“Thanks, Ed.”
* * *
I pull up in front of Miriam’s house a few minutes before two. Lenny wakes up and the first thing he wants to know is how long until his birthday party.
“Three weeks,” I say. “Be sure to tell your mom which animals we invited. She’ll have to get a big cake.”
Just then, the front door opens and Miriam smiles.
“You ready to go in?” I ask.
“Yes, Daddy.”
I get Lenny out of the car seat, and he runs into the house on his own. I carry the seat back to the porch, where Miriam is standing in the doorway.
“Your interview went well, huh?”
She shrugs, like it doesn’t matter either way.
“What, you don’t care?” I ask.
“I could see myself working there,” she says. “And I could see myself not. If it’s supposed to work out, it will.” She pauses a second and says, “Hey, Freddy?”
I put the booster seat down. “Huh?”
“You seeing anyone?” She has a big, warm smile on her face, which I don’t trust at all.
“What do you care?”
“I’m just asking. I think it would be nice if you had someone.” The way she has her arm up against the doorframe—it’s a seductive pose, and I wonder if it’s on purpose.
“Yeah, well, I work a lot—”
“You work too much.”
“—and wives, you know, they don’t do well with husbands who are out all hours of the night.”
“It doesn’t have to be a wife,” she says. “Who do you talk to?”
She’s probing again. “I talk to Bethany—”
“She’s young.” Miriam says.
And that sweet smile. I can’t stand that smile, because at her core, she really is a decent person. “I know she’s young,” I say. “I talk to Leon.”
“Leon doesn’t count. He’s like a computer.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say.”
“What about Ed? Do you still talk to Ed?”
I tell her I talk to Ed all the time.
“No, I mean, like really talk to him?” She finally takes her arm down off the door frame.
“What, like a dinner date?”
“Well… yeah. You know, Ed had it hard growing up. All those stories about his family, and the treatment they got from the whites down there. It made them close. They had to rely on each other. Do you ever talk with him about that?”
“We don’t talk about race,” I say. “Unless it comes up in a case.”
“Ugh! I’m not talking about race. Why are you so thick?”
“Then what are you talking about?”
“Freddy…” She has this pained look on her face that I can’t stand, because it makes me want to comfort her. “I hope you find someone.”
“I find people all the time. That’s what investigators do.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
“Then why don’t you tell me what you mean?”
“Find someone to talk to.” She’s trying to contain her frustration. I know that look well.
“Like a counselor?” I ask. “Or a girlfriend?”
“Either one.”
“What am I? Your pity case?”
“It’s not pity, Freddy. You know I care about you.”
“Yeah, well if you cared so much, you could have had my kid.”
“Get out!” she screams as she shoves me back from the door. “Get the fuck out of my house right now!”
She slams the door in my face.
This is the kind of crap I used to deal with every day.
7
Back at the office, Leon and Bethany are staring into their monitors like they haven’t moved since last night. Bethany looks up and says hello. She always makes eye contact when someone walks in. Leon’s resting his chin in his hand, reading a news story about militias in Idaho.
“Digging into Owen Briscoe?” I ask.
“Guy’s crazy,” Leon says without looking up.
Bethany tells me that the other names that had been flagged on the Hawaii list are looking less and less promising. The Muslim man from Dearborn, Michigan, was as moderate as a Midwest Sunday school teacher. And the combat engineer from Kansas turned out to be a solid levelheaded soldier with a positive attitude and no grudges against anyone.
Obasanjo, however, is now an official suspect. The news channels finally got some new photos of him and now he’s all over the Internet. The kid is twenty-two years old. His face has a gentle look. In his fourth-grade photo, his front teeth are too big and his skin reflects the shine of the camera lights. His smile is just like Lenny’s. It pushes his cheeks out and makes them look too big. The photo from his airline ID has the unfortunate look of a mug shot. Head tilted slightly back, eyes a little narrow. And he’s got a three-inch Afro that might remind some people of the radicals of the 1960s and 70s.
CNN says he’s from a solid working-class family in Oakland, with a mother and father who are both steadily employed. His former high school classmates describe him as having a strong sense of justice. His battery trial arose from an incident in which he claimed to be defending two Muslim girls who were being harassed by a couple of white teenagers. The jury agreed and acquitted him.
I switch over to Fox News, where they’re playing up the Islam angle. Obasanjo’s dad, a Nigerian Muslim, is a naturalized citizen who’s worked the same job managing a car rental office for the past twenty-two years, but they keep calling him an immigrant and suggesting he arrived with questionable papers. Obasanjo’s mom, an Oakland native, is a cook in a neighborhood restaurant. CNN described her as a deeply religious “socially progressive Muslim,” whatever that means. Fox has her pegged as “a child of the radical Nation of Islam.”
And when Fox talks about the battery incident, they emphasize the fact that Obasanjo was arrested and tried for a violent crime. Not that he was acquitted. They keep his ID photo up on screen, the one that looks like a mug shot, while their experts talk about how small failures in the criminal justice system embolden criminals to commit heinous acts.
According to Ed, the FBI has been putting Obasanjo through round-the-clock interrogation. The kid won’t crack. Ed told me on our call a while ago that Obasanjo was so scared during the initial questioning he lost control of his bowels. They had to find him a new pair of pants. I guess those were the ill-fitting ones he was wearing during the perp walk.
Meanwhile, the airline is getting desperate. They’re flooding us with videos of passengers in the airport before the flight.
“I’ve gone through four hours of footage today,” Bethany says. “And the airline has teams in Denver and Chicago poring over the same images.”
“You find anything interesting?” I ask.
“A couple of clips,” she says. “You want to see?”
“Let’s take a look.”
I pull up a chair at Bethany’s desk, and she says, “OK, I’m going to just skim through this one, because it’s twenty minutes of the same thing.”
She shows me a video of a white guy in a hoodie pacing back and forth in front of the terminal windows at gate seventy-six.
“That’s Owen Briscoe,” she says. “The schizo, and he’s on meds. See how he shuffles his feet?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen this clip. That might be suspicious activity outside of an airport,” I say, “but that’s not how a terrorist behaves. Those guys are trained not to draw attention to themselves. They’re not going to show up early to the gate and pace around, looking unsettled. Plus, if the guy is schizo and he’s on meds, he’s going to have a hard time planning an attack like this.”
“Right,” says Bethany. “They also sent video of these two guys in the executive lounge before the flight.”
She queues that one up and runs it.
Two men are sitting at a table in the VIP lounge with drinks in front of them. They’re both around
forty, wearing slacks and button-down shirts. One has a big beer belly and looks like he might be drunk. The other one is agitated and fidgety. He talks a lot and keeps wiping sweat from his brow.
“Who are they?” I ask.
“Sheldon Brown and Franklin Dorsett,” Bethany says. “A couple of rich guys from Texas with huge frequent-flier balances. Brown owns a string of car dealerships. Dorsett’s company leases drilling equipment to oil companies. They’re flying first class.”
“Why are we looking at them?” I ask. “Why would they blow up a plane?”
Bethany shrugs. “You asked if there was anything interesting in the video they sent. So far, this is as interesting as it gets.”
“Don’t waste your time on those clowns.”
“I have eight more hours of this stuff to look through,” she says. From her tone, I can tell she’s not thrilled about that.
“Go back to the passenger list if you need a break from the videos.”
As soon as I get to my desk, Ed calls with some inside information.
“You know baggage handlers go through security when they come in to work.”
“Makes sense,” I say.
“Well our guy Obasanjo went through a checkpoint manned by two TSA agents. One of them wasn’t feeling well, had the runs, and stepped away to the restroom. Obasanjo went through before TSA got a second guy in to help. This was early in the morning, when the airport was dead. The sole agent at the checkpoint when Obasanjo went through was a guy named Timothy Welcher, and he’s AWOL.”
“What do you mean?”
“The last person to see him was his girlfriend, a few hours after the plane went down. She said he was a wreck.”
“I could imagine. You have a job protecting people, and then something like that happens. It has to get to you.”
“His girlfriend said he stepped out of the apartment to talk to someone, and he never came back.”
“She know who he was talking to?”
“She didn’t recognize the voice,” Ed says. “But she said by the way they were talking, they knew each other.”
“So you gonna have the A team look for Welcher?”
“Everyone’s looking for him. TSA wants to find him before the FBI does. They don’t want a rival agency debriefing their guy first. Oh, and that Vietnamese guy you mentioned. He doesn’t work at SFO.”
“Yeah he does. I saw him.”
“I know you saw him,” Ed says. “Surveillance cameras all over the airport picked him up. But he doesn’t work here. He came through security with a backpack and a ticket to LA. Then he went into a bathroom and came out without the backpack, dressed as an airport employee. He went around emptying garbage cans for about twenty minutes, staying near gate seventy-six. Watched the passengers get on then made a call as he left the terminal.”
“Any idea who he is?”
“The Bureau ran facial recognition on the videos and matched him to a social media profile. The guy has no record, but some of his friends do. They say he ran low-level errands for quick cash. You know—follow someone, deliver something. He was reliable and kept a low profile. Seems he’s been sliding beneath law enforcement’s radar for months now. Oh, and he’s Cambodian, not Vietnamese.”
“They know where he is?”
“Not yet,” Ed says. “But they found the number of that phone he was carrying. They pulled his call records from Verizon. According to the security footage, he made the call just before four p.m.”
“Who’d he call?”
“Someone waiting in one of the satellite lots.”
“Who was it?”
“We don’t know,” Ed says. “It was a burner phone, bought used with a SIM card from God knows where. But your garbage man is now a person of interest. Keep that to yourself. The Bureau wants to pick him up before he knows they’re looking for him. Oh, and that other guy. The one with the blonde in the security line?”
“The tall greasy one?”
“Petty criminal. Has a record down in Texas. Possession and disorderly conduct. That blonde he was with was one of the victims. Her name was Anna Brook.”
“I know. I told you that, remember?”
“Sorry. It’s been a long day.”
“You learn anything about her?”
“She’s of no interest to the investigation.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because the Bureau already looked into her and wrote her off. We know she didn’t bring the bomb onboard. She didn’t even check a bag.”
“What’s the greasy guy’s name?” I ask.
“Ramón Ramírez.”
“Can you send me some info on him?”
“Yeah.”
We hang up, and I spend the next few hours running background checks on passengers from the Chicago list. By eight o’clock, my eyes are red and burning, and I’m starting to think I’m wasting my time. Ed and the Bureau, with all their resources, are in the thick of things in San Francisco, and they’re making progress. Me, I’m sitting in an office on the other side of the country, playing junior detective with a list of people from a different flight.
Miriam once told me that at her family’s Thanksgiving dinners, the kids had to sit at their own table, away from the grown-ups. She and her cousins were stuck at the kiddie table into their twenties, and they all resented it.
When she first told me that, I didn’t understand why she was complaining. She had a family. They ate together. There was warmth and tradition—things I wanted but didn’t have. So what’s the problem?
I get it now. The kiddie table. The B team. It’s demeaning.
I’m getting frustrated with all these names. My head aches.
Even Leon looks burnt out. But Bethany—she’s a trooper. She never complains.
“Why don’t you two go home,” I say.
“There’s one more thing in this video,” Bethany says.
“The Cambodian guy?” I say. “Emptying the garbage cans?”
“How’d you know?” she asks.
“The FBI has already ID’d him. Ed told me. Go home, will you?”
“I ain’t done,” Leon says.
“We’ll never be done,” I say. “The Feds will have a suspect and a case before we finish crossing all the names off this list. I hate to say it, but this is pointless. We’re digging around on the off chance that we find a clue that gets the airline off the hook. We’re duplicating work the Feds are already doing. In three days, or five days, or ten days, the airline will call it off and tell us to send them a bill.”
“Thanks for the pep talk,” Leon says.
“Sorry. I wasn’t trying to bring anyone down. I appreciate your work, but don’t kill yourself over this. Go get some dinner. Go home and rest.”
Leon stands reluctantly and stretches. Bethany picks up her bag and says, “I’m meeting some friends for a drink at eight thirty. Either of you want to come?”
Leon says no.
“What about you, Freddy?”
“I have work to do.”
“Come on,” she says. “That’s two hours from now. And you just told us to go home.”
“I have work to do.”
After Bethany and Leon leave, I get up from the computer and rub my eyes and think of Anna Brook, and that feeling comes back. You have a crush on a girl, and every time you think of her, you get this warm, giddy feeling. With her, it’s the opposite. It’s an unsettled feeling in a deep, dark part of me that no one ever gets to, and it fills me with dread.
I dreamed about her last night. She was swimming in a clear blue sea while I watched from the rocks above. Then suddenly, the sea darkened, and a whirlpool opened beneath her. I watched her get sucked into it, struggling against the current as she swirled down into the center.
She went round and round, her arms extended forward against the spiraling waters, her blonde hair flowing out behind her. Her body was long and lithe, and her strokes were g
raceful and determined. She didn’t ask for help, but it was clear she wasn’t going to make it.
I dove in after her, more out of compulsion than choice. I’m not a good swimmer, and I’ve always feared drowning. The coldness and the weight, the dark and the depths terrify me. But I went in headfirst and followed her straight to the heart of darkness.
And when we got deep into that swirling funnel, when the light of the world above was almost gone, and it was clear there was no point in resisting any longer, she turned her body forward and swam downward with the current.
In that moment, the dread I had felt when I first saw her grew into full-blown terror. I remember thinking she has some instinct I don’t understand, and if I get too close, she’ll pull me down with her.
She swam far out ahead of me, and I couldn’t follow. I turned and began to swim back toward the surface, but I was powerless against the current of the cold, dark water. When the terror was overwhelming, I woke up gasping for breath in sweat-soaked sheets, like a drowning man.
* * *
At nine-thirty p.m., as I’m nearing the end of the Chicago passenger list, the office door opens and Bethany walks in.
“Why are you working in the dark?” she asks.
“Because I am.”
“You want the lights on?”
“No. What are you doing here? I thought you were meeting friends for drinks.”
“I left my bank card,” she says as she walks to her desk.
“When you were buying shoes online?”
“You noticed that?” She laughs as she picks up the card.
She pauses for a few seconds, tapping the card on the desk and looking at me. Finally, she says, “Hey Freddy?”
“Huh?”
“Why are you still working?”
“You know me,” I say. “I get on the trail of something and I just keep going.”
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