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

you this: what did Leroy take with him from his home with Cherise and Earl?”

“What did he take with him? I assume you mean something other that his pajamas. Uh…” She looked out at the quickening night and shrugged. “The first thing that springs to mind is his aunt.”

“OK.” I nodded. “So run with that. How does his aunt lead to a kind of repetition…”

She sat forward, “Holy…!” I paused and waited. She said, “Did you see this? Is this what you have been driving at?”

“I don’t know, Dehan. You’ll have to tell me what it is first.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Are you suggesting that Sonia killed her own nephew?”

I sighed and sank back in my chair. “Well, that is one of the possibilities, isn’t it?”

“She said herself that she was struggling emotionally between guilt, the desire to protect her nephew and her anger at the fact that he’d killed her sister. When you think about it, it must have been driving her crazy.”

“It must have…”

“But what would trigger something like that, Stone? Out of the blue like that.”

I took another sip of whiskey. “But it wasn’t out of the blue, was it?”

“No.” She shook her head. “It wasn’t. She had made that huge sacrifice, allowed her sister’s murder to go unpunished, saved him from the consequences of what he had done, and he shows his gratitude by trying to blackmail Brad Mitchell. She is suddenly overwhelmed by grief and regret and decides to set things right.”

I thought about it. “Couldn’t she have simply gone to the cops, as she did later?”

“Not without risking a prison sentence herself. She helped a murderer escape justice.” She picked up her glass and set it down again. “Maybe she went there just wanting to talk to him. She arrived at the house and heard the kids playing in the garden. She went to the back, meaning to call him over and talk to him. Perhaps he didn’t hear her, or ignored her, and she went to the shed…”

I nodded. “Perhaps. It’s a lot of perhaps and maybes, though, Dehan, and it doesn’t explain why she would kill little Lea. Seems to go against the grain if she’s there to avenge her sister.”

She grunted. “Stone, we have seen enough homicide to know that, unless you’re dealing with a pro, people go a bit crazy when they kill. More precisely, people go a bit crazy just before they kill. We can’t sit here in this restaurant and apply logic to what happened inside that shed when Leroy got killed. If she was there intending to avenge her sister, or seek justice for her sister, there is no telling what emotional state she was in. And if little Lea got in the way, or tried to stop her …”

She trailed off and shrugged.

I nodded. “Point taken.”

“Just like Earl killed his own daughter.”

I nodded some more. “I get it. It’s plausible, but we still lack proof.”

“The knife used in the Mitchell killing…?”

“Lea was killed with a knife that was kept in the shed for cutting twine, pruning, that kind of stuff. It was pretty sharp but had traces of rust, and that rust was found in the wound. That same knife was the one found in Leroy’s back, very much in the same place where his mother had stabbed his father. There were no prints found because the handle had been wiped with paint thinner.”

“And there was no other forensic evidence?”

“No.” I picked up my glass. “A shed of that type is not ideal for recovering forensic evidence. There’s a lot of dust, a lot of contaminants…”

“Plus a lot of people were moving about in there.” She paused and sighed, gazing out at the cold, Manhattan night. “I have to say, Stone, it’s hard to see a way forward. We have only one witness, and he’s in a catatonic state.”

She cut a piece of Stilton, popped it in her mouth and grimaced.

“Why would anyone eat rotting feet?”

“It’s an acquired taste.”

She gave me a doubtful look. “I mean, even if we get the court order to be able to see Marcus and talk to him, there is no guarantee that he will talk to us.”

“None.”

She sipped her whiskey and leaned her elbows on the table, gazing at me. “What did that boy see, Stone? What did he see that traumatized him so deeply he stopped moving or talking?”

“He seems to have been a sensitive kid…”

“OK, so a sensitive kid witnesses the murder of his sister and his adoptive brother, that is going to be traumatic, very traumatic. But, it is going to be that much more traumatic if it’s his dad, or, let’s face it, his mother, who strikes the blow.”

I grunted and sliced at the Brie.

“You were against that idea this afternoon. Are we now saying our suspect pool is both the Dr. Mitchells and Sonia?”

She ran her fingers through her hair and looked cutely frazzled. “I know. I know, but it has to be one of those three, doesn’t it?”

I pierced the Brie with my knife and looked her in the eye.

“There is somebody we have been overlooking, Dehan, and I don’t know why.”

She frowned. “Who?”

“Dr. Wagner.”

“Hell. She had as much to lose from Leroy’s blackmail as the Mitchells did. It may have struck the Mitchells as funny, but it probably didn’t strike her as funny at all.”

“It’s a possibility.”

“How would that work?”

I signaled the waiter to bring us another couple of whiskeys.

“How would that work?” I thought about it. “Assuming there is more to the relationship between Wagner and Mitchell than just work, he would tell her about Leroy. He’d tell her they managed to laugh it off but that they need to be careful with the kid.” I cut a slice of Wensleydale and put it in my mouth, savoring the blueberries in the creamy cheese. Then I pointed at Dehan. “She would advise him to get rid of the kid, send him back to the orphanage, something of that sort. He does not