Fire From Heaven: Dead Cold Mystery 9

by Blake Banner

  “Tonight was more difficult because Jasmine had to do it alone, while we were out at the clearing. She had to use a trolley. You probably saw it in the cellar. But that night I did it myself. I cut off the head and the feet and…” He hesitated and scowled at May and Stuart, who had gone sickly white. “Well, I was angry!” he said. “Trying to fuck my wife!” His face flushed with rage, then it slowly subsided. “I kept the bits in the freezer and put his body in the furnace, on a sheet of metal from an old oil drum. It gets damn hot in there. You need a lot of heat to get through the winters up here. It drops to well below freezing, and you have snow for months on end…” He might have been giving one of his lectures, or narrating a travelogue. “When he was reduced to ash, with a few bones, I gathered him up and put it all in a cooler in the back of my car, and drove back to the Bronx.”

  Colonel Hait was staring at him, transfixed somewhere between horror and fascination. “But how? For twenty years, the murder has been unsolved because it was impossible! Even Detective Ochoa ended up accepting it must have been some kind of non-human agency!”

  I smiled and nodded. “Believe me, Detective Dehan and I were scratching our heads and beginning to wonder if this was a genuine X-File. But actually, it was really simple.” I spread my hands. “If it had just been the lights over the park, that’s simple, right? A remote controlled chopper, or helium balloons with some kind of directional fan to drive it around, a few lights and a few lasers bought from an electronics store. With a little advice from Jane—albeit unwitting advice—something like that was easy to put together.”

  Don was nodding. “It was a helium balloon with a directional fan, much like a zeppelin. I had been planning to use it for a sighting up here in the fall…”

  I continued, “Even the mutilation and the incineration were not impossible to explain, as you’ve seen, but what made it seem impossible, what acted as a catalyst to make the whole thing seem impossible, was the absence of footprints or tracks. Any explanation you came up with fell apart when you tried to explain how the body got there. And that was what fell into place when I realized that there was a cabin out here. Suddenly the house had to have a furnace, for the long winters—a furnace capable of producing the necessary temperatures to incinerate a body. And when you have the furnace, you are no longer carrying a hundred and sixty pound body, you are carrying much less weight; and if you have a furnace for the snowy winters, well, you’re also going to have snow shoes, right? Snow shoes, possibly adapted with a bit of sheepskin, or wool, would leave no recognizable tracks across the mud. And then everything else fell into place.”

  I smiled at Dehan as she closed her eyes and slapped her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Son of a bitch!”

  “And the little spectacle tonight? Paul was given some sleeping tablets ground up in his drink. That’s why he retired early.” I looked from Don to Jasmine. “Which one of you two lovely people did it?”

  Jasmine blinked.

  “Oh, it was you, was it? You slipped into his room and stabbed him. Then we were lured out to the terrace, and that ‘beam’ you were so certain had come down and teleported him up to be instructed for his mission, had not come down at all. It had shot up. It was a couple of hundred dollars worth of lasers, of the sort you might use at a rock concert, stuck to a board in a small clearing thirty yards from the meeting of the three paths. It was triggered, I have no doubt, by a remote control concealed in her dressing gown pocket. She had her fit, collapsed in a trance and triggered the light display. We went running from the house, led by Don to the exact spot where we were to find the singed circle he had made earlier with a blow torch.”

  Dehan was shaking her head, staring at Jasmine. “But why? Why would you collude in all this? He murdered the man you loved!”

  I laughed out loud and Dehan stared at me in genuine shock. I spread my hands. “It was the best thing that ever happened to her! Don found himself being driven, almost in spite of himself, to write up the case of his charismatic friend and colleague, fallen in his passionate pursuit of the truth. Interest in that kind of story in the media in those years was at an all-time high. The chance was too good to pass up. He wrote the book and published it and, if before he was comfortably well off, suddenly his book had sold over a million copies, and twenty years later it is still selling and the case has become a UFO classic. Overnight, Mr. and Mrs. Kirkpatrick had become millionaires.” I looked Don in the face. “Of course it destroyed you as a person. You became this…” I gestured at him. “This bitter, twisted residue of a human being. But you…” I turned to Jasmine. “You’d never had it so good!”

  Dehan was nodding. “But when we reopened the case, Jane and Paul suddenly became a liability. And when you saw that we were getting too close and we wouldn’t buy the ET explanation, you decided Jane and Paul had to go.”

  I nodded. “Exactly.” I turned to Jasmine. “My money is on you. I think it was your idea. You are deep and dark, and I think you suggested it to Don. Let’s not just kill them, let’s use it as the basis for a second book that will sell even more than the first one. A commemorative reunion in the mountains, where Jane, Paul, and Danny’s parents are all mysteriously killed in exactly the same way as Danny, and you, Colonel, would have the honor of being the survivor, the credible witness who saw the whole thing happen, the beams of light from heaven, the trances. You would provide the alibi for the killers.”

  Stuart stared at Don, his eyes bulging. “You were going to kill us?”

  Don scowled at the floor. “Don’t you want to join your precious son?” He turned to me. “Enough of this. What’s this deal you are suggesting?”

  I waved my gun at the colonel, May, and Stuart. “We kill them, Dehan and I provide you with the alibi, and we get fifty percent of the proceeds from the book.”

  Hait’s jaw dropped. “What?”

  May screamed and covered her moth with both hands, staring at me with eyes wide with fear.

  Stuart was shaking his head frantically, “No! Don, no! We won’t talk! Listen to me! For God’s sake!”

  Jasmine spoke. She looked at Don. Her eyes were hard and pitiless. “I don’t want to share.”

  Don snarled, “If they don’t call into the precinct tomorrow, people will come looking for them. We need a credible witness! Without a witness we have nothing!”

  Suddenly Hait’s face was flushed red. “I don’t believe you people! Have you gone insane! This is murder you’re talking about!”

  Don went scarlet and screamed at him, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

  And then Jasmine was screaming, “I don’t want to share! We don’t share! We kill them! Kill them!” Then she swung her gun arm around, pointed at my head and screamed, “No share!”

  She squeezed the trigger. There was a violent flash and a huge explosion. Jasmine was lifted off her feet and hurled back against the fireplace with a big, ugly, red-black hole in her chest, while the slug from her gun tore through the back of my chair. Dehan was on her feet. She had her left arm wrapped around Don’s gun arm, she had aimed the shotgun at Jasmine and pulled the trigger with her right. I gaped and scrambled to my feet as she smashed her left elbow back into Don’s jaw. He staggered away and fell to the floor, leaving the gun in Dehan’s hand.

  Next thing, Stuart had jumped up and hurled himself at Don. I shouted, “Stuart! No!”

  But he ignored me and fell on Don with his hand clasped around his neck, screaming, “I am going to kill you, you son of a bitch!”

  I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and dragged him off. Then Don was scrambling to his feet and running. Dehan bellowed, “Freeze! Stop!”

  But he ignored her, wrenched open the door and ran. Stewart pulled free from my grasp and went after him. I shouted, “Stuart! For God’s sake! You damned idiot!” And as I shouted, I was running. Dehan was just ahead of me. We burst through the door and out into the night. The moon was declining toward the west, but by its light we saw Don hurtle across the clearing, with
Stuart close behind, and disappear among the trees, headed in the direction of the lake. We went after them. As we ran, Dehan indicated she would go right and I should go straight, and before I knew it, she had peeled off among the trees and disappeared.

  I swore violently under my breath. It is easy to get lost in a forest in broad daylight. In the middle of the night, it is almost impossible not to. Thankfully, the trees were less dense here and some moonlight did filter through, plus we were on a slope that I guessed ran down to the lake. I slowed from a mad dash to a steady run, trying to listen for sounds ahead. I could clearly make out the noise of heavy bodies crashing through the undergrowth, but whether it was Don, Stuart or Dehan was impossible to tell. And the peculiar acoustics of the forest made it equally impossible to pinpoint the location.

  I had figured that if the track we were on led to the lake, it was a fair bet there was a boat at the end of the track. If Don made it to the boat and managed to row to the other side of the lake, it would be impossible for us to catch him. But a more immediate worry was that, though Stuart was in the grip of a wild rage right now, he was not a killer. Don was, and I had no doubt Don would kill Stuart to get away. And all of that added up to the fact that I had to catch Don, and I had to catch him before Stuart did.

  The trees started to thin and suddenly I had broken out onto a moonlit beach. Globules of amber light warped and glimmered on the black water. Ten paces away, the black hulk of a rowboat loomed on the shore. A man stood motionless beside it. It was impossible to tell if he was facing the water or facing me. I had my back to the mass of the trees and I wondered if he could see me. I stepped silently forward a few paces.

  Then there was a sound, a movement. A shadow rose up out of the black form of the boat. It swung an object, possibly an oar, and struck the motionless figure on the back. There was a grunt and a thud, but by then I was shouting, “Freeze! Drop it! Freeze!”

  I ran forward and came around the hulk of the boat. I could see them grappling now in the sand. Stuart was screaming, making shrill, incoherent noises, gripping Don’s throat. Don was pounding his face with his fists, but it seemed to have no effect. I holstered my weapon and moved forward to grab Stuart’s collar, but suddenly Don was kicking sand and scrambling to his feet, running for the lake, and Stuart was up and going after him. Don’s plan was clear and I shouted, “Stuart! No!”

  I had no shot. The risk of hitting Stuart was too high. I swore for the second time and made to run. But in that moment there was a streak across the sand. A black form hurled itself at Stuart’s legs and he went down flat on his face.

  I ran to him and as I grabbed his wrists and knelt on his back, Dehan snarled, “Cuff him!” And she was off.

  Don’s tall, willowy form was wading into the water. For a moment, he looked like some strange, ancient creature of the woods, tall, thin, and angular, waving his arms like branches as he went deeper into the dark liquid, with the pale moon touching his skin and the small waves around him.

  The moment didn’t last. Dehan crashed through the water, holding her weapon in both hands, shouting at him to stop. He turned to face her, almost waist deep now. Perhaps she thought he was going to surrender. Perhaps that and the dark, and her innate reluctance to shoot an unarmed man, all conspired against her in that moment. But he lunged, took the gun from her hands, and in the next moment, he had dragged her under the water.

  It may have been a fraction of a moment. It seemed to be an eternity of stillness and silence while he stood, with his back arched and Dehan gone beneath the black, enveloping water of the lake. I was not aware, in that moment, of what I was doing. I heard a voice screaming Dehan’s name. I felt the splash of cold against my body. I saw an automatic weapon in front of me in the darkness, in the strange moonlight. I saw it kick once, twice, three, four—seven times, and then it was just clicking. Don’s dead body lay on the surface of the lake, staring blindly up at the universe, at the empty stars that in the end had given him nothing. I screamed again, “Dehan!”

  I dropped the gun and reached beneath the small waves with frantic hands, searching for her clothes or her hair, or anything to grab hold of. And then the lake exploded, and Dehan erupted from the inky depths like a whale, spraying foam and hair in all direction, screaming, “Son of a bitch! Where are you, you mother…!”

  Her fist and elbows were going like a windmill on speed. I reached for her with both hands. “Dehan! Dehan, it’s me, Stone, stop! Stop!”

  “Don! Where is he? Where is he?”

  “Dead. He’s dead. I’ve got you. Come here…”

  She came to me and I held her tight, and we stood and trembled together, waist deep in the cold black lake, under the moon, with Don’s dead form drifting slowly toward the shore.

  EPILOGUE

  We eventually pulled Don’s body ashore, dragged him onto the sand, and covered him with a tarpaulin from the boat. I then un-cuffed Stewart, who was sobbing and shivering like a small child, and we had walked back up the track to the cabin. There we had found that the colonel had telephoned the sheriff’s department and that the sheriff was on his way with several deputies.

  By the time he, the ME, and the CSI team had arrived, and he and his deputies finished taking detailed statements from everybody, the sun was already rising over the giant pines in the east, and the birds were getting busy singing and doing whatever it is birds do in the early morning. A warm copper mist was rising off the grass and the sky seemed to stretch and yawn as it turned from dark to bright blue and the moon finally sank down in the west.

  The sheriff promised to forward his report to the 43rd and asked us, as a courtesy, next time we wanted to shoot somebody in his county, to let him know beforehand. We had promised we would and driven away.

  At the bottom of Elk Lake Road, we had come to the intersection with County Route 84. There I had turned left, headed back toward the I-87, New York City, and the Bronx. Along the way we passed once again through Blue Ridge, and shortly after that we had come to a small cottage on the left, set back among the trees, and there must have been at least a dozen ancient, half-rusted signs posted outside it. Everything from County Route 87, to arrows pointing to campsites, gas stations, and nature reserves. There was something beautiful about the woods and the cottage, and even about the signs that seemed to belong to an older, simpler world.

  But the sign that really caught my eye was bigger than the rest. It was a long, wooden arrow pointing back the way we’d come. It was painted brown with white letters in the style of the old West. It said, ‘Adirondack Buffalo’ and under that it said, ‘Bison meat’.

  I pulled over to the side of the road. Dehan looked at me without much interest and said, “What are you doing?”

  “I’m calling the inspector.”

  She gave a single, upward nod. While I dialed, she said, “That was pretty neat, Stone, about the snow shoes and the furnace… Simple, when you know…”

  The phone rang on the other end. I shrugged. “It just made sense.”

  “So who killed Jane?”

  “I figure it was Jasmine. Five minute drive early in the morning. Jane would let her in. She had no real quarrel with her. Her pretext was to convince her to come to the reunion. Jane insists she won’t, and Jasmine kills her.”

  “What about the whole samurai sword thing?”

  “Eskrima, the ancient Philippine art of fighting with blades. We will never know for sure, but my guess is she had some training.”

  “Huh! And what the hell is a Mangku…?”

  “A Mangkukulam. A practitioner of Philippine voodoo.” The phone stopped ringing and I got the inspector’s voicemail. I said, “Hi, Inspector, it’s Stone here. We got lucky and managed to wrap up the case. The Essex County Sheriff’s Department will be sending over their report. We’re on our way back, but we seem to have got a little lost. Cells just don’t seem to work up here, sir, no signal at all. But as soon as I can, I’ll call you. If I can’t, expect to see us no later than, say… Tues
day.”

  Dehan burst out laughing. I swung the Jag around and headed back into the mountains. I had seen a sign earlier for Aunt Polly’s B&B. I figured with a name like that, it couldn’t be bad. And nearby was The Cellar, on Long Lake, where they were bound to do Bison Steak and good artisan beers. I began to smile and looked at Dehan. The sun was shining, she had the wind in her hair, and she was grinning behind her shades. She looked like a million bucks wrapped for Christmas, and I felt like the luckiest man alive.

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  BOOK TEN PREVIEW

  ONE

  “Do you know how many times I have stood at this breakfast bar watching you cook bacon and eggs, wanting to tell you how much I love you when you cook bacon and eggs?”

  It was seven o’clock in the morning and the smell of bacon and coffee was strong and rich on the air. She didn’t look at me but I could tell she was smiling. She said, “Yup.”

  “How many?”