Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set) by Blake Banner (read aloud books TXT) 📗

Who’d a thunk it?” He laughed. “No, I’m really happy for you guys.” He leaned toward Dehan and gestured at me. “I don’t know how you put up with this arrogant SOB, but I am glad for you!”

Dehan gave a small, dry laugh. “You’ll say the same to him as soon as I go to the john.”

We gave the obligatory laugh and with the preliminaries out of the way, I said, “Listen, Rafa, you know we’re working the cold cases, right?”

“Yeah, I heard you’re putting everybody to shame—again.”

I shook my head. “Not at all. Cases go cold for very good reasons. You look at them again with fresh eyes and notice different things. You know that.”

“Sure I do. I’m just messing with you.” He sat back in his chair with realization dawning on his face. “Ooh… So let me guess. You’re reopening the Sue Benedict case?”

“Yup.”

“Man! After twelve years? I wish you luck. You know me, right? I mean, we were never pals…” He turned to Dehan. “Stone and me, we was never like close pals, you know? But he knew me, and…” He turned back to me. “You know I would never drop a case unless there was just zero evidence, right?”

I nodded. “I know that, Rafa, and that’s kind of why we’re here. So far we have three witnesses, for want of a better word. We’ve Juan at the church, Giorgio who is a royal pain in the ass and about as useful as a footbrake on a wheelchair, and Fernando, who we haven’t spoken to yet, but I’m willing to bet he’s going to be about as useful as his pal Giorgio.”

Dehan had narrowed her eyes and was shaking her head at me. I knew why and I didn’t care.

“Seriously? A footbrake on a wheelchair? You said that?”

Rafa was wheezing a laugh. “Yeah, twelve years ago and you brought it right back. You ask him any damned question and he’d answer by telling you what kind of an artist he was: ‘I did not notice, Detective, because me, I am an artist of the soul…’”

I laughed. “That’s about it. What was your take on the case, Rafa? Did you have any suspects?”

He watched Dehan pull out the list of students and slide them across the table. He shook his head. “Jeez, buy a girl a drink, guys! If you’d given me some warning, I could have refreshed my memory.”

He looked over the names, leaned back in his chair and stared at the TV for a while. Then he started talking while still looking at the TV.

“Things I remember, we went through all the guests, who were pretty much everyone on that list…” He paused and looked at me. “You’d know this if you bothered to read the damned report.”

I smiled without feeling. “But you have such a nice speaking voice, I like to hear it from you.”

“Yeah, right. So we worked our way through them and they all alibied each other, plus we couldn’t find anybody with any kind of issue with Sue. But…” He reached out and turned his glass around three times. “There were three exceptions to what I am saying: there was Giorgio, who disappeared from the party around two thirty. He says he went up to his bedroom with three women…”

“Rocio, Karen and Ruby.”

“Correct.”

Dehan had picked up the list of names and was going through them. Rafa said, “You won’t find them on the list. They weren’t in the group and they weren’t invited to the party. When we challenged him about that, he admitted they were prostitutes and he had called them. He couldn’t remember the number.”

Dehan asked, “You checked his phone records?”

He shook his head. “By that time, we had the DNA and fingerprints from the lab. Everybody at the party gave us a sample and they were all cleared, including Giorgio. We had no justifiable reason for checking whether he had been with those prostitutes or not.”

She grunted and Rafa went on. “Same thing with Fernando. He said he left with Sue, she told him she didn’t want to sleep with him, he went his way and she went hers. But there is a witness you might want to talk to…”

Dehan said, “Patterson Avenue.”

“So you did at least glance at the report. Yeah, just across the road from Sue. He saw a man matching Fernando’s description going up the stairs to Sue’s place with her. He said they had a brief scuffle. He went to get the phone to call 911, but when he got back to the window, the man was walking away and the door was closed. Next thing, he saw another man approach and climb the stairs: short to medium height, woolen hat, pretty much nondescript. He saw the door open, the guy stood there for a moment and then went in.”

“Could it have been Fernando, come back?”

“That’s what I asked. The witness said it was possible, but he didn’t think so.”

I sipped my beer. “You said there were three exceptions, Giorgio, Fernando and…?”

“Cyril Browne, with an ‘e’. My understanding is that he was at the party, though just about none of the people who were there remembered him. Those who did varied from being sure they saw him, to thinking they might have seen him. Apparently he’s the kind of guy who sits in the corner and nobody knows he’s there.”

I was surprised and my face said so. “And Cyril was one of Giorgio’s students?”

“Yup, and apparently he was pretty good. But in class it was the same as at the party, nobody was ever sure if he was there or not. He never got involved, never spoke to anybody, shy, insecure, whatever. So he was probably at the party, but we can’t be one hundred percent sure.”

Dehan had been listening with her glass