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

that maybe you were your wife’s victim.” I stopped at the top of the stairs and stared into Dehan’s face. She was frowning, confused. Then I looked past her at Donald Kirkpatrick. “Both made sense, yet neither made perfect sense. Then it dawned on me, only tonight, that you were partners. That you were acting together.”

I turned and walked out of the kitchen into the vast living room. There, Stuart, May, and Colonel Hait sat together on the sofa, looking frightened and confused. Jasmine stood by the fire. She held a .38 revolver in both hands, trained on the colonel.

May watched me walk in and said, “What the hell is going on?”

I gave her a lopsided smile. “You asking the bacon, May? I couldn’t begin to understand, remember?”

Stuart looked at me resentfully. “This is not the time for scoring points, Detective Stone!”

I gave my head a little twist to the side and made a ‘tsc!’ sound. “If not now, then when, Stuart?” I looked at the colonel. There was a question in my eyes: had he relinquished his weapon? I knew he read me, and he seemed to nod. The .38 was his. I sat in the armchair with my gun on my lap and looked at them all. Don and Dehan were close behind me.

Don shoved Dehan toward the sofa and said, “Sit down!” Then he turned to me. “OK, Stone, now you hand over your gun. If you don’t, we start shooting. We start with May, then Stuart, then the colonel, and finally your partner.”

I made a face like I wasn’t really convinced. “I don’t know, Don. I grant you, you have a strong hand, but it sounds to me like you’re not thinking very clearly. Let me explain the situation to you. Here you have two senior detectives from the 43rd Precinct of the New York Police Department, who have gone for a long weekend up to the Adirondacks while in the middle of an investigation, and they have gone to the very spot where the case they are investigating started…” I smiled, gave a small laugh and shook my head. “Clearly this is no coincidence, and it is merely a device to get around jurisdictional red tape. So you must realize that our chief is aware of where we are, and what we are doing here. And in fact, he will be expecting to hear from us tomorrow morning.”

Jasmine was staring at me with no expression on her face at all. Don glanced at her, then back at me. He swallowed. I went on.

“Now, maybe, if you are real smart, you might get away with killing all these witnesses and pretending it was the aliens who did it. Everybody will know you are lying, but if there is no evidence, you might just get away with it.” I laughed. “But a sofa full of bullet holes and soaked in blood? I don’t think so. We are at an impasse, Don. You both know it.”

He snarled, “You think we are incapable of taking them outside one by one and executing them?”

“Oh, I think you are very capable of that. But the moment you pick somebody, I am going to put a bullet through your head.” I looked over at Jasmine. The only change to her expression was that her face had gone tight; other than that, there was nothing. I said to her, “How about that, Jasmine? Life without Don. The rest of your life in a women’s prison, knowing that Don was dead. That appeal to you?”

Her eyes flicked over at him and I saw fear.

He snapped, “Don’t listen to him! We can do this!”

I said, “I’m curious about something. Just indulge me for a moment, and then we can get back to how we solve this impasse…”

He frowned, smelling a way out. “What do you mean, ‘solve’?”

I laughed. “Come on, Don! We are all grown-ups here. I am sure we can find a solution where everybody wins.” I played a hunch and gave Jasmine a sly look. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Jasmine?”

Don said, “Some kind of deal…?”

“We’ll come to that. Just indulge me, I’m curious. How this whole thing started, way back in ’98. Back then, you were no part of this, were you?” I looked at Jasmine. “You were just a mail-order bride, right? Young—what were you, twenty-five, twenty-six, excited, a little out of your depth, swept off your feet by a husband who, though he was a lot older than you, was fun, exciting, even a bit glamorous, right? You must have been blown away by the whole thing.”

I waited. She didn’t answer. She just stared at her husband. There was terror in her eyes. I pushed on.

“And, you know what I’m curious about? Were you interested in UFOs back in the Philippines? Or was that something you just got involved in through your husband? Either way, it must have been pretty cool to have the cabin for the weekends, and come out to the mountains, and all of Don’s friends who’d come along, too…”

I let the words trail away. She was staring at Don real hard. She was willing him to do something. All of her attention was on him and I could have shot her right then without her ever realizing it, but the risk of Don shooting Dehan in retaliation was too high.

“Trouble is,” I said, “however much we have, we always want something we don’t have, isn’t that right? And you had it all, Jasmine, but, like the desperado, you wanted something you couldn’t have. You wanted Danny, didn’t you?”

She shook her head. “No, not true.”

I laughed quietly. “Come on, Jasmine, the game is over. It’s time to admit the truth. You saw him, and right away you fell in love, but you were totally dependent on Donald, for everything, from