Fire From Heaven: Dead Cold Mystery 9 Read online

  She looked at me. “You could have told me all this when I came up with the theory.”

  “But you looked so happy. And, also, there might still be something in it.”

  “What’s the other thing?”

  “To incinerate his body to the state it was in, it would have needed around one thousand, eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit, sustained for about two hours. Even then, there would have been more bones in the ashes. The boiling point of hydroxyapatite is around one thousand five hundred centigrade, which is about two thousand five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Hydroxyapatite is a naturally-occurring mineral form of calcium, which you would need to evaporate to make bone disintegrate. So either he was burned for over two hours at nearly two thousand degrees, or he was blasted with heat at nearly three thousand degrees for a short while.”

  She looked out the window at the passing houses as the streetlamps started to come on. “You just happen to know this, about what temperatures bodies burn, and hydroxipa-whatever.”

  “No, but I have a book on the subject. It’s on the shelf at home. I looked it up. Books are good like that.”

  “Point taken. So we are back to square one.”

  I shook my head. A car passed with its headlamps on. I leaned forward and switched mine on, too. Imperceptibly, dusk moved in and turned the air grainy.

  “What you did was show that with a little ingenuity, you can make a murder look like the work of aliens.”

  We drove in silence for a while, but as we turned onto Morris Park Avenue, she suddenly shook her head. “I don’t know, Stone. I don’t think I did, because, A, the timing of the rain was crucial and, B, even if you remove the rain from the equation, the fact remains, you need about three thousand degrees to burn the body. The cuts on his feet and neck were singed, but the head and feet themselves, his hair and his flip-flops were untouched, just like the grass underneath him. However ingenious his killer was, that is one tall order.”

  I nodded. I had to admit she was right. And after a moment, she added, “And let’s face it, do you see Paul as the type to dream up something that elaborate?”

  I shrugged and made a face. “People can surprise you. Sometimes if you over-think something it becomes more complicated than it need be. An uncomplicated mind sees things more clearly.”

  She grunted. “What do you think?”

  I shook my head again. “At the moment I’m trying not to think.”

  “The way of the empty mind, Sensei? Idiot Do?”

  “Something like that.”

  We left the car in the large parking lot and entered the lobby of the hotel as dusk was shifting to evening. The conference was signposted and we made our way to a large, windowless, ‘L’ shaped room down a blue, carpeted passage. Rows of chairs had been set out facing a table holding a small projector, with a screen set up behind it. The event was well attended. I figured there were maybe seventy or eighty people there, and more were arriving. Among the throng, talking to a man by the projector, I saw the long, lanky figure of Donald Kirkpatrick.

  In the foot part of the ‘L’, opposite the entrance, I saw Jasmine at another table, setting out cups, plastic bottles of water, and jugs of orange juice. I approached her and smiled. She didn’t look at me.

  I said, “Hello, Jasmine. Do you know if Paul Estevez is here?”

  For a moment, she ignored me completely and I thought maybe she hadn’t heard me. Then she gave her head a tiny shake and said, “Not yet,” turned, and hurried away.

  We made our way to the conference section and found a couple of seats at the back, in the corner, where we could observe without being observed. But as it turned out, that was something of a vain hope.

  Five minutes later, all the seats were filled and Kirkpatrick was having a few last words with a man in a blue blazer. I guessed he was the speaker. He was a strongly built, earnest-looking man in his mid sixties, with a graying beard and very short, gray hair. The man stepped back, beside the projector, and Kirkpatrick stepped forward, looked out at his audience and the murmur of conversation hushed. He smiled, and instantly looked like a different man. For a moment, I could almost see the man Jane had described to us.

  “Welcome,” he said, “I am delighted to see so many familiar faces, and a few new ones. Today is a very special day for me. It is twenty years this week that I decided to start researching Heaven’s Fire, just a couple of weeks after Danny Brown’s death. So, in what some might think a futile gesture, I am dedicating this conference, tonight, to the memory of a very remarkable young man. His parents, Stuart and May, are with us tonight, and we extend an especially warm welcome to them.”

  I had seen them come in a couple of minutes earlier, and now several heads turned to look, there was some friendly waving, and silent mouthing of greetings. Kirkpatrick started talking again.

  “We extend also a very warm welcome to Detectives John Stone and Carmen Dehan, who are with us tonight…” There was more head turning and staring, but more in astonishment this time than in friendliness. “They are, curiously enough, here tonight because the New York Police Department has decided to reopen the case on Danny’s homicide, and we are keen to cooperate as fully as possible. Who knows, they may end up with some very unsuspected suspects.”

  He smiled and there was scattered laughter. He became serious again, and waited for the laughter to subside.

  “I doubt there is a person in this room who is not familiar with the name Danny Brown. To Stuart and May, he was their cherished son. To me, he was like the son I never had. To many, he was an inspiration, for his dedication and energy, to all of us he was a well-loved friend. It is impossible to conceive that he was anything but that, to anybody. Which is why it is such a tragedy, and such a mystery, that he is not with us tonight. We continue with our mission, in his memory.” There was a lot of warm applause. He gestured to the man behind him and said, “Please welcome as our first speaker tonight, a man who needs no introduction, United States of America Air Force Colonel Chad Hait!”

  I looked at Dehan. Her eyebrows had shot up all the way to her hairline. Colonel Hait spoke in a voice that was accustomed to being listened to.

  “ I never had the honor of meeting Danny Brown, but I know how much he meant to most everybody here, and as I address you tonight, I do so with the belief that his death will not be a vain one. I have been researching the subject of UFOs for about forty years, since I was a young pilot stationed across the Atlantic. I have been an active, dedicated investigator for the last twenty of those years. And I can tell you that within the field of UFO research there is one subject that is taboo; one subject that nine out of every ten ufologists will not address—will not even talk about—and that is the possibility that the Visitors are not, as many believe, highly advanced, benign friends and guardians, but hostile predators, just as Professor Stephen Hawking predicted they would be…” He paused and looked around the room. “Well, let me tell you.” He smiled and gave a small laugh. “And I hope our friends from the NYPD are awake and paying attention, because I have with me here tonight hard, photographic evidence, and sworn testimony, from witnesses in the U.S.A., in Latin America and in Europe, that proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the alien visitors to this planet are hostile. Let me put it simply, ladies and gentlemen, they are here to kill us.”

  ELEVEN

  The colonel continued in that vein for the next sixty minutes. And he was as good as his word. He adduced photographic evidence, and sworn statements, to back up three cases of people who had been killed in inexplicable circumstances, that were all recognizable as what he called ‘classic mutilations’: they had all had their blood drained out of their bodies, all had at least some organs surgically removed, and in all cases, there were no tracks or footprints in the vicinity.

  When he’d finished showing us the last of his slides, he was quiet for a moment, sucking on his teeth. “I’m going to go off on a tangent here for a moment,” he said suddenly. “As I have already said, I am glad we have
two police officers here tonight, because I want to ask them both a question. I know it’s hypothetical, and I know it calls for speculation, but we’re among friends here and nobody is going to hold you to your word, or quote you.” There was some scattered laughter. “Detective Dehan, Detective Stone, many of us in this room have had visits from that other law enforcement agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, at some time in our lives. Usually they have not been asking for information so much as requiring us not to divulge any to anybody else. But on this occasion, as we have you here, let me ask you this: Let’s assume the murderer in this case is not from Alpha Centauri, but Sicily. Let’s say we are not trying to prove that the killer is an extraterrestrial, but a Mafioso—are we ready to go to the DA? Are we ready to go, with this evidence, to the DA? What is he going to say? Have we got enough to go to trial and be confident of a win?”

  Everybody turned to look at us. Dehan looked at me. I thought about it for a moment and stood.

  “First of all, I can’t speak for the DA. Maybe Darcel is a fan of the X-Files. I don’t know her that well. But setting that to one side, it’s not that simple, Colonel. Because we’re talking about different burdens of proof. The burden of proof you need to convince a cop, or the DA, that the Mafia was behind a murder is actually pretty low.” There was a small ripple of laughter. “But the burden of proof you need to convince a court of law that Robert de Niro whacked Joe Pesci in Tony’s Ristorante on February 14th, is very high. It is, as you said, beyond a reasonable doubt.

  “What does that mean? What am I saying here? I’m saying that, if Joe Pesci winds up dead, shot six times, execution style, in Tony’s Ristorante, I’m already pretty sure it was the Mob. I might be wrong, but I am personally convinced this was a Mob hit. However, to convict de Niro in a court of law, I need proof. I need the murder weapon, I need forensic evidence from ballistics, I need fingerprints, I need eyewitnesses who can personally identify de Niro. And above all I need, not just a victim, but also a particular person I can attribute the murder to.” I shrugged. “The difference is that I am looking for an Italian individual. You are trying to prove the Italians actually exist.”

  He smiled. “Fair point.”

  There was a lot of muttering and murmuring. After a moment, I added, “For what it’s worth, if you were trying to prove, in a court of law, that those murders could only have been committed by… the ‘Mafia’, I’d say you’d have the defense sweating and loosening their ties.”

  There was a fifteen minute break, and for a short while the room was in mild uproar. People thronged around Colonel Hait and Donald Kirkpatrick and I scanned the room for Paul.

  Dehan pointed, said, “He’s there,” and swung her long legs over the back of her chair to go after him.

  I followed her through the crowd to where Paul was talking to a small man in sparkling eye shadow and a purple velvet cloak. She placed a hand on his shoulder and smiled, but it wasn’t a particularly nice smile.

  I said to the man in the cloak, “May we borrow him for a while?” and gently hustled Paul out to the corridor. The doors thudded behind us and suddenly it was very quiet.

  He was looking from me to Dehan and back again. He looked worried. “Is there a problem?”

  I shook my head. “No. We were just talking and we have a few loose ends we’d like you to tie up for us. Maybe you could you come in tomorrow and we could go over them with you?”

  “Loose ends? Like what?”

  I smiled. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow. What time suits you?”

  He looked more worried. “Nine AM?”

  “Perfect.”

  The door opened and Kirkpatrick stepped out with his wife behind him. The agreeable smile had gone, replaced with his usual look of sour betrayal. He saw Paul and snapped, “There you are. I’m going to take the detectives to the small conference room. I need you to supervise the Q and A. Do you think you can manage that?”

  “Of course.” To us he said, “Excuse me,” and went back inside.

  Kirkpatrick said, “Follow me,” and began to walk. He had a large bag hung around his shoulder. As I fell into step beside him he extracted from it a cardboard box containing a videocassette. “Remember these?” He handed it to me. “It wasn’t so long ago. They were replaced by digital cameras only twelve years ago, but it seems like another world. That’s the original film, shot on the Sunday night, over Soundview Park. I assume you will want to hang on to it as evidence, but I would like it back when you’re done with it.”

  He pushed into a small conference room and Dehan, Jasmine, and I followed him in. There was a row of windows along one wall with slatted blinds drawn down, shutting out the night. A long table occupied the center of the floor with six chairs set around it. He turned to his wife and said, “Kill some of these lights, will you?”

  As she did so, he pulled a laptop from his bag, opened it, and plugged a pen drive into one of the USB ports. He rattled at the keyboard and said, “Sit down, Detectives. This is a digital copy of exactly what you have on the videotape I have given you.”

  We sat and he turned the laptop to face us, then stepped away with one hand behind his back, the other separating the slats of the blinds so he could gaze out the window at the darkness and the distant sparkle of anonymous lights.

  The screen was black. Then it was suddenly filled with fuzzy, colored light that moved around while the cameraman tried to focus in on it. You could hear lots of excited voices. Some of them were screaming, others were asking, “What the hell is it?” The camera zoomed out, focused, and then began to zoom slowly in again. In the foreground you could see a throng of people. I guessed about forty or fifty, lining O’Brien Road, staring up at the sky. Many of them had umbrellas.

  You could also make out the line of trees that fringed and concealed the park, so that it was impossible to tell if Danny was already there or not. Above the park, in the air, the shape of the UFO was not discernible. All you could see were bright red, blue and yellow lights, and among them smaller lights of the same colors, which were flashing intermittently. It was hard to tell if the object was stable or not, because the camera was moving, so it seemed to dance around on the screen. But by freezing the image I was able to make a rough estimate of its size. I said to Dehan, “What do you think, six to ten feet across?”

  She nodded.

  Kirkpatrick said to the window, “The experts we submitted it to estimated eight, so you are in the same ballpark.”

  Dehan spoke half to herself. “Too small to carry a man or a woman.”

  I shrugged. “Assuming he was a full-sized human.”

  She frowned at me, but before she could answer I pressed ‘play’ again. Loud screams erupted from the computer. What had triggered the screams was a sudden burst of red lasers, about six of them, that erupted from the belly of the craft toward the ground. Somebody expostulated, “Holy shit!”

  Somebody else was shouting, “It’s an attack! Is it an attack? What the hell is going on? Is it an attack!”

  The lasers stopped and then erupted again. The bursts were repeated a total of six times, then the craft began to move away, out over the East River. It was hard to be precise, but I figured it had gone three or four hundred yards when there was a white flash and it vanished.

  There were more screams and shouts, the camera searched the sky, there were more voices saying, “It’s gone! It’s just gone, man!” And the film ended.

  I sat back in my chair, staring at the blank screen, thinking. I said, absently, “You showed this to the feds?”

  He was still peering out through the slats. “I contacted them and invited them to come and view it. They took it away, copied it, and returned it.”

  “Did they comment on it?”

  He smiled, let go of the slats and came to stand by the table. “They said it was clearly authentic, but it was impossible to see what it was.” He sighed noisily. “What is clear, I think you’ll agree, is that when it fires its lasers, it is right above w
here Danny’s body was found.”

  I nodded. “Yes, that much is clear.”

  He stared at me from under his eyebrows. It struck me that his was an angry, bitter face. It was a face, I thought, that had been robbed and now wanted revenge. He said, suddenly, “We are at war, Detective Stone, only we don’t know it. I don’t know if the government knows it, or if there are people in the Bureau or the CIA who know it. I hope so, but innocent people, like Danny, are being systematically abducted, mutilated, and killed, and as of today, we are defenseless against them.”

  I sighed and stood. “That’s a lot of conclusions, Mr. Kirkpatrick. Maybe it’s like me and the Mob.” I gestured at the computer. “That is enough for you to know for sure that you are right in what you believe. But to prove it, in a court of law, or before a select committee, you need hard evidence. You need a weapon, fingerprints, DNA…” I shook my head. “What you have here is a compelling argument. But you do not have proof of anything, except that there were lights over Soundview Park the night Danny was found there.”

  He studied my face a moment, then looked away. “I am a scientist, Detective Stone, I know about evidence and proof. I was not intending to prove anything to you. I was simply hoping to open your eyes to what is happening. I hope I have done that, if only a little.”

  I held up the tape cassette. “Thank you for this. We’ll be in touch.”

  Out in the corridor again, I saw Stuart and May Brown standing, holding paper cups of coffee and talking quietly to each other. I stared at Dehan a moment, thinking, then made my way toward them. She followed. Stuart looked up as we approached and half-grimaced, half-smiled. “Detectives, we didn’t expect to see you here. We were just debating whether to go home.”

  I smiled blandly. “Subtle. No need, we are just leaving.”

  He closed his eyes a moment. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”