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

bottom lip curled in and tears welled in his eyes. He stared at me with wild, injured eyes, then up at Dehan by the door. “Why? Why would somebody do this?”

“When did you last talk to Sonia, Dr. Garrido?”

“Last night, about eleven thirty, or shortly before twelve. We didn’t talk. I sent her a WhatsApp wishing her goodnight.”

“Did she reply?”

“Yes.” He frowned at me. “It struck me as an odd message at the time. She said, ‘You are too good. Sonia doesn’t deserve you.’ That wasn’t like her, saying that, and in the third person like that. There was no false modesty or cute fishing for compliments with her. She was very direct and very honest.” His face crumpled and there was a madness in his gaze. “You don’t think that message was from…?”

Dehan had already gone and was crossing the living room, shouting, “Joe! Joe!”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, Dr. Garrido, but we’ll check and I’ll let you know what the lab says about her phone. Now, I need you to think carefully about this before you answer. Is there anything, anything at all, that you can think of that struck you as odd or unusual in her behavior recently? Anything she did or said, anybody she saw…”

He took a long time to answer. When he finally did he made a couple of false starts. “She…” He gave his head a small shake and frowned. “About a month ago? She started talking again about her sister, and her nephew, Lee.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Lee?”

He looked surprised. “Yeah, Lee, the boy whose murder you’re investigating.”

“I thought she called him Leroy.”

“No, that’s what his parents called him. She never liked it. It was Sonia who told the Mitchells his nickname was Lee.”

I thought about that a moment, then made a mental note. To Garrido I said:

“So what kind of things was she saying about them? What was it she was remembering?”

He looked me in the eye. “I didn’t like it much, to be honest. She kept talking about Brad Mitchell. She called him a skunk. Said he’d betrayed his wife, how he deserved to be exposed for what he was. She even went so far as to say she believed he might have killed his own daughter, as well as Lee.”

“What made her say that? Did she give you any idea of what brought this on?”

“No, it was sudden. One day she just seemed real mad…”

“That was all a month ago?”

“More or less, yeah. I told her if she really believed it, and it was affecting her so much, she should go to the cops.”

“Was this when she saw the article in the paper? The one about the Mitchell Clinic in White Plains.”

“Uh…” He made a dubious face and stared up at the ceiling. “Uh…” He shook his head. “No, it was kind of the other way. I showed her the article because she had been talking so much about Mitchell. Otherwise I would probably never have even noticed it. I saw it and showed it to her and she got pretty mad. So I told her, ‘For God’s sake, go to the cops and get this off your chest!’ So she did.”

“OK.” I nodded, thinking. “I appreciate your candor, Dr. Garrido. You are familiar with the house. Are you aware of anything having been disturbed, turned over, missing?”

“No, it was the first thing I checked after I called the cops.”

“Fine. We’d be grateful if you could drop by the station later today to read and sign your statement.” I moved to get up but stopped. “Did Sonia have a computer at work?”

“No.” He shook his head. “She used her own laptop.”

“OK, good.” I glanced at the uniform. “You done?”

She nodded. “Sure.”

“Dr. Garrido, you can go home now. Be with your family, get some rest. We’ll be in touch.”

He left and I went to look for Dehan. She was upstairs in the master bedroom talking to Joe. She turned to me as I came in.

“There’s no sign of forced entry.”

“Yeah, and Garrido says there’s no sign that anything was stolen.”

“So she let whoever it was in, probably knew them, and they came for the sole purpose of killing her.”

“It looks that way.”

She nodded. “Her cell has been dusted. So far prints show one principal user.”

Joe added, “Which we can assume to be her. But there are smudges, as though somebody had used it who was wearing gloves. We’ll give it a full analysis at the lab and I’ll let you know.”

“Sure, good. I also want every other form of communication in the house bagged and gone over with a fine-toothed comb: tablet, laptop, desktop, whatever else you can find. I want to know every message she sent and received over the last four to six weeks: Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, email—everything. I want to know who was talking to her, and I want to know what they said to her a month ago.”

“OK, noted.” He smiled. “So unless there is something else, get off my crime scene and let me do just that.”

We thanked him and Dehan followed me downstairs. “Feel like sharing, sensei?”

“Sure.” We stepped out of the house onto the porch and followed the dogleg steel stairs down to the front yard and the sidewalk. There I leaned my ass on the hood of her small car and looked up at her. The wind dragged a few strands of her hair across her face. She brushed them away and looked astonishingly natural and beautiful doing it. For a moment I was distracted, wondering, not for the first or last time, how I had wound up so lucky. She said, “So?”

I smiled. “About a month ago, somebody said something to Sonia which made her so mad she decided she wanted to expose Dr. Brad Mitchell for, and I quote, ‘what he was.’”

“And what was, or is, he?”

“According to her, a man capable of killing his own daughter, as well as Leroy.”

“Huh…”

“And, curiously enough, this anger against Brad Mitchell started