by Blake Banner
“Don’t worry, we’re used to it. I just wanted to ask you something. I keep hearing about how devoted Danny was to the subject of UFOs…”
Stewart nodded. “It was his life. I have no doubt, if he had lived, he would have become one of the big names in the field. He had that kind of dedication.”
I nodded. “That is certainly the impression I am getting. But I also keep hearing about how attractive he was to women.”
May laughed out loud. There was an element of ridicule to it, but a lot of maternal pride too. I watched her and waited for her to stop. Dehan asked, “What’s the joke?”
She smiled at Dehan and there was a hard glint in her eyes. “Don’t take offence, honey, I’m on your side. I am just amused to see that the New York Police Department is as imaginative as ever in its investigation of crime.”
My eyebrows told her I was surprised. “I didn’t know you were a criminologist, Mrs. Brown. I thought you were a secondary school music teacher.”
Her face became hostile.
I didn’t let her answer. I turned to Stuart. “It would be very helpful for us to have a better understanding of Danny’s romantic life. Did he have a girlfriend, was there anyone special…”
May started talking again. “What possible connection can that have with his…”
She didn’t get any further. Dehan cut her dead. “Do you know who killed your son?”
May looked startled. “We are satisfied that…”
“I’m not asking you what species of being killed your son. I’m asking you if you know the name and identity of the individual who killed your son!”
“No, of course not…”
“It was never discovered, right?”
“No, but…”
“Did anybody ever investigate his love life before?”
“No…”
“So quit acting smart and answer the damned questions—honey.”
She went puce.
I turned to Stewart. “What can you tell me about your son’s love life, Mr. Brown?”
“Um…not a lot. It is true he was attractive to women. It wasn’t unusual for him to have a woman stay the night. But there didn’t seem to be anyone…”
He hesitated.
I said, “You’re not one hundred percent sure about that, are you?”
He closed his eyes and shook his head. “It is nothing I can put my finger on, but I did have the feeling for a couple of weeks or so before he died that there might have been someone he was a little more serious about.”
Dehan asked, “Someone he brought home?”
“No, that’s just it. He didn’t bring anyone home, which was unusual for him.”
I raised an eyebrow. My mind was working faster than I could keep up with. “Someone he was taking to his van?”
He smiled. “It’s possible. It was just a feeling.”
I nodded. “Thank you. Enjoy the rest of the conference.”
We stepped out of the hotel into the parking lot. It was floodlit by spindly, aluminum giants with glowing eyes that spread a depressing yellow light over several hundred cars, all of which observed us with dead, black windshields. Our heels made stark echoes across the silence as we crossed toward the Jag. Then Dehan stopped abruptly as I pulled the keys from my pocket. She looked up at the sky, but the sky was invisible, as were the stars, obscured by the glowing blanket of interference generated by the city lights. She spoke with her face upturned, trying to pierce that veil of light, to see into the dark.
“Why did they wait?” She looked at me. “If he transgressed some rule or law by not going to the glade, why didn’t they zap him right there, at the camp site?”
“That was my question to you, remember?”
I opened the car, but she stayed, staring up, with the ghostly lamplight on her skin. “Now I’m asking you,” she said quietly.
I smiled and shrugged. “Jack Alderman.”
Now she looked at me and frowned. “Jack Alderman?”
“Sentenced to death in Georgia in 1975, and executed thirty-three years later.”
She walked toward me and stood looking up into my face. “You mean, just because they are aliens doesn’t mean they don’t have procedures to follow? They had to seek authorization? Maybe there was an appeal? Rubber stamps…?”
“If, Dehan.” I said, “If they are aliens. We have no idea what happened that night. This is all mind-blowing stuff, I agree, but none of it—none of it—so far, proves anything at all.”
She puffed out her cheeks and blew, then leaned the top of her head against my chest. “Take me home,” she said, “My head is going to explode.”
TWELVE
She was peeling potatoes by the sink. I took a cold beer from the fridge and cracked it for her, then mixed myself a strong martini, dry. I took a long pull, felt myself start to relax and started cutting the potatoes into French fries. I glanced at her. Her face was kind of rigid. She peeled and chopped some onion and garlic and threw them in a pan of oil with the potatoes. After that, she wrenched open the fridge and hauled out tomatoes, lettuce, avocado, cucumber, and, from a cupboard, a jar of artichoke hearts. Then she started making salad with enough aggression to take down Mike Tyson. When she had reduced the tomatoes to a bloody mess, she turned and stared at me with wide eyes and clenched jaw.
“We are going about this all wrong.”
I shrugged with one shoulder. “I would have cut the tomatoes into chunks rather than make a puree.”
“Danny was not killed by aliens!”
“As I have said to you before, statistics support that view.”
“But!”
“But…”
“From trigger to execution…”
“You mean from the trance on Friday night to his death Sunday night?”
“There simply wasn’t time to set up something this elaborate…”
“You said Paul might have been building up for months…”
“For petrol and drones! But we’ve seen it was much more elaborate than that! Something this elaborate…”
I sighed. “OK…”
“That is…” She put her long index finger on my chest. “There wasn’t time for people with the resources of Paul or Jane to set it up.”
“Jane?”
She looked surprised. “Sure, she has as much motive as Paul.”
“Interesting. But you are saying not Jane because she hadn’t the resources.”
“Yeah, but my point is, I am excluding the damned aliens!”
“So our question, you are saying, should be, who, exclusively among humans, had the resources?”
“Yes!”
“And your suggestion is…?”
She stared at me for a long moment. “Are you taking me seriously?”
“Yes.” I pulled the salad bowl over and started making a salad that didn’t look like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. “But while you tell me your thoughts, open the wine and put the steaks on.”
She walked away and after a moment I heard the cork pop. Then the fridge opened and closed and she came and stood next to me while the griddle got hot. She said, “The Feds.”
I stopped dead and turned to stare at her. “The Feds? Dehan, do you realize what you are saying?”
“Of course I do.”
I shook my head. “No. It doesn’t make sense. They might, at a real stretch, break the rules to eliminate a terrorist, somebody the director deemed a real threat, but Danny Brown? Besides, that culture hasn’t existed in the Bureau since Hoover.”
She held up her hands, “OK, OK, OK, maybe not the Feds, but some department acting on information supplied by the Feds.”
I stared at her for a long time. I had a bad feeling. Past her shoulder I could see the griddle beginning to smoke. I sighed. “Let’s get the meat on.”
She sprinkled coarse salt on them, slung them on the iron and they hissed and caught fire. I took the salad to the table, checked the French fries, and started to spoon them onto the plates. We didn’
t talk again till we were sitting at the table and I was pouring the wine.
I watched her cut into her steak and was momentarily hypnotized by the trace of blood that trickled across her plate and mixed with the oil from the salad. She stuffed the piece in her mouth and watched me while she chewed. She said, with her mouth full, “Come on, Stone, we both know there are departments in the White House and the Pentagon that not even the President is aware of.”
I stuffed an excess of fries and steak into my mouth and said, “Bumph, oy, eehang?” She frowned. I swallowed and drained half my glass of wine. “But why, Dehan? Why would the federal government want to assassinate Danny Brown? It’s nuts. Leave aside for the moment the effort and expense of such an elaborate hit. Why would they want to kill him, of all people? A twenty year old geek! They have a hundred terrorists, Islamic and domestic, they could go after. Why Danny Brown, who is not a threat to anybody?”
She pointed at me with her fork. “But what if he was?”
I spread my hands. “How?”
She wagged the fork and narrowed her eyes. “We have been focusing on the relationship between Jane, Danny, and Paul, thinking of a sexual motive for his murder. But what else happened that night, Stone?”
I sighed, ate, and thought. “The trance…”
She shook her head. “That is still in the sexual motivation. It triggered Jane’s jealousy and Paul’s. Before that. What were they talking about? What were they excited about? Why were they still up when everybody else had gone to bed?”
“The lights they had seen, and the signals Don said were not naturally occurring.”
“Stone, what if the equipment Don had developed allowed them to stumble on a classified military research program. It is not so farfetched. There was a lot of high-tech R and D going on at that time. They did see something that night, and they did hear something, and…”
“We don’t know that. We only know they believe they did.”
“But that very weekend Danny dies in very bizarre circumstances. Circumstances that so far neither of us has been able to explain. Circumstances that require resources!”
We ate in silence for a while. We drained our glasses and I refilled them. Then she said, “You have to ask yourself, Stone. I mean, just put the idea of aliens out of your mind for a moment. Let’s have a reality check. If you eliminate the alien hypothesis, you have to ask yourself, why would his killer make it look like he was killed by aliens? And also, who had the resources to do that at such short notice?”
I nodded. “Those are probably the most important questions we could ask right now.”
She spread her hands. “It is the ultimate red herring. As long as you are looking for aliens, you are not looking for a person. It’s like what you said to the Colonel. They are trying to prove the existence of a species, instead of looking for the individual responsible for the murder.”
I nodded, a lot. “Dehan, I think you have put your finger on it. That is precisely it, isn’t it. The ultimate red herring.”
She leaned across the table. “So who has the resources? The CIA, the Pentagon, Military Intelligence. They detect that somebody is tracking one of their experimental vehicles. There were a number in development in the ‘90s. They detect their position, track them and… zap!”
I grunted and tackled my steak again.
“If you’re right, Dehan, and there is no doubt you might be, we have as much chance of getting our man as Donald Trump has of winning Mr. Congeniality 2018. Let’s stay focused and take baby steps. You nailed the question: what would make the killer want to make it look as though an alien killed him? That’s a question for us, and tomorrow we have Paul coming in, and our question for him is, why didn’t he tell us that he and Jane had a row over Danny, and split up the night before Danny died? So far, Carmen, that is still the most compelling motive we have. We have motive and we have opportunity, which we did not have yesterday, all we are lacking is means.”
She sighed. “Yeah, you’re right, motive and opportunity. But man, means…” She shook her head. “It’s easily said.”
We finished our meal and while I washed up, she made coffee and poured a couple of generous measures of Bushmills. We took them out to the back yard and sat on the swing seat with a small table in front of us. She curled up and nestled next to me, under my arm.
“I’m an alien, Stone.”
“Are you? I have wondered at times. It’s that green tint of your skin.”
“I’m serious. I don’t mean I’m from another planet, I mean I don’t belong.”
“I know what you mean.”
“You’re the same, but you’re better at pretending than I am.” She sipped her whiskey and stared into her glass for a bit. “I use you.”
I didn’t know how to answer, so I waited.
“I use you to communicate with them. If you’re not there, I end up being rude or blunt. That’s why people say I have an attitude.” She looked up at my face and smiled. “If somebody is being stupid I’ll say, ‘You’re being stupid,’ but if you’re there you’ll say, ‘Have you thought about it this way? Or that way?’” She stopped and gazed at the dim glimmer of the stars. “I guess what I am trying to say is, you help me to be in this world.”
“I’m glad,” I said. “It wouldn’t be much of a world without you.”
She nestled the top of her head into my chin. Her hair smelled of apples. Somewhere, out in the wilds of the Bronx, an owl in a tree hooted, a single star winked, and the vast, infinite sky stretched and yawned. Then, I swear, it gave a self-satisfied smile.
* * *
Paul looked nervous. More than nervous, he looked unhappy. I smiled at him regretfully. It was a smile that was designed, subtly, to make him feel more nervous and unhappy than he did already.
I said, “We spoke to Jane Harrison.”
He gave a single, upward nod.
I went on, “She told us what happened on the Friday and the Saturday.”
He stared down at his huge fists on the table and chewed his lip.
I waited. When he didn’t say anything, I said, “I’m giving you the opportunity to fill out the statement you already gave us. You must be aware, Paul, that all the bits you left out cast you in a pretty bad light right now.”
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes as he blew out. It was a very eloquent gesture. He opened his eyes and stared for a long time at Dehan. “You would not believe how sick I am of hearing everybody talk about what a great guy Danny was. You know? I loved that guy. Seriously. I loved him more than a brother. Especially before…”
He stopped dead.
Dehan said, “Before what?”
“OK, I’ll say it. Before Jane came on the scene.” He sighed again. “I was pretty serious about her. I was ready to marry her. What is it with people, huh?” He looked at me as though I might have an answer to his unspoken question. “We never fall in love with the people who are good for us. You noticed that? We always fall in love with the people who are going to hurt us. I knew! I knew she was in love with Danny. But she couldn’t have him, because Danny was in love with fuckin’…” He made a gesture with his open hand, like he was pointing at some imaginary TV screen. “Dana Scully! That was his ideal woman. And…” He turned to Dehan. “Forgive me if I am sexist, and maybe you are completely different, but in my experience, women cannot resist a guy who is unattainable. And Danny—he was straight, he had his biological needs, sex was fun, but he was one hundred percent emotionally unobtainable! That was it. Do not go any deeper than that! And every damn woman he knew wanted to have a ride in his damned van. You know he had this special van where he screwed chicks, right? Sorry.”
He made a fist and softly pounded the table. “I shouldn’t talk about him like that. He was my friend and I swear to God I loved him like a brother. But he was a womanizer. That’s God’s truth.” He crossed himself and kissed his thumb. “It’s God’s truth. Other men are womanizers and they are obsessed with women. Not him. He didn’t
even try. He didn’t even know. It was just like, ‘Who am I gonna fuck tonight?’ And there would be three or four chicks all waiting in line in case he chose them. You know? And in the end it just got, boring. I got bored. I got tired of always being in his fucking shadow.”
Dehan asked, “So if she was in love with him…”
He spread his hands, like it was obvious. “She couldn’t have him, so she took me. I was his best friend. Second best. You can’t afford the Mercedes S class so you buy the A class. You can’t afford an apartment on Madison Avenue, but you buy one in a cheaper part of Manhattan. I was his best friend. She couldn’t have him, so she took me instead.”
“That’s pretty harsh.”
“It’s also true.”
“Must have made you mad.”
“Yeah!” He flopped back in his chair. “Yeah, it made me mad. It made me mad at her and it made me mad at him. I was mad at her for being a cheap hypocrite whose feelings…whose love, was so fuckin’ shallow, you know what I’m saying? Was so fuckin’ shallow she didn’t care who she was giving it to. Who was so lacking in compassion and empathy, that she didn’t care what it did to me that she was gonna screw my best friend, just so long as she got what she wanted.”
Dehan frowned and raised an eyebrow. “How do you know she was going to screw him?”
“C’mon! I’m not stupid! As soon as Don tells Jasmine she’s not going to the glade, Jane is all over Danny like a fuckin’ rash: ‘Let’s you and me go! We can’t let this opportunity go! It’s too good! Let’s you and me go, Danny!’” He shrugged. “What are they gonna do up there in the glade? Count the fuckin’ stars?”
I nodded. “But Don put a stop to that. He was already concerned, even back then, about the cases of human mutilation.”
“Yeah. He said we all go or nobody goes. As it turned out, he was right. But I had already made up my mind by then, I was through with Jane.”
“What happened next, Paul?”
He thought for a bit before answering. “I let Jane know I was mad. I let Danny know too. I didn’t care any more if she screwed Danny or not, but I was damned sure I was going to break up with her before she did. She was not going to screw another guy while she was my girlfriend. You know what I am saying? You don’t do that. That is a deep lack of respect for your partner. So we slept three or four hours, till just after dawn, and went back to Don’s place.”