Cast Them Dead by Joe Kilgore

Author:Joe Kilgore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encircle Publications
Published: 2023-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Ellis sat at the desk in his hotel room with a lot on his mind. There were still two of the five suspects who had been in the hotel the night of Abel Dane’s murder that he hadn’t interviewed yet, the cinematographer Yuri Kaminski, and the actress, Jocelyn Hayward. But it was the recent death of Iris Stanton that kept interrupting his train of thought. Had she really been killed by someone who tried to make it look like suicide? If so, why? And should the remaining four, who were at the hotel when Dane was killed, be the prime suspects in Iris’s death?

Plus, there were still the items he had found in Dane’s hidden drawer. A passport, ostensibly for someone named Vadislav Zobeck, who happened to look remarkably like Yuri Kaminski. And another DVD he was still analyzing. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Iris. The woman he had held in his arms and made love to only days ago was now gone forever. He was determined to know why. Then his phone rang and he answered before it could ring a second time.

“Ellis here.”

“Brig, it’s me, Ed.”

“Hey. What have you found?”

“You were right. The whole suicide thing was a setup. The CSI team thought as much and the coroner’s autopsy confirmed it.”

“Give me the particulars.”

“The team found traces of cleaning products all over the bathroom. Whoever it was tried to make everything seem spotless, but you can never get it all. And here’s the thing. Even though her wrists were slashed, the coroner determined she didn’t die from blood loss, but from drowning.”

“Explain that, Ed.”

“It appears the killer drugged her. There were traces of Rohypnol in her system. Once she was out, he probably took her clothes off, carried her to the bathtub, slit her wrists there, and filled the tub with water. Then he turned it off, tried to clean up, and took off. She must have still been unconscious but alive when the killer left. So her heart kept pumping and she kept bleeding, but she must have slid down into the bath, because it was the water in her lungs that actually killed her. With the drugs and blood loss, even though she was still breathing when she went under water, she would have been to too weak to do anything about it.”

“Jesus,” was Ellis’s only reply.

“This was no professional job, Brig. Too many foul-ups. The botched cleanup. The drug that was used to knock her out. Nobody tries to commit suicide by taking Rohypnol. And here’s the big one, we couldn’t find whatever her wrists were cut with. No razor or razor blades anywhere. Who the hell kills herself, but somehow manages to dispose of the weapon she uses?”

“Why would the killer do that? Why get rid of it?”

“My opinion,” Ed volunteered. “I think the dumbass got so involved in trying to clean everything up, that he threw whatever he used on her wrists, in with any other trash he took away. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if he still has it around somewhere.

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