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

“May we come in? We won’t take much of your time. We Just need to talk to him for a minute.”

She backed away a step which I took, rightly or wrongly, as an invitation to come in. I stepped over the threshold into a broad entrance hall, and Dehan came in behind me. Mrs. Kirkpatrick backed up some more, saying, “Umm…” and Dehan closed the door.

She didn’t look happy. “OK, I’ll go and tell him. Wait, please…”

I watched her disappear toward the kitchen and wondered absently what had turned her into an obedient, servile woman. My gut told me it didn’t come naturally. I dismissed the thought and looked around. On my right a door stood open onto a large, comfortable living room. The furniture looked expensive, but old and threadbare. There were bookcases in every available space, and even so there were more books than they could hold. So they stood in small piles everywhere you looked, in front of other books, on the floor, on the sideboard.

Ahead, a staircase rose straight to the next floor. The banister was painted white and the carpet was an ugly, dark green. Past the stairs, on the left, I could see light streaming in from the kitchen. There was a smell of baking bread, and I could hear feet stomping up wooden stairs, and a nagging male voice explaining to Mrs. Kirkpatrick the million and one ways in which she had failed him—yet again. I told myself I had probably found the answer to my question about her servility.

His shadow loomed across the light and then Donald Kirkpatrick moved down the passage toward us. He was at least six foot six, slim and stooped. His knees had an odd trick of poking out to the sides as he walked. His face should have been handsome, but his irritable bad temper had etched it with ugly lines.

“Is it too much to ask that New York Police Department phone before just turning up? We do have lives, you know, and jobs.”

He was drawing breath to follow up on his greeting so I cut him short. “Yes. I’m sorry. Crime waits for no man,” I added facetiously and smiled. “We won’t take up much of your time, Mr. Kirkpatrick. It’s about Danny Brown. You do remember him?”

His thick eyebrows, which were turning a snowy white, knitted over his long nose. “Of course I remember him. What can you possibly want with Danny after twenty years?”

I stared at him without expression for a slow count of five, then said, “May we come in and perhaps sit down? It will make it easier to explain. We are not here to inconvenience anybody, Mr. Kirkpatrick, we are only trying to solve a homicide.”

He sighed noisily and gracelessly and flung a long arm in the direction of the living room. “Very well. Of course. We may as well have coffee. Jasmine, make coffee. And try not to make it too strong this time.” He walked ahead of us through the door, muttering, “I’ve only been telling her for twenty years.”

He lowered himself into an old, cracked chesterfield. Beside it there was a small table with a large ashtray and a pipe settled in it. Dehan sat on the sofa and I took the chair directly across from him. He began scraping out his pipe with a small pen knife and spoke without looking up.

“Well, what do you want to know?”

“We’d like you to talk us through the last forty-eight hours of Danny’s life.”

He stopped scraping and stared at me incredulously. Then he stared at Dehan, then back at me. “You have got to be joking. What is this? Is this some kind of joke?”

I sighed. “No, Mr. Kirkpatrick. Believe it or not, the NYPD does not tend to joke about murder. We run a cold cases unit out of the 43rd Precinct, and we are reviewing Danny’s case.”

He shook his head and went back to scraping the bowl of his pipe. “Priceless. This is priceless. You ignore the case for twenty years and now you want to open it up again and find the…”

My patience ran out. I snapped, “Mr. Kirkpatrick, I am as unimpressed by your opinion as I am by your lack of good manners. Now we can do this here or we can do it down at the station house. Wherever we do it, we’ll get done faster if you spare us all your opinion on things you know nothing about.” His eyes bulged and his face went scarlet. He looked like he was about to rupture an artery so I said, “I believe Danny came to see you on the Friday. You and the group were going on some kind of field trip, is that correct?”

He sat working his jaw. Dehan said, “Sir, it is probably simplest just to answer our questions, then we can get out of your hair. Did Danny come over on the Friday?”

“To answer your impertinent question, Danny and some ten or eleven other people came over to my house on that Friday. Friday 5th of June. We then got into three off-road vehicles, two Jeeps and a Land Rover, and drove to Macomb Mountain. There we camped for the night and attempted to make contact with the Visitors. Does that answer your question?”

Dehan said, “When you say ‘the Visitors’ you mean…?”

“Yes, Detective, and you can mock me to your heart’s content. Believe me, I have been mocked by brighter people than yourself and I have become impervious! Aliens, extraterrestrials, ETs, trans-dimensional travelers! Whatever you want to call them. We attempted to contact them!”

I frowned at him. “Did you succeed?”

He looked surprised. He searched my face for any indication of mockery. He didn’t find any because I was not mocking. After a moment, he shrugged. “Maybe.”

I thought for