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

I raised an eyebrow. My mind was working faster than I could keep up with. “Someone he was taking to his van?”

He smiled. “It’s possible. It was just a feeling.”

I nodded. “Thank you. Enjoy the rest of the conference.”

We stepped out of the hotel into the parking lot. It was floodlit by spindly, aluminum giants with glowing eyes that spread a depressing yellow light over several hundred cars, all of which observed us with dead, black windshields. Our heels made stark echoes across the silence as we crossed toward the Jag. Then Dehan stopped abruptly as I pulled the keys from my pocket. She looked up at the sky, but the sky was invisible, as were the stars, obscured by the glowing blanket of interference generated by the city lights. She spoke with her face upturned, trying to pierce that veil of light, to see into the dark.

“Why did they wait?” She looked at me. “If he transgressed some rule or law by not going to the glade, why didn’t they zap him right there, at the camp site?”

“That was my question to you, remember?”

I opened the car, but she stayed, staring up, with the ghostly lamplight on her skin. “Now I’m asking you,” she said quietly.

I smiled and shrugged. “Jack Alderman.”

Now she looked at me and frowned. “Jack Alderman?”

“Sentenced to death in Georgia in 1975, and executed thirty-three years later.”

She walked toward me and stood looking up into my face. “You mean, just because they are aliens doesn’t mean they don’t have procedures to follow? They had to seek authorization? Maybe there was an appeal? Rubber stamps…?”

“If, Dehan.” I said, “If they are aliens. We have no idea what happened that night. This is all mind-blowing stuff, I agree, but none of it—none of it—so far, proves anything at all.”

She puffed out her cheeks and blew, then leaned the top of her head against my chest. “Take me home,” she said, “My head is going to explode.”

Twelve

She was peeling potatoes by the sink. I took a cold beer from the fridge and cracked it for her, then mixed myself a strong martini, dry. I took a long pull, felt myself start to relax and started cutting the potatoes into French fries. I glanced at her. Her face was kind of rigid. She peeled and chopped some onion and garlic and threw them in a pan of oil with the potatoes. After that, she wrenched open the fridge and hauled out tomatoes, lettuce, avocado, cucumber, and, from a cupboard, a jar of artichoke hearts. Then she started making salad with enough aggression to take down Mike Tyson. When she had reduced the tomatoes to a bloody mess, she turned and stared at me with wide eyes and clenched jaw.

“We are going about this all wrong.”

I shrugged with one shoulder. “I would have cut the tomatoes into chunks rather than make a puree.”

“Danny was not killed by aliens!”

“As I have said to you before, statistics support that view.”

“But!”

“But…”

“From trigger to execution…”

“You mean from the trance on Friday night to his death Sunday night?”

“There simply wasn’t time to set up something this elaborate…”

“You said Paul might have been building up for months…”

“For petrol and drones! But we’ve seen it was much more elaborate than that! Something this elaborate…”

I sighed. “OK…”

“That is…” She put her long index finger on my chest. “There wasn’t time for people with the resources of Paul or Jane to set it up.”

“Jane?”

She looked surprised. “Sure, she has as much motive as Paul.”

“Interesting. But you are saying not Jane because she hadn’t the resources.”

“Yeah, but my point is, I am excluding the damned aliens!”

“So our question, you are saying, should be, who, exclusively among humans, had the resources?”

“Yes!”

“And your suggestion is…?”

She stared at me for a long moment. “Are you taking me seriously?”

“Yes.” I pulled the salad bowl over and started making a salad that didn’t look like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. “But while you tell me your thoughts, open the wine and put the steaks on.”

She walked away and after a moment I heard the cork pop. Then the fridge opened and closed and she came and stood next to me while the griddle got hot. She said, “The Feds.”

I stopped dead and turned to stare at her. “The Feds? Dehan, do you realize what you are saying?”

“Of course I do.”

I shook my head. “No. It doesn’t make sense. They might, at a real stretch, break the rules to eliminate a terrorist, somebody the director deemed a real threat, but Danny Brown? Besides, that culture hasn’t existed in the Bureau since Hoover.”

She held up her hands, “OK, OK, OK, maybe not the Feds, but some department acting on information supplied by the Feds.”

I stared at her for a long time. I had a bad feeling. Past her shoulder I could see the griddle beginning to smoke. I sighed. “Let’s get the meat on.”

She sprinkled coarse salt on them, slung them on the iron and they hissed and caught fire. I took the salad to the table, checked the French fries, and started to spoon them onto the plates. We didn’t talk again till we were sitting at the table and I was pouring the wine.

I watched her cut into her steak and was momentarily hypnotized by the trace of blood that trickled across her plate and mixed with the oil from the salad. She stuffed the piece in her mouth and watched me while she chewed. She said, with her mouth full, “Come on, Stone, we both know there are departments in the White House and the Pentagon that not even the President is aware of.”

I stuffed an excess of fries and steak into my mouth and said,