question without even thinking.
“Both of the pilots were women,” Mel said pointedly.
“I have no idea,” Mel said. “We may have been introduced. If we were, I don’t remember. A pilot is a pilot. There were two of them. They were both wearing uniforms.”
There were official ways to get the information I needed-grindingly slow bureaucratic ways. The situation required speed. Later on I could go back and cross the official
I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d only just that moment seen it. “Not yet,” I said, “but remember the other day, when I asked you about that flight into Cancun?”
“Sure,” Ralph said. “What about it?”
“Can you get back to whoever gave you that information and ask for a little more?”
“That depends,” Ralph replied. “What kind of information?”
“I need the tail number on the plane,” I said. “I also need to know the names of the pilots-names and addresses, too, if you can get them.”
“That might be a little more difficult,” he allowed, “but I’ll see what I can do and get right back to you.”
I closed my phone. “I don’t remember asking Ralph about the flight to Cancun,” Mel said absently.
It was, as I mentioned earlier, the Ides of March. “It was when we were talking to him about everything else,” I said. “It must have slipped your mind.”
Before anything more was said, Ross called me back. Now the conversation with him, one I had dreaded, came as a welcome diversion. I spent the next ten minutes telling him what I could about what was going on in the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab under Destry Hennessey’s dubious leadership.
When I finished, he let out a long sigh. “Damn,” he said. “But you and Mel are right. Doing anything to try to secure those rape kits right now is going to set off alarms for whoever’s involved. We’re just going to have to leave them for the time being. And maybe when some of the dust settles, we’ll be able to talk Mrs. Kim into coming back and helping us sort it all out.”
“If it gets rid of whoever’s been responsible for moving her stapler, I’m sure she’ll be happy to.”
“Her stapler?” Ross asked.
But call-waiting was calling. “Sorry, Ross,” I said. “Gotta go.”
Ralph Ames was on the other line. “Here are the names of the pilots,” he said. “Diane Massingale and Trudy Rayburn. The plane’s a Hawker 800XP. Tail number is N861AB-that’s November eight six one Alpha Bravo.”
“Excellent, Ralph,” I told him. “What about addresses on the pilots?”
“Didn’t get those,” he said. “The FBO in Cancun might have some information on that.”
“FBO?” I repeated. “What’s that?” It sounded as though we had landed back in Analise Kim’s world of LIFO/FIFO.
“FBO stands for Fixed Base Operator,” Ralph explained. “They handle ground operations for general aviation- fuel, catering, landing facilities, ground transportation, car rentals, all those kinds of things. The FBO in Cancun is called ASUR. Again, that’s A-S-U-R. Got it? If the pilots purchased fuel there, they probably have a record of the credit card transaction. They would also know if there was a rental car involved and maybe even what hotel was used.”
“So FBOs are all over?”
“Sure,” Ralph said. “There are only about three hundred airports in this country that handle commercial jet traffic, but there must be at least five thousand that serve the private, corporate, and charter-jet end of the business. Every one of them has at least one FBO. Some of them have several.”
“And they keep a record of planes that land and take off under their auspices?”
“Especially if landing fees or fuel purchases were involved,” Ralph said. “Why? What does any of this have to do with the price of peanuts?”
“I’ll tell you later, Ralph. Right now I’ve got to go.”
I closed the phone and turned to Todd Hatcher. “Do you happen to have your spreadsheet handy?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Why?”
“You know what an FBO is?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” he returned.
So I explained it as well as I could, bearing in mind that I had only heard the term for the first time a few minutes earlier. “I want you to go to each of the crime scenes we know about, the ones you’ve been putting in. Then I want you to locate all the FBOs in the area and find out if a plane with the tail number November eight six one Alpha Bravo was anywhere in that vicinity at the time of any of our mysterious deaths. Ditto the case in Salt Lake City,” I added.
“The one I read about in the Destry Hennessey stuff?” Todd asked. “The Escobar murder?”
“That’s the one.”
“What do I say if they ask me who I am or what right I have to ask for any information?”
“Tell them you’re a cop,” I told him. “You work for the Special Homicide Investigation Team, an arm of the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. And if they give you any trouble, tell them to call Ross’s office and check. Tell them to call collect.”
While I had been talking to Todd, Mel had located a phone book. “Here,” she said. “T. Rayburn. She lives in Kent.”
“Don’t pilots all have licenses?” I asked.
“I’m sure,” she said. “They’re handled by the Federal Aviation Administration. Want me to see what kind of information we can come up with? If nothing else, it would be helpful to know which is which.”
Suddenly my Belltown Terrace apartment was a beehive of activity as our mini “task force” swung into action. With Todd using the landline to track FBOs, Mel got on her cell phone to start working her way through the powers that be at the FAA. Meanwhile, I poked away at my cell phone to dial my own favorite weapons analyst, a self- described “gun guy” down at the crime lab, one Larry Crumb.
Larry and I go back a long way. We used to be pals-drinking buddies. And for a while, back when we were both still married, we were on each other’s Christmas card list. Every year, Larry’s card was a photo featuring Larry posing with some outrageous weapon or other.
“Hey, bro,” Larry said, when I identified myself. “How’s it hanging?”
Typical drinking-buddy BS. And typical drinking-buddy conversation-never say anything real.
“I’m working on a case,” I told him.
“This is not news,” he replied.
“The problem is, it crosses a few international lines,” I explained. “Like between the U.S. and Mexico. I have the ballistics workup that was sent from the crime scene, and I’m trying to figure out a way to run it through NIBIN.”
“No can do,” Larry returned. “NIBIN would be the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network. Nobody’s calling it the International Whatever, if you get my meaning.”
“I understand that,” I said. “And I don’t want to rattle cages, but I think the case from Mexico leads directly back to at least one case and maybe several more here in the States. If you could just walk this past-”
“Look, Beau,” he said. “You don’t hang around the crime lab much these days, but I can tell you, it’s hell. When Destry Hennessey comes riding through here on her broom, we all run for cover. If she finds out I’m doing an unauthorized analysis on her equipment and on her watch, she’ll have my balls-and my job.”
In other words, Analise Kim wasn’t the only pissed-off employee at the Washington State Crime Lab. There were other avenues I could have used, but those would have taken more time. And lots more documentation. The material I had in hand through Ralph’s unofficial efforts would have to be reobtained, this time going through channels and across desks, something that would take time-a commodity we didn’t have. So I punted.
“As it happens,” I said, “Destry Hennessey could be part of the problem.”
“Whoa!” Larry Crumb exclaimed. “Bring down what you have, then. Let’s see what I can do.”
