Fire From Heaven: Dead Cold Mystery 9 Page 7

  “My feelings precisely. As of right now, I am more interested in the Bureau’s involvement than in the ETs. So, I would like to interview those agents, and I need you to find out, A, if it is true that they went to see the witnesses and, B, if so, will they talk to me about it? And Bernie, make them understand I am not using official channels as a courtesy…”

  “Yeah, OK. But you do realize, Stone, that the FBI does not have a department specializing in supernatural phenomena or UFOs. That’s just fiction.”

  “I know that, Bernie. I also know that the Bureau has investigated both from time to time, when it has considered there might be a threat to national security.”

  “OK, I’ll make some inquiries and get back to you.”

  “I appreciate it. Oh, and, Bernie…”

  “Yuh?”

  “What do you know about cattle mutilation?”

  “Ah, jeez! Do you know how many people ask me about that? That was, like, forty years ago out in the Midwest. Some ranchers complained that their cattle were being slaughtered and mutilated. We were asked to investigate, but the Bureau had no jurisdiction in a case like that. How is that a federal matter, right? I think we investigated a case on an Indian reservation because we had jurisdiction there and there was political pressure to do something. It turned out to be coyotes or some such. But the conspiracy theory websites get hold of this stuff, you know? And they make something out of nothing.”

  I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “OK, Bernie, I thanks, I appreciate it. We need to get together some time. You owe me I don’t know how many drinks.”

  “Yeah, right. Stop talking about it and do it already!”

  We laughed. He told me he’d get back to me and hung up.

  I strolled back toward the station house deep in thought, came to my car, and paused to rest my ass on the hood. After staring at nothing for a while, I called Donald Kirkpatrick. It rang twice and his voice, severe and impatient, said, “Yes!”

  “Mr. Kirkpatrick, this is Detective Stone. Good morning.”

  He seemed to soften a bit. “Oh, Detective. What can I do for you?”

  “I keep hearing about somebody who got footage of the lights over Soundview Park that night. Have you ever seen that film?”

  “Yes. I own the original. I bought it from the person who made it, when I decided to write my book.”

  “May I see it?”

  He seemed to hesitate for a moment. “Yes, of course. Are you coming to the talk tomorrow?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “Good. Then after the conference, we can have a look at it.”

  “Great. Mr. Kirkpatrick, before I let you go. You never mentioned that Paul Estevez and Jane Harrison were engaged.”

  “Should I have?”

  “Well, in view of the fact that they broke off their engagement on the night Danny was murdered, do you not think that was relevant?”

  “Not really. Why should it be?”

  “Do you know why they broke up?”

  “No. It’s none of my business, Detective.”

  “Apparently they had a row at your house.”

  “I was not aware of it. They were terribly young at the time, Detective Stone. People of that age are always getting emotional about their relationships. Frankly, after the experiences we had just had on Macomb Mountain, I couldn’t have been less interested in Jane and Paul’s relationship.”

  “How about Danny? Was he involved with anybody?”

  “Not that I am aware of.” He gave a snort that might have been a laugh. “Danny was a remarkable young man, and eminently sensible. Too sensible to tie himself to any kind of long-term relationship.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, that is the impression I am beginning to get. Thank you, Mr. Kirkpatrick. I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”

  I hung up and watched Dehan step out of the station house and stand for a moment, looking around. She spotted me and crossed the road at a slow run.

  “You hiding, Mr. Stone?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ve been looking for the movie of the lights. I don’t think it was ever uploaded to Youtube. I contacted NBC, who ran it on the news at…”

  She stopped because I was shaking my head. “Kirkpatrick has it. He’s going to bring it along tomorrow night for us to see.”

  She narrowed her eyes and nodded, then pointed at me. “You the man.”

  “I also asked Bernie to put us in touch with the agents who—allegedly—spoke to the witnesses. We’ll see where that leads. Maybe we’ll both get abducted, or visited by men in black.”

  She sat next to me and chewed her lip, staring at the blacktop. “So now we have a motive. Jealousy.”

  “Mm-hm…”

  “And he’s Latino. Latinos can be very jealous.”

  “Is that so?”

  She nodded. “Yup.” Then she shrugged and peered at me in the sunshine. “It doesn’t help us much, because, with a guy like Danny, we might have a hundred motives. There is no telling how many girls he was sleeping with.”

  I studied her face a moment and was struck for the thousandth time by how exquisite it was. “Yeah, it could be a jealous husband, a jealous boyfriend, a woman scorned …” I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders. “Or any variation on that theme. But, what does help us to narrow it down a bit, or should help us, is the way in which the murder was executed. If anything should point out an individual, it is the unique character of this murder.”

  We were both silent for a moment. Because, despite my insightful observation, unless it was a jealous alien or a jilted alien, the nature of the murder did not immediately point to anybody.

  Then Dehan said, “One thing that did strike me was that Paul practices kendo. Samurai swords, if they are well made, can be as sharp as razor blades. And a real expert can split a lentil in half with a single strike. Paul is a seventh dan in taekwondo, Stone, I saw the marks on his belt. Believe me, that guy can kill you fifteen different ways in fifteen seconds, and he has control and precision in his strikes.”

  I studied her a moment. “So we are saying, what? That he beheaded Danny at some other location…”

  “Hence the absence of blood.”

  “Then cut off his feet and his genitals and, somehow, in a way we do not yet understand, placed the body in the park…”

  “…Set up the hoax with the UFO and the lasers, and got away, in a way we do not yet understand, without leaving any prints.” She sighed. “It is the seedling of a theory.”

  I shook my head. “The only part of this theory that makes any sense to me at the moment is the castration. If we are dealing with jealousy or a scorned lover, castration makes sense. But decapitation, cutting off the feet, UFOs…” I sighed. “But I’ll tell you what my main problem with it is. This homicide went down one of two ways: either it is genuinely what it appears to be, and we simply don’t understand the motivation and thinking of the killer because he, she, it, or they are literally alien; or it was very carefully planned and executed. Now, if what Jane has told us is accurate, Paul simply did not have the time to plan and execute the murder. So the only person we know of with a motive, did not have the means.”

  She grunted. Overhead, a pigeon landed clumsily in the tree, beating its wings noisily against the canopy. A couple of uniforms stood in the sunshine across the road, talking and laughing. One went inside, the other walked toward a car, fitting on his hat with both hands. It was all very normal, very mundane.

  “Unless,” Dehan said abruptly, “Jane was as oblivious to Paul’s thoughts and feelings as she thought he was to hers.”

  I frowned. “Talk me through.”

  “Think about it. He is fixated on her and Danny. He doesn’t want to lose either of them. So he is paying attention to both of them. He is very aware of both of them. But Jane is fixated on Danny, not Paul. So she is super aware of everything Danny says, everything he does. She is paying attention. However, she is not paying attention to what Paul is saying or
doing—or feeling! She told us. She said he was boring her. All she could think about is Danny…”

  “OK, I get it, but what’s your point?”

  “My point is, she told us that Paul didn’t notice that she was falling for Danny, but she was wrong. What happened was that she didn’t notice that he had noticed. Because she wasn’t paying attention to him. But Paul did notice, and at some point he began to get jealous. He began to get mad. And then—” She jabbed a finger on my shoulder. “He started to plan. He started to plan how he was going to eliminate Danny from the picture and get his revenge.”

  I looked at her for a moment, then pointed at her the way she had pointed at me. “That, Detective Dehan, is the seedling of a theory. That begins to ring true. Now we just have to answer the question, how does a two hundred and twenty pound man arrange to carry the remains of his friend into the park without leaving prints and…and…” I wagged a finger at her. “…remember, the rain was not something he would necessarily have predicted. Not in June. In fact, all of the events that apparently led up to the murder were not predictable.”

  She stood, pursed her lips, and shoved her hands in her back pockets. Then she walked in a slow semi circle around me and back again, stopped, and shook her head. “No. You are still thinking along the lines that the events of that night were the motive for the killing. But like you said in the beginning, let’s home in closer and dissect this a little more. Think of it this way, that the events of that night were just symptomatic of the motive to kill. Like I said before, this was something that had been building up for some time. He’s been aware, maybe since the beginning, that the man Jane really wants is Danny. His jealousy and his hatred have been building over time. The plan was already laid—all but ready.

  “Now, if that is true, Stone, that takes us back into March, maybe even earlier. And if that is true, the planning would have had to take into account the likelihood of rain, and include some way of crossing muddy terrain without leaving prints. Jane’s attack of jealousy against Jasmine and her flirtation with Danny may have been the trigger, but the round was already loaded and the hammer was cocked.”

  “A nicely rounded metaphor, Dehan.”

  “Thank you. And Jasmine’s trance was probably something that was going to happen sooner or later anyway. As it was, when it happened, it set off the whole series of events that followed, and drove Paul to execute the plan he had been developing for several months.”

  I thought about it. “It’s good. It’s coherent. It’s motive.” I looked at her. “But the question remains, how did he do it? And it raises another question, too. Where?”

  She became suddenly very serious, stepped close to me, and placed her hand on my chest.

  “Where? Right there in the park. What if…” She paused. “What if Paul gets home, his rage is out of control. He’s had enough. He calls Danny and says he wants to meet him. They both live near by. Paul suggests the park. It isn’t raining yet. Paul brings along his sword. He decapitates Danny. Death would be instant. He would not bleed a lot. He cuts off the feet and the genitals, not just relieving his rage but making it look like one of the mutilations Don has just told them about. Then he drags the body over to the location, sets it up and leaves…”

  “What about…?”

  “Wait! He goes to his car, which he has parked nearby, and he brings with him his remote controlled UFO—part of the plan he had already developed. He douses the body in petrol, then sets off the UFO to attract viewers and press. The UFO starts flashing its lights. Now, here’s the clever part. He has rigged a small, battery powered ignition device and linked it to the remote control, to spark when the UFO starts firing its lasers, and ignite the petrol. The body is burned and, later, it starts to rain and the small amount of blood left where the body was killed, is washed away into the soil. In the morning we are left with the mystery of an alien murder. After that, leave it to Don’s conscience to build up the mythology surrounding the case. What am I?”

  “That is very clever. You are very clever.”

  “Tell me again, but use another word, not clever. What am I?”

  “Smart. You are very…”

  “Brilliant! I am brilliant! Me Holmes, you Watson. Suck it up, Stone, man. Ha!”

  I raised an eyebrow at her. “It is a very compelling theory, my dear Dehan. How do we prove it?”

  She thought for a moment, looking up at the leaves on the London plan trees.

  “After twenty years, physical and forensic evidence is out of the question. So we haul Paul in, present him with what Jane has told us, and scare him into confessing.”

  TEN

  But Paul was out of town till the next day.

  I called Frank at the ME’s and asked him to dig out the ME’s report on the case, which he did and emailed it over. I printed two copies and gave one to Dehan. We read it in detail and found it contained nothing we didn’t already know. That night, and much of the next day, we spent reading Donald Kirkpatrick’s book, Heaven’s Fire. It was well written and extremely persuasive.

  It was structured in two parts. The first part of the book dealt with the question of UFOs generally and made a strong case that there was an extraterrestrial presence on Earth. It argued that since the end of the World War II, western governments had been engaged in a cover up, concealing the truth about the presence of ET on Earth. The reason for the cover up was not clear, and he admitted that all he had was speculation. But much of his speculation was based on strong evidence made some kind of sense: avoiding mass panic, using technology recovered from Roswell against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and a more farfetched theory involving a secret war with the aliens.

  He didn’t prove his case, he left many questions unanswered, but he made a well-reasoned, compelling argument with lots of circumstantial evidence.

  The second part of the book dealt with Danny’s murder. It set out to prove, in his own words, that Danny had been ‘deliberately killed by an alien, extraterrestrial presence’. He did not start, as I had expected him to, with the events of the two days leading up to Danny’s death. Instead, he went into a detailed analysis of the many cases of cattle mutilation in the Midwest since the 1970s. It did not agree, in any way, with what Bernie had told me.

  According to Kirkpatrick, Senator Floyd K. Haskell had asked the FBI for help, back in 1975, because of growing public concern about well over a hundred mutilations that had taken place in Colorado alone. But by 1979, the FBI had reported that there had been an estimated eight thousand mutilations in Colorado, causing somewhere in the region of one million dollars worth of damage.

  The mutilations were all very similar. The incisions were always surgical in nature, clean and precise. In most cases the animals were drained of blood, but there was never any sign of blood in the immediate area of the slaughter.

  One of the features that Kirkpatrick pointed to as evidence of ET was the speed with which some of the mutilations were carried out. To illustrate this, he related a case reported by the NIDS of two ranchers in Utah, in 1997, who were tagging their cattle. Having tagged a particular animal, they continued working, just three hundred yards away. Forty-five minutes later, they found the calf completely eviscerated, with all its internal organs missing: no blood, no entrails, no tracks, and as in all the other cases, there were no tracks or footprints around the site of the mutilated animal. It was as though the attackers had approached from the air.

  He detailed many similar cases. In the end, the FBI had concluded their investigation and admitted they could not explain how the animals were killed, or why they were killed in that particular way. Local law enforcement continued to investigate, but with no results.

  He then went on to list a number of human deaths and mutilations which were very similar in character to the cattle mutilations. These included an unidentified Brazilian man in Guarapiranga who had had all his internal organs removed, along with his lips, eyes, ears and tongue. He had not bled, and his body had shown no si
gns of decay after seventy-two hours of his death. The coroner’s report was included in the book, with its official seal.

  Other cases were listed, like the case of USAF Sergeant Jonathan Lovette and Major Bill Cunningham, in which the major allegedly witnessed the sergeant being abducted by a UFO in the desert near the Holloman Airbase. His body turned up three days later, expertly exsanguinated and eviscerated. Just like the cows in the Midwest. Just like the man at Guarapiranga.

  By six in the evening, I had not yet come to Danny’s death, or the events of that weekend. I dropped the book on the desk and looked at Dehan. She was engrossed in her copy, frowning hard. Without looking at me, she said, “What?”

  “Time to go.”

  She glanced at the clock on the wall. “Let me finish this page.”

  I stood and put my jacket on. “Come on, Carmencita, I’ll take you to see the real thing.”

  She sighed, put a marker in the page, and stood.

  Outside it was still light, but there was a copper quality to the air, the shadows were long, and the birds sounded sleepy. As we climbed into the Jag, she said, “Is this for real, Stone? He is making a damn good case. I can see why a lot of people believe him. I don’t mind telling you it is scaring me.”

  I fired up the engine and pulled out of the lot. As we headed toward Bruckner Boulevard, I made a face and shook my head. “He makes a compelling case for the existence of UFOs. I’ve got to the cattle mutilations…”

  “Same.”

  “So far, he hasn’t proved anything, but he is putting up a damn good argument. As far as explaining Danny’s death…” I shrugged. “I haven’t got there yet, but I am not seeing it.” I glanced at her and smiled. “Besides, what happened to Holmes? I thought you had the whole thing figured out.”

  She scowled. “You’re a son of a bitch, Stone. You knew perfectly well there was no petrol, no accelerant of any sort found in the ashes or the soil. That’s why you asked Frank to send over the ME’s report.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, that was a small problem, plus it had been raining on and off all afternoon—Ochoa told us that—so the clay would have been wet long before they got there. And there was another problem…”