Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #2: Books 5-8 (A Dead Cold Box Set) by Blake Banner (best desktop ebook reader .TXT) 📗

how he had seen the Devil in your garden and your house.” I paused and looked at Sylvie for a long moment. “But then I asked myself, why would you conceal El Chato’s identity? Because that was just what you were doing, wasn’t it?

“For some reason, you were keeping your husband’s killer’s identity a secret, by pretending to have amnesia. Which kept dragging us back to the reverend. He seemed to be the only person whose identity you might want to protect. But we knew that was wrong, too. Was it then, that Humberto had seen you arguing with Simon and come to your rescue? Had he killed Simon defending you, and you, relieved to be free of your husband, agreed with the reverend to keep his identity secret, to protect him? There had, after all, been no evil intent. He had simply been protecting you.”

Dehan sighed. “But that raised a question. It made sense in terms of the opportunity and the motivation. But where the hell would Humberto get a bowie knife? The search eventually revealed that he did in fact possess a bowie knife. It had no prints on it. But the plastic bag that contained it, did have prints on it, Humberto’s and somebody else’s, somebody who was not in the system, not the reverend’s and not Sylvie’s or Mary’s. Humberto himself said that he had been given the knife by a guardian angel. Clearly, the killer had wiped his own prints off and given it to Humberto, in the bag, assuming that Humberto would take it out and handle it, thus implicating himself, and/or the reverend.”

I shook my head. “But who, and why? We were out of suspects. And then it came back to me that there was somebody we had been overlooking. The gardener, Ahmed. What motive could Ahmed possibly have for wanting to kill Simon? I went and spoke to him, and he seemed a real, genuine nice guy. So much so that I almost discounted him, but, following Holmes’ famous dictum, when you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left must be the truth; he was the only suspect left. He had been there that Sunday, and many other afternoons, and there was one, very feasible motive. This whole case revolved around religious fundamentalism, and religious hypocrisy.

“Ahmed had had ample opportunity to witness the reverend paying his regular visits to Sylvie. This, to Ahmed, was disgraceful behavior for a woman, and even more disgraceful for a priest. Bad enough that you were infidels, devout Christians, but that you were also engaging in fornication—that was beyond contempt. And in an act of classic religious hypocrisy, he decided he would have a bit of the action.”

Sylvie was looking down at her hands clenched between her knees.

“That was why the lights were not on, wasn’t it, Sylvie? That was why Simon’s dinner was not ready. That was why he came through the door calling you, and you were not there to receive him. Because you were upstairs, being raped at knifepoint by Ahmed.”

Twenty Seven

Her pretty face was transformed into an ugly mask of grief and hatred. Her mouth pulled down at the corners, her eyes screwed up, swollen and red, spilled tears down her cheeks. Her voice was twisted with pain.

“Why couldn’t you have just stayed out of it? Why did you have to come probing, pushing, forcing your way in? You were not welcome here!”

Mary put her arms around her and pulled her onto her lap, stroking her hair, murmuring gently to her that it would all be all right. God, she said, would make it all right.

Dehan was frowning at me. She looked confused. I met her eye for a moment. I wasn’t sure if she was confused by me, or by the fact that she hadn’t seen it sooner. That was the way I felt when it dawned on me. I shrugged.

“It was one of those things that is so obvious you don’t see it. You represented everything that he most hated. Maybe someday, somebody will manage to explain why so many people use sex as an instrument of punishment and hate. Whatever the reason, that was what Ahmed did. He raped you. And Simon was unlucky enough to arrive home just as Ahmed was coming down the stairs. Ahmed beat him and stabbed him to death, and left the way he’d come in, through the open back door.

“And just as his demented interpretation of ‘God’ had taught him that it was right to rape and subjugate you, and kill Simon, your demented interpretation taught you that it was shameful to be raped. His intention was to humiliate you, and you conspired with him by accepting that humiliation in silence.”

Mary looked at me like I was being somehow grotesque.

The captain scowled. “Look here, John, that is not…”

I looked him in the eye. “Bullshit.” I said it without any particular inflection. It was a simple statement of fact. “My job is to find and state the truth. It was the thing that kept coming up, over and over: what was it that made Sylvie conceal the identity of Simon’s killer? I knew that the amnesia was a lie. I knew that she had seen his killer and she remembered who it was. What I could not understand was what was driving her to conceal it. It was not a love affair with Paul, and it was not compassion for Humberto. So what was it?

“Then it dawned on me. She was not concealing his identity. She was concealing her own shame and humiliation. She had been raped and defiled and, worse still, she had been raped and defiled by an Arab, by a Muslim. You were brought together by your own irrational hatred and contempt for each other, in an act that was supposed to be an act of love. He dressed it up as justified by