“Do you have the names of these places?”
“I do.”
I give them to him over the phone. Thorpe tells me he’ll have some of his agents from the San Diego field office check it out to see if anyone who works there might have seen or heard something.
“Assuming it was him, do you think he could have made you?” says Thorpe.
“What do you mean?”
“If it was Liquida, do you think he might have seen you or your investigator and kept his distance until later?” asks Thorpe.
“The thought never entered my mind. You seemed to think it wasn’t him.”
“Have you told the police any of this?” he says.
“What’s to tell? We didn’t see anything.”
“Of course.” There’s a long pause at the other end. “I don’t know what to tell you. As soon as I got your first message, I had one of our agents contact San Diego homicide. He didn’t find out much.”
“Then am I safe to assume that the killer didn’t leave a calling card this time?”
“Not that they found. At least not yet. We checked. We told them to pay particular attention to prints. Of course, they’d already dusted the place. They’ll go back and take a second look. We told them anything they couldn’t identify to run it through our computers. We’ll authorize it to be expedited. We told them so.”
“Did they ask you what your interest was?” I say.
“They did. We told them we couldn’t discuss it unless there was evidence linking it to a couple of cases we have open. For the time being, unless they find something else, I’m afraid that’s all I can do. Unless we can make some connection, we’d be hard pressed to say it’s him.”
“What about the MO, the knife and the wounds?”
“How did you know about that?” he asks.
“Local sources,” I tell him.
“I see.” Thorpe is wondering if I’ve talked to the cops and if so whether I’ve lied to him. “There’s nothing there to connect it either to Afundi or to the kid in the apartment in D.C.,” he says. “Liquida, if he exists at all, may use a knife, but we have no record of it.”
Now, suddenly, it seems Liquida doesn’t exist at all, but is a figment of my imagination.
“I didn’t dream this guy up,” I tell him. “You’re the one who warned us about him. Remember?”
“Well, but we just don’t know,” said Thorpe.
“You have two matching thumbprints at two separate crime scenes, one of them on the back of one of my business cards. What is it exactly that you don’t know?”
“Who those prints belong to for starters,” says Thorpe.
“You can be sure of one thing. It’s not a coincidence,” I tell him.
“Of course not,” he says.
“And according to my investigator-he talked to the paramedics-Jenny’s death looked like a professional hit. This wasn’t a girl who ran with drug dealers or gangbangers any more than Jimmie Snyder did,” I tell him. “You can trust me on that one.”
“I don’t doubt you,” says Thorpe. “But without more we can’t connect your daughter’s friend to the other two cases or to the prints.”
“Do you know if the local police have any other suspects? Anybody of interest?” I ask him.
“According to our agent, at this time the answer’s no. The detective in charge told him it was too early to know.”
“So what do I do?” I ask.
I can hear him take a deep breath on the other end. “I really don’t know what to tell you,” he says.
TWENTY-ONE
The old tarmac seemed to have more cracks than solid surface. With weeds sprouting up through the fissures, it looked like the prairie. Some of the taller grass came up to his hips. From a distance, as he drove in off the highway, Thorn could swear that he was looking at a farmer’s fallow field instead of what it was: one of a score of abandoned army airfields left over from World War II. These dotted the island of Puerto Rico like the measles, as they were used to guard the entrance to the Panama Canal. Anyone with a map who wanted to take the time could find them.
Thorn spent the better part of two days surveying four of the old airfields. Two of them had landing strips that looked good on paper but were too short for the plane and its final cargo when he measured them. Some farmer had cut a trench across one of them before he realized that the old oil-soaked tar macadam and the three-foot gravel bed underneath it weren’t exactly the best soil for growing crops.
The third field was long enough, with a good surface. It was well maintained. But there were too many prying eyes. The airstrip was a hangout for the local general aviation crowd. There was a small fleet, maybe a dozen single and twin-engine props. If he landed the big bird there, the amateur pilots would be crawling over it in minutes, asking him what he was doing and if they could watch.
This one, the prairie field, seemed to have everything Thorn needed. The oil surface looked as if it hadn’t been sealed since the fifties. But the runway was long enough, and it would only have to take the heavy load twice, once coming in and once going out.
Thorn paced it off, taking nearly two hours to make sure there were no surprises. There were no buildings, just some footings and a large concrete slab, probably what was left of an old hangar. After a thorough inspection, Thorn decided that, all in all, it was in good shape.
Best of all was the location. It was isolated. The runway lay in a narrow valley between low-lying hills along a rugged stretch of coast about a mile in from the ocean.
If there was a place on the island where a large plane on a single approach might not attract much attention, this was it.
Thorn turned and looked out toward the sea. He planned it all out in his mind. If he dropped down, say, a hundred miles out, and skimmed the waves coming in, he could slip in under the radar from the airport in Mercedita ten miles to the south. The airport presented problems, but it also gave him cover. Anyone seeing the plane come in over the water would assume that he was either on an approach to the airport or was circling around for another shot.
His biggest concern was the AWAC flights manned by the U.S. military. These were large four-engine jets or prop jobs with radar domes on top. They flew regular missions over the Caribbean, mostly for drug interdiction. They were a problem for Thorn because he couldn’t get under their radar. If they picked him up coming in, they would notify drug enforcement. Within minutes Thorn could expect a flyover from an unmanned drone or a helicopter doing followup surveillance. An hour later he’d be up to his hips in DEA agents with their dogs sniffing his crotch.
He turned and looked back at the runway. Somebody would have to knock down the weeds. Otherwise the friction from the wheels or the blast from the engines would start a fire. A man with a harvester could do it in a day, crop it all down close enough that it wouldn’t matter. Thorn could rent a small combine harvester on the island, and one of his men could operate it.
He surveyed the trees at the far end of the field, mostly scrub brush with a small grove of tall palms casting long shadows in the late-afternoon sun. Some steel cable, a couple of come-alongs, and enough camouflage netting and they could fashion their own hangar. Taxi the plane under the trees, drop the netting, and no one would see it.
With the right equipment, supplies, and a little labor, they could kick the plane into shape in two weeks. Thorn would do a title search, find out who owned the land, and lease it from them for six months.
He made a mental list of what they would need. At the top of the list was a wheeled electric starter motor for the engines, unless he could find his dream plane, an airliner that didn’t require one. Most large commercial jets, once the engines were shut down, could not be restarted again without an external power source.
A good-size front-end loader rigged with a tow bar could push the plane around to maneuver it, that is, if they
