Dead Cold Mystery Box Set 3

by Blake Banner

  I took a deep breath, in sympathy with his lungs, and said, “Thank you, no, we really won’t keep you long.”

  We entered an open-plan living room and dining room, with a bow-window on the right overlooking the street and a set of French doors at the back, in the dining area, overlooking a back yard. There was a suite of well-used furniture set around a large coffee table, and against one wall in the dining area there was a huge, stripped pine dresser. Stuart directed me to sit in a worn, red calico armchair and Dehan sat on a sofa that was covered in Mexican rugs and bits of newspaper. Feet hurried noisily down the stairs and May Brown came in on short plump legs that were accustomed to terrorizing noisy classrooms. The rest of her was as short and formidable as her legs, she too had a habitual smile that meant nothing, and, for a moment, I was transfixed by the bizarre image of these two, retired, in each other’s company all day, perpetually grinning at each other without meaning it.

  “Detective!” she said, reaching for Dehan with both hands. “Don’t get up! I’ll sit next to you. What is this about? I am fascinated.”

  Stuart smiled at me. “Welcome to the age of Aquarius.” He turned to his wife, who had sat beside Dehan, grabbed hold of her hand and was telling her New York needed more strong women, and said, “Darling, this is Detective Stone, Detective Dehan’s partner.”

  She looked at me like I was the unwanted guest at Thanksgiving. “Of course,” she said, with big lips and big eyes. I thought she was going to add, “How nice of you to come,” but instead she turned back to Dehan and said, “Stuart and I are intrigued, not to say bemused. It has been twenty years! I believe you run a cold case unit…?”

  Stuart sat in the armchair opposite me and crossed one long, thin leg over the other. “That suggests that the case is still open,” he said. “But, to be honest, to us it is quite definitely closed.”

  I frowned. “Closed? How could it be? His murderer was never found.”

  He shook his head and May stared at me with eyes the color of over-chlorinated swimming pools. “That is absurd. Forgive me for being blunt, Detective, but only the narrow mind of an officious, white male policeman could possibly fail to see what happened to Danny.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her. “Are you telling me you know what happened, Mrs. Brown? We will consider any explanation that is properly supported by facts.”

  She waved a small, plump hand at me. “There you go, you see, ‘properly supported by facts’.” She sighed. “As far as we are concerned, Detectives, Danny was shot with some sort of energy beam by trans-dimensional beings, or beings from another planet.”

  I nodded. “I am aware of that theory, Mrs. Brown, but have you anything concrete in the way of facts that I can take to my inspector, so that we can begin extradition proceedings?”

  It went straight over May’s head. Dehan clenched her jaw and Stuart cocked an eyebrow at me. “We didn’t invite you here to mock us, Detective. We are not alone in believing in the presence of trans-dimensional and extraterrestrial beings among us. There are some very eminent minds who accept the possibility.”

  I nodded. “I’m not mocking you, Mr. Brown, far from it. But I would like you to understand that the NYPD can’t just walk away from a homicide investigation because the murder may have been committed by an extraterrestrial.”

  “Have you read Donald Kirkpatrick’s book on the case?”

  “No.”

  “I suggest you do. His investigation is somewhat more thorough than the NYPD’s, I am bound to say. His analysis of the situation is profound and comprehensive, and he shows, quite conclusively, Detective Stone, that our son’s murder could not have been carried out—mark my words here—could not have been carried out by a human being. Once you establish that point, where do you go from there…?”

  Dehan scratched her head and spoke. “That’s the second time Donald Kirkpatrick’s name has come up. What exactly was his relationship to Danny?”

  He sank back in his deep chair and brushed some imaginary dust from his blue jeans. “Relationship is an unnecessarily strong word, Detective Dehan. They had no relationship other than that Donald ran the investigation group in which Danny was involved, along with at least a dozen other people.”

  I said, “UFOs were a consuming interest for him…”

  “It was a passion. For May and myself it had been a lifelong interest, but for Danny it was a true passion. We encouraged him but always urged him to approach the subject empirically. Sadly, for the vast majority of ufologists these days, the subject has become religion by another name. And John Mack, for all his good intentions, was, I am afraid, largely to blame.”

  He said this apologetically, as though I might be scandalized by the suggestion. I shook my head. “John Mack?”

  “Professor of psychology at Harvard University, wrote several books on abduction syndrome, concluded that…”

  “Forgive me, Mr. Brown, we are on the clock and I am sure you have lots to do yourself. What about the other members of the UFO group? How did Danny get on with them? Do any relationships stand out as either particularly good or particularly bad?”

  May sighed and shook her head. “Truly, Detective Stone, it is a shame you can’t understand you are barking up the wrong tree…”

  “Help me to understand.”

  “Danny was gregarious, outgoing, emotionally very healthy. He had all the self-assurance of the only child, which was a deliberate decision on…” She nodded graciously at her husband. “…our part. The result was that everybody loved him. He was popular, fun, charismatic. He had a great sense of humor, didn’t he, Stuart?”

  Before Stuart could answer I cut in. “I am sure he was a charming person, Ms. Brown. But, as I am sure you know, the motive for murder lies always in a relationship—whatever the basis of that relationship may be—so at the moment we are keen to understanding all of Danny’s relationships. Did he, for example, have a girlfriend?”

  She placed both her hands on her lap and affected a loud, parrot-like laugh. “Just one?” She hooted again. “You have photographs of him? He was gorgeous! And that happy-go-lucky personality! The girls were crazy about him!” She shook her head. “But he was not ready to settle… Hold on.”

  She rose and strutted on those powerful legs to the dresser in the dining room. There she squatted down with startling flexibility and opened one of the cupboards in the base. She extracted a couple of photo albums and brought them back with her, leafing through the top one as she walked.

  She sat next to Dehan and handed her the album. “There, that’s him. Was he hot or what?” She wheezed. Dehan studied the photos without expression. May went on, nudging Dehan with her elbow. “’Course, he’d be forty now, a bit too old for you, hey?”

  Dehan handed me the album and I looked at a large photograph of about fifteen people against a backdrop of pine trees in what appeared to be a mountainous area. Most of the people there were young men and women, probably in their early to mid twenties, though behind them there was an older man, perhaps in his late thirties. He was the only one who was not smiling. His gaze was more what you might describe as keen. Next to him was a woman, maybe ten years younger than him. She looked Asian, perhaps Filipina. May was saying, “Danny is the one in the middle, sitting at the front, with the open denim shirt.”

  I found him. He was a handsome young man with a mischievous grin and floppy brown hair. Hunkered down on his left was a powerfully built, dark-haired guy with his arm around Danny’s shoulders, and on his right was a pretty girl, laughing, with her head on his shoulder. Danny’s arms were both on his knees. I looked up at Stuart, who was watching me carefully.

  “May I take a copy of this?”

  He gestured at me with an open hand. “Be our guest.”

  I took a picture on my cell, then showed Stuart the album. “Who are the two either side of him?”

  He took it and set it on his lap, gazed at it for a while with sad eyes. “This was their first field trip after he’d joined them. Th
e man standing at the back is Donald Kirkpatrick, a highly intelligent man. Some kind of scientist by training. He founded the group. The two at the front…” He took a deep breath which turned into a sigh. “I remember them, I don’t recall their names. May?”

  He handed it to her. She glanced but didn’t take it. “Paul Estevez and Jane Harrison.”

  “They look pretty close.”

  “I told you, everybody loved him, but he was a free spirit. For them it was probably nothing more than a social activity. For him it was a search for the truth. And, as Donald points out, it was a search that cost him his life.” She regarded me with an expression that was close to pity. It was only the hint of contempt that stopped it getting there. “Really, Detective, you are asking the wrong questions. What you need to be asking is, what did he discover? What did he unearth that made him a target?”

  I spread my hands. “OK. Tell me. What did he discover that made him a target?”

  Dehan was watching May with the kind of expressionless face she normally reserved for people she wanted to slap. Before May could answer me, Dehan asked, “A target for whom, Mrs. Brown? And also, what evidence have you got that he was a target for somebody? If you have that evidence, why have you not shared it with the police?”

  Stuart had raised his hands in a ‘slow down’ gesture and was smiling at the coffee table. “Hang on, hang on, let’s take these questions one at a time. First: we are not withholding any information. Second: we do not have any proof, as you would understand it, that Danny was anybody’s target.” He spread his hands and nodded. “Beyond the obvious fact that he was murdered. Third: we don’t know who he was a target for, any more than a herd of gazelles in Africa knows who is shooting at them from the helicopter. However, we are satisfied, based on the evidence we have, which is the same evidence that you have, that Danny was not killed by a human being.” He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head in an oddly helpless gesture. “It simply isn’t possible.” He gazed at me a moment. “And to answer your question, Detective Stone, we don’t know what he had unearthed.”

  “But you think he had unearthed something.”

  It was May who answered. “Stewart is not convinced, but I am. He would often go off for several days at a time. Sometimes alone, sometimes with members of the group; sometimes it was for a night, sometimes several days at a time. He never told us what he was doing or where he was going. That’s why we didn’t raise the alarm that weekend. I think he discovered something…”

  Stuart sighed and attempted a smile. “It will sound absurd to you, Detectives. It seems absurd to anyone who has not done the research. But there are very eminent people, in the White House, in the Pentagon, in academia, all of whom are agreed that there is a conspiracy to conceal the truth about UFOs. And we think it is possible, May is convinced, that Danny had found something. And whatever it was he found got him killed.” Again he shrugged, again he spread his hands in that helpless gesture. “Nobody else had a motive. Nobody else had the means!”

  I thought about it for a long moment. I was aware of Dehan watching me. Maybe she wanted to slap me, too. I pointed at the album which lay open on the coffee table. “Have you got contact details for Paul and Jane?”

  May shook her head. “No, but Donald will have.” She reached down by the side of the sofa and picked up a brown leather handbag. From it she extracted a small notepad and a pen. She scrawled an address and a phone number and handed it to Dehan. “He’ll be happy to see you.”

  Dehan took it and thanked her. “One last question before we go. Can you tell us about his movements that night?”

  May shook her head. “No. We last saw him on the Friday. They were all going on some kind of field trip, after which they were going to have a party or something at Donald’s place. We never saw him again.”

  We thanked them and stood. They followed us to the door. As Stuart opened it, he held my eye a moment. “The FBI tried to silence us, you know.”

  I frowned.

  Dehan snapped, “The FBI tried to silence you? How?”

  He nodded. “They called on the telephone and they came to see us: two men. They’ll deny it, of course. But they came and advised us, for our own good, to keep quiet. Don’t be surprised if you hear from them. They’ll tell you to drop the investigation and close the case.”

  We thanked them again and stepped out into the midday glare.

  THREE

  We didn’t get into the car, instead I walked to the top of Beach Avenue and looked down. Dehan was sitting on the hood of my old, burgundy Jag, watching me. I pointed. “Soundview Park is four or five hundred yards down there. That’s where they found him. What do you say we go and have a look?”

  She nodded, stood, and followed me. We walked in silence for a while, enjoying the sunshine and the warmth. After a moment, she slipped her arm through mine and leaned against me as she walked.

  “Are you buying this alien…”

  “Don’t say BS.”

  She glanced at me. “So you are buying it?”

  “That is a very open question, Dehan.”

  “What do you mean? It’s a yes or no question. Are you buying it? Yes, I am, no, I’m not.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her but she looked away, as though she was checking for traffic on an empty road. We crossed Patterson Avenue and continued down Beach toward the park, which was now clearly visible at the end of the road, about a hundred yards away.

  “OK,” I said, “what is ‘it’ exactly? What is it, precisely, you are asking me if I am buying? Are you asking me if I believe that alien life exists on other planets, or moons? If so, I don’t believe it, I think it is impossible that it does not exist. Are you asking me if I believe alien life forms are visiting Earth? I just don’t know, but I know there are some very smart people who do. Or are you asking me whether I believe that Danny was murdered by an extraterrestrial?”

  “That one.”

  “Then the answer is, I don’t know who killed him, yet. Statistically he is more likely to have been killed by a human being, over sex or money. But I am not going to make the evidence fit my theory, I am going to develop my theory…”

  “Based on the evidence, yadda yadda. I know. But come on, Stone! He was shot by an alien with a ray gun? Seriously? And while we chase little green men, the killer pisses his pants laughing and gets away with murder.”

  We had reached the bend in the road where it becomes O’Brien Avenue. To our right there was an untended wilderness of knee-high grass and flowers interspersed with oaks and linden trees. I stopped and she stopped with me. I gazed at it a moment and said absently, “This is what the world should look like, Dehan.”

  She looked at me in surprise and smiled. “Why John, you’re a romantic after all!”

  I smiled back and pointed in among the undergrowth. “He was found in there.”

  We picked our way through a broad border of grasses, wild flowers and bindweed until we came to a broad expanse of coarse scrub and gray clay, bounded by a path that entered the park from the west, ran along the riverbank for two hundred yards, and then turned north, skirting the amphitheater. I stopped and looked around for a moment, remembering the photos I’d studied. Then I pointed south, to a slight rise where I could see a small tree. “Over there, by that oak tree.”

  We trudged across the dense, cloying soil for maybe a hundred yards, until we came to a tall, spindly pin oak which, twenty years earlier, would have been little more than the sapling I had seen in the picture. I stood by the tree and took ten paces to the west, turned, and looked at Dehan, who was watching me with her hands in her back pockets. “This is the spot,” I said. “Try to visualize it. Sometime on Sunday night. It’s been raining on and off since late afternoon. It’s dark. His feet, in his thongs, are here.” I found two large clumps of clay and positioned them where his feet had been. “Facing out toward the water. His body, or what is left of it, is lying back from his feet. Imagine,” I said, “that a guy with a samurai sword,
as sharp as a scalpel, had cut through his ankles, and he had fallen straight back.”

  “Wait.”

  She picked up a stick and came over, scratched out the shape of his body, with no head, lying on the ground, with his arms at forty-five degree angles from his body. Then she went and found a large clump of clay, the size of a melon. “His head is…” She gauged the distance with her eye and placed the lump where his head had been found. “…about here. And…” She grinned, found a twig and two acorns and placed it where his genitals would have been. “…the pièce de résistance!”

  I pointed at the ground. “This is clay. It sucks up water, holds it a long time, and keeps its shape.”

  She nodded, “I hear you. There should have been footprints.” She screwed up her face like an angry fist. “But wait, please, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Sensei. Let’s look at each step separately and then see if we can fit them together at the end. First, of the people we know of, who had anything like a possible motive?”

  I scratched my head. “Anything like a possible motive? Any one of them, Dehan. We just don’t know anything about his relationships yet. He was attractive, single, wanting to stay unattached. Right there you have a breeding ground for motives: jealousy, rejection, envy…”

  “OK, so opportunity.” She sighed and corrected herself. “OK, not opportunity, because we know nothing of his movements, so any one of them might have had opportunity, including his parents.”

  I nodded. “Which brings us to means.”

  We stared at each other for a long time. Then she threw her hands in the air and expostulated, “Son of a gun! Means! Sure, anyone with a laser scalpel in 1998! But not just a laser scalpel—a laser scalpel capable of incinerating an entire body at the same time as surgically removing the head, the feet and the…” She sighed. “This is bullshit, Stone.” She turned to me. “He was not killed by aliens!”

  I chuckled in a way I knew was annoying. “It’s not just the scalpel and the incineration, there is also the question of how the killer got here across the wet clay and then left, without leaving any tracks. Even if we argue that Danny might have been killed somewhere else and deposited here, the killer still has to cross the wet clay and lay out the feet, the head…” I shook my head. “And then go back. It’s a hell of an undertaking.”