I grinned. “You becoming a believer, Scully?”
“Take a hike. I’m saying it’s easy to see why somebody would come to that conclusion.”
I screwed up my face.
She arched an eyebrow. “What? Now you are the skeptic?”
“Thing is, Dehan, even if you do accept the extraterrestrial hypothesis, there are questions that have no satisfactory answer.”
“Like?”
“Like why didn’t they kill Donald? Why didn’t they kill Jasmine? Paul, Jane, Dixon and all the others? Danny was the only one who was actually keen to go to the glade. But he’s the one who gets killed.”
She thought about it. “OK, I’m not saying I buy this, but we’re exploring the idea, right?”
“Right.”
“So they said that Don was the rock on which they were going to build. So maybe they wanted him for that.”
“So are they simply hunters or have they a mission here?” I shook my head. “It lacks consistency. Even if they wanted to preserve Don and Jasmine for some reason, why only kill one of them? And why wait till he’s back in the Bronx? Why not kill him out in the mountains? If they are hunters, they could have had a field day out there in the forest.”
“Maybe they were not hunters. Maybe they were scientists conducting a sociological experiment that went wrong. Maybe he was taken up, and they were beaming him down to a discreet location near his home, and the transporter went wrong. That would be more consistent.”
I smiled at her for a moment. She picked up a pencil, stared at it and threw it on the desk. “Listen to me. Next thing, I’m going to be wearing a tinfoil hat.”
“Eliminate the impossible, Watson, and whatever is left, however improbable…”
“Not helpful.”
“Perhaps. But let’s be careful about what we eliminate as impossible, when it might simply be highly improbable.”
“What are you talking about? Are you switching the tables on me?”
The phone buzzed. I picked it up.
“Stone.”
“Detective Stone, you have a Jane Harrison here to see you.”
“OK, thanks.” I hung up. “That was fast. She’s here. You want to take her up? I’ll get coffee.”
Ten minutes later, I pushed through the door holding three paper cups of coffee-like substance precariously in my hands. Jane Harrison was in her early forties, but looked younger. She was well-dressed in an expensive mulberry suit and had an expensive haircut to go with it.
I set down the coffee and smiled at her as I sat. “It’s coffee, Jane, but not as we know it.”
She laughed.
I went on, “Thanks for coming in. The case is twenty years cold and we can use any help we can get.”
She gave a small frown. “To be honest, I was pretty surprised to get your call. I thought Donald Kirkpatrick’s ‘explanation’,” she put inverted commas around the world with her tone of voice, “had been accepted by default.”
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,
