by Blake Banner
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 is clever because it also pretty much guarantees that nobody is going to come into the park. Remember, in 1998 the X-Files is at the peak of its popularity, as is abduction syndrome. So people are scared!”
I made a ‘you have a point’ face and nodded.
She went on, “So then, and this is the really daring bit, he comes in off the river on a hovercraft.”
I smiled. “A what?”
“Like the ones they use in the swamps in Florida. If anybody hears the noise they’ll think it’s the UFO. He positions the body, takes off back into the sound, brings the drone in to land on the craft, and makes off across the river to… what? Powell Cove? Little Neck, King’s Point, wherever!”
“It’s certainly daring.”
“Is it less likely than aliens? Have you got a better theory that doesn’t involve Predator?”
I shook my head. “I have no theories at all at the moment.” I pointed down toward the water. “You have a line of trees between the park and the river. Your hovercraft would have to break through them.”
She nodded. “Yes, but over there, down by Harding Park, you have a little harbor with no trees, and he would have access through there.”
“That’s true.” I thought a little more. She danced around with her fists up, like Cassius Clay or Bruce Lee. “C’mon, Stone. Hit me. Show me whatcha got.”
“How did he lay out the body without leaving any prints in the mud?”
She thought for a moment. “He settled the hovercraft on the mud, and placed his victim without getting down, laying on his belly on the craft, and then left.”
I nodded for a while, visualizing it, then said, “You about ready for lunch?” She nodded vigorously and we turned and started walking back toward Beach Avenue. I said, “It’s very good. In fact, I only see two problems with your ingenious scenario, Dehan.”
“What?”
“The first is, you are assuming he was killed elsewhere, but you still leave unanswered the question, how did he kill him? The second, and more difficult, is, having laid the corpse out and sprinkled the ash in the form of the body, on leaving, the very powerful fan that the hovercraft uses to move about, would have blown that ash all over the park, even wet.”
She stopped dead in her tracks and sighed. “Dammi! I should have seen that.” She started to walk again, “It does tell us one thing, though. Danny was either killed—or the body was placed—after the worst of the rain, because heavy rain would have washed the ash away.”
“Yup. That’s true. Now we just need a hovercraft that doesn’t use a powerful fan.”
She shoved her hands in her pockets and eyed me. “You mean like a flying saucer with a dilithium crystal warp drive.”
“Don’t be downhearted, Dehan. Top of our to-do list, after we’ve talked to everyone, make a list of vehicles that could have covered that distance, discreetly, and deposited the body without leaving tracks.”
“Yeah, makes sense. Also, a list of tools or instruments that could have generated that kind of intense, focused heat over an area of, what, five and a half feet? To cut off his ankles and his head.”
I looked at her, chewing my lip as we walked, turning over what she’d said in my head. I knew for a fact that there was no such instrument or weapon. It just didn’t exist in terrestrial technology. But I didn’t say so.
We came out of the park and made our way up toward my ancient, un-computerized, primitive brute of a car. There was not a shred of software in it. Even the lock was mechanical. As I slipped the key in the door and opened it, I found that oddly comforting.
Before getting in, I leaned on the roof to look at Dehan, and felt the heat through my sleeve. She leaned on the other side and lifted her sunglasses to squint at me. I said, “Hamburger, beer, Donald Kirkpatrick.”
She blinked. “The elegance of your syntax is matched only by the beauty of your words, Sensei.”
“I thought so,” I said, and climbed in behind the old walnut steering wheel.
FOUR
Just where Soundview Avenue meets White Plains Road, there is a cute bar and grill called Maravillas. It serves Latin American food that is superb, in a setting you just wouldn’t expect. We ate in silence, partly because the food was so good and partly because Dehan didn’t want to discuss the case. When we had drained our beers and paid, we left the car by the restaurant and walked the short distance to Pugsley Avenue.
Pugsley Avenue is a cul-de-sac that abuts Pugsley Creek Park, and Donald Kirkpatrick’s house was the last on the right, before the footpath that leads to the park. It was a big, quirky, white clapboard affair standing apart from the other houses in the street, in its own grounds. It was on two stories, plus an attic and a basement, and had six stone steps leading up to the front door, with wrought iron railings on either side. The garden was untended and the fence and gate, rather than white picket, was steel tubing and wire mesh, like Ochoa’s.
We pushed through, followed the concrete path past a huge cypress tree with a wooden bench under it, and climbed the concrete steps. After I’d rung the bell, the door was eventually opened by a woman I recognized. She was now in her late forties, but she had aged well and was still recognizable as the Asian-looking woman who was standing next to Donald in the photograph we had seen.
“Mrs. Kirkpatrick?” She nodded and I showed her my badge. “I’m Detective John Stone. This is my partner, Detective Dehan. Is your husband in?”
Anxiety momentarily contracted her face, but there was a kind of obstinate strength in her eyes. She said, “Yes. But he’s in his den. He’s busy.”
“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 wo
man. 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 a moment. “What is it, exactly, that makes you unsure?”
He tapped the scrapings from the bowl of his pipe and began to pack it with tobacco. Without looking up from what he was doing, he said, “Your partner has no time for what she regards as an absurdity, but I take it you are open to the possibility that beings that are not originally from Earth walk among us, or at least visit us from time to time.”
I nodded. “I am certainly open to that possibility. And I think you’ll find my partner is not as closed to the idea as she appears to be.”
He seemed not to have heard. He put the pipe in his mouth and lit it with two tapers, sending big billows of sweet-smelling smoke drifting across the room. Dehan glanced at me, but I could not make out her expression. It might have been withering. Kirkpatrick started to speak again.
“If you try to imagine a mountain wolf trying to communicate with a human being…” He paused. “You are nowhere near close to the difficulty a human being has trying to communicate with an alien civilization. Because, at least the two species of mammals have common DNA, common instincts, broadly speaking a common environment, even common basic values. There are, for example, basic body movements that all mammals will understand, so there is a common, basic framework on which to build some form of communication.
“But when we try to communicate with the Visitors, it is more akin to trying to communicate with water, or air, or an amoeba. I am not talking about the disparity in intelligence, I am talking about the alien nature of their form of intelligence.” He labored each word with a downward stroke of his pipe. “We have no common points of reference on which to start to build a system of communication…”
“In that case,” I said, “perhaps I should ask you, what makes you think you might have?” He glanced at me. I explained, “Established communication. What makes you think you might have?”
He nodded. “That would be a better question.” He took a moment, gazing into the incandescent bowl of his pipe, as though my improved question were in there, smoldering nicely. “Stone, I am a scientist by trade and by training. That means that my brain is conditioned to do two things: prove by experimentation, and evaluate the weight—the validity—of the evidence!”
He spat the last words furiously. For a moment he looked to me like a man fighting back against a lifetime of unfounded, damaging criticism. He leaned back in his chair and went on.
“Whatever you may think, I have no time, no patience, for charlatans and fools who invent evidence where they can’t find any. Telepathy has not been proven! Some, unrepeated, unduplicated, experiments have indicated that perhaps, at a very short distance in space, there may be some quantum level influence of one brain on another! That is not the same—not the same—as telepathy.”
Dehan gave a small cough. “Forgive me, Mr. Kirkpatrick, I am not following you. What has telepathy got to do with…”
He scowled at her. “It seems that the Visitors employ some form of brain to brain communication. And I am trying to impress upon you that I, as a scientist, am very, very resistant to this idea. I do not accept the existence of ESP, astral projection or any of this other New Age hippie garbage that so-called researchers go in for these days. I am a scientist!” He paused for a long moment, puffing
and sending aromatic clouds across the room. “However, on that night, it is possible that we might have received some form of brain to brain communication.”
Dehan turned to me. “Is this relevant to our investigation, Stone?”
I smiled blandly at her. “Let’s find out.” I turned to Kirkpatrick. “I know Princeton has been conducting experiments for over twenty years on how consciousness interacts with the physical world at a quantum level. But I understood that the electrical fields generated by the brain were so weak…”
He interrupted me. “That is precisely the point. The brain generates fields at the quantum level, and they are miniscule. So communication between one and another is practically impossible, even when the heads are touching. However…” He sighed. He looked almost like a man about to make a guilty admission. “The issue is not, in fact, the strength or weakness of the signal. A very feeble receptor is capable of capturing a single quantum particle, an electron or a photon, over millions of light years’ distance!”
Dehan snorted. “Come on! That’s ridiculous! How would you even prove such a thing?”
I smiled at her, impressed not for the first time by her irreverence and total lack of respect for her supposed superiors. Kirkpatrick flushed and glared at her. She shrugged and spread her hands. “Sorry, but really…”
Dehan has a face it is hard to stay mad at, and Kirkpatrick sighed and shook his head. “Tonight, Detective Dehan, do yourself a favor and step outside. Try to find a place where the damned city lights have not flooded the sky, maybe Soundview Park, or take a drive to Long Island. Look up at the sky and pick the smallest star you can find and stare at it. When you do that, remind yourself that the feeble electrical fields in your brain are capturing and processing photons that were projected millions of years ago, by a star millions of light years away.”