by Blake Banner
Dehan frowned. “You don’t buy Donald’s explanation?”
Jane sighed and thought for a moment before answering. Then she seemed to lock onto Dehan’s eyes. “You know the poster? It has a picture of a flying saucer over a woodland, and it says, ‘I want to believe’. That was me. That was all of us back then. And it is a really bad motto. I want to believe. What does that mean? It means you are going to interpret the evidence, it means that when the evidence gives you the wrong answer, you will massage it and even distort it until it gives you the answer you want. And frankly, with hindsight, I think that is what Donald has done. OK, Danny’s death is very hard to explain in conventional terms.” She gave a small laugh. “I can’t explain it! But the fact is there is as little evidence to show he was killed by an alien hunter, as there is to show he was killed by a terrestrial drugs dealer, loan shark, or jilted lover. When you approach a mystery with that ‘I want to believe’ attitude, you’re screwed before you even begin.”
Dehan blinked at her a few times and smiled. “Have you any theories of your own as to what happened?”
She shook her head. “But I can tell you that what happened that weekend was not quite how it is portrayed in Donald’s book, or how he describes it at his conferences. There was more to it than that.”
I nodded a few times. “Why don’t you give us a fuller picture, starting from Friday evening?”
She spread out her hands on the table top and stared at her fingers for a long moment. “Probably the first thing I should tell you,” she said, “is that Paul and I were engaged to be married.”
EIGHT
“Danny and Paul were childhood friends. They used to say they were brothers, but guys say that kind of thing, don’t they?” She glanced at me for confirmation.
I offered her an inexpressive smile.
“Whatever. They were real close and obviously loved each other…” She glanced at me, startled momentarily by the possibility that I might have misunderstood her. “Not in a weird way. They weren’t gay.” She laughed. “Just like… guys. And they were both really into that UFO stuff. Especially Danny. He was crazy about it, and he kind of infected Paul. Paul was interested, but he was also interested in other stuff, like…” She hesitated and glanced at Dehan for understanding. “Like life…right?”
Dehan smiled. “Right.”
It was a neutral statement, but Jane took it as encouragement and laughed. “Like movies, dancing, a restaurant now and then. And hey! We can talk about books that aren’t about the alien presence on Earth!”
I gave her an ‘I know exactly what you mean’ chuckle and said, “But hang on a moment, are we talking about Paul or Danny here?”
She stared at me for five whole seconds, which when you are staring at somebody is a long time. “You don’t miss much, do you?”
“No.”
She sighed. “It was kind of odd, because it was like Danny was obsessed with UFOs and the X-Files and that whole world, but somehow he made it fascinating. Plus he was funny, happy, inexhaustible and he just made you feel alive by simply being in his presence. But Paul…” She flopped back in her chair and sighed again. It was a sigh of real regret. “Paul was obsessed with Danny! I guess we all were to a greater or lesser extent. Or, if not obsessed, at least kind of really aware of him, all the time… you know?”
I nodded. “I feel you are leading up to something, Jane…”
“Yeah, I am. I’m sorry. I’m getting there, but it takes some explaining. So, Danny’s whole life was his UFO research. Which was, in a sense, why I was with Paul. With Paul, we could go out to the cinema, or watch a movie at home, maybe sometimes go out to dinner or whatever. We had a life that included more things than just aliens. But, sooner or later, the conversation would always come back to Danny.”
She paused, staring down at her hands. After a moment, she looked up and searched Dehan’s face. I thought I saw a hint of guilt, a plea for understanding. She went on.
“With Danny, the subject always came back to UFOs. With Paul, the subject always came back to Danny. I fought it, I really did, but bit by bit I began to lose respect for him.”
Dehan nodded a few times, and in a voice that was not unsympathetic she said, “It sounds to me, Jane, as though all along the one you were in love with was Danny.”
“That obvious, huh?”
“You said so yourself at the beginning. The only reason you were not with Danny was because his whole life was UFOs.”
“I said that? Yeah, I guess I said that.”
I sat back. “So what happened?”
“Something you have to understand is that Danny never fell in love. There just wasn’t a woman on Earth who could keep up with him, and he needed a woman who would not just keep up, but would challenge him. So he never gave his heart to anyone. But he was the ultimate flirt. He didn’t even know he was flirting. He didn’t care if she was ninety, two, a drop dead gorgeous supermodel, a homeless tramp, or the First Lady. It was all the same to him. If she was female, he would flirt with her. Just because flirting was fun. He would make her laugh, tease her, make her feel good about herself. And believe me, if you were a woman and you spoke to Danny for two minutes, you felt like a million bucks.” She smiled. It was a private smile between her and some special memory. “I guess there were not many girls who didn’t have a bit of a crush on him.”
I scratched my chin. “Jane, did Danny have occasional girlfriends? Did he have passing affairs…?”
“Yeah. They weren’t quite one night stands, but you knew that if you hit the sack with Danny, it would not develop into anything serious.” She laughed again, without much humor. “They were more like three or four night stands. He never lied or pretended. I guess he slept with most of the girls in the group, and some who were not in the group. He was hard to resist.”
“Where did these encounters take place?”
Her cheeks colored a little. “His parents were pretty liberal and if he took a girl home to meet them it was generally accepted that she would stay the night. But they drew the line if the girl had a boyfriend, or if they knew she had a boyfriend. So he had a van.”
Dehan raised an eyebrow. “A van?”
“Yeah. Sometimes we would use it to go on field trips. It was pretty luxurious in the back. He had music.” She smiled and shook her head. “He told us what it was for.”
We fell silent for a moment and I drummed my fingers on the table. “OK, Jane, we have been talking around this for a while. Do you think it’s time to get to the point?”
She nodded a few times, then took a deep, reluctant breath.
“Paul and I didn’t have a row or anything. We didn’t start arguing or anything like that. I truly believe he was not aware that there was a problem. But I had grown really bored with him. With him and his kind of adulation of the ground Danny walked on. And at the same time, my attraction for Danny was growing to the point where I was kidding myself that maybe I could be the one. Stupid, I know, but that was how it was.
“On the Friday night, we all went up to Macomb Mountain. Donald had his equipment there and we were trying to pick up signals or transmissions that might confirm there was a non-terrestrial presence in the atmosphere, the stratosphere, or even just in orbit. He also had some kind of visual scanner that could pick up light beyond either end of the visible spectrum. I’m no scientist, but the equipment seemed pretty sophisticated to me.
“So, around midnight we picked up some signals that Don said were not naturally occurring, and were not of human origin. I don’t know how he knew that, but he did. And then we saw lights in the sky…”
I asked, “Visible to the naked eye?”
“Uh-uh, no, on the scanner. And they were moving at incredible speeds. Accelerating naught to a thousand miles an hour instantly, then stopping dead, reversing, turning right angles. Crazy stuff you normally only read about in books. It was pretty exciting and we were all pretty high.”
“High?”
“No!
No, not high. None of us was into that. No, high on adrenaline; on the buzz. So then the lights just vanished. We sat around waiting for them to come back, but they didn’t and finally a bunch of the guys got tired and went into their tents.” She paused. “I’m trying to remember who stayed… Danny, obviously, me, Don and Jasmine, and Paul… There may have been some others. The conversation was all between Don and Danny. To say they were excited would be a huge understatement. They were tripping. Then, it must have been about two in the morning, Jasmine suddenly freaks out and starts having this kind of fit. She’s shaking all over and kind of moving her hands and feet. I remember asking Don if she was epileptic. He said she wasn’t, but he was looking for something to put between her teeth to stop her from biting her tongue. We were all sort of, what the hell do we do?” She stopped, shrugged and blinked a few times. “Then it just stopped. She lay still, on her back, with her eyes closed, and started talking.”
I leaned forward. “Have you read Don’s book?”
She shook her head. “No. I didn’t want to.”
“Have you discussed what happened that night with many people?”
“I lost touch with the group immediately after what happened, and I think this is probably one of the only times I have discussed it with anybody in all this time. Why?”
I nodded. “OK, good, I would like you to try and be as accurate and precise as possible about what happened next, and in particular about what Jasmine said.”
She looked a little surprised. “OK.” She thought for a moment. “It was like it wasn’t really her talking. Her voice kind of changed. It was deeper, kind of weird. And she said… I can’t remember it verbatim, Detective Stone, but basically she said that each of us there had some kind of function, or purpose, but that she and Danny were like their messengers or spokespeople, and that they should go up a path—it was a path we had explored earlier that led to a kind of clearing—and there they would have a close encounter with these beings.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I am not proud of my feelings right then. You know, maybe I am just really shallow. Everybody else there was, like, blown away because we were making contact with ET, and these two guys were going to carry their message to mankind. But me, all I could think of was why was it Jasmine going up that path with Danny and not me?
“So when Don turns around and says, no way, he will not allow Jasmine to go, I was the happiest chick in the world. So he is saying ‘Either we all ago, or nobody goes!’, most of the others are saying we should follow the aliens’ instructions to the letter, and me, I am saying, let’s me and Danny go. You know, like a compromise. And then Don got real mad, and he started quoting cases at us about where humans had been abducted and mutilated. Um… he quoted Darlington, Ohio in 1958, Sergeant Lovett in New Mexico in 1956, Guarapiranga in Brazil, in the 1980s, 1988 I think. And several other cases…”
She trailed off. We waited a bit, but she just sat and bit her lips. Finally, I said, “What about these cases, Jane?”
“Well, you’ve heard of cattle mutilation?”
“Something. Not much.”
“Well, Detective, however skeptical you are, this is something that has been going on in the Midwest for at least forty years and even the FBI don’t know what to make of it. It’s a problem, because ranchers are losing stock, sometimes by the hundred, and in every case the genitals, the lips, and other parts of the anatomy have been surgically removed, without leaving any trace of blood, or any tracks. There is basically no sign that there was anybody there. You go and talk to those ranchers, and we have, and they’ll all tell you they have seen lights in the sky at night, and in the morning they go and they have five, six, seven—sometimes more—dead cows, all surgically mutilated. Now, each one of those animals weighs half a ton. And there isn’t a trace of blood, a tire track, a foot print…”
She paused. “Now, what Don was telling us that night was that this also happened to people, but it’s something that is hushed up even within the UFO community, and he listed a number of cases where people had been found exsanguinated, surgically mutilated, with genitals and other parts of their body removed; and in some cases with parts of their body incinerated. As with the cattle, no trace of any person or vehicle was ever found near the body. In the light of those cases, he insisted that if anybody went, we should all go together.” She stopped and studied the expression on my face for a moment, then smiled unhappily. “If you have contacts in the FBI, check with them. You know they visited most of us after Danny’s death? This is real, Detective.”
“It’s also a hell of a coincidence.”
“Maybe. But I can tell you that I had nightmares for two years, thinking about what might have happened to us if I had persuaded Danny that we should go to that glade, that he should go with me instead of Jasmine. I had to see a therapist in the end.”
I grunted. “So in the morning you went back to Donald’s house?”
She nodded. “Yeah. We were supposed to have a barbeque, a party and chill. Don was cool like that. He and Jasmine were older than the rest of us, but they were fun.”
Dehan frowned. “Don? Don was fun?”
“Sure. Have you met him yet? He’s cool. I miss him sometimes. Real smart, intelligent, a real open mind. And lots of fun.” She laughed. “And when he and Danny started hitting off each other, they’d crack you up. They were good times. But that night we were all just kind of freaked out.”
“So you went home early.”
She didn’t answer straight away. She stared down at her hands on the table for a while, then heaved a big sigh and said, “Not exactly. I am really not proud of what I did that day. I behaved like a total bitch. I kind of lost it, and all Saturday I just came on to Danny big time. It freaked him out, it upset everybody, and it really upset Paul. At first Danny took it as a joke, but as I kept on pushing, he started to back off. Paul started getting mad. Like, he went really cold and wouldn’t talk to Danny.” She hesitated a moment. “In retrospect, I guess that was what I wanted, to break them up. So I pushed harder. When Danny wouldn’t respond, I got mad too, and around four, everybody started to leave. It was a pretty crazy weekend. Paul took me home and we broke up in the car.”
I said, “Was it mutual?”
She made a face. “Kind of. I wanted it, I was tired of him, but he broke up with me. He told me he never wanted to see me again. What made him really mad was not that I had betrayed him, but that I had broken his friendship with Danny.”
Dehan asked, “He phrased it like that, with those words?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
The room fell silent for a long moment. Finally, I sighed and said, “You have given us a lot to think about, Jane. Thank you for being so candid. I just have one more question. Paul is a martial arts instructor. Was he already into the martial arts when you were engaged to him?”
“Oh yeah, all his life, since he was like six years old.”
“Taekwondo?”
“Not just taekwondo, though that was his main discipline, also kendo and ninjitsu.”
I stared at her, wondering if she realized what she had just told me. I was pretty sure she didn’t. Dehan saw her to the door while I sat and stared at the table and thought about Danny and Paul—and the FBI.
NINE
Dehan returned to her desk and I stepped out to stroll under the plane trees on Storey Avenue while I phoned Bernie at the Bureau. It was warm, not yet the oppressive heat of July, but moving that way, and the dappled shade of the trees was welcome.
“Yeah, Stone, what’s up, my friend?”
“Bernie, listen, I have a very unusual request.”
“All of your requests are unusual, Stone. It’s what makes you so loveable—that and your hot partner. What makes this one different?”
“Yeah, I know, but this one is special. Listen, twenty years ago, June 8th, 1998, there was a murder in Soundview Park. It was never solved…”
“Yeah, I know, you’re doing the cold case
s. OK, how can I help?”
“This case has some very unusual features, Bernie, and it seems your boys at the Bureau may have got involved.”
“In a homicide? That’s local PD’s brief. What was in it for the Bureau?”
I stopped in the shade of a tree and stared down at the sidewalk, thinking about what I was about to say. Finally, I said it. “Bernie, the victim was one Danny Brown, a UFO researcher, and there’s circumstantial evidence that he might have been killed by a UFO...”
I could hear the smile in his voice. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I’m not kidding, Bernie. And please note, I am not saying that I believe he was, only that there is circumstantial evidence. And also note, Bernie, that the ‘U’ in UFO stands for ‘unidentified’.”
He snorted. “OK.”
“However, the detective who had the case back then now believes the victim was in fact killed by an ET, and, the night he was killed, several hundred people saw an unidentified flying object over Soundview Park at the spot where he was killed. So, I am not saying this lightly.”
“OK, Stone. I hear you. What do you want?”
“I want you to listen to me. The UFO was seen by hundreds of witnesses, it was reported in the press—whatever it was, Bernie, it was there. That is not a matter of opinion. It’s a fact. So, here is where you can help me. Several of the people who were involved with the victim in his research claim that they were visited by agents who purported to be Feds. They say they were told by these agents to keep quiet about the murder, and about what had happened.”
“Holy shit.”
“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…”