by Chris Carter
‘It’s OK.’ Garcia moved forward in his seat. ‘So this passenger showed no signs of recognizing Ms. Barnard, even though she thought he looked familiar?’
Tom shook his head. ‘Not as far as I know. If he had, she would’ve jumped at the chance, I’m telling you.’
Garcia wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad sign.
‘Did this passenger look familiar to you at all?’ Garcia asked. ‘Do you think that maybe you have seen him on a previous flight or something?’
‘No, not to me. Truth be told, he was quite a hunk. If I had seen him before, I’m very sure that I would remember.’ Tom looked at Garcia curiously. ‘Do you think that this passenger could’ve had anything to do with what happened to Sharon?’
‘Probably not,’ Garcia admitted. ‘But we’re checking absolutely everything.’
Those last words seemed to comfort Tom.
‘Can you remember which flight it was?’ Garcia asked.
Tom chewed on his bottom lip. ‘Not exactly, no, but I know that it wasn’t that long ago.’
‘Past week? Two?’
‘Umm . . .’ Some more squinting. ‘I don’t think it was any longer than in the past week.’
‘And you’re sure you can’t remember which flight it was? That would really help.’
Tom rubbed his eyes as he thought back. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said after a long while. ‘I can’t remember. My mind is in such a mess.’
‘That’s not a problem,’ Garcia reassured him. He decided to try a different approach to narrow it down as much as he could. ‘How many flights did you and Ms. Barnard work together in the past week, do you know?’
‘I’m not quite sure, but let me go get my cellphone and I’ll find out.’
As Tom got to the door, he paused and looked back at Garcia.
‘Would you like a drink, Detective? Coffee, juice, water?’
‘No, I’m fine for now, thank you very much.’
Tom left the study. When he came back, he was holding a smartphone in his right hand.
‘We did five flights together last week,’ he announced even before he had returned to his seat.
Damn! Garcia thought. That was still a hell of a lot of passengers.
‘Is there anything else you can remember about the flight that could maybe narrow it down a little further?’
Tom looked pensive. ‘It was a morning flight, I remember that.’ He checked his cellphone again. ‘OK, Sharon and I worked only three morning flights last week. We did an out/in from LA to Frisco on Monday. We flew out from LAX at six a.m., landed at around seven-hirty at San Francisco International Airport, quick turnaround, left Frisco at eight-thirty a.m. and landed back at LAX at around ten. The other flight began as an overnight. We flew out to Sacramento on that same Monday night, but the flight back was on Tuesday morning.’
Tom lifted a hand and made a face at Garcia, as if he had just remembered something else.
Garcia waited.
‘OK,’ Tom said. ‘I just remembered that the passenger we are talking about was on a flight back to LA, not on an outward flight.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I’m pretty sure. I remember that, after we landed, Sharon and I had a quick sandwich and a cup of coffee at Brioche Dorée in terminal four. I remember it because she kept on looking around and over her shoulder to see if she could spot him again.’
Down to two flights.
‘Anything else you remember that might help us identify who that passenger was?’ Garcia asked. ‘Or maybe narrow it down a little bit more?’
Garcia saw Tom’s eyes widen a fraction and his eyebrows lift. He had remembered something else.
‘He was sitting toward the front of the plane,’ Tom said, triumphantly. ‘I remember it because I could see him well from the plane’s front galley. That’s where Sharon and I were playing our passengers’ game. But as far as I can remember, he wasn’t right at the front, so I would discard rows one through six, maybe. I’d say he was somewhere between rows seven and fourteen.’
Garcia wrote that down in his notebook. That was a good start. With the mayor and the Governor of California so involved in this case, he would have no problem getting the passenger manifest from the airline.
‘And is this the only passenger that you remember Ms. Barnard mentioning anything about looking familiar to her recently?’
Tom nodded. ‘Like I’ve said, Detective, that sort of thing happens a lot, but yes, he’s the only one that comes to mind right now.’
‘Is it OK if I ask a police sketch artist to come see you some time this afternoon?’
‘I’m not sure I remember him that well, Detective?’
‘Anything helps,’ Garcia countered. ‘And these sketch artists are pretty good at what they do.’
Tom looked down at his feet for a second. ‘Yes, of course. Anything I can do to help catch the sick bastard that did that to Sharon.’
‘Just one more thing,’ Garcia said.
‘Sure.’
‘I take it that, also because of the job you do, yours and Sharon’s circle of friends is quite tight?’
‘Yes, I guess you could say that.’
Garcia reached into his pocket and retrieved a photograph he had brought with him. It was the portrait shot of Nicole Wilson.
‘Do you happen to know if Sharon knew this woman? If they were friends, perhaps?’
Tom took the photograph and examined it for several seconds, before returning it to Garcia and shaking his head at the same time. ‘No, I don’t think so. I’ve never seen her before. Is she a stewardess as well?’
‘No, she’s just someone we interviewed yesterday who said she knew Ms. Barnard,’ Garcia lied.
‘Oh.’ Tom nodded. ‘Maybe she did. I just don’t remember ever seeing her.’
Garcia got to his feet. ‘Thank you so much for your time, Mr. Hobbs. You’ve been a great help.’
They shook hands and Garcia handed Tom one of his cards. ‘If you remember anything else, no matter how small it might seem to you, please don’t hesitate to contact me. It could be very important to us. My cellphone number is on the back.’
Tom took the card and looked at it for a quick second before placing it in his back pocket.
‘Of course I will.’
Tom walked Garcia to the front door.
‘Detective,’ he called as Garcia stepped on to the footpath that took him across the property’s front lawn.
Garcia turned around to face him.
‘You will catch the psycho who did that to Sharon, won’t you? Please tell me you will.’ His eyes glassed over one more time as he waited for Garcia’s reply.
Garcia nodded once. ‘Yes, we will catch him.’
As he began walking toward his car, Garcia hoped that his words had come out with a lot more conviction than he’d felt.
Forty-Seven
Alison Atkins had arrived in LA twelve years ago, at the tender age of sixteen. Back then she didn’t call herself Alison. Her real name was Kelly, Kelly Decker, but she swore that she would never use that name again. She could never use that name again. For her own safety.
Like so many before her, Alison’s suitcase was fairly empty of clothes, but overflowing with dreams and hopes. But unlike most who came to the City of Angels, her dreams and hopes weren’t for stardom, or a career in Hollywood or in the music business. All she really wanted was a better life. A normal life. And any life would be better than the one she had left behind in Summerdale, Alabama – population less than a thousand people.
Alison was an only child, born into a strict Jehovah’s Witness family. Her father was a storeowner. Due to complications, and the fact that Jehovah’s Witnesses aren’t allowed to receive blood, her mother had passed away while giving birth to her. Her father blamed the baby and not the stubbornness of his own faith for his wife’s death. That blame was made overly clear to Alison throughout her childhood and young teenage years.
With an iron fist, her father
demanded that Alison follow the rules of his chosen religion to the letter. She was not allowed to associate herself with a worldly person – one who is not a Jehovah’s Witness. She also wasn’t allowed to salute the flag of her country, recite the pledge of allegiance, stand for or sing the national anthem or vote. Alison had also never celebrated a single one of her birthdays. Her father’s chosen religion forbade her to do so. But the date had never really gone unnoticed, as her father would always spank Alison’s naked back with birch branches until her skin was raw. He then would lock her inside a dark room with no food or water for twenty-four hours, so she could reflect on what her coming into this world really meant – a dark day full of suffering and pain.
Despite being an extremely religious man, Alison’s father was a vicious brute who used physical force to impose his ways. Alison couldn’t remember a single day, while living under his roof, where he hadn’t either yelled at her and made her feel like she had been a mistake, or slapped her across the face at least once. And those were the good days. Some of the beatings and castigations she received were so severe she would pass out. But he was also very skilled in his brutality – no deep skin rupture, and no broken bones ever.
Alison’s father remarried when she was only three years old and her stepmother was just as cruel as he was. She knew of all the beatings; in fact, she administered many of them herself and was present throughout most of the others, always cheering her husband on.
When Alison turned fourteen, her father told her that she was now a fertile woman and therefore was ‘ripe’ to bear children of her own. And ‘ripe’ had been the exact word he’d used.
One night, Alison overheard her father telling her stepmother that he had already chosen the man whom Alison would marry – the eighteen-year-old son of a fellow Jehovah’s Witness family from Tennessee they had met a year earlier. Those words had filled Alison with more dread than any of the beatings she had ever received. She promised herself that she would rather die than marry into her family’s faith.
Alison was no thief, but as desperate panic took over she saw no other way out. A few days after overhearing their conversation, as her father and stepmother slept, she grabbed half of the earnings that her father’s store had taken over the past few days and broke out of the house. Overnight, Alison jogged for seventeen miles, non-stop, until she got to the city of Fairhope, where she bought a one-way bus ticket to the City of Angels.
She sat on that bus for forty-eight hours and 2030 miles, planning the start of her new life. That was when she came up with the name Alison Atkins. Both names, first and family, came from outdoor billboards she saw during the two-day trip. The first was advertising the new album from some singer called Alison Krauss. She had never heard of her, but she loved that name and how beautiful the singer looked. A decision was made in just a few seconds. Kelly had all of a sudden become Alison. She also promised herself that she would find out what Alison Krauss’s music sounded like.
Alison saw the second billboard during a scheduled stop. This one was advertising some sort of diet plan. Alison had already planned on a complete change in the way she looked, behaved and sounded – hair color, hairstyle, body shape, accent, posture, the way she walked, everything she could change about her old self, she would. Her first thought upon seeing the billboard was that maybe she should give that Atkins Diet a try. Her second thought was: I like the sound of the name Atkins. A moment later, she began repeating the name out loud – Alison Atkins, Alison Atkins, Alison Atkins. She liked it . . . very much.
Yes, her new name brought a smile to her face. To her, it sounded like a new beginning. Maybe starting over wouldn’t be so difficult after all.
She was wrong.
Life in Los Angeles proved to be a lot harder than Alison had anticipated. Once she finally got there, she found a cheap room on the south side of the city. The landlord asked for no identification, which suited Alison just fine, but finding a job with no proof of ID didn’t turn out to be quite as easy, especially for someone who looked so young. With just about everything in LA a lot more expensive than back in Summerdale, the little money she had with her ran out a lot faster than she had expected.
The landlord, a short and bald man with dirty nails and weather-beaten skin, who always smelled of stale sweat and fried chicken, told Alison that he would cut her a deal. If she was nice to him, he would be nice to her, and she could stay without having to worry about paying rent. Alison, in her naivety, thought that the landlord was really trying to help her, and when he asked her to come to his apartment, she truly believed that she would probably clean his room and kitchen for him, or perhaps cook his meals.
The landlord was as streetwise as they came. He knew that a place like his, in a city like Los Angeles, attracted a particular crowd. It had always done, and he’d seen plenty of young girls and women just like Alison, frightened to death of the life they’d left behind in some ‘shit-kickers-ville’ town somewhere, to know that they’d probably rather die than go to the cops. Going to the cops meant giving them their real names, showing them some ID and telling them where they were really from. That wasn’t something they were prepared to do. At least not yet, anyway.
Until then, Alison had believed that her mother’s death, as she gave birth to her, and her father’s angry beatings throughout her life were the worse that could ever happen to her. That night Alison discovered a new type of fear and pain. A new type of body and soul violation that she’d never thought possible. She thought that she’d discovered hell.
Once the landlord was done with her, a terrified and bleeding Alison returned to her room, gathered her few belongings and ran away for the second time in just a few weeks – once again, in the middle of the night. That night, for the first time, Alison began to believe what her father had yelled at her so many times – that she had been a mistake, that she should never have been born, that she had been put on this earth as a punishment, and that she should suffer, always. But Alison didn’t want to suffer anymore. All she wanted was to end it all.
It was around six in the morning when, by chance, she ran into Renell, a thirty-two-year-old African-American woman who had gone through everything Alison had gone through, and much more.
Renell worked for a charity group whose main purpose was to help women who had been victims of domestic abuse and violence, be it by partners or parents.
Renell’s charity sheltered Alison that night and for several nights after that. They also gave her food and medical assistance and, when she was well enough, helped her find some decent work.
As luck would have it, or not, Alison’s story was very similar to Renell’s, whose real name had once been Alisha. They became best friends, and it was Renell who, through her street contacts, arranged for Alison to get some sort of documentation with her new chosen name.
Now, twelve years later, they were still best of friends.
Forty-Eight
It was just coming up to lunchtime by the time Garcia got back to the Police Administration Building. A few white clouds had gathered over downtown Los Angeles, providing it with a much-needed break from the incessant summer heat, even if only in the form of a few scattered shadows.
‘We might have a little crack here,’ he said in an animated voice as soon as he entered the office.
Hunter, who was sitting at his desk running over a few paper files, paused what he was doing and turned to look at his partner.
Garcia immediately proceeded to tell him about the passenger who had caught Sharon Barnard’s attention on the morning flight.
‘Operations is already on it,’ he said. ‘They’re contacting US Airways and the FAA for the passenger manifest of both flights.’ He lifted a hand. ‘OK, I’m sure that if this is our guy, he no doubt used a bogus name and probably wore some kind of disguise, but if we establish that it could be him, with the manifest we could then get in touch with the passenger who was sitting next to him. Maybe he or she noticed something Tom Hobbs didn’t. Also �
�’ this seemed to be what excited Garcia the most because his eyebrows lifted like a drawbridge – ‘LAX is packed full of CCTV cameras, including the transit corridors. If this is our killer,’ Garcia nodded, ‘we’ll get some sort of footage.’
Garcia was so focused on the possibility of some sort of breakthrough, however small it might be, that until that moment he’d failed to notice the see-through, plastic evidence bag on Hunter’s desk. He paused and craned his neck sideways.
The evidence bag contained the brown paper envelope that had been slid under Hunter’s door in the early hours of the morning.
Garcia repositioned himself to have a better look at it. As he did, his breathing froze for a second. He didn’t need to compare it to know that handwriting.
‘What the fuck is that, Robert?’
‘It’s exactly what you think it is.’ Hunter slid the evidence bag towards his partner.
‘It was delivered here?’ Garcia asked without reaching for it.
‘No. Somebody slid it under my door some time in the middle of the night.’
Garcia looked at Hunter as if what he’d just said made no sense.
‘Under your door? As in – under the door to your apartment?’
Hunter confirmed it with a nod.
‘Somebody slid it under your door? Somebody who?’
Hunter shook his head. ‘By the time I noticed the envelope, the person was long gone.’
‘The killer?
‘I can’t think of anyone else, can you?’
‘Holy shit, Robert. Are you telling me that the killer dropped by your apartment to deliver that? He was standing just outside your front door?’
Another nod from Hunter. This time, the movement looked a little more defeated than the previous one.
‘It looks that way. Yes.’
Garcia ran both hands through his hair, pausing as they reached the back of his head. ‘What the hell, Robert? Why? Why would he do that?’
‘I have a suspicion as to why, but I’d like you to read the note first and tell me what you think.’
Despite their investigation not being in the news yet, it wouldn’t have been hard for the killer to get hold of Hunter’s address. All he needed to do was place a call to the PAB and ask for the name of the detective in charge of the investigation. Once he had Hunter’s name, obtaining his address wouldn’t have taken any longer than five minutes.
