Stone Cold

by Dean Crawford

  McKenzie nodded and reluctantly began relating the morning’s events. Truth was, Griffin had already read the sergeant’s report three times and had every single moment of Dale McKenzie’s morning mapped out in his mind. Griffin wasn’t expecting new details because there wasn’t much to go on in the first place, but he did want to see if McKenzie changed anything, altered his story in any way.

  McKenzie went through the description of his return flight, journey home, finding the note and calling the police on his cell. There wasn’t much to relate, really, and he stuck to his story. No deviation from the details, no tells in his demeanour that suggested to Griffin that he was telling anything other than the absolute truth.

  ‘Would anybody you know of wish to hurt your wife in any way?’ Griffin asked when McKenzie had finished. ‘Does she have any enemies, any old boyfriends, people like that who might hold a grudge?’

  ‘No,’ McKenzie replied without a moment’s hesitation. ‘She’s a hugely successful lady. That’s what attracted me to her in the first place.’

  ‘Your wife is the owner of an art gallery in the city, pretty high–class stuff, some international trade.’

  ‘Yes,’ McKenzie said, staring into his coffee. ‘I appreciate fine arts, but it’s Sheila’s passion in life. She’s been running the gallery for over ten years now and has a strong reputation.’

  ‘And a nice life because of it,’ Griffin noted with a friendly smile. ‘Your wife’s a real wheeler dealer, but she’s not in the seven figure range for turnover, right?’

  McKenzie shrugged. ‘She runs her business, and I fly regional for Ventura Air. I don’t have any knowledge of her financial situation.’

  ‘You don’t know how much money your wife earns?’

  McKenzie offered Griffin a tight smile. ‘Our relationship is not about money. Sheila is the big money earner, not me. We are comfortable, financially, which is all that matters to us.’

  Griffin noted McKenzie’s use of the present tense and the use of us when referring to his wife: he believed that she would be found alive and well, and spoke of her naturally as his partner.

  Griffin glanced at his notes once more. ‘Do you think that you’re ten million bucks comfortable?’

  McKenzie blurted out a bitter laugh. ‘If we were, do you think I’d be working weekends and unsociable hours flying a Dash–8 out of Great Falls?’

  ‘Fair point,’ Griffin said, and scribbled a note. ‘So why does this abductor believe that you could raise ten million overnight?’

  McKenzie shook his head. ‘I have no idea, detective. We don’t have anything like that kind of money.’

  ‘What about Sheila’s life insurance?’ Griffin asked.

  McKenzie stared at his coffee for a moment and then looked up into Griffin’s eyes. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Your wife has a life insurance program in place worth four million bucks,’ Griffin said. ‘Plus what her business premises is worth. That’s a lot of money.’

  ‘There’s the small matter of her having to die,’ McKenzie replied. ‘You think that I’d do that to her, for money?’

  Griffin said nothing in response, just sat and stared at McKenzie for as long as it took for the pilot to break the silence.

  ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, I was at thirty thousand feet and five hundred nautical miles away when my wife disappeared. Who the hell do you think I am, David Blaine?’

  ‘You could be working with somebody else.’

  McKenzie slammed a fist down on the table as he glared at Griffin. ‘Then why the hell would I go through such a charade? If I was insane enough to pull something like this then I’d just kill her, wouldn’t I, and report her missing?’

  Griffin nodded. The assumption that he would have to go through the charade of an abduction told Griffin, along with everything else, that McKenzie almost certainly had not abducted his wife.

  ‘I apologise, Dale, if my line of questioning seems offensive, but it’s just something we have to go through. It’s not to accuse you, but to remove you as a suspect as soon as possible.’

  McKenzie nodded, but now he refused to make eye contact. The unusual contradiction in McKenzie’s behaviour buzzed through Griffin’s mind.

  ‘When was the last time you saw your wife?’ Maietta asked, speaking for the first time since McKenzie had entered the room.

  ‘Yesterday afternoon,’ McKenzie said, ‘before I left for work.’

  ‘And she seemed okay, no problems, no apparent concerns?’

  ‘None, she was fine, really fine.’

  ‘Does she have any family beyond yourself?’

  McKenzie shook his head. ‘No, we’re both orphans.’ He smiled, a little bitterly, and Griffin thought he detected the faintest hint of grief creasing McKenzie’s eyes. ‘We’ve only got each other.’

  Griffin felt any last dregs of doubt over the pilot’s story flutter away. He glanced down at his notes and added a couple of words. Both orphans.

  ‘We spoke to Saira at your wife’s gallery,’ he said. ‘She confided in us that the business was in financial difficulty and that Sheila has made many enemies in the trade over the years. Can you shed any light on that?’

  McKenzie seemed non–plussed. ‘I wouldn’t know about enemies in her trade,’ he said, ‘although I suppose it’s possible to make enemies anywhere in business. As for the financial situation, yes, times have gotten harder for luxury goods since the economic collapse, but we were coping and I was flying extra hours to support us. We’re struggling more than we used to, but it isn’t a crisis.’

  Griffin steeled himself.

  ‘Is it possible, Dale, however remotely, that your wife might seek to stage her own abduction in collaboration with a second party in order to obtain her life insurance policy?’

  Dale’s jaw almost dropped as he stared at Griffin, and the detective heard Maietta suck in a soft breath of air.

  ‘You seriously think that she would rig something like this?’ McKenzie gasped.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Griffin replied. ‘That’s why I’m asking you.’

  ‘No, she wouldn’t,’ McKenzie snapped. ‘Absolutely not. Sheila built her business up from nothing, she’s no quitter. She’d fight for every last inch of that premises, not risk jail or years’ of living in hiding. And besides, who would gain from it? I’m the beneficiary and I sure as hell don’t want to see Sheila’s business go down the can.’ McKenzie scowled as he glanced at his watch and stood. ‘I have a flight to catch.’

  ‘Thank you for your time, Dale,’ Griffin said as he stood from the table. ‘Sorry again for the hard line, it’s over now and you’re free to go.’

  McKenzie turned to leave, his coffee untouched. He shook Griffin’s proffered hand, and Griffin recognised all too clearly the shadows of restrained grief in the pilot’s eyes.

  ‘Do you think that you can find her?’ McKenzie asked, his anger subsiding rapidly. ‘Before…’

  ‘They want money,’ Griffin cut him off, ‘not blood. We’ll find her.’

  *

  ‘He didn’t do it.’

  Griffin slapped his notebook down on the Formica table as soon as McKenzie had left.

  ‘I agree,’ Maietta said as she pushed off the wall. ‘He looked shifty though.’

  ‘He’s nervous,’ Griffin admitted, ‘anxious, afraid maybe, but he sure ain’t guilty of this.’

  Maietta’s eyes narrowed. ‘He was hiding something.’

  Griffin looked at her. ‘Say what?’

  ‘He kept dodging questions.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ Griffin asked. ‘He answered everything damned straight, far as I could see.’

  ‘Yeah, but it was the way that he answered,’ Maietta insisted. ‘It’s the dip of their eyes, to the right and down, that betrays the liars, we both know that. They have to think about what they’re saying. He wouldn’t look you in the eye all the time and kept his head down when things got difficult.’

  Griff
in shrugged.

  ‘Doesn’t look much that way to me. Sure, I thought he seemed a little awkward but he wasn’t lying when he said he didn’t know where his wife was.’

  Maietta did not answer other than to tilt her head in acquiescence.

  ‘What now?’ she asked as they left the room and began making their way back toward the airport terminal.

  ‘We get Dale’s house wired for sound in case the abductors make a call. We should probably sneak in for a look ourselves, and forensics have got to get in there somehow and dust for fingerprints and such like.’

  ‘That’s not going to be easy if the abductors are watching the home. Sure we could get one person in wearing a pilot’s uniform, but a forensic team?’

  ‘We’ll have to think of something,’ Griffin insisted, and rubbed his temples. ‘You know, there’s a hell of a lot about all of this that doesn’t add up. Dale comes home, walks into the house, finds the note, calls us. By then his wife had already been gone for a few hours at least because the bed wasn’t slept in and only one day’s mail was lying on the doormat. So how come they haven’t made contact with Dale yet? Where are the instructions for leaving the money? The abductors can’t achieve much if they don’t receive their ransom.’

  ‘Maybe these guys are real pros,’ Maietta suggested. ‘They’re letting us sweat on it, waiting until the last minute. Then they’ll call in, ask for a reasonable amount of money, something that maybe the McKenzie’s can afford, and bingo…’

  ‘They walk away with a couple of million,’ Griffin finished her sentence as they walked out into the cold air, but he frowned. ‘Seems kind of elaborate though, doesn’t it? Like all ransoms they’re risking identification when the money’s brought out.’

  ‘Well,’ Maietta said, ‘we’re pissing into the wind until they make contact. Let’s get back and hand over to the night shift, okay?’

  Griffin nodded, still thinking about Dale McKenzie and the alarm system in the pilot’s house.

  ***

  11

  ‘Ventura four–one–nine–six, downwind for finals to stop, runway two–seven.’

  Captain Dale McKenzie held the control column of the Dash–8 tightly in his hands, trying to let the aircraft ride the air currents as the bottom of the cloud layer skimmed past just above him. But he couldn’t loosen his grip and the Dash–8 felt twitchy and awkward in his grasp as he squinted into the sunset through ragged bands of turbulent cloud, the past hour of flying consumed by concern for his wife.

  On one of the glass screens before him, a digital clock read 16.52. Twelve hours ago, as near as anybody could figure, Sheila had been abducted. Dale had no knowledge of whether there had been contact from her abductors while he had been airborne, or if her cold corpse had been found dumped in some lonely woods somewhere out on the plains.

  The aircraft had just descended out of its cruise, the darkening clouds parting to reveal a gloomy evening below, a stark difference to the brilliant blue sky and burning deserts of Las Vegas from where his flight had just returned. The lights of Great Falls twinkled like a galaxy nearby as Dale watched the runway of the airport passing by off the port wing, following the standard approach pattern into the airport.

  ‘Landing checks,’ his first officer said.

  Elaine Kingsley was a first–year graduate pilot, fresh out of flight school and eager to impress. She already had the checklist in her lap and was calling out each check for Dale’s benefit as she ran through them.

  ‘De–ice on…, flaps retracted…, landing lights on…, fuel as planned plus ten per cent reserve…’

  Dale listened to her until she completed the list, then he made his own call.

  ‘Flaps stage one, landing gear down.’

  Elaine repeated the calls, the flaps whining into position as the undercarriage dropped out into the airstream. Dale tweaked the trim and throttles to compensate, watching the airspeed decrease steadily.

  ‘Flaps stage two, trim her out in advance.’

  Elaine obeyed, trimming the nose down slightly and then deploying the flaps again as Dale held the aircraft steady. Dale felt the Dash settle into its new configuration as Elaine advanced the throttles to arrest the descent, the extra lift generated by the flaps causing the airplane to bob about on the wind more vigorously than before.

  ‘You got anything planned now that the shift’s over?’ Elaine asked.

  Dale shook his head, monitoring the instruments as he replied. ‘Nothing special, just relaxing at home.’

  ‘How’s the wife?’

  Dale opened his mouth to reply, but his brain momentarily froze as he pictured Sheila alone somewhere, maybe in pain or terrible fear, suffering. His grip tightened on the control column as he heard Elaine reply to a call from air traffic control, and he realised that he was breathing more heavily, hot and uncomfortable.

  ‘You okay?’

  Elaine was watching him with some concern.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ Dale blinked himself out of his torpor. ‘Just feeling a little under the weather.’

  ‘You want me to land?’

  ‘No, I’m good, really.’

  Dale checked his instruments one last time as he turned the descending aircraft to the left, the streetlights and rivers of headlights of Great Falls’ rush–hour traffic sweeping past below his wingtip as he performed a wide circular flight–path that turned gradually toward the runway to join the final approach.

  ‘Outer marker,’ Elaine said. ‘On height, on airspeed. You got the traffic?’

  ‘Traffic?’

  ‘ATC called traffic on finals, two o–clock.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Just now, I called confirmed. They’re at…’

  Dale McKenzie saw a series of blinking lights flicker just along the bottom edge of Elaine’s window, hidden by the Dash–8’s steep bank angle.

  ‘Power!’

  Elaine lunged for the throttles and Dale hauled back on the control column as a frenzy of voices suddenly blasted through the communications system.

  ‘Ventura–nine–six pull up!’

  ‘Traffic! Pull up!’

  ‘Ventura abort circuit!’

  The Dash–8’s engines screamed as they went to full power. Dale saw Elaine out of the corner of his eye as she yanked the undercarriage lever to the “up” position to kill drag as the aircraft surged upward.

  The sound of another airplane’s engines thundered through the cabin and Dale heard a flurry of alarmed cries from the passengers as the Dash clawed for altitude.

  To his left and below him Dale saw another aircraft thunder past on finals to land at the airport, barely a hundred feet away, its navigation lights blinking brightly as it sailed on toward the runway.

  Elaine’s panicked voice sounded over the radio.

  ‘Ventura–nine–six landing aborted, going around to stop, runway two seven.’

  Dale pushed the nose of the aircraft down again, his heart thundering in his chest as he blinked sweat from his eyes. Elaine grasped the throttles and hauled them back into their landing settings, the whining turbo–props settling back into a more natural rhythm.

  ‘Captain?’

  Elaine’s voice echoed through Dale’s skull. He turned to her.

  ‘Sir, I have control,’ she said.

  Dale stared at his first officer for several long seconds, and then he released his control column and nodded. ‘You have control.’

  Elaine gripped the column and checked all around her for traffic and the airport’s proximity before she began to visibly calm down.

  ‘What the hell was that? Didn’t you hear the traffic call?’

  Dale tried to think straight. ‘I.., I must have missed it.’

  Elaine peered sideways at him. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

  Before Dale could respond the radio came alive with chatter from air–traffic–control.

  ‘Ventura nine–six, please report, confirm status and separation in the pattern.’

  �
�I’ve got to call that in,’ Elaine said.

  ‘No,’ Dale snapped, and then forced himself to calm down. ‘It was a one–off, I just missed the call.’

  ‘And then missed another aircraft by a few feet!’ Elaine shot back. ‘Jesus, your head’s not in the game, sir.’

  Dale felt as though he were gasping for air like a beached fish, unable to think of a suitable explanation or retort.

  ‘It happens,’ was all that he could manage to say. ‘Let’s just let it go, okay?’

  Elaine stared at him for a long beat. ‘You want me to break aviation law and commit a criminal offence, in my first year with my first airline, because you were staring into space while in the landing pattern?’

  Dale stared at his first officer for a long beat, and knew that he had nowhere left to go.

  ‘You do whatever you feel you’ve got to do,’ he muttered.

  Dale sank back into his seat and rubbed his eyes as Elaine spoke into her microphone.

  ‘Ventura nine–six, downwind for two–seven, and we would like to report a near–air miss.’

  ‘Roger nine–six, circuit is clear, report to tower after landing.’

  ***

  12

  The two case detectives working the night shift had already logged in for duty as Kathryn walked in to the precinct station to see Detective Griffin standing over a stack of papers that littered his desk.

  ‘Anything new?’ she asked, by way of conversation.

  Griffin looked up at her and shook his head as he gestured to the images.

  ‘Security camera shots pulled down from the street where our abduction image was obtained,’ he replied. ‘Sheila McKenzie walked up and down here from time to time between business engagements.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you have gone home by now?’ Kathryn asked as she set her bag down alongside the detective’s desk.

  ‘Home’s over rated,’ he replied, ‘and me going home isn’t going to help find Sheila McKenzie. Besides, I got a lot of other cases ongoing here okay?’