Showing results by author "Blake Banner" in All Categories

Lilith Jones was a statistical anomaly. Her mother found her face down on the frozen sidewalk by the light of the single streetlamp on Pugsley Avenue, with her neighbor’s scissors stuck in her back. The scissors belonged to her neighbor, and so did all the fingerprints on them. Her neighbor, Pat Perkins, hated Lilith. She hated her because her own husband, her brother, and her daughter all loved Lilith. Lilith was charming, beautiful, smart, and adorable.

Sue Benedict wasn’t giving out treats, so she got the trick. It was a hell of a trick. She was raped and murdered in her apartment after attending a Halloween party with a bunch of art students. The killer did not use a condom or gloves, the CSI team got a perfect DNA profile and two perfect thumbprints from her throat, a witness saw her admit the killer to her apartment at 2:30 AM that night.

When a leading international financier is murdered in his Beverly Hills mansion, at first it looks like just another daemon at work in the City of Angels. But when the ritual nature of the killing emerges, the FBI takes an interest. And then the international connections start to emerge: the European Commission, high-ranking officials in Hong Kong...and Iran. That’s when the file gets passed to ODIN and Alex Mason.

Sebastian Acosta has been gunned down at three a.m. on a Saturday morning, sitting behind the wheel of a beaten-up Toyota. The passenger door is open, and a few paces away, his pal Luis Irizarry lies with his life ebbing away through two gunshot wounds in his chest. It should be a red-hot case, except that 15 years earlier, Rosario Rojas was raped and strangled in that same house, the house Luis was crawling toward, the house that belonged to Angela Rojas, Rosario’s daughter. Rosario, who was like a sister to Marta Flores, Detective Dehan’s mother.

There is a time bomb ticking down toward a global extinction event. The bomb has a name, and everybody knows where it is. In fact, people pay to go and see it, and have picnics around it. It’s called the Yellowstone Caldera, and when it next blows it will probably take out mankind.

There is nothing unusual about a young Catholic girl from the Bronx winding up raped, beaten, strangled, and decapitated—unless she winds up that way in Lefthand Canyon, in the Colorado Rockies, where there hasn’t been a murder since 1922. Then it’s unusual enough to become a problem for the sheriff of Lee County. And when he finds no blood at the scene and no physical evidence, it becomes more than a problem. It becomes a headache—for five long years. That’s when he bats it back to the Bronx, to the 43rd precinct, and right onto Detectives Stone and Dehan’s desk.

When Wayne Harris contacts Detectives Stone and Dehan, of the 43rd Precinct’s cold case unit, and tells them he has information relating to the Westchester Angel murder two years earlier, they agree to go and see him–at Rikers Island.

It was the first time John Stone had been back to London for 15 years. Last time had been on an exchange program between the NYPD and Scotland Yard: an exchange of skills and experience that was supposed to last six months, but went one for a year and a half.

The weather was freezing, but the case wasn’t cold, it was too hot. It looked open and shut: Dr Agnes Shine had shot Dr Jose Robles eight times with a Sig Sauer Tacops p226, while they were drinking Californian wine in her living room; then she’d disappeared. But Assistant DA Costas Varufakis didn’t like it and he was leaning on Deputy Inspector John Newman of the 43rd Precinct to have somebody look a bit deeper. That somebody was Detectives John Stone, and his partner Carmen Dehan.

There are a lot of things you really don’t want to find when you’re a homicide detective in the Bronx. High on the list is a new serial killer. Serial killers are real bad news because they kill without motive, so they are hard to trace and they can take years to catch. But even worse than a new serial killer, is a new kind of serial killer: one who murders with a motive, but a motive so unfathomable nobody can understand it; a motive that makes his choice of victims incomprehensible and unpredictable, a motive that leads to each victim being killed in a particularly cruel and unusual way.

Cherise Brown, her small daughter Shevron, her husband Earl. The only survivor, eight year-old Leroy who witnessed the whole thing. His story, that his father broke his sister’s neck, his mother stabbed his father in the back and his dad, before dying, in a kind of berserker rage, took the knife and killed his mother. Four years later Leroy Brown is murdered along with his adoptive sister, Lea. He is stabbed in the back, while his sister’s throat is cut, in a tool shed in the back yard of his adoptive family.

An 18-year-old girl sets out one November night to walk five blocks down Gleason Avenue to her boyfriend’s house. He calls her and she tells him she’s on her way. It’s a walk that should take ten minutes, but she never arrives. When she does turn up, it’s five days later, washed up on the banks of the River Bronx, in Soundview Park, strangled to death.

The Cold Cases team at the 43rd Precinct in the Bronx tend to focus on homicides. But now, Detective John Stone, head of the team, is curious about a two-year-old rape case. A rape case where Sadie Byrne got HIV, turned out to be a rapid progressor and died of AIDS within a year. She never named her attacker.

The neighbor called it in because the house next door, normally empty and silent, at two AM was a blaze of light, with people shouting and car doors slamming, like gunshots in the night. Until he heard two reports that echoed down the dark, silent street and spoke of death, two reports that were not slamming doors, but gunshots.

Mommy’s Boy had not killed for five years. Detective Alvarez of the 43rd in the Bronx had lined up his suspects, but each of them had a more or less credible alibi, and he was nowhere close to solving the case. Then, the killings had stopped, and the case went cold....

At forty-something, Bob Walklet was about to make a fortune with his IT company. But he'd made the mistake of falling in love with his assistant, twenty-something Sorka Williams. They were crazy about each other, and Bob had told his wife, Sheila - a thirty-something, ex-cop insurance consultant. He wanted a divorce. And there was a prenup. When he was found in his bedroom, stabbed in the heart, her DNA was literally all over him, her prints were on the knife and a neighbor had seen her hurrying from the house at the time of death.

Detective John Stone of the NYPD heads up the 43rd’s cold case unit, in the Bronx. In a place like the Bronx you get a lot of cold cases. So Stone has one golden rule for investigating a case: It must have some remote chance of being solved. So what made him choose the Al Chester case, the 60-year-old schizophrenic murdered on his birthday, 12 years earlier, alone in his apartment—a case where there was zero forensic evidence?

It was a real Jack in the box. Only this box was a UPS delivery to crime novelist Helena Magnusson, and the Jack was Jack Connors–her husband; or at least his head. The rest of him was probably in the East River somewhere.

Detective John Stone had a marriage made in heaven. His wife was young, beautiful and smart, and she was his partner in the Cold Cases unit at the 43rd. They were tight, close, and practically telepathic. At least, that was what he’d always thought - until she got an interest outside their marriage, and that interest became a passion.

October, 2010, Sally Jones had been stabbed in the heart in her apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, in the Bronx. Her coat was on the back of her chair. Her shoes were beside her bed, her clothes were neatly folded, and she was dead under the sheets.