Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (A Dead Cold Box Set) Blake Banner (best books to read ever txt) 📖

I smiled. “It gets a little confusing, I know. And it was that simple fact that helped consolidate this as one of the classic cases in UFO mythology. Because, you see, Jasmine was not alone in being infatuated with Danny. Jane also had a big crush on him. And that night, she became jealous because she realized, with her feminine intuition, that Jasmine was coming on to him, in her own quiet, subtle way, and that he was liking it. So she made her play and tried to seduce him. The net result was that she got nowhere with Danny, but made Paul very mad and, where there was supposed to be a party at the cabin on Saturday night, instead, Paul and Jane’s bad feelings spread throughout the company and everybody ended up going home early.

“And that confused me to start with because I had assumed that everybody was going home from your place in the Bronx. But they weren’t, they were going home from here, and Danny stayed. What did you do, Don? You sent Jasmine to bed. She’s so obedient she would do anything you told her, right? So you sent her to bed and, what? Did you shoot him? Stab him?”

May let out a ghastly, inhuman wail. “Oh, no! Dear God, no, please!”

I stared at her and wondered for a moment at a mind that could accept her son’s death at the hands of extraterrestrials, but the thought of his being killed by another man was intolerable. I turned back to Don. He sighed.

“I stabbed him with a kitchen knife. Poor boy. He was very surprised.” He turned to look at May and Stuart. “I’m sorry. It was very quick. He hardly suffered at all. I stabbed him from behind, directly into the heart. Left the knife in until the heart had stopped beating, so there was practically no bleeding.”

The horror on Stuart’s face, and on May’s, was beyond words. They stared at him, and not just the horror of their son’s death was writ large in their eyes, but also the twenty years of betrayed trust, the twenty years of calling him a friend while all the time he had been their son’s executioner, all the while he had held the memory of their son’s death in his mind. I didn’t want to go on. I didn’t want to subject them to any more, but I had no choice.

“You took him down to the basement, as you did with Paul tonight.”

“Tonight was more difficult because Jasmine had to do it alone, while we were out at the clearing. She had to use a trolley. You probably saw it in the cellar. But that night I did it myself. I cut off the head and the feet and…” He hesitated and scowled at May and Stuart, who had gone sickly white. “Well, I was angry!” he said. “Trying to fuck my wife!” His face flushed with rage, then it slowly subsided. “I kept the bits in the freezer and put his body in the furnace, on a sheet of metal from an old oil drum. It gets damn hot in there. You need a lot of heat to get through the winters up here. It drops to well below freezing, and you have snow for months on end…” He might have been giving one of his lectures, or narrating a travelogue. “When he was reduced to ash, with a few bones, I gathered him up and put it all in a cooler in the back of my car, and drove back to the Bronx.”

Colonel Hait was staring at him, transfixed somewhere between horror and fascination. “But how? For twenty years, the murder has been unsolved because it was impossible! Even Detective Ochoa ended up accepting it must have been some kind of non-human agency!”

I smiled and nodded. “Believe me, Detective Dehan and I were scratching our heads and beginning to wonder if this was a genuine X-File. But actually, it was really simple.” I spread my hands. “If it had just been the lights over the park, that’s simple, right? A remote controlled chopper, or helium balloons with some kind of directional fan to drive it around, a few lights and a few lasers bought from an electronics store. With a little advice from Jane—albeit unwitting advice—something like that was easy to put together.”

Don was nodding. “It was a helium balloon with a directional fan, much like a zeppelin. I had been planning to use it for a sighting up here in the fall…”

I continued, “Even the mutilation and the incineration were not impossible to explain, as you’ve seen, but what made it seem impossible, what acted as a catalyst to make the whole thing seem impossible, was the absence of footprints or tracks. Any explanation you came up with fell apart when you tried to explain how the body got there. And that was what fell into place when I realized that there was a cabin out here. Suddenly the house had to have a furnace, for the long winters—a furnace capable of producing the necessary temperatures to incinerate a body. And when you have the furnace, you are no longer carrying a hundred and sixty pound body, you are carrying much less weight; and if you have a furnace for the snowy winters, well, you’re also going to have snow shoes, right? Snow shoes, possibly adapted with a bit of sheepskin, or wool, would leave no recognizable tracks across the mud. And then everything else fell into place.”

I smiled at Dehan as she closed her eyes and slapped her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Son of a bitch!”

“And the little spectacle tonight? Paul was given some sleeping tablets ground up in his drink. That’s why he retired early.” I looked from Don