Elsinore Canyon (24 page)

The screener, all the running around in the house, then a fake trip to the Maldives. It was as far away as Dana could get if that was Claudia’s object, certainly farther than Costa Rica—but why the rush? Don’t mess with Dana’s luggage, don’t let her mess with yours, and don’t wait for her. She googled queasily. Extradition treaties, she and Oscar had gone over that. Drug trafficking. Penalties. Thailand.
She will not be accompanying you out of the airport.

She felt her lips moving by themselves.

“See anything?” Gale said.

She sat back from the monitor. “The other side of the looking-glass.” Her father’s advice came back all twisty. Don’t think about anything beyond this moment. Plan, don’t jump. For this moment, she would do one thing only: skim the snitchware. More items had downloaded, from Claudia’s and Oscar’s accounts. Yes, there were Rosie and Gale’s replies to Claudia—the little rattlesnakes were biting her in her face as they spoke. And hadn’t Oscar been busy! Correspondence all over the place, the charter airline, Singapore Air first class from Bangkok to L.A., the St. Regis, and another first-class ticket from Anchorage for Laurie Polonius. Yikes, Dana hadn’t even thought of Laurie. Her father must have ordered that. Nothing for Dana, though. Nothing! Everyone was in on this Thailand scheme but her—and surely not her father despite all his other betrayals. How soon would she be able to contact him?

Don’t act yet, plan deeper. Write it off as an affordable loss that her traitorous, willfully blind, horny father who had sat right there and picked his sex-toy wife over his daughter wasn’t available to advise her now, assuming he knew anything anyway. So there was something about luggage. She would start with hers—wait! Log off the computer first. PLAN. She folded up the handwritten note and put it in a pocket. “Wanna get the mouse,” she mumbled. She padded back to the luggage racks, rummaged in her suitcase, and got the mouse. Then she went through her purse and palmed out the pills she had taken from Claudia’s room.

“They have Stoli and fresh-squeezed juice on this plane!” she called as she bounced back out to Rosie and Gale. “I’m making a pitcher of screwdrivers.”

“All right,” said Gale. Rosie blinked “Yes” as the aluminum tube carried them across the northern parallel of 42 degrees, conveying them out of the airspace over California.

Dana recalculated with her hurting brain. It wasn’t that much work, but it felt like forcing a dull needle through fine cloth. It was just after two thirty in the morning Elsinore Canyon time, a little over one hour before they would touch down in Anchorage to refuel. Then that would take about an hour, then six hours forty minutes to Tokyo where it would be another hour on the ground to refuel again, and then five hours and forty minutes to Bangkok, which would be the final destination and not a final refueling unbeknownst to all but her at the moment, all nineteen or twenty hours of which meant that Rosie and Gale would undoubtedly get into their bags at some point, since they’d wake up eventually and no one could go that long without a change of clothes and a wash. Dana sat cross-legged in the one-person sleeping compartment. The door was closed and her suitcase was spread before her. Arranged like chess pieces at its side were nine items:

• Jessalyn Cranach Underall Sun-Block
  
• MAC Macroviolet Fluidline
  
• MAC Star Violet Eye Shadow
  
• MAC Blackberry Eye Shadow
  
• MAC Nehru Eye Shadow
  
• Jane Iredale Purelash Mascara
  
• Burt’s Bees Red Dahlia Tinted Lip Balm
  
• Kirkland Daily Facial Cleansing Towelettes with Chamomile, Triple Tea Complex
  
• CVS Isopropyl
  

That was the “doubtful” pile. To the right was the “maybe” pile, with eleven items:

• Crest Cavity Protection
  
• Johnson’s Baby Powder Pure Cornstarch
  
• Colgate Peroxyl
  
• Jessalyn Cranach Non-Abrasive Facial Cleanser
  
• Jessalyn Cranach Oil-Free Eye Makeup Remover
  
• Jessalyn Cranach Every Day Skin Toner
  
• Molokai Shampoo for Blondes
  
• Charlotte Honeydew Long Hair Conditioner
  
• Victoria’s Secret Secret Charm Hydrating Body Lotion
  
• Victoria’s Secret Amber Romance Refreshing Body Mist
  
• Tampax Pearl Plastic Multipax Heavy Unscented tampons
  

Could a person dissolve or crush a powder into any of those things and distill it out? Could a dog sniff it?

Her clothes were in another “maybe” pile. She felt the hems, cuffs, pockets, and collars. Every jacket, blouse, skirt, and pair of pants. She sniffed them—what did a dog smell?—and refolded them before packing them back up. Could clothes be dusted or soaked in anything? Her lingerie—soft. Swimsuits, soft. Robes, soft. Shoes. She shook them. Could Claudia saw off the heels and glue them back on? Stop asking insane questions. Precious time ticking away on this bullshit. She felt every square inch of the linings of the suitcase and then sorted everything back in, but—she tossed everything back out again. Damn it, why? As if Claudia could cut a lining open and sew it back up without a trace! But Oscar? Perla? Had Miguel been told to hand the flight crew some trinket, with instructions to make sure Dana had it before she got off the plane? A Thank-you-for-flying-with-us gift that would destroy her life? How many operatives and links and variables could you safely have in a plan like this?

Rosie and Gale were still hard asleep, thanks to Claudia’s Fuckitol. They might vomit and choke to death, and then there’d be an autopsy. No, the stewardess wouldn’t let them choke. Spiking their drinks, was Dana fucking kidding? She knew nothing about drugs and dosages, they really truly might be dying or DEAD on the buff leather tilt-back seats. The three of them had been playing
Call of Duty
when Rosie dropped off. Gale went next. Dana could see the dope thickening them up. Tongues sloppy, eyes lazy, minds wandering, three—two—one. The stewardess scared her. “Should we get these two some blankets?” she said with a discreet smile. Dana smiled back. “They do this all the time.” Such a little mother. She got their shoes off without eliciting a snore or a blink. Zonked.

Everything back into the suitcase except the “maybe” pile. Crush. Rub. Smell. Fold. Back in. Maybe she needed to throw the suitcase itself into the tub and soak out whatever was in there. Maybe she could leave things behind. No, not with this crew. They wouldn’t miss anything, and besides, Thai customs agents would board the plane to do the check. Burn everything. Hah. If only you could open a window on a plane. She’d throw it all out and disembark nude.

Her own laptop. She disconnected the power cord and turned it on. It started up. How could you stuff a battery with white powder or a bottle of something and have it still function? Same for the mouse, which used a drugstore battery. She put the computer into the “maybe” pile. She would have to get a tiny screwdriver from the crew. “As long as I have the time, I’m going to try to see what’s wrong with it.” She could pull that off.

Her father would try to get her out of jail. He would go live in Bangkok and spend every penny he had to save her life at least, but she would still rot behind bars for years. Or was Claudia planning to kill him, too? Or maybe she was setting something else up, maybe her father was on his way to Asia to meet her for…what? Damn it. No more Oscar-grams, no more clues. The plane clicked across the northern latitude of 61 degrees at a heading of 270 degrees west.

The International Date Line had been crossed. Deep seas with rogue waves rolled below the aluminum tube.

Rosie and Gale were still dead asleep and the stewardess had retired to her darkened booth. Dana sat on the floor next to the unfolded bed. She had been awake for twenty-four hours. At her left were two items:

• One periwinkle crocheted bikini, Gale’s
  
• One Herve Leger ultrashort sequined bandage dress, Rosie’s
  

At her right were six empty tubes and bottles:

• Crest Cavity Protection
  
• Johnson’s Baby Powder Pure Cornstarch
  
• Jessalyn Cranach Non-Abrasive Facial Cleanser
  
• Molokai Shampoo for Blondes
  
• Charlotte Honeydew Long Hair Conditioner
  
• Victoria’s Secret Secret Charm Hydrating Body Lotion
  

The contents were gone. Squeezed, pumped, poured, dumped, flushed. Down the toilet, down the drain. The clear liquids she considered safe, so they were spared and repacked. It wouldn’t be realistic if she didn’t have some cosmetics. Still set to go were the tampons one by one, which would be followed by the cardboard box itself in shreds, then the empty bottles and tubes, sliced to strips with scissors and fed down the hole, and the scissors wiped with rubbing alcohol to remove her fingerprints. She could do it all before Narita, which was just over an hour away. She sighed. The computer couldn’t go, but then she didn’t see how it possibly needed to. She stuck it back in her suitcase. Every last item had been shaken, fingered, held up to the light, folded, poked with swizzle sticks, wiped down, and squeezed. Everything. Twice. The empties would probably keep her busy for another half hour, and then she could dab herself all over with a hot sponge and change into some different pajamas and soak in a blissful sea of sleep all the way to Bangkok.

In her pocket were four small dark-brown glass bottles swabbed clean with rubbing alcohol, each bearing an unbroken manufacturer’s seal and containing twenty-five grams of Mallinkcrodt Cocaine Hydrochloride Powder USP CII. Maybe the anonymous tip from Elsinore Canyon to Thai customs that a passenger on N12UT was smuggling in medical-grade cocaine had already been placed. There were no e-mails about that, but of course a phone call would do just as well, maybe better. Four bottles. That made it easy to re-gift to Rosie and Gale. All Dana had to do was make sure to pull her sleeves down over her fingers when she tied two of the tiny bottles into the bikini and rolled the other two into the sequined dress and then tucked them back into Rosie and Gale’s bags. She would do that now, first, before she shredded and flushed her boxes and bottles. And then she would place a call to Thai customs herself to clarify everything.

A cold, bitter wave rolled through her. To think, just hours earlier she had been battling her conscience over an accidental shooting—of an evil spy yet, who had virtually placed himself in the path of her bullets—and look at what had been planned all along for her. The things Polly had about her on his laptop! And as for the death-doctor, where had Dana been in
her
prayer? No mention of the grieving stepdaughter who showed her wounds every minute. As for the two accomplices, Dana would give them a chance. They might chicken out at the last second. They might arch a meaningful eyebrow to signal her of danger, or give up the scheme with a casual “Fuck this.” Or the whole thing might go bust in a shit-happens kind of way, the customs agents changing shifts or forgetting or screwing up—or the plane might actually land in the Maldives. Whatever happened, Dana would play as long as Rosie and Gale did. If they played to the end? She had some idea about quantities and qualities—she’d done a little research in the past few hours. In Singapore, for instance, fifty grams each would officially get them hanged. Maybe they would get pricked—lethal injection in Thailand since 2001. They had answered that e-mail and they knew she wouldn’t be getting out of the airport, and she couldn’t have two murder accomplices shadowing her in some unhelpful foreign land. She could always get back to the Bangkok prison later and explain or bribe or whatever you did to get your rich American girlfriends out, but for now Rosie and Gale would have to pay for the mistake of mixing themselves up with people whose blood ran hot, not cold like theirs.

As of Tuesday, Mr. Hamlet was not a criminal suspect, Oscar having backed his story up to a tee, and it was 99 percent certain that he would not be charged. Polly was in a coma at St. John’s, where Laurie was maintaining a vigil. Phil had been sent back to the cottage by everyone who had anything to say about it.

I kept my voice even and edged my chair so I could get Phil’s attention without jarring him. “Isn’t it out of tune?” I said. It was the third time. I waited. “Phil?”