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

out walking the dog in the morning and she finds the body. Fortunately, she managed to get to the dog before it disturbed anything. This is ’98, before everybody had cell phones, so she has to hurry home to call it in. We get there with the crime scene guys and the ME and, believe me, there was not a person there who had ever seen anything like it. It was the craziest fuckin’ thing I ever saw in my whole career—in my entire life! No exaggeration.” He looked at each of us in turn. “For a start,” he adjusted his ass in his chair and held out his hands like he was framing a shot in a movie. “There’s his feet. They’re there, on the grass, about shoulder width apart. Just like he’s been standing there looking out at the river. And he’s still wearing his fucking thongs.”

Dehan smiled. “What are they, like, rubber sandals?”

“Yeah, you know, with the bit that goes between your toes. Like they wear in Florida. His fuckin’ head is there, and his fuckin’ balls are there. Everything, you know, in the right place if you know what I mean. And everything else, his neck, his chest, his arms, his hands, his fuckin’ legs—everything—has been incinerated. It’s just fuckin’ ash, you know what I’m saying? Ash! Except there were a few bits of bone, but they were all in the right place where they were supposed to be. It was like, and I don’t care if you think I’m crazy because now I’m retired so I can be crazy if I want to, it was exactly like he had been standing there and he had been hit—zap!—with a laser.”

Dehan sighed and shook her head. I scratched my chin. He raised both hands and nodded a lot. “I know. I know what you are thinking. It was set up to look that way by some nut. Now, I am going to tell you two things. One…” He held up one finger and stared at Dehan. “What possible motive could anybody have to set up such an elaborate, difficult murder? I mean, leave aside for now how they did it. We can come back to that in a minute. What possible motive? I mean, that kind of scenario, where the killer sets up an elaborate scene like that after the murder, we only find that with serial killers, right? That is the typical scene where you find that kind of staging of the corpse. But can you think of a single other case where we found a body set up like that?”

Dehan grimaced and I shook my head.

He went on, “Well believe me, I have canvassed every single PD from San Diego to Madawaska, and the only cases like it are unsolved cases of either spontaneous combustion or cattle mutilation.” He gave Dehan a challenging smile. “So I ain’t the only cop who couldn’t solve it. These cases do happen, they are investigated by local PDs, sheriffs’ departments, and the FBI, and they don’t get solved.”

Dehan looked unhappy. I closed my eyes to think. Ochoa went on. “And two, despite the rain that night, there were no footprints! So what are we saying? The body was carefully laid out using a sky crane that nobody noticed?” He leaned forward toward Dehan. “The problem you begin to face, Carmen, is that in order to give this a…” He used his fingers to make speech marks. “‘Logical’ explanation, you have to go to such lengths, to such extremes, that the logical explanation becomes more crazy than the illogical one.” He flopped back in his chair, smiling and shaking his head. “His body was surgically incinerated. Get that, surgically incinerated! Only a laser can do that, and several hundred people saw a laser at that location around the time he must have died.”

He spread his hands. Dehan looked at me resentfully. “We have maybe a thousand cold cases, and you have to pick this one.”

I gave her my blandest smile. “Just because you are murdered by a bad guy from Betelgeuse doesn’t mean you’re not entitled to justice, Dehan.” I turned to him. “What was your impression of the witnesses…”

He snorted. “Such as they were. You say witnesses, but the fact is there weren’t any. There were several hundred people who saw the lights that night. But nobody saw the killing. His friends and family, the last people to see him alive. They all liked him, they were all real upset, they all struck me as honest people…” He gave a knowing laugh. “In as much as anybody is truly honest, right? But most important of all, there was nobody who had anything you could call a motive.” He shook his head. “Nobody had means or motive. It was a locked room mystery, out in the middle of the park.”

We were silent for a moment. Finally I asked him, “What is your own feeling? Never mind facts or evidence or lack thereof. What does your gut tell you?”

He smiled at me but pointed at Dehan. “She’s going to laugh at me. But Donald Kirkpatrick, who knew Danny really well—he was one of the last people to see him alive—he wrote a book about the case. He called it Heaven’s Fire. And he says that Danny was shot by a UFO, just like we have assholes who go over to Africa and hunt from helicopters. He figures that’s what happened to Danny. He was hunted, for game.” He made a face and shrugged. It was an almost apologetic gesture. “I have to say, I agree. After twenty years turning this case over and following every conceivable lead, in my expert opinion, Danny Brown was shot, for sport, by an alien.”

Two

Stuart and May Brown, Danny’s parents, lived across the Westchester Creek in Clason Point. They were both retired—he had been an architect and she a school teacher—and,