“We don’t get to pick our facts. We just have to deal with them. We need to keep interviewing and letting the evidence lead us to the answers. We have to find out what caused that plane to come down. And to do that, you’re going to have to be a little more dispassionate about things, even if they don’t make sense.”
“Dispassionate. Okay.” He took a deep breath and looked up to the ceiling. “Mrs. Bartkowski here certainly looks like the one we talked to yesterday. That better?” His voice trembled, his hand continued to shake.
Suter smirked again. “So does Mrs. Gonzales, and, I bet, if we look at Mr. Newsome, he’ll match up. They’re on the list here.”
He walked farther down the row of tables and stopped to look at a number. He waved for Bohannon to follow. After a moment of hesitation, Bohannon relented. He lifted the sheet on Mrs. Gonzales—same face as the mind reader in southeast Portland. Suter pointed to a table two rows down.
“That one should be Newsome, the egg man. Go ahead and take a look.”
“I’m about to lose it,” Bohannon said, looking down at the man’s face. “This ain’t right.”
“Remember, dispassionate. Just let the facts lead you.”
“I don’t want to go where these facts lead.”
Bohannon leaned against one of the tent’s support poles, looking out over the tables of cadavers.
He stood there for several minutes, not moving, until a chill went down his neck, through his spine and to the rest of his body. He got the jitters and realized the shakes came as much from the morgue’s refrigeration as the secrets it held.
“What’s going to happen to these people?”
“I don’t know. We may never know, depending on how things turn out.” Suter looked unconcerned.
Bohannon shook his head, disgusted. “Can we get out of here?”
*
While they took off their BioSuits, Bohannon said, “You said there were 121 passengers but only 120 bodies. Why the discrepancy? Who’s missing?”
“Since we’ve known about the redundancy among survivors and fatalities, I haven’t had a chance to figure it out. We assumed someone was blown out of the plane or swept down the river, which would not be unusual in cases like this,” Suter said. “I’ll give you the lists, and you can do the compare. You tell me what you find in the morning.”
CHAPTER 17
NO MATTER HOW hard she stomped, the mud would not come off her shoes, so Mara slipped them off and left them on the back porch. Heavy rain always turned the short path from the driveway to the back door into a muddy mess, and she had just sprinted through it. She took off her jacket, shook it and opened the door into the kitchen. The smell of spaghetti sauce and garlic bread drove away the shiver she felt coming on.
“Hard day at the salt mines?” her mother asked, standing over the stove, stirring a steaming pot.
“Not at all. It was nice to get back into a routine and do something productive.” Mara slipped her jacket onto a hook next to the door.
“Ned Pastor called and said he would stop by later this evening to talk to you about the medallion. Why don’t you go get some dry clothes on and wash up? Dinner will be ready in about ten minutes.”
“Don’t overcook the pasta,” Mara said heading out of the kitchen.
“A thank-you would be nice. This isn’t a boarding house, you know.”
*
Ned showed up at 7:15 p.m. carrying the DVD case Mara had used for the medallion as he stepped into the living room. He sat down in an armchair across from the couch where Mara and Diana sat.
“I’ve cleaned it up,” he said. He removed the copper disk from the case. “All of the char and soot came off. However, I cannot get the burned azurite crystals to come out of their settings. I’ve tried everything, including prying them loose, heating the metal to soften and loosen it, even smashing or splitting the crystals.” He held up the medallion, pointing to the blackened stones in the newly gleaming copper face. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“What do you mean?” Mara asked.
“Even if I couldn’t get the settings to loosen up, azurite isn’t that hard. It should be relatively easy to remove. I took some extreme measures to take them out. They would not budge. If I didn’t know better, I would think those crystals are something other than azurite.”
“Could they be something different? Something harder?”
“No, it’s azurite. Except for the larger crystal at the bottom. That’s black tourmaline. I assumed it was a burned azurite crystal like the others, but it’s not. Anyway, it’s not letting me take out the azurite.”
“Not letting you?” she said.
“I told you that I felt strange about working on it. I know it sounds funny, but I just get the feeling that something other than the physical properties of this medallion prevents me from removing those stones. I have no other explanation.”
“Do you get impressions like this about other things you work on?”
“Sure. I sense energies, both good and bad, in many objects I work on. This one is different. The impressions I get from it are not subtle. They are profound.”
“Okay, I guess I’ll look at other options. Thanks for everything.”
Ned tipped the carrier into his hand to pour out cut azurite crystals and showed them to Mara. “If you can find someone who can do the work, here are the replacement crystals I cut.” He put the crystals and medallion back in the case and handed it to Mara. “Sorry I couldn’t be more help.”
*
Mara stretched out on the couch in the living room, reading a magazine while her mother sat in her lotus position on the round rug in front of the fireplace, meditating with a candle and several crystals placed in an arc in front of her.
“Why did you and Dad get divorced?” Mara asked.
Her mother opened one eye and looked across the room at her daughter. “What prompted that? You’ve never asked before.”
“An article I’m reading, and it occurred to me that I didn’t know.”
“As trite as it sounds, we just drifted apart,” Diana said, keeping her eyes closed. “I became more engaged in my spiritual beliefs, and he finished his residency, started to get deeper into his career. He felt more pragmatic about life. I stayed more of a, well, a free spirit, I suppose.”
“You’re always saying I’m like him, but he says I’m like you. He’s not that thrilled about me working at Mr. Mason’s shop and thinks I should just go straight into college.”
“I suppose you’ve got a bit of both of us in you,” her mother said, reaching for a demantoid, a lustrous green garnet. She raised the round crystal to the candle flame, gave her wrist a twist. A kaleidoscope of green hues spun throughout the room. “You have many facets. You control which ones shine.”
“That is so cool. You should do light shows at the planetarium.”
Diana smiled and slid back into her meditation.
“So you just woke up one day and asked for a divorce?”
“What?”
“You and Dad. You asked him, right?”
“You are a buzz kill, child. I don’t remember. It was mutual.”
“Did you guys ever consider having other kids?”
Diana opened her eyes. She stared at Mara long enough without answering to make Mara uncomfortable. “We did,” Diana said.
“You considered having more kids?”
“When you were almost two, I got pregnant. I went nearly full term, but when he was born, his lungs were underdeveloped, and he didn’t make it.”
“Oh, my God. I’m sorry, Mom.”
“It was a long time ago, sweetie. It was a complication we didn’t expect. After all, we had you, and everything went perfectly. I don’t think your dad and I ever really recovered from that. He dived into his career, and I looked for solace in my own way. We eventually went our separate ways.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“You were too young to remember, and I suppose it just never came
up when you got older.”
“Did you name the baby?”
“We named him Sam.”
CHAPTER 18
BOHANNON PULLED INTO the circular drive in front of the beige stuccoed airport hotel and braked at the front entrance under a large overhang.
Suter walked out the hotel’s front door and grabbed the passenger door handle. “Head over to the hospital,” he said, slipping into the passenger seat. “I left the NTSB contact info with the doctors, and Pirelli forwarded a call this morning from Peter Newsome’s wife. You remember Newsome, right?”
“How could I forget?”
“Turns out his wife was on the flight, too, and she says they want to talk.”
“I don’t recall seeing another Newsome on the list.”
“Kept her maiden name. She’s Jill O’Donnell. They were sitting toward the back of the plane and apparently saw a tussle of some kind.”
Bohannon pulled out of the hotel driveway and headed west toward the hospital.
“Does the wife seem to think anything is odd about her husband?”
“Didn’t say anything. Why?”
“If you were married to someone who laid an egg, wouldn’t you think that was strange?”
“I suppose, but, you have to remember, she’s probably a clone too. Who knows what these people think is strange? Anyway, it probably wasn’t an actual egg. I’m sure it didn’t have, you know, a little something inside waiting to hatch.”
“Lord, have mercy.”
“Don’t go looking for problems. Let’s just find out what they saw.”
“How did Pirelli find out about Newsome at the hospital anyway? It isn’t like there’s a hotline set up for tracking passengers from the flight.”
“He’s got folks monitoring calls going into the local police and emergency lines,” Suter said.
“An NTSB investigator tapping the local cops? That sounds odd. He’s not really NTSB, is he?”
“Actually he is. But you could say he’s other things as well.”
“I guess those documents I signed don’t entitle me to know what those things might be.”
“You guess right.”
*
Jill O’Donnell brushed blond bangs off her forehead, and smoothed her navy jacket and skirt in one motion as she stood on the far side of the bed when Suter and Bohannon walked into her husband’s private room. Apart from a chrome bed railing and the florescent tube light mounted on the wall over the bed’s wooden headboard, the room could have been part of a suite in a nice hotel. Mauve drapes covered the windows, and tasteful artwork hung from the walls. Bohannon almost tripped, stepping from the linoleum-floored hallway on to the carpet in the room.
The head of Peter Newsome’s bed was slightly elevated, but he appeared to be asleep, on his side curled around a sizable lump under the covers.
“Are you Mr. Suter?” she said, looking tired.
“Yes, ma’am. Special Agent Suter. This is Detective Bohannon.”
She looked back at her husband. “We’ve been through so much this past week with the accident and everything going on in our lives.”
“Yes, ma’am. Do you have a few minutes to talk?”
“Yes. Let’s step out into the hall so we don’t wake him.”
“No, that’s okay. I’m awake.” Peter Newsome lifted himself and rubbed his eyes. “You guys can talk in here.”
“We just have a few questions about the flight and anything you might have seen.”
The young woman sat on the edge of her husband’s bed, running her hand through his unruly hair. “We saw a red-headed boy running toward the back of the plane. He carried this strange orb-looking thing that filled the plane with spinning light. It was very disorienting. Two girls, older teens, followed him. I think they might have been twins or sisters. They looked a lot alike. One was a little more dressed up with a skirt and jacket. The other wore jeans.”
“Can you describe these girls?”
“With all the lights and panic, it was hard to tell. They were both, maybe, medium height, not real tall. I would guess brown hair. It was a little long and wavy. Not permed or anything, just a natural wave to it. The cuts were a little different, but both were longish, shoulder length.”
“Were they thin, fat, how old?”
“I would guess sixteen, seventeen at the most. Trim, not model skinny. Definitely not fat.”
“So this boy. How old was he?”
“Definitely younger. Probably a teen too but younger, still a little boyish looking.”
“You said these girls were following him. Were they chasing him, or were they just going to the back of the plane with him?”
“I’m not sure.”
“This orb the boy carried, did you get the impression it was some kind of explosive? Could it have been what caused the accident?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it. It produced an incredible amount of light. It was almost blinding, so bright it filled the cabin. I didn’t get the impression it was dangerous per se, just disorienting.”
“Did you see what happened to this orb?”
“It looked like they were struggling with it or over it. The girls may have been trying to take it from the boy. There was a blinding flash of light, and all hell broke loose. The cabin decompressed, and the plane went into a dive. I think by that time, we were on our way back to Portland.”
“Did you see the orb after that, when the plane was going down or after the crash?”
“No. I don’t remember anything after that until I was in the water.”
“Have you ever seen these girls before?”
“No. Never.”
“How about you, Mr. Newsome?”
“Jill saw a lot more than I did. She likes to sit on the aisle. I was in the middle seat and didn’t see any of that. I heard some of it, but I didn’t see it,” he said.
“Did you see this orb?”
“No. I saw the light in the cabin, but not where it came from.”
“So you never saw this orb yourself?”
“No. Like I said, she was on the aisle.”
They thanked the couple and stepped into the hall. Suter’s phone rang, and he stepped into an empty waiting area for some privacy. Bohannon waited at a nurse’s station next to the elevators. A bing toned, and the elevator doors slid open to reveal the older doctor Bohannon had met Saturday.
“Detective Bohannon. I see you’re visiting our patient from this weekend,” he said, leaning on the counter.
“Yes. His wife called and had some information related to our investigation,” Bohannon said.
“What is the nature of your investigation? Can you say?”
“Not really. Why do you ask, Dr., ah…?”
“Samuelson. Paul Samuelson. After he was tranquilized, we examined Mr. Newsome.”
“And?”
“Normally it would be inappropriate to discuss a patient’s personal medical information, but you’re already aware of some of the anomalies related to his case. And, to be honest with you, I think I should tell someone about what we found. First, you must agree to keep this in the utmost confidence. This information cannot be traced back to me.”
“Okay, Doctor. What did you find?”
“Mr. Newsome appears to be perfectly normal and healthy. He has a radical mutation in his reproductive system and some unusual glands just below his sinuses, but it appears to be how he was born. The acid he spewed came from those glands. The mutations are not the result of surgery or some pathological condition. They appear normal for him. There is no mention of this in his medical records.”
“What about the egg?”
“The egg is an egg. It’s a girl. And she appears to be human, with some of the same variations present in her father, or maybe he’s the mother. Who knows?”
“So she is going to hatch?”
“I would assume.”
“What are you going to do?” Bohannon asked.
“There is nothin
g to do. Mr. Newsome is checking out in the morning. He has requested to be discharged, and we don’t have any reason to keep him here. What are you going to do?”
“What do you mean? He hasn’t broken any law that I’m aware of.”
“I just thought perhaps his status had something to do with your investigation.”
“Not at all.”
*
Bohannon braked the Caprice at the stop sign at the exit of the hospital parking lot. They faced a row of mirrored office buildings across Burnside Road that reflected the dense clouds that were rolling in behind them. He turned to look at Suter in the passenger seat. “Where we going next? Another passenger interview?”
“We need to identify that boy and those two women. We figure that out, I think we have a shot at solving what brought down the plane,” Suter said.
“And where would you like to do that?” The detective pointed fingers left and right above the steering wheel.
“Oh, let’s just drive around for a minute. I need to think this through.”
Bohannon turned toward downtown and said, “At this point, the accident seems incidental, don’t you think? We have a plane full of people switched for altered versions of themselves. Don’t you think we should be looking into that? I don’t think proceeding like it was a run-of-the-mill bombing or a mechanical failure is going to get us anywhere.”
“I think whatever, or whoever, caused the explosion caused the switch. If we figure out what blew a hole in the plane, I bet we’ll find out what caused the rest of it,” Suter said.
“I don’t know. You’re assuming there’s a connection, and that is premised on accepting that we have two sets of passengers for one flight. I just don’t understand how you can accept that so easily.”
“We have no choice. We do have two sets of passengers for one flight. I accept the facts we find. We can’t stop to hyperventilate every time we encounter something that’s a little odd, so let’s go over what we’ve got.”
“All right.”
“The body of Debbie Bartkowski in the cooler looks like the woman we met at the apartment complex,” Suter said. “But it’s obvious the woman we met was something other than what we would expect, agreed?”
“Yeah, I would say so.”
Broken Realms (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 1) Page 9