Final Payment

Chapter Nine

“Can you give us about ten minutes?” Estelle asked the State Police lieutenant, and Mark Adams grinned.

“You can have all night as far as I’m concerned. We’re not going anywhere.” He bent down and looked through the windshield of the patrol car at his backseat passenger. Sebastian sat on the wreckage of the backseat, tail thumping his blanket expectantly. Estelle was eager to learn what the dog’s awesome nose would discover, but once that process started, other evidence could be destroyed forever.

She turned to Jerry Turner. “Show me the grass,” she said, and followed him back into the hangar.

“Bobby called me sayin’ that someone might have been in the hangar, so we came down. Now, in a preflight check, we always look at the tires pretty carefully. And it’s obvious when you do that. See right there?” He aimed his flashlight, and Estelle knelt beside the right main wheel skirt. “I saw that tuft of grass stuck where it shouldn’t be stuck. I saw that, then I saw some other marks on the skirts…like I don’t know what. Then I looked at the prop tips.” He lowered his voice as if the information might be confidential, and squatted down beside Estelle. The wheel skirt’s fiberglass was cracked in various places, including around one of the bracket bolts. Several bits of grass had been caught there.

“Show me the prop,” Estelle said, and pushed herself upright. Turner warmed up to his role as tour guide.

“Rev it up, and the tips of that prop are traveling just short of supersonic, you know. They suck in just about everything.” His eyebrows raised as he extended one hand to within an inch of the rounded propeller tip without actually touching the metal. He traced the smooth edge. “Real vulnerable part of the airplane. What I’m looking for is nicks, of course. Nicks from stones and crap off the macadam. You get a big enough nick, and it causes vibration, and that can ruin your whole day, lemme tell ya. Anyway, there’s residue on the prop tips that shouldn’t be there. She’s been in the grass. Dust and grass. I’d bet the farm on it.”

“That’s not just from gathering dust sitting here?” Estelle asked.

“Hell no, it ain’t that. Lookit.” He held the light so that the beam shot down the prop blade. “Look at the tip, now, right there on the black paint. I clean that prop every time I fly, and I clean it when I put the bird away. There’s dirt and crap all over it.”

Estelle saw the reddish film, maybe enough to prove Turner’s point, maybe just his overactive imagination.

“You don’t operate out of any locations that might-” she asked, but Turner interrupted her with an emphatic shake of the head.

“Never. Never. I don’t land on dirt roads, I don’t taxi anywhere but on the macadam or concrete. The last time I went up in this airplane, I flew over to Cruces International with Jimbo to pick up the new rotating beacon for the airport here, and the International sure as hell don’t have grass growing up through the cracks of the runway.”

“That’s a fact,” Bergin said, his head jerking up as if he’d been dozing.

Estelle regarded the taciturn Bergin for a moment. “What do you think?” Estelle asked him, understanding his need for prompting.

Bergin shrugged. “The airplane has been operated off the dirt,” he said. “Dirt, grass, whatever. No doubt in my mind. You don’t get grass in your wheel skirts by sitting on concrete floors in a locked steel hangar.”

“You were saying something about the gasoline,” Estelle said. “Explain that to me.”

Bergin stood on his tiptoes, pointing at the wing. “Filler caps are on top of each wing.”

“You want the ladder?” Turner asked. “I got me that old aluminum one over in the corner.”

“I don’t think so,” Estelle said.

“This is what I was thinkin’ outside,” Bergin said. “If whoever used this airplane was dumpin’ automotive gas in the tanks, say from jerry cans, then he could park it here and fill it.”

“They better not be putting auto gas in my airplane,” Turner said. “You want to drain some?”

“That’s what I was gettin’ at,” Bergin said.

“Can I?” Turner said to Estelle. “I got to open the left door to do that. Sampler’s in the pouch behind the pilot’s seat.”

“The plane is locked?”

“Nah,” Turner said. “I don’t lock it. The hangar’s locked.” He opened the door gingerly and retrieved the plastic fuel sampler. Thrusting the pin into one of the vents under the left wing, he squirted a jet of fuel into the sampler. “There you go,” he said, and handed it to Bergin.

The airport manager sniffed it carefully and looked dubious. “I don’t know.” He held it up, holding a flashlight off to one side. “Auto gas is red, avgas is blue. Maybe this is a mix. Who the hell can tell in this light?”

“But it could be,” Estelle prompted.

“It could be.” He walked to the engine cowling and stooped down, drawing another sample. “If she was running on avgas when she was parked, and then the wing tanks were filled with auto gas, we might be able to tell-maybe.” He shot a skeptical glance at Estelle. “If our lab was good enough.” He eyed the engine fuel sample, then flipped it out on the concrete floor.

“These are ladder marks?” Estelle asked, playing her flashlight on the floor where scuff marks were obvious.

“Most likely,” Turner said. “But I clean off the top of that wing, and I check the filler caps every time I fly. Them could all be mine.”

“Huh.” She stood back and regarded the airplane. “Eleven hours, you say?”

“Damn close.”

“Is maintenance on the aircraft done here, Mr. Turner?”

“You bet. Jimbo here does it all for me.”

“Then chances are good that I’ll want to see your logs, and the maintenance records. We want to nail down exactly when you last flew, when Jim last worked on the aircraft…simple things like that to give us a window of opportunity.”

“Okay. We can do that. All that’s in the airplane. And after all this, I’m going to have Jimbo go over this old crate with a finetoothed comb after you’re through with her. Make sure someone hasn’t monkeyed with anything. Hell of a note.”

“The hangar door is always locked?” Estelle asked.

“Yep. I go in the side door there, which is dead-bolted. We can only access the main door from inside. It’s got that big slide bolt.”

“Go ahead and open that.”

She watched as Turner pushed the massive door to one side. It rolled easily on well-greased wheels. She beckoned to Bob Torrez, who broke off his conversation with the State Police lieutenant.

“Bobby, I don’t think we’re going to find much on the floor, but it’s worth a try. We could use those portable lights.” She held up both hands, framing the airplane. “If we set them up off to the left there, we can get a good angle. If there are any interesting shoe prints on the floor, they might show up better.”

“God, I hate to put you to all this trouble,” Turner said. “It’s not like we found a corpse or anything inside the plane, after all.”

“No trouble, sir.” She smiled at him. “And you never know what we’ll find. I’m going on the assumption that you’re correct about someone using your plane. There’s no reason why you would be wrong about something like that. If someone used it, that means they had a way to gain access without breaking down the door. They took it, flew somewhere, landed, and then returned, and tucked the plane back in its hangar here, with no one the wiser.”

“Remember those three teenagers who stole a plane down in Houston, was it?” Turner said. “Someplace like that, several years ago. One of them was a student pilot, and he took his friends up for a nighttime joyride around the city.”

“They were all drunker’n skunks,” Bergin added. “Tower had to talk ’em down. That sure as hell isn’t what’s going on here, though.”

“And that was in a little puddle jumper,” Turner said. “A trainer. Someone with just a few hours could fly one well enough to get her off the ground and back again, with a little luck. But it’s a different story with this one.” He nodded at his aircraft.

“This is a…” Estelle prompted.

“Turbo 206,” he said proudly. “There’s a lot of horses under that cowl, and she’s a complex, heavy airplane. It’s not something a kid is going to take on a joyride.”

“And worth some money, I imagine.”

“Sure. This is probably the most popular model to steal, especially along the border here,” Turner said. “Good freight hauler.” He paused with evident pride. “We got us right at eighty grand parked here.”

“And you don’t keep it locked?”

“Nope. Somebody gets in this hangar, I don’t want ’em ruining the aircraft door to get in. You know how much that would cost to fix?”

“There is that,” Estelle said. She pushed the door open and looked inside. The ignition key was in place, a small evergreen air freshener and a second key hanging from the ring.

“Do you normally leave your key in the airplane, sir?”

“You know, I do….” Turner hesitated. “Stupid, huh?”

“Yep,” Sheriff Torrez said, and his one-word utterance jerked Turner around as if he had forgotten that Bob Torrez was standing nearby.

“But see, I look at it this way,” he said. “The hangar’s locked. Always locked. I make sure of that. It’s a steel building with a dead bolt on the access door, there, and steel lock bolts on the main door. I figure that if someone is going to go to the trouble of breaking in to steal my airplane, then what the hell. They’re going to take her whether there’s a key in the ignition or not. Airplane’s just about the easiest thing next to a power lawn mower to hot-wire.”

“Uh huh,” Estelle said, keeping her tone neutral.

“And what the hell. Jim, your Citabria?” he called to Bergin, who stood just outside the open hangar door. “That doesn’t even have an ignition key, does it? Just a couple of switches.”

“True.” Bergin sounded noncommittal.

“What’s the second key on the ring for, sir?”

“Well, now I’m going to sound even stupider,” Turner said. “That’s an extra door key.”

“You mean for the hangar?”

“Yes. Well, hell. That way I know where it is.”

“I see,” Estelle said, managing to keep the amusement out of her voice. People routinely did dumb things, but that never seemed to lessen the umbrage when their habits caught up with them.

“Well, now…” Turner started to say, then bit it off.

Estelle added the dangling keys to the list of photographs that she wanted Linda Real to inventory.

“What’s all that tell you?” Turner asked. “Are you able to do anything with that grass sample?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Estelle said. “Grass is sort of a ubiquitous thing, you know. And the red dust on the propeller? I wish we had a magic computer where we could feed a sample into a program and it would instantly locate where in the world it came from-but that’s still Hollywood sci-fi.”

“The grass caught in the wheel skirt could tell you something, couldn’t it?” Turner persisted.

“I suppose it could, if it turned out that it was a rare, endangered species that grows only on a small peninsula in the Yucatán.”

“What you’re saying is that we may never figure this out,” Turner said.

“Been known to happen,” Torrez said. “Just for fun,” he continued to Estelle, “let’s go over the inside with black light when you’re all done lookin’ for hairs and fibers and all that shit.”

“What’s that do?” Turner asked.

“Shows some interesting things,” Torrez said, and let it go at that.

“Body fluids show up,” Estelle added for Turner’s benefit.

The possibilities of that weren’t lost on the aircraft owner. “Well, yuck,” he said with a grimace. He’d grimace even more if he knew about the family of corpses currently reposing in the basement morgue at Posadas General, she thought.

“Let me ask you something, sir,” Estelle said. “How long could this airplane have been missing without you noticing?” When he didn’t answer immediately, she added, “From the last time you closed and locked the door to right now.”

“Well, like I said-I guess when Jim and I flew down to Cruces. That was last month sometime.”

“Early in the month,” Bergin said. “Today’s the ninth of May. That’s a month.”

“I guess so,” Turner said. “About a month.”

“Ay,” Estelle whispered to herself. “That’s quite a window of opportunity. All these nice flat surfaces can gather a lot of dust in a month.”

“Could. But what’s on that prop isn’t something that sifted down from the ceiling in here,” Turner said doggedly.

“Eleven hours of flight time in a month.” She leaned inside again, examining the instrument panel. “Which one of these is the Hobbs?”

Turner reached across the seat and tapped a small, black-ringed clock. “Right there. Hobbs meter gives true time, and the tach records engine hours.”

“They’re not the same thing, then?”

“Ah, no,” Turner said indulgently. “They’re not the same.”

“You have a record of what the Hobbs read when you flew last time?”

“Sure. The logs are in the pocket behind the seat. Lemme come around.”

Estelle pulled back and let Turner rummage. He flipped open a black book and leafed through the pages. “When we came back from Cruces, and that was on April fourteenth, the Hobbs read 2134.6 hours. And now, it reads…” He paused as he squinted at the dial. “It looks like 2145.9. That’s-” and he looked upward as he did the math in his head “-a little more than eleven hours.”

“How far could you fly in that time?” Torrez asked. “Or half that time. You gotta come back.”

“To keep it simple,” Bergin explained, “a hundred and forty miles an hour gets you seven hundred miles in five hours. But that’s not counting fuel stops or anything like that.”

“Seven hundred.”

“That’s right. Hell of a ways from here to Los Angeles, or Dallas, or Denver. Or a hell of a ways into Mexico.”

“And back,” Estelle added.

“You have any ideas?” Turner said, looking first at Estelle and then at Torrez.

“A couple or three,” Torrez said. “It wasn’t just pleasure flyin’.”

“We could be looking at five trips of two hours each, more or less. Or three trips, or whatever,” Bergin said.

“Yep.” Torrez nodded. “Interesting that they went to the trouble of bringin’ the airplane back when they were done.”

“Pretty darn thoughtful,” Bergin said.

“Oh, yeah,” Torrez grunted. He turned to Estelle. “You ready to have Linda go over it? Then we can let the dog out.”

Turner looked even more uncomfortable. “You think somebody used my plane to run drugs, or what?”

“We’ll find out,” Torrez said.