The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  “Ten thousand dollars?”

  “Whatever’s left.”

  “I’ll do it.” I felt a quick flush of excitement, which he moved quickly to squash. “And I have a few conditions of my own. You have to do what I say when I say it.”

  “I will.”

  “You have to be available whenever I need you, day or night.”

  “I’ve given up sleeping, anyway.”

  “And you take the notes.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “And drive.”

  “What?”

  “All investigators take notes,” he said, clearly seeing more and more merit in the idea. “And you said it. I’m the professional. I know you don’t want me slowed down by administrative duties. It wouldn’t be cost effective.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “Yes.” He laughed, but again in that comfortable way. “It’s been pointed out to me,” I said, “that I can be a little structured at times.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I can use a little more structure in my life. Let’s go get my truck. But first we have to stop at the office supply store around the corner.”

  “What for?”

  “A notepad and pencil for you.”

  The route Bobby had taken me on the night before, as I had suspected, felt more benign by daylight. The masses of tangled trees and thatched brush lining the roadways were lush and full under blue sky and bright sun, not forbidding. The quiet that enveloped us as we moved farther and farther from the city was calming, not frightening. But then I wasn’t alone this time. Jack was in the passenger seat.

  I’d spent most of the drive out talking, filling him in on the details of what I knew so far. I’d given him the timeline Felix and I had made.

  “What did you find out about the rental car?” he asked.

  “Not much. Whoever turned it in left it in the rental car lot way off in a corner by a fence. This agent I spoke to found it and checked it in. It was the same deal as the hotel. John had wanted to pay cash—it was in their records—but they charged it to his credit card when he didn’t show up in person to pay. Like the hotel room, the car has been rented a half dozen times since the murder.”

  He set my timeline on the seat, leaned forward, and searched the trees. “Go up half a mile… right here, where it looks like there’s no road, and make that corner up there. My truck should be back in the bush.”

  I pulled around the corner and stopped. We both got out. I didn’t see any truck, but that was, I imagined, the whole point. Jack struck out on a nontrail into the undergrowth, and I wobbled after him as best I could, careful not to step in any more holes. I found him standing next to a gray low-slung truck that looked as if it had been in all the rough places Jack had been.

  “An El Camino,” I said. “I don’t remember the last time I saw one of these.”

  His stance was odd—back rigid, arms straight at his sides, eyes turned skyward.

  “It was two cops,” he said.

  “What was two cops?”

  “The helicopter crash I told you about, the one I’m investigating. The two men who were killed were county cops up in the Florida panhandle. The county had purchased a helicopter for search and rescue. It was just this small county sheriffs department that was trying to do a better job. And what they bought was old, but it had been refurbished. They’d never even had it up before. A little girl went missing. Six years old. They weren’t in the air fifteen minutes when it fell out of the sky—and crushed them both. They never had a chance.” He started to go on, and didn’t. The bundle of bone and muscle that hinged his jaw to his skull was working hard, clenching and unclenching. I’d known him for less than twenty-four hours, but I could feel the agitation churning beneath the calm exterior, and his struggle not to let it show.

  “Did they find the girl?”

  “They found her body.”

  I leaned back against the truck. It was dusty, but I felt the need to sag against something. “I’m sorry. Did you know any of these people?”

  “I know Jimmy. I know he cut some corner or shaved a little something off here or there to put in his own pocket. And then he went home, went to bed, and slept like a baby.”

  He was very still as he stared up into the high afternoon sky.

  The tight line of his shoulders under his lightweight shirt, the way he seemed to be searching the treetops, and especially the tilt of his head all reminded me of something I had seen the night before. The dog Bull had sniffed the air that way as he’d picked up my scent and had stood all aquiver with anticipation of the chase, and I suddenly felt as if I’d walked into a movie after it had started.

  “Jack, is there something between you and Jimmy Zacharias?”

  “Jimmy is just another scumbag in a long line of scumbags.”

  A little too much indifference, a slight turn away, and I wished all the way back to Miami that I had asked the question when I could have seen his face as he answered.

  “Holy Christ, Shanahan. Are you sure about that?”

  Dan and I were experiencing the usual techno-interruptus that comes along with mobile communications. But this time he was on a landline in his office and the problem was at my end. I was trying to get back to my hotel, but had to keep driving in a circle to keep my cell phone far enough away from the airport’s electronic interference.

  “Think about it, Dan. The impact and fire explains the damage to the logbook. The fact that the airplane crashed explains why no one’s been looking for it. Everyone thought it was destroyed.”

  “And you’re saying you think it was caused by a bad part?”

  “Bad part or faulty maintenance. I think that’s why your buddy over at Air Sentinel was in such a twist. He knew the part you asked him about came from the accident airplane.”

  “If that aircraft came down because of a bad part and the word gets out, Sentinel has got a big fucking problem.”

  “They’re probably trying to figure out right now how to deal with the backlash.”

  A tollbooth loomed ahead. I had somehow gotten twisted around myself in my meandering route. I had to stop talking and pay attention to the road. That didn’t mean Dan had to stop talking.

  “This makes Avidor more of a scumbag than I gave him credit for. If Johnny knew about any of this—”

  “John knew about it, Dan. He had the logbook. I don’t know how he got it, but he must have known it had something to do with that crash. Proof of what caused it… maybe a record of a bad part that was used. I think that’s what got him killed.”

  “That logbook is a mess, Shanahan. I don’t see how it could prove anything.”

  “It’s possible the killer didn’t know that.” I took the last exit before the tollbooth, turned back toward the airport, then found a quiet strip mall where I could park and finish my conversation. “I don’t have it all figured out, Dan. All I know is it never made sense to me that John would wake up one day and decide to fly to Florida to confront Bobby on being a drug runner if he’d known about it all along. John would have roared into Miami if he’d heard Bobby was trading in bad parts.”

  Dan was silent, an event unusual enough for me to take note. “What’s the matter?”

  “I was just thinking… How many people went down on that ship?”

  “Two hundred and three. No survivors.”

  “Jesus God.”

  He was thinking what I was. An airplane accident is bad enough when it’s just that—an accident. A crash caused by a sleazy, back alley transaction between a couple of low-rent, self-dealing criminal entrepreneurs that may have netted each a couple of hundred dollars was so monstrous, so malevolent that trying to comprehend it just made your circuits melt down. It was mass murder.

  “Listen, Dan, I don’t think we should be talking about this to anyone. It’s pretty volatile stuff.”

  “I don’t even like talking to you about it.”

  “Good. And I need more help.”

  “That’
s a big fucking surprise.”

  “I have a theory on how John got the book. According to his phone records, he called a bar in Salem from down here.”

  “So?”

  “So Salem isn’t far from Gloucester, and Gloucester is where Avidor and the McTavishes all grew up. Maybe Avidor still has friends back there, or he and John had a mutual acquaintance. So here’s what I need you to do. I need you to drive up there—”

  “Shanahan, do you know what kind of a week I’m having here? It’s spring break. My loads are off the wall. Not to mention my own kid’s out of school and she’s up here with me…”

  “A nice drive up the north shore will get you out of the airport and give you a little father-daughter bonding time with Michele. You can take her to lunch, have some chow-dah, and while you’re there snoop around this bar and find the connection to Bobby.”

  He was quiet. I hated horning in on his time with Michele, limited as it was. But I couldn’t fly up and do it. Given her circumstances, I wouldn’t ask Mae to take time away from her children, and Terry couldn’t even drive. “Dan, if it’s true Bobby is selling bad parts to commercial airlines, or to anyone for that matter, wouldn’t you do anything to make him stop?”

  I heard a light thud and knew he had put the receiver down on the desk. I’d seen him do it when we’d worked together. It’s what he did when he wanted a moment to think. I watched the rush hour traffic ebb and flow and waited. Dan had long ago surrendered himself—body, soul, and marriage—to the business of flying people from here to there. Like all good airline people, he preferred that the passengers who put their lives in his hands got all the way to where they were going safely. With their bags. Besides, he hated Bobby Avidor’s guts. There was only one conclusion he could come to.

  He picked up the phone and I heard him breathing. “Give me the name of this dive.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Jack’s bungalow on South Beach was one in a long row of low-slung boxy structures that were painted peach and topped with terra-cotta tile roofs. The complex reminded me of pictures I’d seen of officers’ quarters in the Pacific theater during World War II. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Douglas MacArthur, or at least Gregory Peck come striding out with a pipe in his mouth and an aide in tow. But the only one who came out was Jack carrying a cup with a lid. When he got in, the aroma of his coffee filled the car.

  “Where to?” I asked him.

  “Go back out the way you came and get on I-95.”

  “North or south?”

  “North. We’ve got a very busy day ahead.”

  The landscape on I-95 north wasn’t much to see. Thunder-boat factory outlets, truncated strip malls, and tire dealerships hunkered off to the sides. What there was could only be glimpsed intermittently through a solid wall of eighteen-wheelers, tour buses, and hulking SUVs with trailer hitches, all moving over twelve lanes of concrete at speeds that left no margin for error.

  After he finished his coffee he settled back and got comfortable. “I thought,” he said, “you spent fourteen years in the airline business. Why don’t you know more about bogus parts?”

  “What I knew about the maintenance function was all I needed to know—‘How soon can you fix my airplane so I can get this angry throng out of my terminal?’ What exit am I looking for?”

  “I’ll tell you when we’re getting close.”

  Jack’s navigation was making me rethink my commitment to being the designated driver. He was dribbling out the directions as we went, which I despised. I wanted to know in advance where we were going. I wanted to know how far it was and how long it would take to get there. I wanted to have in my mind a route of travel. But I’d quit arguing about it when I finally realized his brain didn’t work that way. He went strictly by feel, and he liked the flexibility of keeping all his options open.

  “I do know this—” I said, checking my blind spot for a lane change. “Majestic Airlines never had a problem with bogus parts.”

  “Dream on, kid. Majestic has a problem. All commercial carriers have the problem. They don’t want you to know about it, and the FAA is helping them cover it up.”

  “That sounds vaguely paranoid, Jack. Slightly conspiracy theory-ish.”

  “The FAA won’t even acknowledge the term ‘bogus parts.’ Their accepted term is ‘Suspected Unapproved Parts.’” He laughed. “That doesn’t sound as menacing as counterfeits. Or scrapped and sold as new. Or old and damaged military parts buffed up and sold ‘like new.’ Or new parts sold for unapproved purposes because they’re cheaper than the right parts. Or hot stamped parts.”

  “What are those?”

  “Parts with paperwork that says they were inspected when they weren’t. The FAA has literally gone through their databases and reclassified accidents that the NTSB attributed to bad parts.”

  “There have been accidents attributed to bogus parts?”

  “What do you think happens when an airplane is flying around with a car part in it?”

  “Car parts? Could we be just a little less hyperbolic?” I adjusted my position in the seat. I’d been there for a long while, and my ankle was stiffening up.

  “Lancer Cargo about five years ago,” he said. “They got a couple of starters in that their mechanics didn’t think looked right. They opened them up and found scrap and car parts inside. These were ten-thousand-dollar parts. But that’s better than having a counterfeit or back door part slipped in on you because at least you have a chance of spotting a car part that’s not supposed to be there.”

  “What’s a back door part?”

  “Say a foreman at a legitimately approved machine shop keeps the assembly line running after he’s supposed to have shut it down. He makes an extra ten combustion liners that his boss doesn’t know about, sells them out the back door to some dirty broker, and pockets whatever he gets. This is your exit.”

  I hit the brakes, sailed into the outside lane, and made the exit, barely. The black Mercedes following too closely on my tail honked his displeasure. If Jack noticed I couldn’t tell. He was on a roll.

  “A back door part doesn’t get tested, which is bad enough, but at least it’s been properly designed and is made out of the approved materials. You can’t say that about counterfeit parts. These dinky little machine shop guys look at parts selling for ten or fifteen thousand bucks a pop and they say, ‘Sheeeeeet, I can make me one of them.’ And they do. Maybe they reverse engineer it and make it out of whatever material happens to be lying around. As for accidents, there was a Norwegian charter flight a few years back, I think it was a Convair, that fell into the North Sea. Do you know why?”

  “I’m sensing a problem with bogus parts.”

  “The fasteners—the bolts used to hold the tail on—were made from a lower grade of steel than the standard demands, and they hadn’t been tested. When the airplane flew into turbulence, metal fatigue caused the bolts to snap. The tail fell off, and everyone died.”

  “If it wasn’t reported, then how does anyone know?”

  He reached over to adjust the air vent. I couldn’t tell if he was too warm or too cold. I was feeling chilled myself. “Because the Norwegian version of the FAA wasn’t afraid to say what happened. In this country, between the FAA and the airlines, they don’t have the manpower, the resources, or the balls to solve this problem. Since they can’t solve it, they have to hide it because if they didn’t, no one would ever fly again.”

  Even with the windows closed, I could still feel the air taking on that familiar humid, swampy quality as we drove farther and farther from the interstate. We kept passing signs on the side of the road that promised tours of the Everglades, alligator shows, and airboat rides. I saw an official National Park visitors’ station with a tall totem pole in the front yard.

  Jack seemed to be searching for a specific street, staring at the infrequent signs until they were past.

  “Jack, do you know the actual names of any of these streets?”

  “No. What do you t
hink would happen if John Q. Traveler found out the fan blades in the jet engine on his airplane came from Rudy’s Chop Shop?”

  “Came from, or might have come from?”

  “You would be amazed, Alex. You will be amazed.”

  “If it’s such a big problem, how come we don’t see more commercial airliners plunging from the sky?”

  “It’s more insidious than that and it’s not at that stage yet. It’s like termites that get into your house and start chomping away. You have no idea what’s going on because the damage is underneath, and the truth is you’re not looking all that carefully. What’s even worse is when the guy you hire to inspect your house looks it over and tells you everything is copacetic.”

  “That would be the FAA?”

  “Right. You think your house is stable and strong. You think it’s going to last forever right up until the day it collapses around your ears. That’s what’s going to happen to the U.S. airline industry and its vaunted safety record one day.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?”

  “Because it’s one of the things I used to do at the Bureau.”

  “I think you’re exaggerating.”

  “That’s what you’re supposed to think. It’s the FAA’s job to shill for the airline business—your business—and it’s the job of the airlines to sell tickets. My job was to chase the termites, no matter where they went. I saw a lot of nasty bugs. Take your next right, go down and park in front of the first trailer in the third row.”

  “Am I about to meet one of your nasty bugs?”

  “No. Ira was a good mechanic who never should have tried to run a business. Unfortunately, those are the only ones who ever seem to get caught.”

  Ira Leemer looked like Rod Stewart without the benefit of your glasses. He had the elfin face, the sharp nose, and the tapering chin. He even had blonde highlights in his gray hair. But whereas Rod’s features were still crisp and distinct, Ira’s were puffy, droopy, and soft. And when he opened his mouth to speak, he sounded like what he was—a half-Cajun South Florida ex-con salvage dealer who lived in a trailer on the edge of a swampy marsh.