by Bill Alive
“Oh man,” Mark whispered. “He’s on the warpath.”
Hollister growled, but he answered in a podium voice, as if they were both at an actual press conference and not squeezed into a tiny lobby beneath dangling model airplanes.
“The plane suffered a mechanical accident. As far as I know, the only source of those allegations are editors with overactive imaginations trying to sell ad space.”
“Not smart,” Mark whispered.
Hannigan-Quinn bristled. (He came complete with a bushy gray mustache, which he could literally bristle.) “This ‘mechanical accident’ is the subject of an ongoing police investigation!”
“And as their forensic team has found, the cause is simple. The fuel gauge was broken. It showed as full, but the tank may actually have been empty.”
“And how often do fuel gauges just break like that?” Hannigan-Quinn demanded. “Right when the tank is conveniently empty?”
“You’d be surprised how many plane crashes happen from running out of fuel,” Hollister said. “You can’t just pull over in the sky. Pilots overestimate how long they can last—”
“That’s a rookie mistake! But Timothy Waterbury was a seasoned veteran! And he ran out of gas a minute after takeoff!”
Mark winced. “Ugh,” he muttered. “I think they both might have ulcers.”
Hollister sighed and seemed to change to a confidential tone. “Look, Dustin, one small business owner to another … do you really have to roast my company to sell your papers? We’re a local FBO, we’ve been managing this airport for years, and truth be told, we’re already having a bad year. An anti-business slant on this could push us over the edge.”
Hannigan-Quinn’s eyes bulged. “Do you even read the Brown County Gazette?” he demanded. He wasn’t quite frothing at the mouth, but spittle was creaming in the corners. “Do you think for one second we’re going to shy away from inconvenient truths? That we’ll crony up to vested business interests while there’s an Airport Murderer on the loose? A serial killer?
Hollister flushed red. “Don’t you dare start talking about an ‘Airport Murderer’!” he bellowed. “If anything really did happen with either of those deaths, it was their own damn fault, and it has nothing to do with this company.”
“So you’d like to go on record that your business partner may have deserved to be murdered?”
“I want to go on record that if you screw around with drugs, bad things happen. You don’t mess with Numb.”
Hannigan-Quinn snapped up, scared but licking his lips with excitement. “Numb?” he said.
Mark gasped. “I’m such an idiot,” he groaned. He burst this out so loud that the other men whipped toward us.
Hollister said, “What the hell are you two doing here?”
Hannigan-Quinn’s eyes gleamed. “What what? Who’s this?”
“Damn it,” Mark said. “Come on.” He rushed out.
“Nice to see you again,” I babbled at the glaring Hollister as I backed away. “We were just dropping in, last time we didn’t really get a chance to check out your airplane models, you’ve really got some great picks here, super detailed … okay, bye.”
Outside, Mark demanded the keys. We drove without a word, roaring along country roads with him grim and tight-lipped. I had no idea where we were going. Finally he parked on a ridge with a wide view of the valley. Below us, Back Mosby spread in a picturesque snapshot, like the whole small town was posing for a selfie.
Mark stared down in silence. Somehow I knew I should wait.
Finally, he said, “I hate cities.”
“Shocker,” I said, unsure where this was going. “Yeah, we should do a run to New York, you’d die.”
He frowned.
Okay, fine, I’d try the non-joke approach. “Did you grow up in a city?”
He nodded. “Alexandria. Not a great place for an empath. Not that my condition was always so … advanced. I’ve still got family there. This is as far west as I could get along 66 without it taking all day to get up there. Plus, it was cheap enough I could actually survive without having to work fifteen hours a day. That’s why I came out here, but now…”
He drifted off and knit his eyebrows, struggling for the right words. I waited.
“You know how you fly into L.A., and it goes on and on forever, like Mordor?” he said. “And you just want to throw up?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never been.”
“It’s like, how did human beings ever think this was a good idea? It’s so impossibly huge, just literally insane. But here, you can go up a mountain and see it all at once, it’s an actual place that fits in your head. You don’t need to cram hordes of millions of people together to be great. Ancient Athens only had a hundred thousand or so.”
He sighed.
I felt even more clueless.
“How many tourists do you think we get a year?” he said.
“What?”
“Tourists. How many tourists come through Back Mosby?”
I looked down at the scattered town. “Twenty thousand?”
“Half a million.”
“What? Just for Highline Drive?”
“The scenic mountain drive, the wineries, whatever. Half a million strangers through those few streets. Plenty enough to bring all that city shit I thought I left back east.”
“So were you, like, involved in stuff? Detective work? With the cops?”
“It wasn’t like that.” He rubbed his eyebrows and closed his eyes. “You know how you were asking how a guy who vibes beautiful women could still be single? Here’s why.”
He pulled out his phone and pulled up a photo.
I caught my breath.
She had the sort of smile that pierces you, and her eyes were laughing at their own sorrow. She was Goth and glittering like a rock star, the Asian avatar of all the Girls Who Ever Got Away, leaning on Mark’s shoulder with her thin cheek pressed against his bald head. Mark had an ironic smile I’d never seen, like he was deliriously happy, and he knew it couldn’t last. Just looking at them made my heart ache.
“Oh my gosh, dude,” I said. “She’s gorgeous.”
“Yeah, she was. Brilliant, too. Akina, the smartest, hottest meth head on the East Coast.”
I cringed. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. We’d both had crazy Catholic alcoholic Dads who favored the belt, so it was a wonderfully wholesome relationship.”
He paused.
“I’m pretty sure she’s dead.”
“God,” I said.
“And I’m pretty sure it was Numb.”
A chill I’d never known crept into my gut. “So ‘Numb’ is a drug dealer?”
“He’s the dealer. And not just drugs. Runs the show in D.C.” He rubbed his face. “And here I thought all that shit was far away.”
“Wait, wait!” I said. “Isn’t that the word Lynch thought? ‘Numb’?”
He snorted. “Brilliant deduction, Watson.”
I wilted.
He winced. “Argh, don’t! I take it back!”
“Sorry!”
“No, I’m sorry. My bad. I’m just pissed at myself for not getting it either.” He took a long breath and exhaled. “Well, good thing neither of us have kids, eh?”
The chill in my gut crackled into ice. “I guess drug dealers are kind of a big deal?”
“Dealers are one thing. Numb’s a fricking psychopath. Senators ask him permission to piss.”
“But if everyone knows him, why can’t they arrest him on something?”
Mark scoffed. “You’re not getting this guy. There was this one time, way back when he was a kid teenager working his way up the ranks, when the cops did manage to catch him and get him cuffed. Almost.”
“What happened?”
“He ditched the cuffs and ran.”
Something in his face made me both scared and compelled to ask. “How do you … ditch … cuffs?”
“He broke his own hands.”
I realized my che
st was starting to shake. “Mark, seriously, what are we going to do?”
“The thing is, Pete, I think she could have made it, if it hadn’t been for the meth. If there hadn’t been this instant release from the agony. From the lifetime of monster voices that some shithead screamed into her mind from the time she was a one-year-old getting beaten when she cried in her crib.”
He paused again. “It’s a nice little town, isn’t it?”
“But do you think Gwen’s right after all?” I persisted. “Should we leave it alone?”
“I think we should catch the damn bad guys.”
Above us, the sky darkened. A gray bank of storm clouds rumbled across the sun, burying Back Mosby in shadow.
Chapter 26
So after we’d recommitted ourselves to hunting down a murderer who might turn out to be some psychopathic crime lord, we went home and binge-watched another season of Unwinnable State.
The next day was a Friday, and I felt like I’d put in enough hours at Valley Visions that week that we could afford to keep doing interviews. In fact, we couldn’t afford not to … now that Numb was on the table, the longer we waited, the more scared we’d be to get out there talking to people again.
Over my scrambled eggs and Mark’s insta-coffee (which was running low), we went over the whole case from this new drug angle.
“What if the money had nothing to do with Lindsay getting killed?” I said. “What if both she and Waterbury were involved with Numb and the drug scene, and both plane crashes were executions? If Fidelio’s also in the scene, he could have used his flight experience to do the sabotage. We already know he’s a criminal who wants easy money.”
“Yes, but conning isn’t dealing,” Mark said. “Or executing. We don’t even know he’s into drugs.”
“He married a drug addict!” I said. “She could have dragged him in. Or maybe he was already working for Numb, and he promised to keep her supplied. And maybe he dragged Lindsay into drugs.”
“That’s a lot of speculation,” Mark said. “We have no evidence that Lindsay was ever into drugs, or even that into Samson.”
“But how did she have the money for flight lessons?”
“She didn’t, remember? She got them for free.”
“Right! Isn’t that suspicious?” I said. “And why would she be messing around with the airport anyway? Hollister made it sound like Waterbury was using the planes to run shipments for Numb. Maybe those tiny airports have zero security, and it’s a whole new delivery system to move around drugs and cash under the radar.”
Mark shook his head. “It all hinges on what kind of person Lindsay was. Is she really a person who would get mixed up with organized crime? Especially when she was expecting a huge payout? We still don’t really know.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I guess we just talk to everyone all over again. Plus anyone else who knew her.”
Mark held his head in his hands. “That’s going to take forever.”
“Dude,” I said, with mild reproach, as if I hadn’t thought this exact thing myself. “This is what detectives do. Plus, you have a superpower. Besides, talking is fun. Except when they’re terrible people.”
“Then you do it.”
“I don’t have the superpower!”
“Stupid empathy.”
“So who do we talk to first?”
Mark sighed. “Let’s see. Her father threatened to sue us, we made Sibyl cry and throw us out, and with Dr. Kistna, you muffed a date and crashed the wake for her murdered father.”
I squirmed. “This detective thing has a learning curve.”
“Speaking of that wake, is Ceci talking to you again yet?”
“She’s a nurse. She gets busy with work.”
“You should call her.”
“I don’t need to call her, we’re just friends.”
“Friends call each other.”
“You’re changing the subject,” I said.
“You’re changing the subject.”
“What? I am not!”
Mark gave a knowing, self-satisfied smirk.
I wanted to say that I hated when he did that, but I could have sworn that his eyes twinkled as if I’d already said it. Then I wanted to say that I hated that … but I took a breath and said, “I say we talk to Lindsay’s husband first. He was pretty helpful.”
“True. But he’s all the way in Manassas.”
“How can you complain about that? I do all the driving!”
“And I bill by the hour! If we get caught in rush hour traffic and my data feed glitches, I miss a couple hundred bucks!”
“A couple hundred? How much do you charge an hour?”
Mark waved this aside. “I say we start with her father, Mackenzie. Might as well get him out of the way.”
Mark won. Of course.
We considered calling first, but we decided to just show up and knock. Without prep time to rile himself up, maybe he’d have a harder time saying no.
When he opened his scuffed front door, both Mark and I drew back. His saggy eyes were red and bloodshot like he’d been crying hard.
He gave a tired sigh. “Why am I not surprised?”
Mark was trying to mask a wince. “I’m so sorry,” he said gently. “Is this a bad time?”
“It’s never a good time. But my grandson’s due in a few minutes for a weekend visit, which’ll make it easier to kick you out. Come on in.”
He turned and shuffled into the dreary townhouse living room. The couch was piled high with copies of the Wall Street Journal and finance magazines, and the TV was blaring some stock market talk show. He wheezed into a leather easy chair without muting the TV. I hate that, when people keep the TV blasting.
As we followed, Mark whispered, “He’s really upset.”
“I knew that,” I whispered back.
We cleared a couple stacks of newspapers and settled on the creaky couch. Before we could ask anything, Mackenzie started.
“I heard about that pilot murder,” he said, talking comfortably over the blare of the talk show hosts. “Maybe you idiots are on to something after all. Who do you think is this Airport Murderer? What kind of bastard would kill my daughter?”
Mark hesitated.
“Mr. Mackenzie, we’ve been going over everything, and we’re just wondering … did you think it was at all unusual that your daughter had this sudden interest in flying planes?”
The old man’s wrinkles creased with unease. “What do you mean?”
“Well, she was recently divorced, and she had to work multiple entry-level jobs just to get by. Those lessons aren’t cheap.”
His red eyes flashed. “Linsday’d always wanted to fly! She’d talked about it since she was a kid!”
“But wouldn’t it have made more sense to start lessons before she got the divorce? She’d have had a lot more time and money—”
“I don’t know!” he snapped. “Have you done everything on your bucket list?”
Mark frowned. Then he said quietly, “Mr. Mackenzie, I think you’re hiding something.”
“Ha! What are you, kid, some kind of human polygraph?”
“Hey, I like that, Mark,” I said. “‘THE HUMAN POLYGRAPH.’ We should get you a tee shirt.”
Mark ignored me. “Sir, please understand. I know this must be terrible for you. Not only to lose your daughter … but to see her suspected of criminal behavior.”
His eyes widened in what seemed like surprise. “Criminal behavior? Lindsay? Listen, you two jackasses…”
He leaned forward in a prelaunch to a tirade, then abruptly deflated. His bright eyes dimmed, and he bit his lip. He eyed us both, hesitating.
Mark perked up, and his nostrils flared, like he was scenting a serious revelation.
And a knock pounded on the door.
Crap.
Mackenzie heaved out of his chair, almost scampering with relief. “How about that?” he said. “They’re actually early.”
Behind his back, Mark and I share
d a grimace of frustration. But we could see it was pointless to push him now, and we rose to go.
When Mackenzie opened the door, Lindsay’s husband Crowley popped in before the kid. “Hi Ramsey,” he said quickly. He sounded rushed. “Just need to use your bathroom.” He slipped past Mackenzie, then stopped in surprise when he saw us.
“Oh,” he said. “Hey.”
“Do you have a minute?” Mark said.
“Sure. I got to get back to the office for the evening, but…” He flicked a glance at his son Vincent, who had snuck in behind him and was poised in Stealth Mode beside a crappy bookcase stuffed with ancient investment guides. “…let’s talk out at the car,” Crowley finished.
“Didn’t you have to use the bathroom?” I said.
Mark rolled his eyes, but Crowley smiled. “Right. One sec.”
He strode off to the bathroom, leaving the rest of us in dead silence.
Finally, Mark said, “Were you going to finish that thought, Mr. Mackenzie?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Mackenzie said.
Crowley came back and we walked out to his car. Although the whole row of houses had clearly been built on the Ghetto Budget Plan, Mackenzie’s gravel driveway had a thick row of overgrown privacy trees that prickled my back as we casually stood beside his car to chat. It was only late afternoon, but the overcast sky was gray and grim.
Mark started to ask a question, but Crowley talked first. “You two hear about this second airport murder?”
Mark smirked, but smoothed it into a Client Mode smile. “We did.”
“That’s right! The article said you two were there! I’m so sorry, that must have been quite traumatic.”
“What article?” Mark said quickly.
“In the Brown County Gazette.”
“Great,” Mark muttered.
“A serial killer who’s into airports,” said Crowley. “Who would have thought?”
“You seem relieved,” Mark said.
“I am. That might sound harsh, but a serial killer means that my wife’s death was random. Some nutjob.”
“Isn’t random scarier?” I said.
“No, the cops always get the nutjobs,” he said. He took a deep breath, then leaned a bit closer and lowered his voice, even though there weren’t any neighbors in sight. “The thing is, my sister-in-law is such a screwup, I’ve always worried that she’d endanger my wife and my son. The divorce was a very difficult time for all of us — when Lindsay moved in with Sibyl, I was already worried that Lindsay might have gotten wrapped up with Sibyl’s whole crowd. Then when Lindsay died … if those people were behind it, what if they came after my son?”