he did it or not. Not only that, such an accusation could have seriously jeopardized his chances of adoption, even by the Mitchells.”

“So, when you read the ME’s report on Earl’s wound?”

I smiled and shrugged again. “Yeah, the wound was pretty conclusive, but also, I mean, last man standing, right? There was nobody else left alive, so it had to be him.”

She frowned. “OK, that makes me feel pretty stupid. I should have seen that.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. You hadn’t had time to read the report.”

“OK, but, what about Sonia? How the hell could you have known Sonia was there?”

“I didn’t, but it seemed likely.” I cut a piece of Stilton and put it on a cracker, chewed it and sipped some whiskey. “If you look at the report, which you simply haven’t had time to do yet, you’ll see that the only clear prints on the knife were Earl’s, even though Cherise had stabbed him with it just seconds before he is supposed to have taken it from her. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Taken with the severity of his wound, and ignoring Frank’s berserker theory, what we have is a situation where she stabs him in the back and he collapses and dies. Now, either she has removed the knife, or it is still in his back, but either way her prints should be on it, right?”

She nodded.

“Next, Leroy either takes the knife from his mother, or he takes it from Earl’s back. Whichever it is, now his prints and his mother’s should both be on the knife, but they’re not. Only Earl’s are. So we have to ask, how were Cherise’s and Leroy’s prints removed, and how did Earl’s get there?”

I sipped a little more whiskey. Dehan watched me without speaking. I went on.

“At first glance, Leroy must have wiped the prints and pressed the knife into his father’s hand, but I just can’t see a kid of his age, in the emotional state he must have been in, driven to such a rage over his father’s murder by his mother, thinking that coldly. Neither does it make a lot of sense that he would try to frame his father, when he has just avenged him by killing his own mother. That being the case, there must have been a fifth person there, a person working to protect the boy.”

“That makes sense,” she said a little gloomily.

“When I saw how close Sonia lived to her sister, and how close their jobs were, it just seemed very likely that that other person was Sonia. I applied a little pressure and she came through.”

“You say it like that and it sounds simple.” She ate some Brie on a cracker and sat swirling the amber liquid around in her glass. “So how does this affect the Mitchells? You probably disagree, but I don’t see how it clarifies the Mitchell case in any way? If Leroy killed his mother, who killed Leroy?”

I grinned. “Karma?”

“Yeah? Karma? That’s about as helpful as a paper frying pan. Are you being facetious, or is there actually a thought in there somewhere?”

I cut another slice of Stilton, balanced it on a cracker and inserted it in my mouth, then sat swirling the Bushmills. Outside the street had grown dark and silent lights were sliding past, amber and red.

“What I mean is that—” I sighed and took a little longer to think it through. “That his own death, his own murder, may have been inescapably woven into his actions when he chose to kill his mother.”

“Is that your brain talking, Stone, or the Irish whiskey?”

“A bit of both, perhaps.”

“You’re going to have to lay it out a lot clearer for me, big guy. At the moment it sounds like a Greek tragedy played out by black Vikings in the Bronx.”

I laughed, then shook my head. “I don’t know, Dehan. I haven’t got anything you could call a theory. The possibilities are there, as plain for you as they are for me. All we can do is explore them.” She stared at me, waiting, her eyebrows arched into a question that said, “So…?”

I spread my hands. “OK, so let me ask