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

look cramped. He glanced up at us, but said nothing and looked back at Sonia. I said:

“I saw her yesterday morning. Dehan and I both saw her yesterday afternoon. She’s Sonia Laplant.”

He cleared his throat and stood, pulling off his plastic gloves. “That’s what her ID says. A tragic, blighted family. Her nephew, as you know, was the boy killed in the Mitchell case, which you are currently warming over.”

Dehan asked, “How’d she die?”

“She was shot; in the chest, at short range. Obviously I’ll be able to tell you more once I get her to the lab, but prima facie, it seems the first shot went in straight, horizontal. The killer stood thus…”

He stood a couple of yards from the soles of Sonia’s feet and thrust out his arm in front of him.

“So the killer is probably a little shorter than me, maybe five ten or five eight. The first shot punches into her chest and makes her fall back. Then he closes in and stands over her, and the next two bullets enter her chest at an angle of about forty or forty-five degrees. He is standing roughly at her feet. He is not a good shot, because only one of the bullets hits the heart. Two others puncture the lungs and a fourth misses altogether and grazes her shoulder to strike the floor. The erratic shooting is consistent with a trembling hand. Joe has the slug. It’s a .22.” He paused, still staring down at the body. “Such a shame,” and then, “Joe is upstairs. He’ll tell you there are no casings, so it was probably a revolver. Twenty-two revolver, the perfect murder weapon.”

He turned to Dehan, as though she had asked a question. “There is rarely an exit wound with a .22, so the slug stays inside, ricocheting and causing more damage than a mere entry wound. Plus there are no casings for people like Joe to find and lift prints from. They are small and thus easy to conceal, but with a Smith & Wesson 617, for example, or the Ruger, you’re looking at ten rounds in the cylinder, as opposed to just five or six in a larger caliber. Very handy.”

I turned to Gunther. “Where’s Garrido?”

“The boss? He’s in the kitchen, back of the house.”

We stepped into the small kitchen. Dr. Garrido was sitting at an imitation pine table. He looked up at us as we entered. There was a kind of mindless reproach in his eyes. He was drawn and a sickly gray color. There was a female police officer sitting at the table with him scribbling in a pad.

“Dr. Garrido.” He nodded once. I went on, “We met briefly yesterday.”

He pointed toward the living room and his voice wavered when he spoke. “Did you do this? Did you make this happen?”

I frowned. “What are you talking about, Dr. Garrido?”

“Butting in, stirring things up, asking questions. I was trying to make her forget, and you come and bring it all back. I told her to leave it be!”

Dehan replied. “You have a family, Dr. Garrido?”

His voice was defensive when he said, “Yeah. What’s it to you?”

“You have kids?”

“What of it?”

“If they were murdered, would you prefer the police refused to investigate, in case somebody else got hurt?”

Before he could answer I asked him, “Why are you here, Dr. Garrido?”

He erupted, “I did not kill Sonia, if that’s what you’re implying!”

“That’s not what I’m implying.” I pulled out a chair and sat at the table. Dehan leaned against the doorjamb. “I’m not implying anything. I am asking you what you are doing here.”

“I already told your sergeant, and I have just told your officer here. When Sonia didn’t turn up for work, I came to see if she was all right. I have witnesses who will tell you…”

Dehan cut him short, “You have keys to all your employees’ houses?”

He faltered and I asked, “See, that’s what I meant by, what are you doing here? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think most bosses would phone, or at most knock on the door. I don’t think many of them would let themselves in with their own key.”

He sighed and sagged, then rubbed his face with his hands. “Sonia has been my personal assistant for a long time, and we have become very close.”

“How close, Dr. Garrido?”

He took a deep breath and puffed out his cheeks. He was obviously in a lot of emotional pain. I leaned forward with my elbows on the table. “We’re not here to judge anybody. What you and Sonia did as consenting adults is none of our business. If it had nothing to do with her murder, then I, frankly, don’t want to know about it. But if you try to hide it from me, and I don’t know if it’s relevant or not, then I am going to have to leave no stone unturned until I find out the truth. So believe me, if your affair with Sonia has nothing to do with her death, your best plan is to talk to me.”

He let me finish without looking at me. Then, after a moment, he started to talk.

“Sonia and I have been…close, for many years. It suits… suited us both. My wife and I stopped being in love a long time ago, but we agreed to stay together for the sake of the children. For her part, Sonia didn’t want us to live together. After we started seeing each other I offered to get a divorce so we could be married. Personally I would have preferred it. I’m more traditional in that way. But Sonia said she preferred living alone, in her own space. We actually fought about it, years ago, right at the beginning, but eventually,” he shrugged, “we just settled into a comfortable rhythm. Sometimes I would stay the night. My wife knew about it but she never asked questions. It seemed to work. Sonia and I even talked about retiring together. Now that will never happen…”  His