Brass in Pocket (11 page)

“Right.”

“So maybe she's just ignoring her phone. It's been known to happen.”

“Yes, it has.” Lindsey had made a science of it. If Melinda Spence needed any excuses later, maybe Catherine could put the two of them in touch. Unless of course Lindsey ignored the phone when Catherine called her about it.

“But you said you wanted to know about any
disappearances or unsolveds that turned up. Her family's worried about her, and their worry feels like the real deal to me. I can't launch an investigation yet, until more time passes or we have some reason to suspect foul play, but I just wanted to tip you off.”

“Okay, Sam, thanks. I'll drop in on the family and have a look around.”

“Let me know if you find anything useful, Catherine. 'Bye.”

She sat at her desk for another minute, pondering the situation. Sam was right: a young woman, in Las Vegas for maybe the first time, could get involved in all sorts of things that she might not want the rest of her family to know about. It didn't necessarily mean she was in any danger.

But her family was worried, and given Greg's theory about a would-be serial killer preparing to make the move to human victims, maybe it had reason to be. She couldn't discount the possibility, however remote. One missing woman was plenty for one night, and now it appeared that she might have two on her hands.

She called Greg into her office and described the situation as Sam had outlined it.

“I should get over to the Palermo,” he said when she had finished. “And those bones should be moved up on the lab's priority list. They're the key to this whole thing.”

Catherine had to admire his enthusiasm. “So far, they're still just animal bones, Greg, and we have plenty going on here tonight. Jesse Dunwood is a dead human being, and Antoinette O'Brady is a
missing human being. Melinda Spence might also be missing, but we don't know that for certain. The other, more concrete issues have to take precedence.”

“I know,” he said bitterly. “Sometimes I want to clone myself so I can be everywhere at once.”

“I know the feeling, Greg. Dunwood is your first case, and now we know it was a homicide. Get back out to that airport and finish processing that airplane.”

“That could take hours, Catherine!”

“It'll take as long as it takes. Go with Riley and get it done.”

He looked like he wanted to say something else, but he didn't.

He was smart enough to rein himself in when he needed to. He had made the right choice this time, because Catherine was in no mood to be secondguessed.

This was the boring part of the job.

Greg and Riley had already checked out the airplane and photographed it extensively. Officer Morston swore that no one had touched it in their absence.

Which meant it was time to go over the aircraft, inch by inch, looking for the minutest bits of possible evidence. Riley got a small handheld vacuum cleaner and started on the cockpit floor, picking up whatever dirt and fibers might have been dropped there. Those had probably mostly come from Dunwood himself, but the killer would have had to enter the cockpit to
position the tube just right behind the vent. The Locard exchange principle said that any time a person comes into contact with another person, place, or object, there's an exchange of materials, each leaving some trace of the event on the other. Modern forensic science was largely based on that principle, and exceptions were rare indeed. So if the murderer had been inside the cockpit, there should be some sign of his or her presence there. Greg and Riley couldn't fathom any way to have placed the tube without entering the cockpit.

While Riley worked inside the plane, Greg landed the unenviable task of examining the engine, muffler, and tube. Taking apart an airplane was a dirty job, so it was possible that he would be able to find greasy fingerprints. In fact, he did, all over and around the muffler. He photographed these visible prints, known as
patent
prints, then lifted them with tape. Easy part done. Now he had to look for the
latent
impressions, ones that couldn't be seen with the naked eye. Even very clean hands left faint oily traces on surfaces they touched, and engine parts were ideal depositories for them.

“You're back,” a voice called from the hangar door.

Greg turned around. Jamal Easton looked in at him, head gleaming in the hangar's overhead lights. “This is a secure area, Mr. Easton.”

“I understand. I'm not coming in. I just wanted to see how your investigation's going.”

“It's a laborious process.” The vacuum cleaner was still humming inside the cockpit—Riley might not even be aware they had a visitor.

“I bet it is.”

“Is there something I can do for you?”

Jamal shoved his hands deep into his hip pockets and swayed from heel to heel. He looked like a shy kid asking a girl to the movies. “I just thought maybe you should know something, in case it's important,” he said. “Jesse Dunwood? I mean, I liked him, and he was a hell of a pilot. Always nice enough to me. Some folks look down on mechanics, but not Jesse. But here's what you should know. He was having a thing with Tonya Gravesend.”

“A thing? You mean an affair?”

“That's right. It was hot and heavy for a while there. But he broke it off, a couple of weeks ago.”

“Was he married?”

“Oh, no, not Jesse. He liked to play the field, always squiring some new babe around. That was a holdover from his jet jockey days, I think. Women go for pilots, and there's a certain type drawn to fighter pilots. Nobody could tie him down. I don't know why he broke up with Tonya, but she was stomping around here for days, slamming doors and shooting him the dick-eye every time she saw him. I overheard her talking on her cell phone to a friend, and Jesse's name came up in a derogatory way. A less charitable man might even say threatening. I got the feeling he was kind of a jerk to her.”

“Did you tell all this to Detective Williams?”

“Oh yeah. I told him the whole deal.”

“That's great, then.”
Why are you bothering me with it?
he almost asked. But he had a feeling the man would tell him anyway. Some people just had to talk. That's what confessionals were for, but
sometimes the nearest CSI would do just as well.

“I just figured, you know, you're investigating it too. So you ought to know.”

“I'm a crime scene investigator, Mr. Easton. The detective is the one who's trying to find Mr. Dunwood's killer.”

“Okay, understood,” Jamal said, nodding his big head. “I just wanted everyone to be in the same loop.”

“I appreciate that.”

“I'll wish you a good night then, sir. You let me know if you need anything else.”

“I'll do that.” Jamal Easton wandered off into the darkness beyond the hangar, and Greg went back to work, wondering if Jamal had some unstated motive for telling him all that.

He started with an ultraviolet light, beaming it this way and that over the muffler. A couple of faint prints showed up, but nothing very clear beyond the patent prints he'd already found. Which meant getting out the dust. He picked a rich carbon black powder, to show up against the gray steel of the muffler. The wand he used was no brush at all, but a magnetic device that never actually touched the surface he was dusting. He concentrated his efforts around the hole that had been bored into the muffler, and on the black plastic tubing near the point of insertion, figuring that the killer would have had his hands all over them in those places.

He was playing loud music in his head, trying to drown out the hum of Riley's vacuum, when the drum part fell out of syncopation and he realized someone was knocking on the hangar door. He
looked over and saw Patti Van Dyke smiling hesitantly at him.

“Please don't come in here,” Greg said. Another one? He shouldn't have let Morston go on a lunch break, but he hadn't thought the officer would be needed for a while.

“Okay, but can I talk to you a minute, though? Can you come here?”

Greg put down his supplies and walked over toward her. She still wore an uneasy smile. It looked like something she'd picked up at a discount store that didn't quite fit on her face. “What is it, ma'am?”

“If you don't hang around airports, you don't know the kind of drama we got going on in a place like this. Between pilots and ground crew and couch rats, we got a TV soap opera going on seven days a week. Even the TV soaps get weekends off, but weekends are when ours get really juicy.”

“Are you saying that you think one of the airport people might have killed Jesse Dunwood?”

“All I'm saying is that some of them aren't too sorry he's dead.”

“I thought he was well liked.”

“Well, in public that's what we all say. We don't like to air our dirty laundry. But it's there just the same.”

“If there's something specific you know—”

Patti barely let him get the words out. “Jesse and Jamal, they fought all the time.”

It hadn't sounded that way just minutes ago, when Jamal Easton was expressing his admiration for Dunwood. “You mean they argued?”

“Well, usually. To put it mildly, I'd say. They got into real hollering matches sometimes. Ugly, vicious ones. Jesse made some racial comments about Jamal that we all thought were over the line, but he was a customer—one of the airport's best customers—so there wasn't much anybody felt like they could do about it. Then last week, or maybe, no, eight or ten days ago, I guess, they got into it for real.”

“Physically?”

“That's what I'm saying. It started with shouting, then pushing. Finally they were all over each other and throwing punches. Jesse ended up knocking Jamal down. He kicked him a couple of times in the ribs, and said something like ‘You're lucky I don't kill you right here.' He was kind of a bully, Jesse was. I had my hand on the phone, ready to call the cops if he tried to do anything more to Jamal. He backed off and we helped Jamal up, but he didn't ever go to the hospital or anything. The bad blood passed after that, but they were never going to be friendly again, you could just tell.”

As he had with Jamal, Greg asked if she had told Detective Williams her story. She assured him that she had, in great detail. Hearing that, Greg talked her into leaving so he could finish his work.

The night was slipping away from him while he listened to airport gossip. He went back to the SUV to get a jacket, since the air was finally turning cool, and then returned to the airplane.

While he worked, almost on autopilot, Greg had to keep reminding himself not to let his mind drift to the animal bones at the Empire construction site
and the missing woman from the Palermo. Catherine was right, after all—Jesse Dunwood had been murdered and deserved his full attention. He wouldn't do anybody any favors by letting his thoughts be scattered.

His fingerprint powder revealed more faint impressions, but just a few. He photographed and lifted these as well, then started in on the engine canopy, where anyone would have to touch it to open it. He hoped Jamal Easton's gloved hands hadn't obscured anything important when he went inside the canopy and found the rigged muffler. Detective Williams had made sure that fingerprints had been taken from all the airport personnel on duty tonight. As always, those people were told they were bring printed for purposes of elimination. Sometimes it was even true, but the hope was always that they would all be used for elimination except the one set that wasn't.

“Hey, pal,” a scratchy voice called. Greg tried not to sigh audibly.
Oh my God, please give me a break tonight
. He turned and saw the disabled janitor, Benny Kracsinski, a few steps in from the doorway, leaning on a worn, chipped wooden cane. Hard for a janitor to get around with a cane, Greg guessed, since brooms and other cleaning tools often worked best with two hands.

“Stay right there,” Greg said. Riley's vacuum was still running. How was it that she never heard these interruptions? “I'll come to you.”

He did. Benny cocked his head, looking up at Greg with hooded eyes. His jaw was thick with silvery stubble. “I hope you find the bastard who did that to Jesse.”

“I'm working on it,” Greg said. The hint was utterly lost on Benny.

“Good, good. You find him, you put him away for a long time, okay?”

“That's the idea. Can I ask you—did you like Dunwood? A lot of people seem to have had some sort of difficulty with him.”

“I got no problems with him myself. He was a rich guy, right? But he was always nice enough to those of us who aren't so lucky. He always gave me a present at Christmas, you know, a bottle of something or maybe some kind of gadget. Most pilots fly out of here don't know the cleaning staff exists, but Jesse, he paid attention to everyone.”

“Was there anybody with a particular grudge against him, that you knew of?” Greg found himself asking, even though he knew the detective had covered this ground.

Benny considered this for a moment. His fingers rubbing his chin made a sandpaper sound. “Lately, I'd have to say Stan Johnston.”

“The tower controller?”

“Yeah, Stan. He had borrowed some money from Jesse. I guess a lot of it, over the years. People don't pay any attention to a guy cleaning toilets or sweeping floors, so I heard stuff. Jesse had reached the point where he didn't think Stan ever meant to pay him back. He was trying to collect, even threatened to sue Stan. There were—well, let's just say there were some angry words tossed back and forth.”

“I see,” Greg said. “Did you tell all this to the detective?”

“Maybe not in quite such detail,” Benny said.

“It would be a good idea to call him up and fill him in,” Greg suggested. “I appreciate the tip, but you can't hold back when you're questioned.”

“I understand. I ain't saying it was Stan who did it, mind you. I just thought you oughtta know.”