by Blake Banner
“But things continued to get worse with you, Jane and Danny.”
He shrugged. “Danny knew something was wrong, and he was kind of backing away from Jane a bit. But at the same time, he wasn’t really interested. He had no time for that problem. He was buzzing with what we had seen that night. He was real curious about the signals we had picked up. Him and Don, they were convinced that we had hard evidence of the presence of alien ships in Earth’s atmosphere. What he did not need was Jane causing problems in the group.”
I leaned back in my chair, trying to visualize the scene. “How was Don taking all this?”
He smiled. “He was oblivious, man. He had no idea. Him and Danny.” He shook his head. “They lived in a different world, on a different plane.” He shrugged. “We packed up and went back to Don’s place. But Jane wouldn’t let up. Right away, even over breakfast, all her conversation is for Danny. She’s making comments about his van, kind of teasing him, messing with him. It was humiliating.”
Dehan shook her head, like she would not tolerate something like that. “I can’t imagine how that made you feel.”
He looked her straight in the eye. “I’ll tell you how it made me feel. It made me feel like killing her. Taking my katana and cutting her fucking head off.”
THIRTEEN
There was a heavy silence in the interrogation room. After a moment, Dehan said to him, “Paul, are you aware that the statement you just made incriminates you and makes you a suspect in our investigation?”
He smiled down at his hand and gave a soft snort. After a moment, he raised an eyebrow at her. “What? You’re telling me you hadn’t already decided I was jealous and had a motive for killing Danny? I’m not stupid, Detective Dehan. I know why you asked me to come in this morning.” He shook his head. “In my moments of rage, I wanted to kill Jane for lying to me, for pretending to love me when she didn’t, for putting me in the way of all that pain and disappointment when, if she had just been honest from the start, it would not have been necessary. I did, I wanted to kill her for that. But Danny?” He shrugged. “Danny, I wanted to give him two good smacks around the head and tell him to wake the fuck up! Stop fuckin’ flirting with every fuckin’ woman you meet, man! He doesn’t realize it, but when he is playing his little games, to him it’s funny, but he is hurting people! That’s not nice. It’s not respectful. I wanted to slap him around the head, but I did not want to kill him.” He gave a small, private laugh. “Bottom line, he meant more to me than she did. The fuckin’ son of a bitch.”
I studied him through narrowed eyes, trying to see if he was a good actor or if he was being honest. I decided I couldn’t tell and said, “So what happened next?”
“What happened next? It was one of the longest days of my life. Don was a very different kind of man back then. He was a really nice guy. He was open, generous, polite…” He looked at me and laughed a big laugh, pointing at me. “You wouldn’t believe it, huh? He’s a real fuckin’ grouch now. He reminds me of that guy on the Muppets.” He turned to Dehan. His laughter was infectious. “You know the one? He lives in a trash can. Don reminds me of him. But he didn’t used to be like that. He was a nice guy and he had been looking forward to that party. We’d brought beer, meat to barbeque, wine.” He shook his head. “The truth is most people were pretty freaked out by what had happened. But it’s also true that Jane…” He shrugged. “And, the truth be told, Danny too, they were bringin’ the mood down. It was hard to ignore them, and everybody was feeling bad for me and trying not to show it. The whole thing was embarrassing.”
I scratched my chin. “So, if I am hearing you right, by the afternoon Danny had started to join in with Jane.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I have to admit that. He didn’t mean anything by it. But by the afternoon he was playing along, flirting back. I had taken Jane aside and asked her to have the minimum respect of not humiliating me in front of all my friends, you know? But she just dismissed me and told me to get a life, or words to that effect. So I thought, yeah. She’s right. You know? Never a truer word spoken. It was time for me to get a life, a life without her in it. Make room for a woman who would love and like me, and respect me—not some other guy.
“So right there, in front of everybody, I went up to Danny and I pointed at him and I said, ‘I am real mad at you. This is not how you treat a friend. I would never, never, do this to you. And Monday, you and me are gonna talk about this!’ Then I turned to her and I said, ‘I’m going home, I brought you in my car, so I will take you home in my car if you want me to. Otherwise you can go in Danny’s fuckin’ fuck-mobile!’ And I saw how she looked at him, like asking, you know, ‘Can I come home with you?’ But Danny was real upset. Our friendship meant a lot to both of us, and he was not happy. Fuckin’ Jane was nothing to him. So he frowns at me and says, ‘I don’t know what you’re mad about, bro…’”
He stopped suddenly and I could see tears in his eyes. His jaw muscles were bunching and when he spoke again he sounded like he had a bad cold. “He says, ‘I don’t know what I’ve done, Paul, but whatever it is, I’m sorry, man. We can talk now.’ He said that, ‘We can talk now, we go outside and we can talk this through.’ But I was too mad and I said I was leaving. I just wanted to break up with Jane and get it over with. So he looks at her and frowns and shakes his head. She asks him, outright, ‘You want me to stay?’ and he looks at her like she’s crazy, and he says, ‘No! He’s your boyfriend. Go with him and sort it out!’”
Dehan asked, “So everybody left about the same time?”
“I guess. Danny said he was staying for a bit to speak with Paul. Jane and I didn’t talk all the way back. It was the longest drive of my life. Finally, I dropped her at her place. It was her parents’ place back then. I remember it like it was yesterday. I had been really in love with her. I was going to marry her, for Christ’s sake! You know? And as she was opening the door…” He shook his head, still incredulous after twenty years. “She was just going to get out of the car and go into her house, without saying anything. But I stopped her. I said, ‘I got to tell you something before you get out of the car.’ She says, ‘Can’t it wait? I’m tired.’ I said, ‘No, because I am probably never going to talk to you again.’ So she goes kind of frozen, like she’s shocked. I said, ‘You are a shallow, selfish, unfeeling bitch. You used me and you discarded me with no consideration for my feelings. You were willing to destroy me without compassion, just so you could play your little game with Danny.’ Then I told her, ‘Get out of my car and get out of my life. I never want to see you again.’ She got out and she had the gall, the sheer, fuckin’ gall—to run into her house crying! Can you believe that?” He sat staring at the wall, shaking his head. “Man, I haven’t talked about this for years. It brings it all back.”
Dehan said, “That was pretty brutal. What did you do next?”
“I continued on my way and went home. There I went to bed and I am ashamed to say I cried myself to sleep. The next day I started drinking around lunchtime and I don’t think I sobered up for a week.”
“Can anyone confirm that?”
He shrugged. “I honestly can’t remember, Detective Stone.” He smiled at me. I was surprised to see that it was not an unsympathetic smile. “I don’t mean to be funny, but I don’t honestly feel I need an alibi. Because there was no way on God’s green Earth that I was capable of inventing whatever it was that incinerated Danny and cut off his head and his feet. Could I have cut off his head and his feet with my katana?” He nodded. “For sure. Could I have incinerated him and placed him there in the park, and arranged for a space probe to fly over and fire its damned lasers at him?” He shook his head and smiled. “Nah. No way. That’s out of my league. I wish you luck. I’d like to catch whoever did it, especially if Don is wrong and you are right, and it was a person who killed him. But I honestly don’t think it was. This is one case you are never going to solve, unless you start looking somewhere else.”
Dehan heaved a big sigh and absently tied
her hair behind her neck. When she was done, she said, “Can you tell us any more about the signals that Don picked up, or the thing you saw flying in the sky? I noticed he doesn’t say much about it in his book.”
He made a face. “Not really. The signals I didn’t understand at all. He said there were too many random variations for it to be of a natural origin. The images, he had a special camera focused on a sector of the sky to the southwest of our position. He had special lenses and software that allowed him to connect the camera to the computer, and then on the screen you could see these objects appear and disappear, flying across the sky just the way he described them.”
“Did he record it?”
“Yeah, he recorded it on his computer.”
“What did he do with the recordings, do you know?”
He shrugged. “You’d have to ask him, but I think he contacted the FBI and the Air Force and offered them sight of what he had recorded. I don’t know what came of that. He never told anybody.”
Dehan glanced at me. I had no more questions, but I was reluctant to let him go. I wanted to go over everything he had said again. I had a gut feeling he had said something that I had missed. It was nagging at my mind, but I couldn’t pin it down. They were both watching me, waiting. I tried to run through the whole conversation, focusing on what he had said, on what he had told us, but I couldn’t nail it. It was in there, some small comment he’d made, but I couldn’t find it. Finally, I shook my head and spread my hands.
“Thank you, Paul. You have been very helpful.”
“We’re done? I can go?”
“Sure, of course.”
I stood and saw him to the door. There he stopped a moment and looked into my face. “It wasn’t Jane, you know. I didn’t mean to suggest that Jane did it either.” He shrugged. “I don’t see how anybody could have done it.”
I nodded. “I know, Paul. Thanks.”
He left and I watched him go down the stairs. Then I went back into the interrogation room, closed the door, and went and rested my ass on the table. Dehan was still sitting. I crossed my arms and looked down at her.
“Did anything in what he said strike you as significant?”
She thought for a while before answering, then kind of shrugged with her eyebrows. “He struck me as sincere. His story seems very believable. And it is hard to imagine him getting back and in just a few hours putting together that elaborate plan. There must be a thousand simpler, more satisfying ways he could have killed him, and still got away with it.”
I grunted. “Yeah. No. It wasn’t that.”
“Also, it rang true that he was mad at her, not Danny.”
I shook my head. “There was something he said. It’s stuck in my brain, like when you get something stuck in your teeth, but I’m not sure what it was. He said something…”
She screwed up her eyes. “You think it might have been her, Stone? What’s that quote?”
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. It’s possible. But it doesn’t get us very far.”
Her face had suddenly taken on a strange expression, like slow shock. “You know what her job is, Stone?”
I frowned. “Uh, yeah, she told me, she’s a TV producer. That was why she was able to come in and see us in the morning, because she has an odd schedule…” I trailed off. “Oh…”
She nodded several times, staring at me. “Yeah, oh indeed… Stone, if anyone has the skill to set up an elaborate production like this one, it would be someone in TV or the movies.”
“Maybe. We need to find out exactly what aspect of production she’s involved in, and, more to the point, what she was doing twenty years ago. She works for NBC. Get on the phone to them. Keep it confidential, I don’t want her to know we’re looking at her yet.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to play back this interview and listen to it. There is something Paul said, Dehan, some passing comment…”
But just as I was saying it, my cell rang.
“Stone.”
“Detective Stone, this is Special Agent Smith, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I was wondering if you and Detective Carmen Dehan could come down to the field office for a talk.”
I stared at Dehan a moment. “Yeah. Of course. What’s this about?”
“Your current investigation into the death of Danny Brown.”
“You have information that could help us?”
“Why don’t we discuss that when you’re here, Detective? Say, in half an hour?”
“Make that forty-five minutes. We’ll see you then. Thanks for calling.” I hung up before he could answer and looked at Dehan. “The Bureau. Agent Smith.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Seriously? What’s the bet his partner is Agent Brown?”
I nodded. “Let’s go.”
FO URTEEN
Agent Smith did not have his name on the door of his small, anonymous office. Neither did he look the way he sounded. His voice had somehow suggested someone who had had all his compassion and humanity ruthlessly trained out of him. But to look at, Agent Smith looked like somebody’s uncle. He was of average height, slim, with a soft, round face and balding, curly, blond hair. He wore round glasses, which added to the soft roundness of his face. But in spite of his uncle-ish look, he did not have a smile.
He rose as we stepped in and came around the desk to shake our hands. There was another man there who also stood. He did smile. He wore a suit, a black mustache, and tightly curled black hair. Agent Smith spoke as we shook. “Detectives, thank you for coming in. This is Agent Brown, I know how busy you must be, so we appreciate your taking the time.”
We sat and they sat. I noticed there were no papers on his desk, no jar with pens in it and no photos of his nieces and nephews on the desk, or the bookcase. In fact, there was no bookcase, either. He said, “I’ll come straight to the point. Agent Bernie Hirschfield passed on your inquiry to us. Do you mind telling us exactly what your interest is in this case?”
I stared at him and drew breath to answer but Dehan was already talking. “What kind of a question is that? Our interest? It was a homicide committed within the jurisdiction of the 43rd Precinct. It wasn’t solved at the time and we are in charge of cold cases. That’s our interest, Agent Smith.”
Smith blinked at her, but aside from that showed no expression. Brown smiled. “It is simply,” he said, “that we were surprised at its resurfacing after all these years, and we wondered why.”
I answered before Dehan could get in. “Purely routine, Agent Brown. We have been working through the cold cases, and this one came up. That’s what happens with cold cases. I am not going to inquire as to why you are interested that we are interested. Presumably you are doing your job and you have your reasons, just as we do. But what I am going to inquire about is whether you did, in fact, visit some of the witnesses in the original case.”
They looked at each other. Smith nodded at Brown and turned to me. “We did visit some of the witnesses. I’m not sure ‘witness’ is the right word, as it seems that nobody, in fact, witnessed the murder. But we did visit some of Daniel’s friends and family.”
Dehan crossed one of her long legs over the other and coughed. “A homicide within New York is not in the Bureau’s jurisdiction. What made you look into it?”
Brown smiled his bland, friendly smile again. “It wasn’t the fact of the homicide, Detective Dehan, but the nature of the homicide.”
“The fact that there was an apparent UFO involved, or the similarity with the cattle mutilations in the Midwest?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Both. The official position of the Bureau on UFOs is that we are not aware of any extra-terrestrial presence either on this planet or within the United States, but we certainly don’t discount the possibility. That would be absurd, when our own National Aeronautics and Space Administration is actively seeking out life on other planets!” He laughed. “Naturally, we were aware of the homicide and of the UFO over the park. So when it emerge
d that the local police were unable to solve the case, we went and asked a few questions.”
I nodded. “The consensus amongst the people you spoke to, in particular Donald Kirkpatrick, is that they were instructed not to talk about what had happened.”
Smith smiled for the first time. It wasn’t what you’d call warm, but it was amused.
“We obviously didn’t do a very good job of scaring them into silence then, did we?” He looked over at Brown and added, “We should get the boys over at the CIA to give us Men in Black lessons.” They both laughed. Then Smith turned back to me and pressed the point home. “After all, he went on to publish a book that sold well over a million copies. I think if the Bureau wanted to silence somebody, Detective Stone, we could do it a little more effectively than that. However, despite what popular fiction may have you believe, we do not actually indulge in that kind of activity. We leave that to the boys at Langley.”
They laughed again and Agent Brown said, “No, we can only speculate as to Mr. Kirkpatrick’s motives for claiming that we tried to silence him, but the fact is that we had no reason to do so. It has, nonetheless, given a definite boost to his sales over the years. If you look at his website, the alleged attempts by the Bureau to silence him are quite prominent in his…” He hesitated a moment. “In his sales pitch.”
I nodded. “So are you telling me that the FBI had no interest in the case, and made no attempt to silence the witnesses?”
Smith answered. “That is exactly what we are telling you. Putting it bluntly, Detective, we don’t mind Kirkpatrick cashing in on a little post-X-Files paranoia about the Bureau, but we don’t want the NYPD running away with the idea that we go around threatening their witnesses.”
“OK, well, we appreciate that.”
“But while you’re here, off the record, may we inquire whether you have developed a theory as to who killed Daniel, and how?”
I studied Smith’s face. It was an inscrutable mask and you could tell he had spent years perfecting it. I turned to Brown. His smile had that same impenetrable quality. I turned back to Smith. “Why do you ask?”