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

Jane and I didn’t talk all the way back. It was the longest drive of my life. Finally, I dropped her at her place. It was her parents’ place back then. I remember it like it was yesterday. I had been really in love with her. I was going to marry her, for Christ’s sake! You know? And as she was opening the door…” He shook his head, still incredulous after twenty years. “She was just going to get out of the car and go into her house, without saying anything. But I stopped her. I said, ‘I got to tell you something before you get out of the car.’ She says, ‘Can’t it wait? I’m tired.’ I said, ‘No, because I am probably never going to talk to you again.’ So she goes kind of frozen, like she’s shocked. I said, ‘You are a shallow, selfish, unfeeling bitch. You used me and you discarded me with no consideration for my feelings. You were willing to destroy me without compassion, just so you could play your little game with Danny.’ Then I told her, ‘Get out of my car and get out of my life. I never want to see you again.’ She got out and she had the gall, the sheer, fuckin’ gall—to run into her house crying! Can you believe that?” He sat staring at the wall, shaking his head. “Man, I haven’t talked about this for years. It brings it all back.”

Dehan said, “That was pretty brutal. What did you do next?”

“I continued on my way and went home. There I went to bed and I am ashamed to say I cried myself to sleep. The next day I started drinking around lunchtime and I don’t think I sobered up for a week.”

“Can anyone confirm that?”

He shrugged. “I honestly can’t remember, Detective Stone.” He smiled at me. I was surprised to see that it was not an unsympathetic smile. “I don’t mean to be funny, but I don’t honestly feel I need an alibi. Because there was no way on God’s green Earth that I was capable of inventing whatever it was that incinerated Danny and cut off his head and his feet. Could I have cut off his head and his feet with my katana?” He nodded. “For sure. Could I have incinerated him and placed him there in the park, and arranged for a space probe to fly over and fire its damned lasers at him?” He shook his head and smiled. “Nah. No way. That’s out of my league. I wish you luck. I’d like to catch whoever did it, especially if Don is wrong and you are right, and it was a person who killed him. But I honestly don’t think it was. This is one case you are never going to solve, unless you start looking somewhere else.”

Dehan heaved a big sigh and absently tied her hair behind her neck. When she was done, she said, “Can you tell us any more about the signals that Don picked up, or the thing you saw flying in the sky? I noticed he doesn’t say much about it in his book.”

He made a face. “Not really. The signals I didn’t understand at all. He said there were too many random variations for it to be of a natural origin. The images, he had a special camera focused on a sector of the sky to the southwest of our position. He had special lenses and software that allowed him to connect the camera to the computer, and then on the screen you could see these objects appear and disappear, flying across the sky just the way he described them.”

“Did he record it?”

“Yeah, he recorded it on his computer.”

“What did he do with the recordings, do you know?”

He shrugged. “You’d have to ask him, but I think he contacted the FBI and the Air Force and offered them sight of what he had recorded. I don’t know what came of that. He never told anybody.”

Dehan glanced at me. I had no more questions, but I was reluctant to let him go. I wanted to go over everything he had said again. I had a gut feeling he had said something that I had missed. It was nagging at my mind, but I couldn’t pin it down. They were both watching me, waiting. I tried to run through the whole conversation, focusing on what he had said, on what he had told us, but I couldn’t nail it. It was in there, some small comment he’d made, but I couldn’t find it. Finally, I shook my head and spread my hands.

“Thank you, Paul. You have been very helpful.”

“We’re done? I can go?”

“Sure, of course.”

I stood and saw him to the door. There he stopped a moment and looked into my face. “It wasn’t Jane, you know. I didn’t mean to suggest that Jane did it either.” He shrugged. “I don’t see how anybody could have done it.”

I nodded. “I know, Paul. Thanks.”

He left and I watched him go down the stairs. Then I went back into the interrogation room, closed the door, and went and rested my ass on the table. Dehan was still sitting. I crossed my arms and looked down at her.

“Did anything in what he said strike you as significant?”

She thought for a while before answering, then kind of shrugged with her eyebrows. “He struck me as sincere. His story seems very believable. And it is hard to imagine him getting back and in just a few hours putting together that elaborate plan. There must be a thousand simpler, more satisfying ways he could have killed him, and still got away with it.”

I grunted. “Yeah. No. It wasn’t that.”

“Also, it rang true that he was mad at her, not Danny.”

I shook my head. “There was something he said. It’s stuck in my