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

your resident’s permit to your food and the roof over your head. Not to mention the way of life to which you were rapidly becoming accustomed. So what to do?” I wagged a finger at her. “And I bet that was when your mind went back, almost without thinking, to the things you had seen as a kid. Where are you from in the Philippines, Jasmine? Let me guess. Western Samar? Maybe Sorsogon…?”

She nodded. “Sorsogon…”

“And you had often seen the trances of the Mangkukulam, you knew how it looked and how convincing it could be. And you were right. It fooled everybody. Especially as nobody expected it from such a shy, obedient young girl like you.” I turned to Don. “It fooled almost everybody. It didn’t fool you, though, did it, Don? You were really in love with your new bride. You doted on her. It really surprised me when Paul told me that, because now you treat her like dirt. But back then, you doted on her. You doted on her so much that you were aware of her every desire, and you noticed the tiniest nuances and changes in those desires. And however hard she tried to hide it, you noticed when she started to turn cold on you, and started to hunger for Danny. You saw the concealed looks, the gazes, the blushes, the smiles…those million and one tiny giveaways that tell you somebody’s feelings have changed. You noticed.” I shook my head. “I’m guessing you would have been willing to ignore it, if she only hadn’t acted on it. Am I right?”

He curled his lip. “If you think you are going to get me to admit anything…”

“Come on! What difference does it make? I’m a cop! I’m curious! But by the end of tonight, you’re going to have as much on me and Dehan as we have on you.” I turned my smile on Jasmine. It wasn’t a nice smile. “If you had just been willing to love him from a distance, it would probably all have blown over. But you are not the type, are you? You are the type who, when you want something, you go after it; in your own, shy, secret way, but you go after it. That, after all, is why you’re here in the States, right? Because you will go the extra nine yards.

“You wanted Danny, but you were never alone with him. You were always with Don. Plus, in the beginning, I bet Danny didn’t responded to your secret come-ons, did he? He loved and respected Don, and he would never have betrayed him. But bit by bit, he started to become fascinated. Because you were not quite like any woman he had ever known before. And you began to notice that he liked you.

“So that night, that awful, fateful night in June, 1998, you pretended to go into a trance, you thrashed around as you had seen the Mangkukulam do, and then you spoke your silly, childish lines, that you and Danny were the chosen ones, and, to keep him happy and make him feel important, you borrowed a line from the Bible and told Don he was the rock on which they would build. And after everything they had just witnessed on Don’s specially adapted equipment, they were all taken in…” I turned to Don. “Except you. You saw right through it, and you saw right through it not just because you could read Jasmine like a book, but because you knew that everything they had all just witnessed on your especially adapted equipment was a crock of horseshit. You knew there were no aliens out there trying to make contact. You knew it was all a scam. I don’t know if you borrowed the technology from Jane, or if she was in on it with you, but all your group saw that night on Macomb Mountain was special effects, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “Yes. I knew they were there. I still know they are there. But I was sick of waiting. I had been promising so much to my group, to Jasmine, but they would not show themselves to me. And I could see Jasmine losing interest, becoming ever more drawn in, like everybody else, by Danny’s magnetism and charisma. They were all drifting away from me. Jane had no idea, but I picked her brains over a few weeks and put something together. For a little while that night I tasted success, and Danny was in awe of me for a change.”

“And then Jasmine had her trance, and you knew. You knew that she had decided to sleep with him, and once she did, it would be over. Your love affair, your marriage, your dreams, the group—everything would be over. So you forbade them to go, and in forbidding it, in trying to terrify them into obedience, you remembered the cattle mutilation cases, and the Brazilian case in Guarapiranga, amongst others, and in that moment, the idea was born in your mind. You wouldn’t kill him, the aliens would.”

May was shaking her head, staring from me to Don and back again. “No! No! Donald? It’s not true! Donald? How? How? We have been over this a thousand times!”

“How?” I said. “With Jane’s help, that’s how.”

Twenty-three

They all stared at me in disbelief. May said, “Jane?”

I shrugged. “She didn’t know she was helping, but it was all those conversations on special effects that gave him the idea. And I confess it was very clever. It only dawned on me what he had done when I realized that he had a cabin up here in the mountains. Because, when you think about it, even though the whole spectacle was mesmerizing, there was only one small part of it that was actually impossible. And it was that small detail that made the whole thing seem impossible.”

The colonel was frowning and Stuart was squinting at