by Blake Banner
I had set my chair back so that it was easy to stand without making a noise. Now I stood and made my way up the stairs, listening carefully to Don’s voice, alert to any change that would tell me he had noticed my absence. There was no such change. His voice continued, repeating over and over, “…your unconscious…” suggesting images of space and stars and sleep.
I reached the galleried landing and moved quickly along to the doors to the terrace, which Dehan had left open for me, as we had arranged. I stepped out and walked quickly to the side. There I pulled myself over and, with some difficulty, clambered down and dropped to the ground below, with only a few scratches and grazes. Then I ran to the back of the house and scrambled under the veranda to the small window we had opened on our way back from the clearing in the forest. The flashlight was where we had left it. I shone it through the window into a very large cellar crammed with everything from old furniture and cardboard boxes to sacks of logs, a washing machine, a big spin dryer and a freezer, a large trolley, and everything else you would expect to find in the basement of a mountain cabin.
I dropped the flashlight onto an old, dusty chair, dragged myself through, and lowered myself onto that same chair. Once down, I took the flashlight and stood in the middle of the floor, playing the light over the walls and into the corners, making a more detailed inspection, and one by one I began to find all the things I had expected to find when it had dawned on me that the party had been at a cabin in the mountains.
All but one.
Then I turned the flashlight to the washing machine, the dryer… and there was the big chest freezer. I approached it, and with a vague sense of nausea, I opened it. And it was there, as I had thought it would be. Or rather, they were there: the head, a ghastly white with blue lips, and his eyes mercifully closed. Beside it, his feet, and beside his feet, his genitals. All neatly contained in plastic bags.
I closed the lid. The torso, then, must also be where I had imagined. That was the other part of the puzzle which had dropped into place. But before I could check, behind me I head the door open, and Don’s voice spoke in a harsh rasp.
“Don’t move, Stone, or I swear I will blow Detective Dehan’s head clean off her shoulders.”
TWENTY-TWO
I turned. There was a flight of wooden steps up to a door. That door now stood open onto the kitchen, and in the opening I could see the silhouettes of Dehan and, just behind her, Don. He seemed to have a hold of the back of her collar in his left fist, and in his right I could make out what seemed to be a pump-action shot gun.
“Where are the others? They are not in on this, are they?”
“That doesn’t concern you.”
I played the light over them. I saw Dehan wince and cover her eyes. Don did the same. I shifted it a little and said, “I haven’t much to lose, Don. You are going to kill us anyway, aren’t you?”
Dehan said, “I’m sorry, Stone. I started questioning Jasmine. He got up and when he came back, he had a shotgun…”
He shook her savagely and snarled, “Shut up!”
I said quietly, “Hurt her and I’ll kill you where you stand, Kirkpatrick.”
He snorted. It may have been a laugh. “Do as you’re told and nobody need get hurt.”
I gestured with my head at the freezer. “Like Paul? Like Jane?”
“This could have been simple and painless, Stone. You chose to make it complicated—and painful.”
“The law, Don, the law made it complicated and painful. The law that says it’s not OK to go around murdering people, however justified you may feel in doing so.”
“Don’t lecture me. I am too old and I have seen too much of the world to take lectures from the likes of you. Now put down your gun.”
I gave a single bark of a laugh. I pulled my gun from my holster and showed it to him. “I put this down and I sign Detective Dehan’s death warrant along with my own.” I shook my head. “No, we are going to have to talk about this.” I frowned. “I am curious. What have you done with the others?” I turned and pointed at the freezer. “You knocked him out with sleeping tablets, the way you tried to do with us, with the cocoa. But I don’t believe you knocked out the whole party that way. No, I don’t think that was your plan at all. I think you actually wanted witnesses…”
I stepped toward him. He backed up and shook Dehan again. “I’m warning you, Stone! I will kill her!”
I shook my head. “No you won’t. You know as well as I do that the moment she is dead, the balance of power shifts in my favor. You will put off killing Detective Dehan to the last possible moment. And that is why I am going to hold on to this weapon.” I moved toward the steps and began to climb. He backed up. I went on talking. “I made a lot of mistakes in this case to begin with. One of my first was to believe that your wife was as much your victim as Danny was. Then I shifted and thought that maybe you were your wife’s victim.” I stopped at the top of the stairs and stared into Dehan’s face. She was frowning, confused. Then I looked past her at Donald Kirkpatrick. “Both made sense, yet neither made perfect sense. Then it dawned on me, only tonight, that you were partners. That you were acting together.”
I turned and walked out of the kitchen into the vast living room. There, Stuart, May, and Colonel Hait sat together on the sofa, looking frightened and confused. Jasmine stood by the fire. She held a .38 revolver in both hands, trained on the colonel.
May watched me walk in and said, “What the hell is going on?”
I gave her a lopsided smile. “You asking the bacon, May? I couldn’t begin to understand, remember?”
Stuart looked at me resentfully. “This is not the time for scoring points, Detective Stone!”
I gave my head a little twist to the side and made a ‘tsc!’ sound. “If not now, then when, Stuart?” I looked at the colonel. There was a question in my eyes: had he relinquished his weapon? I knew he read me, and he seemed to nod. The .38 was his. I sat in the armchair with my gun on my lap and looked at them all. Don and Dehan were close behind me.
Don shoved Dehan toward the sofa and said, “Sit down!” Then he turned to me. “OK, Stone, now you hand over your gun. If you don’t, we start shooting. We start with May, then Stuart, then the colonel, and finally your partner.”
I made a face like I wasn’t really convinced. “I don’t know, Don. I grant you, you have a strong hand, but it sounds to me like you’re not thinking very clearly. Let me explain the situation to you. Here you have two senior detectives from the 43rd Precinct of the New York Police Department, who have gone for a long weekend up to the Adirondacks while in the middle of an investigation, and they have gone to the very spot where the case they are investigating started…” I smiled, gave a small laugh and shook my head. “Clearly this is no coincidence, and it is merely a device to get around jurisdictional red tape. So you must realize that our chief is aware of where we are, and what we are doing here. And in fact, he will be expecting to hear from us tomorrow morning.”
Jasmine was staring at me with no expression on her face at all. Don glanced at her, then back at me. He swallowed. I went on.
“Now, maybe, if you are real smart, you might get away with killing all these witnesses and pretending it was the aliens who did it. Everybody will know you are lying, but if there is no evidence, you might just get away with it.” I laughed. “But a sofa full of bullet holes and soaked in blood? I don’t think so. We are at an impasse, Don. You both know it.”
He snarled, “You think we are incapable of taking them outside one by one and executing them?”
“Oh, I think you are very capable of that. But the moment you pick somebody, I am going to put a bullet through your head.” I looked over at Jasmine. The only change to her expression was that her face had gone tight; other than that, there was nothing. I said to her, “How about that, Jasmine? Life without Don. The rest of your life in a women’s prison, knowing that Don was dead. That appeal to you?”
Her eyes flicked over at him and I saw fear.
I said, “I’m curious about something. Just indulge me for a moment, and then we can get back to how we solve this impasse…”
He frowned, smelling a way out. “What do you mean, ‘solve’?”
I laughed. “Come on, Don! We are all grown-ups here. I am sure we can find a solution where everybody wins.” I played a hunch and gave Jasmine a sly look. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Jasmine?”
Don said, “Some kind of deal…?”
“We’ll come to that. Just indulge me, I’m curious. How this whole thing started, way back in ’98. Back then, you were no part of this, were you?” I looked at Jasmine. “You were just a mail-order bride, right? Young—what were you, twenty-five, twenty-six, excited, a little out of your depth, swept off your feet by a husband who, though he was a lot older than you, was fun, exciting, even a bit glamorous, right? You must have been blown away by the whole thing.”
I waited. She didn’t answer. She just stared at her husband. There was terror in her eyes. I pushed on.
“And, you know what I’m curious about? Were you interested in UFOs back in the Philippines? Or was that something you just got involved in through your husband? Either way, it must have been pretty cool to have the cabin for the weekends, and come out to the mountains, and all of Don’s friends who’d come along, too…”
I let the words trail away. She was staring at Don real hard. She was willing him to do something. All of her attention was on him and I could have shot her right then without her ever realizing it, but the risk of Don shooting Dehan in retaliation was too high.
“Trouble is,” I said, “however much we have, we always want something we don’t have, isn’t that right? And you had it all, Jasmine, but, like the desperado, you wanted something you couldn’t have. You wanted Danny, didn’t you?”
She shook her head. “No, not true.”
I laughed quietly. “Come on, Jasmine, the game is over. It’s time to admit the truth. You saw him, and right away you fell in love, but you were totally dependent on Donald, for everything, from your resident’s permit to your food and the roof over your head. Not to mention the way of life to which you were rapidly becoming accustomed. So what to do?” I wagged a finger at her. “And I bet that was when your mind went back, almost without thinking, to the things you had seen as a kid. Where are you from in the Philippines, Jasmine? Let me guess. Western Samar? Maybe Sorsogon…?”
She nodded. “Sorsogon…”
“And you had often seen the trances of the Mangkukulam, you knew how it looked and how convincing it could be. And you were right. It fooled everybody. Especially as nobody expected it from such a shy, obedient young girl like you.” I turned to Don. “It fooled almost everybody. It didn’t fool you, though, did it, Don? You were really in love with your new bride. You doted on her. It really surprised me when Paul told me that, because now you treat her like dirt. But back then, you doted on her. You doted on her so much that you were aware of her every desire, and you noticed the tiniest nuances and changes in those desires. And however hard she tried to hide it, you noticed when she started to turn cold on you, and started to hunger for Danny. You saw the concealed looks, the gazes, the blushes, the smiles…those million and one tiny giveaways that tell you somebody’s feelings have changed. You noticed.” I shook my head. “I’m guessing you would have been willing to ignore it, if she only hadn’t acted on it. Am I right?”
He curled his lip. “If you think you are going to get me to admit anything…”
“Come on! What difference does it make? I’m a cop! I’m curious! But by the end of tonight, you’re going to have as much on me and Dehan as we have on you.” I turned my smile on Jasmine. It wasn’t a nice smile. “If you had just been willing to love him from a distance, it would probably all have blown over. But you are not the type, are you? You are the type who, when you want something, you go after it; in your own, shy, secret way, but you go after it. That, after all, is why you’re here in the States, right? Because you will go the extra nine yards.
“You wanted Danny, but you were never alone with him. You were always with Don. Plus, in the beginning, I bet Danny didn’t responded to your secret come-ons, did he? He loved and respected Don, and he would never have betrayed him. But bit by bit, he started to become fascinated. Because you were not quite like any woman he had ever known before. And you began to notice that he liked you.
“So that night, that awful, fateful night in June, 1998, you pretended to go into a trance, you thrashed around as you had seen the Mangkukulam do, and then you spoke your silly, childish lines, that you and Danny were the chosen ones, and, to keep him happy and make him feel important, you borrowed a line from the Bible and told Don he was the rock on which they would build. And after everything they had just witnessed on Don’s specially adapted equipment, they were all taken in…” I turned to Don. “Except you. You saw right through it, and you saw right through it not just because you could read Jasmine like a book, but because you knew that everything they had all just witnessed on your especially adapted equipment was a crock of horseshit. You knew there were no aliens out there trying to make contact. You knew it was all a scam. I don’t know if you borrowed the technology from Jane, or if she was in on it with you, but all your group saw that night on Macomb Mountain was special effects, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “Yes. I knew they were there. I still know they are there. But I was sick of waiting. I had been promising so much to my group, to Jasmine, but they would not show themselves to me. And I could see Jasmine losing interest, becoming ever more drawn in, like everybody else, by Danny’s magnetism and charisma. They were all drifting away from me. Jane had no idea, but I picked her brains over a few weeks and put something together. For a little while that night I tasted success, and Danny was in awe of me for a change.”
“And then Jasmine had her trance, and you knew. You knew that she had decided to sleep with him, and once she did, it would be over. Your love affair, your marriage, your dreams, the group—everything would be over. So you forbade them to go, and in forbidding it, in trying to terrify them into obedience, you remembered the cattle mutilation cases, and the Brazilian case in Guarapiranga, amongst others, and in that moment, the idea was born in your mind. You wouldn’t kill him, the aliens would.”
May was shaking her head, staring from me to Don and back again. “No! No! Donald? It’s not true! Donald? How? How? We have been over this a thousand times!”
“How?” I said. “With Jane’s help, that’s how.”
TWENTY-THREE
They all stared at me in disbelief. May said, “Jane?”
I shrugged. “She didn’t know she was helping, but it was all those conversations on special effects that gave him the idea. And I confess it was very clever. It only dawned on me what he had done when I realized that he had a cabin up here in the mountains. Because, when you think about it, even though the whole spectacle was mesmerizing, there was only one small part of it that was actually impossible. And it was that small detail that made the whole thing seem impossible.”
The colonel was frowning and Stuart was squinting at me like I’d just told him two and two made plum donut. “What are you talking about?”
I smiled. “It gets a little confusing, I know. And it was that simple fact that helped consolidate this as one of the classic cases in UFO mythology. Because, you see, Jasmine was not alone in being infatuated with Danny. Jane also had a big crush on him. And that night, she became jealous because she realized, with her feminine intuition, that Jasmine was coming on to him, in her own quiet, subtle way, and that he was liking it. So she made her play and tried to seduce him. The net result was that she got nowhere with Danny, but made Paul very mad and, where there was supposed to be a party at the cabin on Saturday night, instead, Paul and Jane’s bad feelings spread throughout the company and everybody ended up going home early.
“And
that confused me to start with because I had assumed that everybody was going home from your place in the Bronx. But they weren’t, they were going home from here, and Danny stayed. What did you do, Don? You sent Jasmine to bed. She’s so obedient she would do anything you told her, right? So you sent her to bed and, what? Did you shoot him? Stab him?”
May let out a ghastly, inhuman wail. “Oh, no! Dear God, no, please!”
I stared at her and wondered for a moment at a mind that could accept her son’s death at the hands of extraterrestrials, but the thought of his being killed by another man was intolerable. I turned back to Don. He sighed.
“I stabbed him with a kitchen knife. Poor boy. He was very surprised.” He turned to look at May and Stuart. “I’m sorry. It was very quick. He hardly suffered at all. I stabbed him from behind, directly into the heart. Left the knife in until the heart had stopped beating, so there was practically no bleeding.”
The horror on Stuart’s face, and on May’s, was beyond words. They stared at him, and not just the horror of their son’s death was writ large in their eyes, but also the twenty years of betrayed trust, the twenty years of calling him a friend while all the time he had been their son’s executioner, all the while he had held the memory of their son’s death in his mind. I didn’t want to go on. I didn’t want to subject them to any more, but I had no choice.
“You took him down to the basement, as you did with Paul tonight.”
“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.”
