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

here? I’m saying that, if Joe Pesci winds up dead, shot six times, execution style, in Tony’s Ristorante, I’m already pretty sure it was the Mob. I might be wrong, but I am personally convinced this was a Mob hit. However, to convict de Niro in a court of law, I need proof. I need the murder weapon, I need forensic evidence from ballistics, I need fingerprints, I need eyewitnesses who can personally identify de Niro. And above all I need, not just a victim, but also a particular person I can attribute the murder to.” I shrugged. “The difference is that I am looking for an Italian individual. You are trying to prove the Italians actually exist.”

He smiled. “Fair point.”

There was a lot of muttering and murmuring. After a moment, I added, “For what it’s worth, if you were trying to prove, in a court of law, that those murders could only have been committed by… the ‘Mafia’, I’d say you’d have the defense sweating and loosening their ties.”

There was a fifteen minute break, and for a short while the room was in mild uproar. People thronged around Colonel Hait and Donald Kirkpatrick and I scanned the room for Paul.

Dehan pointed, said, “He’s there,” and swung her long legs over the back of her chair to go after him.

I followed her through the crowd to where Paul was talking to a small man in sparkling eye shadow and a purple velvet cloak. She placed a hand on his shoulder and smiled, but it wasn’t a particularly nice smile.

I said to the man in the cloak, “May we borrow him for a while?” and gently hustled Paul out to the corridor. The doors thudded behind us and suddenly it was very quiet.

He was looking from me to Dehan and back again. He looked worried. “Is there a problem?”

I shook my head. “No. We were just talking and we have a few loose ends we’d like you to tie up for us. Maybe you could you come in tomorrow and we could go over them with you?”

“Loose ends? Like what?”

I smiled. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow. What time suits you?”

He looked more worried. “Nine AM?”

“Perfect.”

The door opened and Kirkpatrick stepped out with his wife behind him. The agreeable smile had gone, replaced with his usual look of sour betrayal. He saw Paul and snapped, “There you are. I’m going to take the detectives to the small conference room. I need you to supervise the Q and A. Do you think you can manage that?”

“Of course.” To us he said, “Excuse me,” and went back inside.

Kirkpatrick said, “Follow me,” and began to walk. He had a large bag hung around his shoulder. As I fell into step beside him he extracted from it a cardboard box containing a videocassette. “Remember these?” He handed it to me. “It wasn’t so long ago. They were replaced by digital cameras only twelve years ago, but it seems like another world. That’s the original film, shot on the Sunday night, over Soundview Park. I assume you will want to hang on to it as evidence, but I would like it back when you’re done with it.”

He pushed into a small conference room and Dehan, Jasmine, and I followed him in. There was a row of windows along one wall with slatted blinds drawn down, shutting out the night. A long table occupied the center of the floor with six chairs set around it. He turned to his wife and said, “Kill some of these lights, will you?”

As she did so, he pulled a laptop from his bag, opened it, and plugged a pen drive into one of the USB ports. He rattled at the keyboard and said, “Sit down, Detectives. This is a digital copy of exactly what you have on the videotape I have given you.”

We sat and he turned the laptop to face us, then stepped away with one hand behind his back, the other separating the slats of the blinds so he could gaze out the window at the darkness and the distant sparkle of anonymous lights.

The screen was black. Then it was suddenly filled with fuzzy, colored light that moved around while the cameraman tried to focus in on it. You could hear lots of excited voices. Some of them were screaming, others were asking, “What the hell is it?” The camera zoomed out, focused, and then began to zoom slowly in again. In the foreground you could see a throng of people. I guessed about forty or fifty, lining O’Brien Road, staring up at the sky. Many of them had umbrellas.

You could also make out the line of trees that fringed and concealed the park, so that it was impossible to tell if Danny was already there or not. Above the park, in the air, the shape of the UFO was not discernible. All you could see were bright red, blue and yellow lights, and among them smaller lights of the same colors, which were flashing intermittently. It was hard to tell if the object was stable or not, because the camera was moving, so it seemed to dance around on the screen. But by freezing the image I was able to make a rough estimate of its size. I said to Dehan, “What do you think, six to ten feet across?”

She nodded.

Kirkpatrick said to the window, “The experts we submitted it to estimated eight, so you are in the same ballpark.”

Dehan spoke half to herself. “Too small to carry a man or a woman.”

I shrugged. “Assuming he was a full-sized human.”

She frowned at me, but before she could answer I pressed ‘play’ again. Loud screams erupted from the computer. What had triggered the screams was a sudden burst of red lasers, about six of them, that erupted from the belly of the craft toward the