The Plane and the Parade (Veronica Barry Book 3)

by Sophia Martin

  The three of them left the hospital and went directly to the diner on K, where they gorged themselves on pancakes. They discussed the events of the day down to the most minor detail.

  Veronica went home after, and Daniel came out and joined her, since she insisted that she had spent too much time away from her pets, and it was his fishes’ turn to make do without him. Veronica was stuffed from the pancakes, so that meant salad for dinner. They watched My Fair Lady as they ate. She watched Audrey Hepburn try to speak with marbles in her mouth and Veronica wondered if she would ever be able to see the actress again without thinking of the dress that hung in her closet and, by extension, of Eric. She also wondered whether Daniel had the same problem. He showed nothing if he did.

  ~~~

  The alarm woke them at six the next morning. Daniel had set it so that they would wake in time to call United Airlines—Jossey’s ticket listed the plane leaving at five fifteen in the afternoon, and Belgium was nine hours ahead.

  “Here goes,” Daniel said, dialing his cell.

  Veronica sat in bed, hugging a pillow as he identified himself as a detective in the Sacramento police department and got them to put him through to someone high up.

  “I have it on good authority that there is a threat to your airplane, flight 5322, leaving at five fifteen from Brussels Airport,” Daniel said. Although they had called Brussel Airport directly, he and Veronica had agreed that it was best to make it sound like he was reading from notes or a letter he’d gotten as a tip.

  “Yes, sir, that’s right. No, I’m not certain of the nature of the threat, but I’m concerned we’re talking about sabotage of some kind.”

  He paused, and Veronica tried to make out what the person on the other end was saying, without success.

  “Well, I’ve tried to contact INTERPOL about this, and I’m not sure if they’ve done anything. No, no one we’re sure of, although you should alert your check-in staff to keep an eye out for Antoine Jossey.”

  Another pause.

  “Jossey. J-O-S-S-E-Y. That’s right.”

  Another pause.

  “I’m sorry, I’m not at liberty to say,” Daniel said. “My source is a person of interest in an on-going investigation, and I cannot reveal their identity without jeopardizing that investigation.” Which of course was a lie, but Daniel said sometimes law enforcement officers stonewalled over this sort of thing even if it didn’t really make sense, and he hoped the airline would assume that was what he was doing, and go ahead and take the warning seriously anyway.

  “Look, you can take it up with my lieutenant if you like,” Daniel said, crossing his fingers and giving Veronica a look. It would not be good if Lieutenant Johnson got a call. “I’m telling you, they are reliable. Just do an extra-close inspection of the plane, okay? We wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt if it can be avoided, am I right?”

  Daniel nodded, and Veronica realized she was clutching the pillow so tightly her fingers were going numb. She forced her hands to relax.

  “Okay. Yes, I appreciate that. Sure. Okay, thanks. Bye.”

  Daniel ended the call. He looked at Veronica, eyebrows high, eyes wide.

  “Well, if you’d asked me at this time last year if I saw myself calling an airline to warn them about a malfunction in one of their planes based off a dream my girlfriend had…” He grinned. “I’d have said, ‘Is she hot?’”

  Veronica swatted his shoulder. “Very funny. Do you think they believed you?”

  “I think they are feeling motivated to give the airplane an extra-close inspection.”

  “And are they going to call Lieutenant Johnson?”

  “I doubt it.”

  Veronica let out a long breath of air, patting the pillow and then setting it aside. “Okay,” she said. “I think that’s all we can do.”

  “Yep,” Daniel agreed. “That, and watch the news in about two hours.”

  ~~~

  Nothing came on the news, which in itself was a good sign.

  Veronica and Daniel sat together watching CNN, and Daniel had Veronica’s laptop open in front of him, with the BBC’s website up. Occasionally, he refreshed the page.

  “I’ve no way of knowing what time it was when the plane started having problems,” Veronica said at ten thirty. The plane had been in the air for two hours, according to the United Airlines website, where you could check if flights were delayed.

  “Let’s go out and have a coffee or something. We’ll come back and check all of it again then,” Daniel suggested.

  Although she would have preferred to stay at home, glued to the TV and the computer, Veronica agreed, and they went to Penny Coffee. Doing her best not to jiggle a leg or otherwise give away her impatience, she nursed her iced mocha and tried to interest herself in what Daniel was talking about. Something to do with another detective, the one from Property Crimes, with the Japanese name.

  “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “I didn’t get what you said.”

  Daniel smirked. “We’ll leave in a minute or two, okay? Ronnie, nothing we do now is going to change how this day turns out for those people.”

  She twisted her napkin and finished her coffee, tuning back in long enough to take in that his story about Detective Nakamura had to do with people confusing their names despite their complete dissimilarity. “It’s like, Asian is Asian, no matter if one is Korean or one is Japanese, or one name starts with an S and is one syllable and the other starts with an N and has four.”

  Veronica nodded. “That’s so annoying,” she murmured.

  “I mean, I’m not Japanese. I’ve never worked in Property Crimes, but the other day Officer Calhoun brought me this file for one of Nakamura’s cases. I’ve known Calhoun for two years…”

  Finally, he finished his coffee, and they took his car back to her duplex. She dove for the remote, the TV flicking on. Daniel settled next to her and refreshed the BBC’s page. Still no news. The rest of the morning was the same, and finally the United Airlines website reported that the plane had landed on time at four forty-five in the afternoon in Chicago, or two forty-five Sacramento time. Veronica could hardly believe it, and she refused to stop checking the news on the web and the TV until three thirty. Eventually, however, she accepted that nothing was going to happen.

  “Do you think we’ll ever know what they found?” she asked Daniel.

  “Only if you dream it,” he told her. “I could try to call back, but I doubt they’ll tell me anything. You were pretty sure the problem was some kind of malfunction, though, right?”

  “There was a fire,” Veronica said. “That’s all I know.”

  Daniel turned the corners of his mouth down and shrugged. “Without any sabotage or anything, there’s nothing for the news sites to get interested in. Just some bad wiring or something. The plane didn’t have a problem, so there’s nothing to report.”

  Veronica exhaled, feeling for the first time that day that she could relax and turn her attention back to the troubles in her own life. “Well, I’m glad. We stopped it, Daniel. No matter what else happens, we saved the lives of all the people on that plane. That’s a really good thing.”

  ~~~

  Veronica stood at a window that looked out into a street she didn’t recognize—a third story window, she concluded after counting the windows in the building across from her. The façades she saw brought Paris to mind: some brick, some painted, with some windows protected by ornate iron railings, many decorative window frames, and heavy painted doors down at street-level.

  Her host was fairly tall, and as he raised a wrist to check the time, she examined his watch. Recognizing it, she knew she had dreamt of him before—Leopold Victor. His silver watch had a black face with a tiny window for the day’s date: it displayed a three. The watch’s hands pointed to seven twenty, and based on the light she judged that it was morning. With another glance out of the window, Victor rubbed his temples, then moved to where his briefcase—the same one he’d had in the dream that had revealed his id
entity to her—waited on an end table by an antique sofa. He snapped it open, revealing foam padding with a dozen vials of fluid embedded in it. In one hollowed-out corner a bag of unused syringes waited. He took one of these and put the needle through the stopper of one vial, sucking some fluid—just a little, Veronica noted—into the syringe. Then he turned to a large suitcase on the floor, set it on the sofa, opened it, and pulled the padding with the vials and syringes out of the briefcase. Underneath was a gun—some black, angular model that Veronica didn’t think she would be able to identify even if Daniel showed her pictures.

  He hesitated, then slid the padding between layers of clothes in the suitcase. Then he slid it back out, plucked one of the vials from its padding, and tucked it in an inside pocket of his jacket. After shutting the suitcase with the padding between the folded clothes, he snapped on a lock that was small but looked a good deal sturdier than any Veronica had ever had. He turned back to the gun in the briefcase. After checking it—she assumed for ammunition—he slipped it into a holster he was wearing under the jacket, which Veronica hadn’t noticed until that moment. Under the gun in the briefcase were some papers. Veronica didn’t get a look at them before Victor shut the briefcase again.

  As he returned to the window, Victor looked down at the street. A large gray sedan with a blue and yellow taxi sign on the roof waited there.

  With his suitcase in one hand, Victor left the briefcase behind in his apartment and took the marble stairs that wound down to the ground floor. He exited the building and the taxi driver came around to help him put the suitcase in the trunk.

  Just as the driver leaned in to shift the suitcase, Victor produced the syringe, stabbed it in his neck, and pushed the plunger all the way in. The driver wheeled around, thrashing, clawing at the syringe which was still in his neck although Victor had released it. Victor moved swiftly away as the driver began making choking noises. His fingers closed on the syringe and pulled it free, blood arcing and splatting against the passenger side’s back seat window. The driver’s knees gave way, and he collapsed.

  He was not dead, which was obvious from his labored breathing and the movements of his arms, which were, however, growing weaker. Nevertheless, Victor walked up to him, leaned over, and yanked the car keys out of the man’s jacket pocket. He slammed the trunk shut and sat in the driver’s seat, pulling away without a glance in the rear view mirror at the man he’d left behind.

  What followed was hard for Veronica to understand, at least while it went on. Victor drove on the freeway to the airport—that much she knew from the signs she saw. He pulled into the lane designated for taxis, but then he parked off to one side of where they lined up to wait for customers. Twice people approached him, and he waved them off, claiming car trouble. He just stood by the car, arms crossed over his chest, and waited. Sometimes he perked up, as if he saw what he was waiting for, but then he would settle back down. Veronica tried to figure out what he was looking for, but the best she could figure is that it had something to do with older men with gray hair. This went on for hours.

  At last he saw what he’d been waiting for, and Veronica began to piece together his plan. A man exited the airport whose hair was almost white. He had a low brow and deep set dark eyes and a straight, somewhat long nose, with gray mustache and beard. In fact, he looked quite a bit like Victor himself—he was heavier, and his hair was longer, but Veronica remembered Victor’s reflection in the restroom mirror, and she knew this man that Victor had spotted was very much like him indeed. A brother, perhaps?

  Victor hurried to the driver’s seat and pulled into the line of taxis so abruptly that several honked. He waved to the man, who looked at him without recognition. Victor jumped back out of the car and jogged to the man’s side, grabbing the handle of his suitcase.

  “Bienvenue à Bruxelles, Monsieur. Vous voulez un taxi?,” Victor said with a big smile.

  The man who looked like Victor blinked in surprise and then glanced at the line in front of him. He seemed uncertain, and Veronica wished hard that he would refuse, but the lure of escaping the wait in the long line won out. He must have made up his mind, and smiled back at Victor. “Mais oui, pourquoi pas?”

  “Suivez-moi, Monsieur.”

  The man did as Victor suggested, and followed him. He got in the back seat while Victor took his suitcase and put it in the trunk—had the man come around as well, he might have wondered to see Victor’s suitcase already in there, but he did not.

  Veronica was becoming increasingly alarmed for the man as Victor returned to the driver’s seat. They didn’t know each other. She had a suspicion about what might motivate Victor to seek out a man who looked so much like him, and it didn’t bode well for the man.

  “Hôtel Marivaux, Boulevard Adolphe Maxlaan,” the man said, and Victor gave him a nod.

  Soon enough, however, the man began to protest that they were going the wrong way. Veronica’s heart sank as Victor ignored him, taking turns that led them into neighborhoods with an increasingly industrial feel. Soon they entered a part of Brussels with few people on the streets and much more trash. Finally Victor stopped the car and got out. Using the key remote, he locked the doors each time the man tried to exit, giving himself time to reach for the gun, shielding it from the man’s line of vision with his body. Veronica felt Victor’s face break into a grin as he allowed the man to open the door at last.

  The man came out furious and shouting, but his face fell as Victor raised the gun and fired. Veronica wanted to scream as the man’s body jerked back with each bullet that hit him in succession—one hit his chest, one his hip, and one the side of his abdomen. His body struck the car and bounced off, leaving blood behind on the gray metallic finish of the sedan.

  Victor wasted no time, searching his pockets even as the man made some last noises of agony. He came up with the man’s wallet and passport. He was still grinning as he marched back to the driver’s seat of the taxi. She noted, however, that his stomach was churning most uncomfortably. Perhaps the grin wasn’t so much a sign of his pleasure at committing the man’s murder as a grimace of distaste.

  Taking the same streets to return to the airport, Victor drove carefully, clearly unwilling to draw any attention to himself, what with the blood on the side of the car. He pulled over eventually and loped down several streets hauling his suitcase behind him on its little wheels, until he came to a halt at a bus stop. After a ten minute wait he boarded a bus, which went back down at least two of the streets he’d run through, then pulled onto the freeway for a short time, heading into the airport.

  Victor exited the bus with the other passengers and walked purposefully to the British Airways counter, which was open. A man curly brown hair stood ready behind it.

  “Excuse me,” Victor said, his accent thick. “I would like to buy a ticket.”

  “Certainly. What is your final destination, sir?” the curly-haired man asked with a British accent.

  “Sacramento, California.”

  “British Airways only serves London-Heathrow from Brussels Airport,” the curly-haired man said. “However, I can book you to Sacramento from there.”

  “When is the earliest flight? I am in a hurry,” Victor said.

  The curly-haired man typed quickly. “You can take flight 67 to London leaving in forty-five minutes. At Heathrow you’ll wait two hours, which will give you time for security and such, and leave at ten fifty-five. You’ll change again in Dallas, and reach Sacramento at five after nine tonight. How does that sound?”

  “I’ll take it,” Victor said, and produced the wallet of the man he’d murdered, pulling out a golden credit card. Veronica tried to see the name on the card, but he handed it over too quickly, and the curly-haired man took it.

  “Passport, please,” the man said, and Victor handed that over, too.

  A familiar ringing noise sounded, and Veronica tried to see where it was coming from, but Victor must not have heard it, because he had no reaction.

  ~~~


  It was Daniel’s phone, set to act as an alarm clock.

  Veronica pressed her hands to her eyes, lying on her back, and let out a frustrated groan.

  “Sorry,” Daniel muttered, fumbling with his phone until the ringing stopped. “You should go back to sleep.”

  Her pulled her hands off her eyes, thumping the bed at her sides with her fists. “Dammit, Daniel! I might have gotten his name or at least his flight number.”

  Daniel rolled onto his side. “You were dreaming?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the alarm interrupted it?”

  “Yes.”

  Daniel paused. “We’re really going to have to come up with some way for me to get up on time for work without ruining your prophetic dreams.”

  “You think?”

  Veronica sighed, willing herself to let the irritation go. It wasn’t Daniel’s fault, it’s not like he knew she was having a dream, so blaming him wasn’t going to do any good. The important thing was to figure out if the dream showed her the future, the past, or the present. Victor’s watch had said it was the third, today, and that it was seven twenty in the morning. Belgium was nine hours ahead. That meant the events of the dream had started just as she first fell asleep, at ten twenty PM, Pacific time. He was already well on his way.

  “Dammit,” she said again.

  “Look, I’m sorry, alright?” Daniel said, sweeping his legs over the side of the bed.

  “No, not you,” Veronica muttered. “I’m sorry Daniel, I’m not mad at you. I’m mad because it’s too late to stop him.”

  “Who?”

  “Leopold Victor.” She described the events of her dream to him, grimacing when she got to each of the murders. As she answered his questions about them, nausea threatened to send her running to the bathroom, but she breathed deeply, keeping control.