Fire From Heaven: Dead Cold Mystery 9

by Blake Banner

  FIRE FROM HEAVEN

  Copyright © 2018 by Blake Banner

  All right reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  EPILOGUE

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  BOOK TEN PREVIEW

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  ONE

  It was sunny and warm, so we had the windows down in the Jag. We were following East Tremont all the way down to the East River. East Tremont is a very long avenue, so we were relaxing and cruising. Occasionally I would glance at Dehan. She was smiling behind her mirrored aviators, with strands of hair whipping across her face.

  “Talk me through it,” I said.

  “Well, as I see it,” she showed me a lot of teeth, “you’re Agent Mulder and I am Agent Scully…”

  “Be serious. We’re almost there.”

  “Be serious?” She raised an eyebrow. “OK. Danny Brown, aged twenty, found dead at the south end of Soundview Park, near the mouth of the Bronx River, on Monday, 8th June, 1998. Cause of death…” She fingered some strands of hair from her mouth and tied it into a knot at the back of her head. “The ME was unable to establish a cause of death because the body…” She raised her shades onto the top of her head like a medieval visor so that she could squint at me. “…had been incinerated from his ankles to his neck. I don’t get that.”

  “Just keep going. We’ll have a chance to review the details.”

  She sighed. “OK. His feet were not burned. They were standing, facing the river, in a pair of flip-flops.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Thongs.”

  She shook her head. “No, Stone. A thong is something else. We have been over this. We are going to call them flip-flops.”

  I grunted. “There was some burning around the ankles, but the thongs were un-melted, despite the heat needed to incinerate the body.”

  “Who’s talking who through this?”

  “Whom. You are. Me. You are talking me through it. Continue.”

  “The ME said that the legs had been severed at the ankle with surgical precision. There was no damage to the cartilage or the joints, other than the singeing. The same was true of the head. This was lying on the grass about eighteen inches from the body, as though it had rolled. There was singeing on the cut, which was also surgical in precision, and there was no damage to the vertebrae—again, other than singeing. Finally, the genitals had also been surgically removed—or at least removed with surgical precision…”

  “Correct. Good. We do not know that they were surgically removed, only that they were removed, in a way we do not know, with surgical precision.”

  “That was my point, Stone. That’s why I said it.”

  I grinned at her. “Good.”

  “They too were singed and placed roughly in the correct position. The rest of his body was ash, with a few pieces of bone.”

  I nodded. “Those bones corresponded to…”

  She interrupted. “I was coming to that.” She closed her eyes. “Pieces of rib, collarbone, upper arm, thigh and tibia, suggesting the body had not burned at an even temperature. However, all the bits of bone were found in the correct location on the body. That would be consistent with the body’s having burned in situ.”

  I turned right into Schurz Avenue, opposite the Marina del Rey, and asked, “Problems with that possibility?”

  “Well, for a start, the heat needed to incinerate a body to little more than ash, in an open location, like a park, would be insane. Generating that kind of heat in a park would be almost impossible, plus, that kind of heat should have burned his feet, his head, and his balls, and all the grass around him.”

  “Unless…?”

  She sighed. “Unless it was a laser. Which we both know it wasn’t.”

  “I don’t know that and neither do you.”

  She ignored me. “Also, it rained on Sunday night, but there were no footprints approaching or leaving the location where the body was found. Stone, you cannot seriously be considering…”

  “I am not seriously considering anything at the moment, Little Grasshopper. My mind is open. All I know, like Mr. Socrates, is that I know nothing.”

  I turned right again into Brinsmade Avenue and pulled up outside Detective Arnaldo Ochoa’s house. It was a red brick box with a front lawn enclosed by a tubular metal fence with chicken wire stretched across it. All in all the effect was ugly, but he obviously took pride in his garden, because that was well tended, with a handsome chestnut on one side and a small vegetable patch on the other.

  He came out to greet us before we’d reached the door. He was a friendly, smiling guy who looked unnaturally boyish for his sixty-two years of age. There was a kind of eagerness to his eyes when he smiled, as though he really wanted you to smile back. He held out his hand. “Stone, son of a gun, how’re you doing? You still the man at the precinct? I thought you’d be captain by now!”

  I shook his hand. “Arn, this is my partner, Carmen Dehan. She’s the one who stopped me making captain. Everybody hates her.”

  He laughed. She didn’t. “Come on out back, we’ll have more privacy there. What can I get you? Lemonade? Beer?”

  He led us out to a back yard that was as well tended as the front. He had a small patio with a garden table and chairs sitting in the dappled shade of a plane tree. On the table there was a glass jug of lemonade. He gestured us to a couple of chairs and poured before he too sat. The sun was turning from warm to hot. Somewhere there was a bee getting busy on some flowers, and there was a powerful smell of freshly cut grass.

  He shook his head, still smiling. “So you got cold cases, huh?” He turned to Dehan. “Guy was on fire, you know? Real smart, but a bad attitude. Most people didn’t like him. But we were OK, right, Stone? I got you. I knew what you were about. You’re a good man.” He turned back to Dehan. “He’s a
good man. Am I wrong?”

  She gave a slow shrug. “If you like opinionated dinosaurs, he’s OK. He gets the job done. What can I tell you?”

  He laughed out loud. “She’s got your number, Stone. Opinionated dinosaur. That’s good.” He laughed again and shook his head. “So you’re looking at the Danny Brown case. Man, I don’t know what to tell you about that. I lost sleep over that case. I never saw anything like it. I brought it home with me. I still have it, and you know what? Sometimes I pull it out and I sit there in the evening, looking at it, going over it. It defies explanation.”

  I sipped my lemonade. “Tell me about Danny. What kind of kid was he?”

  “He was a good kid. Everybody seemed to like him. He’d taken a year out to think about what he wanted to do, and his parents were cool with that. They were a pretty cool couple, progressive, liberal… At the time of his death, he was studying law. His grades were OK, he was happy, his parents were happy. But here’s the thing.” He looked from me to Dehan and back again, then repeated, “Here’s the thing. The kid was obsessed with UFOs and with that TV series, the X-Files. You know the kind of thing—posters on his walls, all the DVDs, he’d watched every episode God knows how many times. Every book and magazine article ever published on the Roswell incident, area 51, he’d read them all. What I’m saying, a total nerd. His obsession with the subject was what made him take the year out, and it was bringing his grades down from very good to just OK. That was his parents’ opinion.”

  Dehan asked, “Is that what he was doing out in the park at night?”

  He nodded. “I think so, Carmen. Especially in light of what happened later.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the lights…”

  Dehan frowned at me. She had only read the case file and the case file made no mention of the lights, and I had not mentioned them to her. I said, “Yeah, tell us about the lights.”

  “I didn’t see them, but there were a hell of a lot of witnesses who did. This was on the Sunday night…”

  I interrupted, “Before the rain had started, or after?”

  He looked surprised. “I’m not sure, John. I’d have to check. If it had started, I don’t think it could have been heavy, because a lot of people gathered to watch, along O’Brien Avenue, and other places because you could see them for miles! And I don’t think they would have done that if the rain was heavy.”

  Dehan was frowning. “What kind of lights?”

  “Well, from the descriptions I have heard, there were flashing lights, red, yellow, blue, some people say green…”

  She snapped, “Red, blue, and yellow, that’s a chopper! And the green is an illusion where the blue and the yellow mix.”

  He gave a small, apologetic laugh. “Yeah, maybe, and lasers that were projected down into the park, at approximately the spot where Danny’s body was found.”

  She raised an eyebrow, picked up her glass and sipped, and somehow made it all suggest he was out of his mind. He spread his hands. “You can read the reports in the local papers, Carmen. And when you talk to the witnesses they will all tell you. I don’t dispute that there may well be a perfectly reasonable explanation, but I wasn’t able to find it. And the lights were there. That is a fact.”

  I said, “So these lights were above the park.”

  “At first, yeah. Then, according to the testimony of the witnesses, the lights moved out over the East River, there was a flash of light, and they vanished.”

  “What color?”

  He frowned at me. “You sure ask some funny questions, John. Um, I’m not sure. I’ll check, but I think it was just white light.”

  Dehan looked at me like she wanted to slap some sense into me and said, “So what about the body?”

  “So, it’s seven-thirty on Monday morning when we get the call. This woman is out walking the dog in the morning and she finds the body. Fortunately, she managed to get to the dog before it disturbed anything. This is ’98, before everybody had cell phones, so she has to hurry home to call it in. We get there with the crime scene guys and the ME and, believe me, there was not a person there who had ever seen anything like it. It was the craziest fuckin’ thing I ever saw in my whole career—in my entire life! No exaggeration.” He looked at each of us in turn. “For a start,” he adjusted his ass in his chair and held out his hands like he was framing a shot in a movie. “There’s his feet. They’re there, on the grass, about shoulder width apart. Just like he’s been standing there looking out at the river. And he’s still wearing his fucking thongs.”

  Dehan smiled. “What are they, like, rubber sandals?”

  “Yeah, you know, with the bit that goes between your toes. Like they wear in Florida. His fuckin’ head is there, and his fuckin’ balls are there. Everything, you know, in the right place if you know what I mean. And everything else, his neck, his chest, his arms, his hands, his fuckin’ legs—everything—has been incinerated. It’s just fuckin’ ash, you know what I’m saying? Ash! Except there were a few bits of bone, but they were all in the right place where they were supposed to be. It was like, and I don’t care if you think I’m crazy because now I’m retired so I can be crazy if I want to, it was exactly like he had been standing there and he had been hit—zap!—with a laser.”

  Dehan sighed and shook her head. I scratched my chin. He raised both hands and nodded a lot. “I know. I know what you are thinking. It was set up to look that way by some nut. Now, I am going to tell you two things. One…” He held up one finger and stared at Dehan. “What possible motive could anybody have to set up such an elaborate, difficult murder? I mean, leave aside for now how they did it. We can come back to that in a minute. What possible motive? I mean, that kind of scenario, where the killer sets up an elaborate scene like that after the murder, we only find that with serial killers, right? That is the typical scene where you find that kind of staging of the corpse. But can you think of a single other case where we found a body set up like that?”

  Dehan grimaced and I shook my head.

  He went on, “Well believe me, I have canvassed every single PD from San Diego to Madawaska, and the only cases like it are unsolved cases of either spontaneous combustion or cattle mutilation.” He gave Dehan a challenging smile. “So I ain’t the only cop who couldn’t solve it. These cases do happen, they are investigated by local PDs, sheriffs’ departments, and the FBI, and they don’t get solved.”

  Dehan looked unhappy. I closed my eyes to think. Ochoa went on. “And two, despite the rain that night, there were no footprints! So what are we saying? The body was carefully laid out using a sky crane that nobody noticed?” He leaned forward toward Dehan. “The problem you begin to face, Carmen, is that in order to give this a…” He used his fingers to make speech marks. “‘Logical’ explanation, you have to go to such lengths, to such extremes, that the logical explanation becomes more crazy than the illogical one.” He flopped back in his chair, smiling and shaking his head. “His body was surgically incinerated. Get that, surgically incinerated! Only a laser can do that, and several hundred people saw a laser at that location around the time he must have died.”

  He spread his hands. Dehan looked at me resentfully. “We have maybe a thousand cold cases, and you have to pick this one.”

  I gave her my blandest smile. “Just because you are murdered by a bad guy from Betelgeuse doesn’t mean you’re not entitled to justice, Dehan.” I turned to him. “What was your impression of the witnesses…”

  He snorted. “Such as they were. You say witnesses, but the fact is there weren’t any. There were several hundred people who saw the lights that night. But nobody saw the killing. His friends and family, the last people to see him alive. They all liked him, they were all real upset, they all struck me as honest people…” He gave a knowing laugh. “In as much as anybody is truly honest, right? But most important of all, there was nobody who had anything you could call a motive.” He shook his head. “Nobody had means or motive. It was a locked room mystery, out
in the middle of the park.”

  We were silent for a moment. Finally I asked him, “What is your own feeling? Never mind facts or evidence or lack thereof. What does your gut tell you?”

  He smiled at me but pointed at Dehan. “She’s going to laugh at me. But Donald Kirkpatrick, who knew Danny really well—he was one of the last people to see him alive—he wrote a book about the case. He called it Heaven’s Fire. And he says that Danny was shot by a UFO, just like we have assholes who go over to Africa and hunt from helicopters. He figures that’s what happened to Danny. He was hunted, for game.” He made a face and shrugged. It was an almost apologetic gesture. “I have to say, I agree. After twenty years turning this case over and following every conceivable lead, in my expert opinion, Danny Brown was shot, for sport, by an alien.”

  TWO

  Stuart and May Brown, Danny’s parents, lived across the Westchester Creek in Clason Point. They were both retired—he had been an architect and she a school teacher—and, though they sounded surprised on the phone, they were happy for us to drop in. We came off the Bruckner Boulevard onto White Plains Road and then took a right onto Lacombe Avenue. Theirs was a big, detached, yellow clapboard affair near the corner with Beach Avenue. We pushed through the wrought iron gate and climbed the five steps to their front door. I pressed the bell and heard it buzz inside. The sun was approaching its zenith and it was getting warm. Dehan stared at me while we waited. I said, “It’s almost beer time.”

  She nodded and the door opened.

  Stuart Brown was tall and lean. He had short sandy hair turning to gray and balding on top, like a Franciscan monk. He wore a khaki shirt, with an incongruous Christmas tank-top over it, and boot cut jeans. He smiled at us, but it was nothing personal. He looked as though smiling was a habit for him; his go-to response.

  “Detectives Stone and Dehan?” We showed him our badges and he gestured us in. “Please, come in, but I am sure I don’t know how we can help you. May!” This last was hollered up the stairs as we crossed the entrance hall toward his living room, “May! It’s the cops!” He smiled a smile that would have been cheeky in a child, but in him looked like retarded adolescence. “Forgive me,” he said. “Go right on in and make yourselves comfortable. May will be down in a moment. Can I offer you anything?”