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

way through a broad border of grasses, wild flowers and bindweed until we came to a broad expanse of coarse scrub and gray clay, bounded by a path that entered the park from the west, ran along the riverbank for two hundred yards, and then turned north, skirting the amphitheater. I stopped and looked around for a moment, remembering the photos I’d studied. Then I pointed south, to a slight rise where I could see a small tree. “Over there, by that oak tree.”

We trudged across the dense, cloying soil for maybe a hundred yards, until we came to a tall, spindly pin oak which, twenty years earlier, would have been little more than the sapling I had seen in the picture. I stood by the tree and took ten paces to the west, turned, and looked at Dehan, who was watching me with her hands in her back pockets. “This is the spot,” I said. “Try to visualize it. Sometime on Sunday night. It’s been raining on and off since late afternoon. It’s dark. His feet, in his thongs, are here.” I found two large clumps of clay and positioned them where his feet had been. “Facing out toward the water. His body, or what is left of it, is lying back from his feet. Imagine,” I said, “that a guy with a samurai sword, as sharp as a scalpel, had cut through his ankles, and he had fallen straight back.”

“Wait.”

She picked up a stick and came over, scratched out the shape of his body, with no head, lying on the ground, with his arms at forty-five degree angles from his body. Then she went and found a large clump of clay, the size of a melon. “His head is…” She gauged the distance with her eye and placed the lump where his head had been found. “…about here. And…” She grinned, found a twig and two acorns and placed it where his genitals would have been. “…the pièce de résistance!”

I pointed at the ground. “This is clay. It sucks up water, holds it a long time, and keeps its shape.”

She nodded, “I hear you. There should have been footprints.” She screwed up her face like an angry fist. “But wait, please, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Sensei. Let’s look at each step separately and then see if we can fit them together at the end. First, of the people we know of, who had anything like a possible motive?”

I scratched my head. “Anything like a possible motive? Any one of them, Dehan. We just don’t know anything about his relationships yet. He was attractive, single, wanting to stay unattached. Right there you have a breeding ground for motives: jealousy, rejection, envy…”

“OK, so opportunity.” She sighed and corrected herself. “OK, not opportunity, because we know nothing of his movements, so any one of them might have had opportunity, including his parents.”

I nodded. “Which brings us to means.”

We stared at each other for a long time. Then she threw her hands in the air and expostulated, “Son of a gun! Means! Sure, anyone with a laser scalpel in 1998! But not just a laser scalpel—a laser scalpel capable of incinerating an entire body at the same time as surgically removing the head, the feet and the…” She sighed. “This is bullshit, Stone.” She turned to me. “He was not killed by aliens!”

I chuckled in a way I knew was annoying. “It’s not just the scalpel and the incineration, there is also the question of how the killer got here across the wet clay and then left, without leaving any tracks. Even if we argue that Danny might have been killed somewhere else and deposited here, the killer still has to cross the wet clay and lay out the feet, the head…” I shook my head. “And then go back. It’s a hell of an undertaking.”

She made a three hundred and sixty degree turn, scanning the entire visible park and the river. Then shook her head. I pointed up at the sky. “The lights were seen up there.” She stared at me like she was about to smack me. “Don’t look at me in that tone of voice, Dehan. The lights were seen by several hundred witnesses, they are a part of the evidence we have to sift through. Suck it up, baby. They were seen directly above the scene, firing lasers down toward the ground. They then moved south for a way and suddenly vanished in a flash of white light.”

She turned and pointed at me. “OK, Stone, I’m going to come at this from a different angle.”

“Good.”

“Forget the whole UFO thing, right?”

“This is different?”

“Let’s face it, if he was killed by an alien, we will never prove it and, as you pointed out to May Brown, we have no extradition treaty with Betelgeuse, so we will never catch him. Therefore the only line of inquiry worth pursuing is, the killer was human.”

I shrugged. “The statistics are on your side at least.”

“Shut up and tell me what you think: our killer is smart, he thinks out of the box. He would have to, to come up with a plan like this and get away with it. I mean…” She gave a small laugh. “If you hadn’t pissed off Captain Jennifer Cuevas back in the day, we would never have been assigned to cold cases, and he would have got away with this. And he still might! So he is smart, and an original thinker.”

“Can’t argue with that.”

“And…” She raised a finger. “He is daring. He is not afraid to go extreme and take risks.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “Hmmm…”

“So, he puts together a drone, or whatever equivalent they had back in the ’90s, with all the flashing lights and lasers. He hovers it over the park. It’s daring because it is drawing everybody’s attention, but it