The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  I think of how my life would be without him, and the thought of letting go scares me to death.

  He bent his head down as if to nuzzle my neck. He didn’t touch me, but still I felt the rush of blood through my veins, a powerful surge fueled by a heart beating so wildly, it threatened to lift me off the floor. I tried to breathe, but when I did, I breathed him in. I closed my eyes, fighting for control, and tried to remember the rest of the passage, hoping for some kind of a message from Ellen, some kind of safety in her words.

  When I think about life without him, she’d said … my lungs fill up with something cold and heavy, and I feel myself going under and … and what? And the only thing that keeps my head above water is the motion of reaching up for him … without him I’ll disappear to a place where God can’t save me and I … can’t … save … myself.

  I opened my eyes and scanned the room, searching for the note. I wanted to see it, to see that it was still there. It was on the desk where I’d left it. I can’t save myself is what she’d said. “But she could.”

  “What?”

  I hadn’t even realized I’d said it out loud. “She could have saved herself.”

  When I looked at him, he was wearing that smile, the one that changed him, the one that changed me. “Ellen didn’t need you, she didn’t need Dan, and she didn’t need God to save her. She could have saved herself. All she needed was to know that, and she wouldn’t have disappeared. You couldn’t have made her disappear if she’d known that, if she’d felt it. She couldn’t feel it.”

  He stared down into my face and I stared back.

  “But I do.”

  He took a step away and then another, and I watched him back off, fascinated by what I was seeing—finally seeing. It was a reverse metamorphosis. The smile disappeared, and then the charm, the smooth self-confidence, the easy authority, all began to fall away. He was like a butterfly wrapping himself back into a cocoon, turning from awe-inspiring and breathtaking to small and tight and ugly. Ugly but, I knew, authentic.

  By the time I’d completely exhaled, he was across the room, around the desk, and sitting in my chair. When he spoke again, even his voice sounded different. “You should give me the tape,” he said, but with no inflection, conserving energy, saving the charade for some fool who would still buy it. He tapped the answering machine with one finger. “There’s nothing on here to incriminate me beyond that silly contract business, and I can make even that questionable. Why put yourself through it?”

  I was still catching my breath, but I was breathing. I was taking in buckets of air, filling my lungs, feeling the oxygen flowing through me. I felt lighter, almost buoyant. I felt as if I could fly. “Put myself through it?”

  “I know you’ve thought about the consequences of making accusations against me, “The Man Who Saved the Airline Business.” The hint of a smile appeared. “Who’s going to believe you, a lonely woman with no life beyond her career who slept with the boss and couldn’t take it when she got dumped? And, of course, one of the most effective defenses is to attack the accuser—that would be you—and the victim, Ellen.” He was sitting up straight now, gears grinding, getting into it. “Ellen had plenty of secrets, some you don’t even know about. My defense team will dig them up. My PR team will get them out there. What about you, Alex? Is there anything about you that you wouldn’t like to see in the left-hand column of the Wall Street Journal? Because that’s where this will all be played out. My team is going to set upon you like a pack of wild dogs. It won’t be pleasant.”

  He looked at me expectantly, but I wasn’t biting. I was too worn out and besides, there was nothing personal in this. He didn’t really hate me, any more than he had loved me. The curveball I’d just thrown him was nothing more than a twist in the road, another detour, and he was having fun with it.

  “The best opportunities come from disaster,” I said.

  “What?”

  “That’s what you told me once.”

  He smiled openly, genuinely. “That’s right. That’s exactly right. I think this just might qualify as a disaster. Certainly for you it does.” He stood up, stretched, and meandered to the other side of the desk. “I’ll have to resign, which is inconvenient. But there’s always a demand for people like me. Hell”—he reached down for his coat and briefcase—“depending on how all this plays out, it might make me more marketable. It depends on how we spin it. Now that I think about it, you have more to lose than I do.”

  “You can’t take anything else away from me, Bill.”

  “What about your job? I know you. You’d be lost without it. You love this business, this company—”

  “No, I loved you. And I quit.”

  I’d said it so fast, I wasn’t sure the words had actually come out, so I said it again slowly this time and tried to feel it. “I quit, Bill. I resign, effective immediately.” It felt good. It felt right.

  He stared at me as I rounded the desk and reclaimed my seat, the one he’d just vacated. It was still warm. I flipped open the trapdoor on the answering machine and made sure the tape was still in there. He laughed. “You thought I took it? Where’s the challenge in that?”

  “Just checking,” I said.

  He put one arm through his coat, then the other, then paused to straighten his tie as if he were about to go onstage. Maybe he was. To him, all the world was his stage. “So you’ll be available to come and work for me again. That’s nice to know. It’s tough to find good people.”

  “No one’s going to work for you. You’re going to go to jail.”

  “I’m not going to jail. When you’re dealing with the legal system, the smartest one wins. I’m smarter than they are, and I still think there’s a possibility you won’t turn in that tape. I’m not counting on it, of course, I’m just working the probability into the equation. I’m liking my chances better and better.”

  “I don’t think you’re getting out of this one, Bill. I don’t care how smart you are, or how good your lawyers are. But if by chance you do, it won’t be because of me.”

  He turned to go, opened the door and stopped. “It’s good to hear you say that you loved me. I’m not sure that you ever did.”

  “Love you?”

  “No, say it.” He smiled. “I know that you loved me.”

  I leaned back in my chair and watched him walk away, through the reception area and out the door. Then I listened to his footsteps as he made his way down the corridor. Ellen’s note was still on the desk. I pulled it in front of me and read it again.

  … I think about my life before him, about the work that filled my days and the ghosts that walked the night with me, and I feel myself going under and the only thing that keeps my head above water is the motion of reaching up for him. And I can’t let go.

  You should have let go, Ellen. I wish you had let go.

  I put the note in one pocket and the tape in the other. Bill was wrong about me in one respect. I was going to turn this tape in. But he was right about me, too, as he had been so many times before. I had loved him.

  But I had also let go.

  Parts Unknown

  An Alex Shanahan Thriller

  Lynne Heitman

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2002 by Lynne Heitman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition June 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-350-2

  For my mother

 
Prologue

  The sky might have looked like this in prehistoric times. Before cities, before streetlights, before electricity, there was only the pale moon and distant stars to illuminate the night. On a moonless night, there was nothing. Only darkness so thick you could reach out and lay the back of your hand against it.

  But in prehistoric times there would have been nothing like the mammoth airliner that lies shattered across the side of the mountain. From a very great distance, the gleaming wreckage would look like a constellation of stars clustered around the ancient peak. Closer in, it would look more like a bright carpet spread across the rolling ridges and spilling down the steep incline to where the last piece of the aircraft, torn and gutted, had lurched to a stop.

  After a while, the mountain regains its equilibrium, enfolding the wrecked airplane in a deep, gentle silence that is interrupted only by the crackling of the burning parts and the small, intermittent explosions muffled within the twisted remains. Every now and then a tree catches fire and ignites like a blowtorch.

  A large section of fuselage teeters on a ridge. With the agonized shriek of metal on metal, it rolls and settles on its side. No one hears. All two hundred and three souls on board are gone, their corpses strewn across the rough terrain with the struts and panels, books and tray tables, wires, seats, and insulation.

  Investigators will find the captain’s watch still on his wrist, a Piaget given to him by his wife and four children to honor his twenty-five years as a pilot. It stopped at 2047, thirty-four seconds after the aircraft had dropped from the radar, fifteen seconds after one air traffic controller had turned to the other and said, “We lost them…”

  At 2209, a distant sound from the valley below begins as a soft swishing, grows clearer, more clipped, then thunderous as helicopters explode from behind the ridge, bursting through the black smoke like two projectiles spit from a volcano. They swoop toward the wreckage with engines roaring, blades hacking—all identifying markings concealed. Anyone looking would not be able to see, behind the powerful floodlights, the heavy equipment, the special extraction tools, the masks that the men wear to work around the dead.

  One helicopter passes quickly over the holocaust, flying as low as the heat and the flames allow. The second pilot steers his ship in search of level ground. The sooner he lands, the sooner he can get men and equipment to the scene.

  Every second is critical. They have to be gone before the rescuers arrive.

  Chapter One

  The padded mailer was nine by twelve inches, barely adequate to hold its chunky contents. ALEX SHANAHAN was written across the front in blue ink, but the rest of my address was in black, as if the sender had filled it in at a later date. I stared at the handwriting for a long time because I knew I’d seen it before. I couldn’t place it.

  According to the postmark, the envelope had been mailed two weeks earlier from East Boston, Massachusetts. For a good portion of that time it had been sitting at the post office with postage due, which explained why it had taken almost two weeks to get from one end of town to the other. The idea of calling the police crossed my mind. Logan Airport was in East Boston, and anything mailed to me from Logan Airport should have been checked by the bomb squad. I decided against it. I hadn’t worked there in a long time, and besides, whatever was in the package had the stiff outline and solid feel of a heavy book, not an incendiary device.

  I went looking for a kitchen knife to use as a letter opener, forgetting that everything from my kitchen, indeed my entire apartment, was wrapped, packed, and stacked neatly against the wall in cardboard boxes. I found my keys and used one to slit open the end of the mystery package.

  Whatever was in there was wedged in tightly, and I couldn’t get a firm grip anyway because the contents came complete with a greasy film that rubbed off on my fingers. I picked up the envelope and studied the problem. The only way I was getting it out was by performing surgery. Using the key again, I made rough incisions along two of the three remaining edges and created a flap, which, when I folded it back, provided a clear view of what was inside.

  It was a stack of pages, torn and smudged, attached to a single thick cover that was smeared with the black grease and soot that had come off on my fingers. From the orientation of the pages, it appeared to be the back cover. That meant I had to flip it over if I had any hope of figuring out what I had.

  There was no point in risking my security deposit two days before I moved out, so I found a section of the day’s newspaper to spread across the countertop. I used the Money & Investing section of the Wall Street Journal—superfluous to someone who is completely broke. Using the envelope like a hot pad, I lifted the damaged book and nudged it over until it flipped onto the newspaper. I was right. The front cover was a victim of whatever trauma had befallen this book. The pages had drip-dried into stiff waves of pulp, some sticking together, and whatever had soaked them had bled the ink. most of the pages were gone forever, but then there were some that displayed entries that were remarkably legible. The first one I could read was a captain’s report of a seat in coach that wouldn’t recline. Beside it was the mechanic’s entry—the date he’d fixed the seat and his signature.

  I knew what this was.

  The second was a write-up on a fuel indicator light that refused to go off, and the one after that on a landing gear problem, each duly noted by the cockpit crew, and each duly repaired by the maintenance team on the ground.

  Someone had sent me an aircraft logbook, or the remains of one, the kind I used to see routinely in the cockpits of Majestic airplanes when I worked at Logan. No front cover meant no logo or aircraft number, so I couldn’t tell which airline it belonged to, but I knew what all airline people knew—logbooks are never supposed to be separated from their ships. The information they carry on their pages is irreplaceable. It’s the entire history of an aircraft, recorded event by event by the pilots who have flown it and the mechanics who have fixed it.

  Logbooks are as unique to an aircraft as fingerprints, as much a part of the plane as the flaps or the wings or the seats. Standing alone in an empty apartment staring at this one, I had to admit to feeling a chilly whisper of airline superstition. A logbook without an aircraft is like a wallet without a person. You just know the separation is not intentional. To know that an airplane was flying around without its logbook, to see the book in this condition, felt like bad luck.

  When I picked up the envelope and turned it over, a wad of tissue paper dislodged from one corner and dropped to the counter. It was stained black on one side where it had been flattened under the weight of the logbook. But it wasn’t completely flat, and something had to be inside to make tissue paper thud. After I’d unpeeled a few of the layers, I began to feel it, a nodule in the center that had some weight to it. I pulled back the last of the tissue to reveal a sight that was at least as stunning as it was bewildering.

  It was a diamond ring, but in the same way the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is a painting. It was thick and heavy—a complex latticework of gold studded with what must have been fifteen small diamonds. In the middle of the setting was a massive oval diamond that rested like a dazzling egg atop an intricate diamond-encrusted bird’s nest.

  I spread one of the tissue paper sheets flat on the counter. BURDINES was printed in light brown ink and repeated over and over in diagonal rows across the sheet. I knew Burdines. I remembered it from a trip my family had made to Miami when I was a kid. We’d arrived in the middle of a cold snap dressed for the beach. My mother had marched us all over to the nearest department store—Burdines—for sweat suits and heavy socks.

  The ring felt heavy in my hand. There was no way this piece came from Burdines, or any other department store. It felt old and unique, as if it had been custom designed for the hand of a woman who was much loved and treasured, and I had the sense that it was real, even though it made no sense that it would be real. No one sends something that valuable via U.S. mail in a wad of tissue paper.

  I checked insid
e the band for an inscription. The absence of one felt like karmic permission to do what I had been dying to do since I’d unwrapped it. I slipped it on my own finger. There was no wedding band to remove first, and no pesky engagement ring to get in the way. Jewelry wasn’t something I bought for myself, so the coast was clear for it to slide right on. It was too baroque for my taste, and so big. I didn’t know how anyone could wear it without feeing a constant, unsettling imbalance, or without consistently smacking it into things. Wearing it gave me the same queasy sense of dislocation I had felt about the book—it belonged somewhere else.

  I slipped the ring off and went back to the logbook. Toward the back was a place where the pages were less clumped together, almost as if there was a bookmark. I flipped to the place. There was a bookmark, a single piece of white paper folded in half and stuck in between two soiled, damaged pages. My fingers were still black, so I went to the sink and washed my hands. Then I pulled up a dish pack to sit on and opened the note. When I read it, I felt myself growing cold from the inside out, starting with the marrow in my bones. A single line was written across the pristine page. This time I recognized the handwriting, but even if I hadn’t, the note was signed.

  I’ll call you.