The Heart to Kill (A Dead Cold Mystery Book 7) by Blake Banner

Author:Blake Banner [Banner, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-02-05T23:00:00+00:00

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The Rockford Center was a permanent exhibition located in a large dome, set in its own garden and surrounded by fountains. Opposite was the Rockford Building on the Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The exhibition it hosted was described as ‘an ongoing tribute to those philanthropists committed to elevating humanity to its highest potential’. It consisted of an ever changing display of photographs, films, and installations that illustrated variously how wonderful these philanthropists were, how limited the potential of those they helped was in comparison to the potential of the philanthropists, and how starkly impoverished were the lives of those who were poor—truly poor—in the poorest countries of the world. Put more briefly, it seemed to say, “Look at us, aren’t we wonderful!”

Shelly had picked me up in a limo. She looked aggressively attractive in a crimson dress with a gash up to her right hip, and a diamond necklace that looked real and did nice things for her cleavage.

The chauffeur deposited us at the end of a red carpet that led to the glistening, plate-glass entrance of the exhibition center. There was a handful of photographers and a small crowd of celebrity spotters, but they ignored us because Mark Zuckerberg and his wife were just ahead of us. Shelly took my arm and leaned in to me.

“Have you read the guest list?”

I tried not to sigh. “No.”

“It reads like the Forbes 400. Bill Gates is here, George Soros… All of them.”

I wondered for a moment how it felt for Carol Hennessy to know that there were almost sixty people in America whom were richer and more powerful than she was. I put the question to Shelly as we stepped through the door and she handed over her invitation. I took two glasses of champagne from a passing tray and gave one to her. She took it and studied my face as she sipped.

“You’re gunning for her, but have you any actual, concrete evidence?”

“You know I can’t answer that question.”

She thought for a moment, then said, “You know, John, we are both investigators and we both know that evidence is a very subjective thing.”

I shook my head. “No it isn’t. Evidence should be objective.”

“Okay, if you are talking about DNA or fingerprints. But you know as well as I do, that if one person states firmly enough on TV that they saw smoke beyond the trees, by the end of the day there will be a hundred people who believe they saw smoke beyond the trees, even though there was no smoke to be seen. And within a week there will have been a raging forest fire, where there was none.”

I sighed. “Shelly, I am not in the business of framing innocent people. I am not here to take somebody down just because they look guilty. I’m with William Blackstone when he says that it’s better that ten guilty men go free than that one innocent one should suffer…”

She smiled. “It’s a hundred guilty men and it was Benjamin Franklin.

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