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

detectives’ room looking like a surprised ostrich lost in Times Square at rush hour. He rarely descended from the remote heights of his office upstairs. Now he inched through the room, looking right and left until he saw me watching him. He waved and moved my way. When he was within earshot I said to Dehan, who was reading through cold case files, “Don’t say anything rude about the captain.”

She frowned at the page in front of her like she wasn’t really listening. “Why?”

“Because he’s right behind you.”

She jumped and looked around. I smiled. “Guilty conscience, Dehan.”

The captain still wore his air of ratite uncertainty. “Good morning, you two. How’s tricks?”

I offered him no expression and said, “She hasn’t come in this morning, sir.”

His eyebrows twitched and he placed a file on the desk. After a moment, he sat and nodded, like he’d got the joke but didn’t think it was especially funny. “We have an unusual request from the sheriff of Lee County, in Colorado.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say, but Dehan dropped the case she was reading and frowned. “Lee County? Colorado? Really? What’s the request?”

“The details are in the file,” he patted the file with his palm, “but in a nutshell, detectives, Kathleen Olvera, of Rosedale Avenue, just down the road here, aged twenty-three, was found in Lefthand Canyon…”

Dehan laughed. The Captain looked at her like she’d said something inappropriate. She suppressed the laugh. “Lefthand Canyon? Seriously?”

“There was nothing funny about the way she was found, Detective Dehan. She had been clubbed, strangled, raped and then decapitated. This was back in 2012. There was some uncertainty over jurisdiction…”

I leaned forward. “Why?”

“Because it wasn’t clear that she had been killed there.”

I scratched my head. “It’s not very likely that she was killed here and transported over one and a half thousand miles to Colorado.”

“Quite. I agree. And as the actual scene of the crime was never discovered, the local sheriff investigated. However, there was very little evidence and eventually the case went cold.”

“So what’s his request?”

“The Denver DA wanted a review of cold cases, and as they were not able to make any progress, and Kathleen was originally from here, he has asked me if I wanted to run it by our cold cases team.”

I raised my eyebrows and spread my hands. “Sure. We’ll take a look, see what we come up with. But if it turns out to be a Lee County, Colorado case, we’re going to end up batting it right back to the sheriff.”

He nodded, then made a peculiar smile with the corners of his eyes. “Have a look. See what you come up with.”

He left us and wandered around the detectives’ room for a bit, peering at things and smiling with an air of it all coming back to him, then retired upstairs. You got the feeling he’d had quite enough excitement for one morning.

I picked up the file and Dehan snatched it from my fingers. She leaned back in her chair and put her boots on the corner of the desk. Her legs were as long as an eight-day week. She read aloud while I sat back and enjoyed looking at her.

“Kathleen Olvera, twenty-three, married to Moses Olvera, then twenty-four, of Seven Hills, Colorado...”

“Ah!”

“Don’t interrupt. Mother of new-born Sin-eed—S-I-N-E-A-D—how do you pronounce that?”

“Shin-aid.”

“What is it, Irish?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Kathleen, Sinead, these guys are Irish. OK. So according to testimony given by Moses and Kathleen’s mother, Melanie Vuolo, in July of 2012, Kathleen was suffering from postpartum depression and decided to take a few days and go visit Moses’ parents, in Seven Hills. That was Friday the 6th. The parents in-law, that’s Alfredo and Ingrid, claim she never showed up. A few days later, some trekkers found her body abandoned in the woods and called the sheriff. He administered a rape kit because her clothes were in disarray. Her blouse had been ripped and the zipper on her skirt was broken…”

“What?”

She glanced at me. “The zipper on her skirt had been broken.” She continued reading. “Only one of her shoes was found at the scene. The other was recovered later, on the Lee Hill Road, half a mile outside Boulder.”

“Hmmm…”

“Shut up. The rape kit established that she had had sex before being killed. Impossible to tell whether it was consensual or not because, after a week in the open, in warm weather, the body was badly deteriorated and partly eaten by animals. The semen was too deteriorated and contaminated to provide a hit. The head was found about six feet from the body…” She pulled out an eight by ten photograph, examined it and tossed it over to me. “It had been severed surgically, with a single, clean cut, no hacking or sawing. The weapon was not found. There was evidence of blunt force trauma to the back of the head, pre mortem.” She sighed. “A few initial suspects…”

I held up a hand. “Stop there. Let’s not follow the same mistaken tracks that they did. Let’s pursue our own thoughts. Anything strike you? Where do you want to start?”

We stared at each other for a few long seconds. It was a habit we had got into which irritated other people, but it helped us to think. Eventually she said, “Let’s talk to the mother. She lives on Commonwealth Avenue,” she checked the file, “and so do Isaac and Anne-Marie. That’s Moses’s brother and his wife. They seem to have been a close-knit family.” She shrugged. “Catholics. Kathleen’s postpartum depression seems to be what sent her off to Colorado, and eventually her death. One person she is most likely to have talked to about it is her mother. Let’s start there.”

“Hmm…”

“You’ve never been a mother, you wouldn’t know.”

“Or a daughter. Let’s go, Little Grasshopper. Let’s go talk to Melanie Vuolo. It’s