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

when bad things happen to good sentences? That said, for some reason I understand you. But even so, those women hurt their kids by overprotecting them, not by sticking knives in them. I just don’t see Emma Mitchell hurting her own daughter, whatever the case about Lee. Your phone is ringing.”

I pulled my cell from my pocket. The screen said it was Joe, from the lab.

“Joe, what have you got.”

“John, if you’re free, you need to come and see this.”

I glanced at Dehan. “Head for the lab. We’ll collect the car later.” To Joe I said, “We’re on our way, what is it?”

“I don’t know what this woman was into, John, but there are photographs stored in a password protected file that you need to see.”

“OK, we’ll be there in ten minutes.”

I gently shook my head for a while as we sped east and north toward the Jacobi. Eventually I said to myself, “This is like a spaghetti junction of the mind.”

She looked at me curiously. “I think that’s the first time I ever heard you admit that you were confused.”

I grunted. “Don’t get used to it.” And after a moment I wagged my finger. “Points that we can nail down.”

“Not many of those.”

“No,” I said, a little sullenly as we turned into Seminole Avenue past the oddly named Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Every time I went by I wondered if it was for people who were relatively ill. I didn’t share that thought with Dehan. Instead I said, “Marcus witnessed the murder of his sister, Lea, and his adoptive brother, Lee.”

She nodded. “Solid fact.”

“Emma Mitchell does not want Marcus to talk to us, or anybody else, for that matter.”

“Also a solid fact, but possibly a misleading one.”

“We are not interpreting right now, Dehan. We are just stating facts.”

She pulled into the hospital parking lot and parked the Toyota in the shade of a big plane tree. As the engine died she said, “Lea’s throat was cut, Leroy was stabbed in the back, while Brad Mitchell was running to the shed. Fact.”

“And the only people in the house were the Mitchells and their three children. Fact.”

She spread her hands wide and shrugged. “Of the two Drs. Mitchell, only one, Brad Mitchell, has anything approaching a motive.”

I nodded just once. “That we know of. But while Brad Mitchell has been nothing but helpful and cooperative, Emma Mitchell has been nothing but obstructive.” I paused a moment, then added, “Fact.”

She sighed noisily through her nose and climbed out of the car. I followed.

We made our way to the lab and found Joe in the small cubicle he called his office. He was sitting at his desk with a manila file open in front of him. Inside the file was a small stack of glossy eight-by-ten photographs. He looked up as we came in and smiled.

“Hey, the dynamic duo. How’s it hanging?”

“Could be better, could be worse. What have you got?”

He arched his eyebrows and shook his head. “I don’t know. This was a file on her computer, called BM and MW. It was password protected. Pretty basic security. When we got in this was what we found.”

We sat and he slipped the file across the desk to us. There were eight pictures. Each one of them of Dr. Brad Mitchell and Dr. Margaret Wagner. They were not at the university. They were outside what appeared to be a small, country hotel. In the first they were pulling a couple of cases out of the trunk of a car. In the next, the car had gone and they were standing, holding each other in a deep kiss. In the third one they had emerged from the kiss and she was holding his face tenderly, while he had his arms around her waist. In the fourth they were climbing the steps to the hotel entrance, arm-in-arm.

The next four showed them walking on the beach, holding each other and also kissing. I looked up at Joe. He said, “I’m still printing. There are another twelve of them. Twenty all together. There are five taken with a telescopic lens through the hotel window which are definitely X-rated.”

He turned the screen of his computer so we could see them, and clicked through them one by one. When he came to the hotel window, Dehan wolf whistled. He had not exaggerated.

I sank back in my chair. My brain felt as though it was stretching like an overinflated balloon. “So, she was blackmailing him.” I looked at Dehan. “Sonia was blackmailing Brad Mitchell. So much for her concern that Lee was taking after his father instead of his mother.”

“Not only that, but she was actually using Leroy as her go-between.”

I shook my head, like I was trying to clear it. “But, what does that make Brad? The most cunning, devious, evil genius on the planet? How can he play it so cool and come across as so sincere?”

She nodded. “I agree. He was totally credible.” She turned to Joe. “We confronted him with the fact that the kid had tried to blackmail him. He not only admitted it. He told us that when the kid showed him a photograph of him with this woman, he laughed and called his wife to come and see the picture. She confirmed it.”

Joe smiled. “That’s one cool customer.”

“Too cool,” I said. “I find it hard to buy it. He must have known that the first photograph was a shot across the bows. They must have warned him that there were more, and more incriminating. It makes no sense that he would call his wife, show her the photograph and tell her what the boy had done.”

Joe frowned at me. “But that is what he did. There is no would or wouldn’t about it. He did it.”

I studied him a moment and Dehan studied me. I heard myself say, “Unless somebody is lying.”

Joe and Dehan looked at each other like I was nuts. Dehan said, “How do you figure that?”

“I don’t know.” I