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

I fired up the engine and pulled out of the lot. As we headed toward Bruckner Boulevard, I made a face and shook my head. “He makes a compelling case for the existence of UFOs. I’ve got to the cattle mutilations…”

“Same.”

“So far, he hasn’t proved anything, but he is putting up a damn good argument. As far as explaining Danny’s death…” I shrugged. “I haven’t got there yet, but I am not seeing it.” I glanced at her and smiled. “Besides, what happened to Holmes? I thought you had the whole thing figured out.”

She scowled. “You’re a son of a bitch, Stone. You knew perfectly well there was no petrol, no accelerant of any sort found in the ashes or the soil. That’s why you asked Frank to send over the ME’s report.”

I nodded. “Yeah, that was a small problem, plus it had been raining on and off all afternoon—Ochoa told us that—so the clay would have been wet long before they got there. And there was another problem…”

She looked at me. “You could have told me all this when I came up with the theory.”

“But you looked so happy. And, also, there might still be something in it.”

“What’s the other thing?”

“To incinerate his body to the state it was in, it would have needed around one thousand, eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit, sustained for about two hours. Even then, there would have been more bones in the ashes. The boiling point of hydroxyapatite is around one thousand five hundred centigrade, which is about two thousand five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Hydroxyapatite is a naturally-occurring mineral form of calcium, which you would need to evaporate to make bone disintegrate. So either he was burned for over two hours at nearly two thousand degrees, or he was blasted with heat at nearly three thousand degrees for a short while.”

She looked out the window at the passing houses as the streetlamps started to come on. “You just happen to know this, about what temperatures bodies burn, and hydroxipa-whatever.”

“No, but I have a book on the subject. It’s on the shelf at home. I looked it up. Books are good like that.”

“Point taken. So we are back to square one.”

I shook my head. A car passed with its headlamps on. I leaned forward and switched mine on, too. Imperceptibly, dusk moved in and turned the air grainy.

“What you did was show that with a little ingenuity, you can make a murder look like the work of aliens.”

We drove in silence for a while, but as we turned onto Morris Park Avenue, she suddenly shook her head. “I don’t know, Stone. I don’t think I did, because, A, the timing of the rain was crucial and, B, even if you remove the rain from the equation, the fact remains, you need about three thousand degrees to burn the body. The cuts on his feet and neck were singed, but the head and feet themselves, his hair and his flip-flops were untouched, just like the grass underneath him. However ingenious his killer was, that is one tall order.”

I nodded. I had to admit she was right. And after a moment, she added, “And let’s face it, do you see Paul as the type to dream up something that elaborate?”

I shrugged and made a face. “People can surprise you. Sometimes if you over-think something it becomes more complicated than it need be. An uncomplicated mind sees things more clearly.”

She grunted. “What do you think?”

I shook my head again. “At the moment I’m trying not to think.”

“The way of the empty mind, Sensei? Idiot Do?”

“Something like that.”

We left the car in the large parking lot and entered the lobby of the hotel as dusk was shifting to evening. The conference was signposted and we made our way to a large, windowless, ‘L’ shaped room down a blue, carpeted passage. Rows of chairs had been set out facing a table holding a small projector, with a screen set up behind it. The event was well attended. I figured there were maybe seventy or eighty people there, and more were arriving. Among the throng, talking to a man by the projector, I saw the long, lanky figure of Donald Kirkpatrick.

In the foot part of the ‘L’, opposite the entrance, I saw Jasmine at another table, setting out cups, plastic bottles of water, and jugs of orange juice. I approached her and smiled. She didn’t look at me.

I said, “Hello, Jasmine. Do you know if Paul Estevez is here?”

For a moment, she ignored me completely and I thought maybe she hadn’t heard me. Then she gave her head a tiny shake and said, “Not yet,” turned, and hurried away.

We made our way to the conference section and found a couple of seats at the back, in the corner, where we could observe without being observed. But as it turned out, that was something of a vain hope.

Five minutes later, all the seats were filled and Kirkpatrick was having a few last words with a man in a blue blazer. I guessed he was the speaker. He was a strongly built, earnest-looking man in his mid sixties, with a graying beard and very short, gray hair. The man stepped back, beside the projector, and Kirkpatrick stepped forward, looked out at his audience and the murmur of conversation hushed. He smiled, and instantly looked like a different man. For a moment, I could almost see the man Jane had described to us.

“Welcome,” he said, “I am delighted to see so many familiar faces, and a few new ones. Today is a very special day for me. It is twenty years this week that I decided to start researching Heaven’s Fire, just a couple of weeks after Danny Brown’s death. So, in what some might think a futile gesture,