Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [reading in the dark TXT] 📗

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