The Darker Side sb-3 Page 5

  He reaches his hands up, grips the steering wheel on either side, and squeezes, once. Blows air out of his mouth, a noisy sigh.

  "Look," he says, "I don't like transsexuals. I think it's unnatural."

  He shrugs. "I can't help it. I dealt with a few tranny murders when I worked in the LAPD, and I did my job and I felt for the families--a person is a person--but it doesn't change the truth. They disgust me on some level. Sometimes it slips out."

  I gape at my friend, shocked. Absolutely, one hundred percent poleaxed. Am I really hearing this from Alan? Outside of an interrogation room, Alan is the calmest, fairest, most tolerant person I know. At least I've always thought so.

  "My, my, my, where have those clay feet been hiding?" Callie asks, echoing my own thoughts.

  "He's a homophobe," James says, the venom in his voice surprising me. "Right? You don't like fags, do you, Alan?"

  Alan rotates in his seat so he can look at James. "I'm not a fan of seeing guys kiss, but no, I'm not a homophobe. I don't care who you screw. There's a big difference between that and cutting off your breasts or chopping off your cock." He scowls. "This is my 'thing,'

  okay? I'm not saying it's right or that it makes sense, and frankly, I don't want a bunch of crap about it. Elaina's given me a piece of her mind on the subject already, and it just doesn't seem to change. It won't affect how I do my job."

  "Tell us the truth," Callie says, her voice solicitous. "Was it a woman you picked up one time? Lots of tongue-kissing and then you reached down and found sticks and berries?"

  Alan groans. "Fuck this. I shouldn't have said anything."

  "You're right," I say. "You shouldn't have. If you let that kind of comment slip around the family . . ."

  He nods, chastened. "Yeah. I'm sorry."

  "Not homophobic, huh?" James says.

  I glance at him, surprised. His face is angry. He's not letting this go.

  "I already said I wasn't."

  "Bullshit."

  Alan looks ready to get angry, but sighs instead.

  "Fine. Don't take my word for it. Doesn't make it less true."

  James stares at Alan. He's scowling and shaking. I have no idea what's going on here.

  "Really? Then tell me . . ." He stops, hesitating, breathing deeply, in and out. "Then tell me what you think about this: I'm gay."

  Silence fills the car. I can hear the heater blowing and the sounds of breathing.

  "Oh boy," Callie says. She mimes eating from a bag of popcorn.

  "Go on, don't stop now, honey-love."

  For myself, I'm speechless.

  James, gay?

  It's not the revelation itself that shocks me. It's the fact that he's revealing anything at all. It's just too personal. It would be as disconcerting if James told me what his favorite flavor of ice cream was. I am, on some level, surprised at how well he's managed to hide it. We've dealt with gay victims before. He's never let the slightest hint or opinion slip.

  Of course, neither had Alan.

  "Why are you telling us this now?" Alan asks.

  "I don't know!" James snarls. "Stop stalling. Answer the fucking question."

  Alan gives James a long once-over. The slightest smile tugs at his lips. "Then I'd say . . . I still don't like you."

  Callie snorts and begins to giggle. She sounds ridiculous. Some of the anger drains away from James's face. He scrutinizes Alan, looking for deception.

  "And that's all you'd have to say?"

  "That's it."

  Something happens that rocks me. Alan reaches his arm out over the seat and places a hand on James's shoulder. It's a gentle gesture, full of reassurance. What shocks me though is James's reaction. No twitch or flinch or turning away. I see a hint of something else, a kind of . . . what?

  Relief, I realize, amazed. It's relief. What Alan thinks matters to him.

  "Really, son," Alan says again, his voice as gentle as the gesture. The moment hangs. James shrugs off the hand. "Fine," he replies. He glares at Callie and me. "I don't want to hear anything more about it, okay?"

  I hold my fingers up in the "scout's honor" salute. Callie nods, but slides herself across the seat, putting as much space between her and James as possible.

  "What the hell are you doing?" he asks, suspicious.

  "Don't worry, honey-love," she says, "I have no problem with you being gay, really I don't. But I'm getting married soon, and, well--they say those gay cooties can be catching. Better safe than sorry."

  I manage to keep the smile off my face. James gives her a speculative look before sighing and saying: "You're an idiot."

  Again, there's a certain relief there. Callie is treating him the same as ever and this annoyance is comforting to James in the wake of his revelation.

  What about me? I wonder. What did he expect from me?

  I glance his way, but James is staring out the window again. He seems relaxed.

  I realize he wasn't worried about how I'd react. James knew I'd accept him. This makes me feel good.

  "Now that we've gotten the Jerry Springer moment out of the way," Callie says, "can we get back to the business at hand? Let's not forget our priority: planning my wedding."

  "What does the business at hand have to do with that?" I ask, bemused.

  Callie rolls her eyes at me. "Well, it looks like we have to catch a killer first. So, chop-chop."

  I grin at her. She's not actually worried about her wedding. This is Callie's way; she lives to lift the somber, to light the dark.

  "Let's head to Dulles," I say. "They're holding the plane for us. We can talk on the way."

  Alan gets the car moving and I reflect that this is the thing about life that's so different from death. Life is in motion. It's always happen- ing, always going somewhere, forcing its way through the cracks, moment-opportune or not. Alan's unexpected ugliness regarding transsexuals, James's sudden reveal, good or bad, both mean alive, and the often uncomfortableness of living is always preferable to the always tidy peacefulness of dead.

  5

  IT TOOK US ABOUT FORTY-FIVE MINUTES TO NAVIGATE OUR way to the airport. A local cop who'd been waiting got our car hurried through a security checkpoint and pointed us in the right direction. It's after midnight now, but like all international airports, Dulles lives off the clock. As Alan drives, I can see planes taking off, jumping from a sea of light into the night sky.

  The plane Lisa was killed on had been moved to a maintenance hangar. The hangar is large, made of metal and concrete, which means it's cold. The temperature is continuing to drop and I realize I'm really not dressed for this weather.

  Lights are on in the hangar, big and bright. The late hour and the stark utility of the place combine with the cold to create a feeling of solitude.

  "Guess we're supposed to just drive right in," Alan mutters, and does so.

  "Who's that?" Callie asks as we pull up.

  We're being met by a blonde woman I've never seen before. She's about my age, and she's wearing a black jacket, black slacks, and a white shirt. Simple, but it fits her too well to be off-the-rack. She's neither tall nor short, about five-five, pretty without being beautiful. Her face, which is a study in blankness, frames intelligent blue eyes.

  "Smells like an exec to me," Alan mutters.

  She walks right up to me as I get out of the car. "Agent Barrett?"

  "Yes? And you are?"

  "Rachael Hinson. I work for the Director."

  "Okay."

  "You have the plane for up to twenty-four hours," she says, skipping any preamble. "No one will be allowed in this hangar until then. You won't be bothered." She points to a rolling cart near us. "Forensic field kits are there, including cameras, evidence bags, and the file created by the police before we took over. I'll be supervising."

  I thought this might be coming.

  "No," I say, keeping my voice mild.

  Hinson turns to me with a frown. "I'm sorry?"

  "I said no, Agent Hinson. This is my investigation. My
team and I will be the only ones on that plane."

  She steps close to me, very close, using her height advantage to try and intimidate me. It's a smart move, but an old move, and I'm unfazed.

  "I'm afraid I'll have to insist," she says, glaring down at me with those blue eyes.

  She's fairly scary looking, I'll give her that.

  "Call the Director," I say.

  "Why?"

  "Because he's the one who can resolve this. This isn't a power play, Hinson. Okay, maybe it is a little. But the truth is, you'll just be in the way, and your motives for being there would be a distraction. We don't need someone looking over our shoulders right now."

  She doesn't so much step back as shift her weight onto her right leg. I can see her considering what I'm saying, weighing whatever directive she'd been given regarding keeping an eye on us against the wisdom of bugging the Director. She's not worried, she's thinking it through. Hinson is used to exercising her own discretion.

  "Look," I say, to help her along, "You know I'm not here just because the Director ordered me to be."

  "Functionally, you are."

  "Functionally, but not actually. I'm here because the congressman's wife asked for me."

  The smallest of smiles ghosts her lips, a slight softening of that all-business blankness. It's a smile of respect, an appreciation of my not-so-subtle name-dropping.

  "Fine, Agent Barrett," she says, stepping back now. She reaches into her inside jacket pocket, giving me a glimpse of a weapon held by an under-the-armpit shoulder holster. She produces a simple white business card and gives it to me. The card says: Hinson in black type, followed by a phone number and e-mail address. Nothing else. I glance at her. "We're into brevity, I see."

  She shrugs. "I can count on two hands the number of times I've handed that card out. Please call if you need anything. You can reach me twenty-four seven."

  She turns and walks off without another word, pumps clacking against the cold gray concrete of the hangar.

  Round one to me, but I remember AD Jones's warning and I'm sure now he was right to give it.

  "Hm," Alan rumbles, "how do you describe someone like that?

  Scary? Tough? Both?"

  "Describe her as she lives to be," I murmur.

  "Which is?"

  "Useful. Useful is her higher power. Now let's check out our crime scene."

  "I'VE NEVER BEEN ON A totally empty plane before," Callie says. "It's odd."

  "Too quiet," Alan observes.

  They're right. Under normal circumstances, planes have their own noise, a kind of murmuring crowd sound. This one is a tomb.

  "What is this, a seven twenty-seven?" Alan asks.

  "This is a seven thirty-seven eight hundred," James replies.

  "Medium-sized, narrow body, seats one hundred sixty-two passengers in a two-class layout--which is what this plane has. It's one hundred twenty-nine feet long with a wingspan of a hundred twelve feet. It weighs ninety-one thousand pounds empty, can travel over three thousand nautical miles fully loaded, and has a cruising speed of roughly mach point seven."

  Alan rolls his eyes. "Thanks, Encyclopedia Brown."

  "Where was she seated?" I ask.

  Alan consults the file. "Twenty F. Window seat."

  I frown. "One question to ask: How did he ensure he had a seat next to her? That requires prior knowledge of her seating arrangements. We need to find out how she booked her flight."

  "There are too many variables here," James says. I glance at him. "Meaning?"

  "Look, the way he killed her required that she have a window seat."

  He pulls the file from Alan's hands and removes a photograph. "He left her leaning up against the window, with a blanket pulled over her, like she was asleep. He wouldn't have been able to do that if she was sitting in the middle seat, much less an aisle."

  "So?"

  "My point is, there's various ways he could have found out what her seating assignment was. He could have bribed someone, or hacked into the system. From there, he could have requested the seat next to hers, or talked the person who was originally supposed to sit there into giving it up to him, any of a number of things. But post nine eleven, there's virtually no way he could have guaranteed she'd have gotten a window seat. No way to plan or arrange that."

  I understand now what James is saying. "Killing her on the plane wasn't a given."

  He nods. "Right."

  It's a tiny thing, but, as always, it is a piece of the overall puzzle, a part of seeing the man who did this.

  He started out with the decision to kill Lisa Reid, not the decision to kill her on a plane. He stalked her, watched her, gathered information about her life. He found out she was going on a trip, found out somehow that she had gotten a window seat, and only then planned and arranged killing her here. If events hadn't fallen into place the way he needed them to, he would have killed her somewhere else.

  "Location interested him," I murmur, "but it was an aside, a novelty, a 'see what I can do.' She was the most important factor, not the location. Lisa was the key."

  "Wait," Callie says. "There's another possibility, yes?"

  "Which is?"

  "That it was a random killing. Perhaps the location was the key factor for him. He got himself a middle seat and planned to kill whoever was unlucky enough to be sitting next to him, and that just happened to be Lisa. Maybe he has a problem with this airline, or air travel in general. I've wanted to kill off an obnoxious fellow passenger myself once or twice."

  "Possible and definitely disturbing," I allow, "but unlikely. The fact that it was Lisa Reid--transgendered person and offspring of a congressional family?" I shake my head. "That's not a coincidence. He likes planning and control. Victim choice would be an integral part of that. I could be wrong, but . . . this doesn't feel random to me."

  Callie considers this, nods in agreement. "Point taken."

  We move down the single aisle. The 737-800 has the classic seating arrangement, rows of three seats on either side. The air is cool but not cold yet. Airplanes hold heat well. We arrive at 20F.

  "How far did their Crime Scene Unit get, Callie?" I ask. She flips through the file. "Full photographs, with good coverage both before and after removal of the body. They collected her luggage, which is down there in the hangar. That's about it."

  "Someone jumped on this one fast," Alan observes. I take a moment and look. Nothing fancy, nothing psychic. This is it, right here, the place where one human being murdered another. A life ended in that seat by the window. If you believe in the soul, and I do, this is the location where the essence of the who of Lisa Reid disappeared forever. I'm struck, as always, by how inadequate the location of death is when compared to the truth of death itself. I saw a pretty young woman once, staked out in the dirt. She was naked. She'd been strangled. Her tongue lolled from her swollen, beaten mouth. Her open eyes stared at the sky. She still had some of her beauty, but it was fading fast, being eaten around the edges by the coming entropy. Dead as she was, she still put the dirt to shame. There was no forest, no ground, and no sky, there was only her. No canvas exists that can really add to an ended life; death frames itself.

  "I see blood on her seat cushion," Callie observes, jarring me from my thoughts. "Easiest thing to do will be to just take the whole cushion. Take hers, take his, then search for prints. That's a good avenue. It would have stood out if he'd worn gloves. Then vacuum everything for trace. That's pretty much going to be it."

  "I think he would have taken something," James notes. I turn to him. "What?"

  "A trophy. He left something in her, the cross. He's into symbols. He needed to take something."

  Not all serial killers take trophies, but I agree with James. It feels right.

  "Could have been anything," Alan says. "Jewelry, something from her purse, a piece of her hair." He shrugs. "Anything."

  "We'll go through her belongings, see if something obvious is missing," I say.

  "It's only getting colder, s
o what's the game plan, honey-love?"

  Callie's right. I've started to get the smell of him but there's nothing else here that's going to help me.

  "You and James are going to stay here and finish processing the scene. Call me when you're done. Alan, I want you to drop me off at Lisa's place, and then I want you to interview the witnesses. Flight attendants, passengers, anyone and everyone. Follow up on how he bought his ticket as well. Did he use cash? A credit card? If he used a credit card, it was probably a false identity. How'd he make that happen?"

  "Got it."

  Callie nods her assent.

  I take a final look at the window Lisa had died next to, turn, and walk away from it forever. It'll fade eventually, I know. Someday I'll be sitting at a window seat on an airplane and I won't even think of Lisa Reid.

  Someday.

  6

  ALAN AND I ARE ON THE FREEWAY HEADING BACK TO ALEXandria. We don't have much company on the road; just a few other night-drivers who, like us, probably wish they were in bed. Alan is silent as he drives. We have the heaters blowing full tilt to deal with the cold. Darkness has really settled in, darkness and silence and still.

  "What is it about the cold that makes things seem more quiet?" I wonder out loud.

  Alan glances over at me and smiles. "Things are more quiet. You're used to Los Angeles. Doesn't get cold enough there to drive people and animals inside, usually. It does here."

  He's right. I've experienced this before. Between the ages of six and ten, before my mom died of cancer, we used to take family driving trips. Mom and Dad would synchronize their vacation time and we'd spend two weeks trekking halfway across the U.S. and back. I remember the hard parts of these trips; the unending sound of the wheels on the road and the world rushing by, the intense, almost painful boredom. I also remember playing car games with my mom. I-spy, counting "pididdles" (cars with only one headlight working). Raucous, off-tune car songs. Most of all, I remember the destinations. In a four-year period, I saw great parts of Rocky Mountain National Park, Yellowstone, Mount Rushmore. We crossed the Mississippi in a few places, ate gumbo in New Orleans. We rarely stayed in hotels, preferring to camp instead. One year, Dad got especially ambitious and drove us all the way to upstate New York in the fall. He wanted us to see the Catskill Mountains, where Rip Van Winkle was supposed to have snoozed. It was an unbearably long trip and we were worn out and cranky by the time we arrived. We pulled into the campground and I got out of that car as fast as I could.