The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  But it turned out that Webster Gayle, like John-Bird, had a pet subject on which he was only too happy to talk – and, mercifully, it was not the Colorado River but the fate of Coastal Airlines Flight 124. In his tiny office, which was really just a partitioned-off corner of the larger space with screens for walls, he got started before she’d even sat down.

  ‘Human error,’ he said to Kennedy. ‘That was what they said, in the end. Human error.’ His emphasis was heavy, almost sarcastic. ‘I guess that’s one of the things they come up with when they don’t really know what all else they can say.’

  ‘I thought it was the door,’ said Kennedy. ‘The door came open in the air and they lost cabin pressure.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Gayle agreed. ‘But the door mechanism was sound as a bell. So they don’t really have an explanation as to why it blew. Human error is kind of the fallback position, is what I’m thinking. If nothing else went wrong, well, then the people must’ve gone wrong. That’s easier than saying, “We just don’t know”, or maybe grounding the whole fleet while they check out the doors on every last plane, like the Australians did that time with their superjumbos. You know, when they had an engine blow? And hell, that didn’t even kill nobody.’

  Kennedy nodded politely. ‘But it’s all academic now, right? They closed the investigation when they found the flight recorder.’

  ‘No, ma’am.’ The sheriff was emphatic. ‘They never did find that black box thing. They just stopped looking for it when it stopped signalling – which is something that’s not supposed to happen, by the way. I read up on it. The battery’s supposed to be good for three months, and you pretty much can’t destroy it even if you’ve got a bomb. Makes sense, doesn’t it? A plane falling out of the sky, that’s kind of like a bomb, so it would have to stand up to …’

  He stopped abruptly and his face went blank. Kennedy thought he looked like he was remembering something very specific and very vivid, and trying not to.

  ‘Did you see the crash, Sheriff Gayle?’

  The big man pulled himself together. ‘No, ma’am, I didn’t. But I saw what it was like afterwards. The wreckage and such. Wasn’t anything I’m going to forget in a hurry.’ He drummed the table, thrown off track – either by the question or by his own disordered recollections. ‘So the recorder,’ he said at last, picking up the thread again, ‘that’s not gonna come to harm, and it’s not going to stop sending unless it falls into a live volcano or something. And last time I checked, we don’t have too many of those in Coconino County.

  ‘So there’s two mysteries, right there. How did the door come open and what happened to the box? Now I’m going to add a third one to that list. How many survivors were there?’

  Kennedy blinked – running on empty and wondering how the conversation had gotten so quickly into X-Files territory.

  ‘None, is what I heard,’ she said.

  ‘None is what they reported,’ Gayle said, with something like relish. ‘But then all this other stuff started happening.’ He launched into a detailed summary of the post-mortem sightings, the walking dead of Flight 124, while Kennedy – deeply sceptical, and incapable of faking any kind of interest – did her best not to respond at all. When Gayle wound down, she groped for a non-committal comment.

  ‘Well, I … I guess that’s a mystery of a different order,’ she said. ‘I mean, what happened on the flight, and what happened to the recorder afterwards – you could actually get an answer to those two things. But ghosts are, you know … there’s not ever going to be an explanation. People will believe they saw what they saw, but they won’t ever be able to prove it. So there’s no answer. It will just go down as one of those things.’

  She was trying hard not to give offence: Gayle didn’t take any but he dismissed the objection with an easy smile. ‘Well, ma’am, I find that it’s best in life to keep an open mind. Sometimes if a thing looks impossible, it’s just because you’re looking at it from the wrong angle.’

  Damned jet lag. Kennedy really didn’t feel up to this kind of brinkmanship. ‘Well, like I said, my main focus is going to be on—’

  ‘—the facts that relate to your investigation. I know that. But there again, what’s relevant isn’t always what seems to point in the right direction. I don’t need to tell you that – you’re a detective.’ He was jocular and confiding, radiating a sort of proprietorial eagerness, and Kennedy realised why he’d agreed so readily to see her and help with the investigation: he’d been waiting for someone he could give this stuff to. She wondered, with glum fatalism, how far she’d have to humour him in his pet obsession to get answers to her own questions.

  ‘Right,’ she agreed, guardedly.

  ‘Now I’m not saying you should give an ear to every crank theory that someone shoves your way. I just value an open mind, like I said, and I don’t think you should straight away dismiss something just because it sounds stupid. Great things get invented on account of stupid questions, it seems to me. What if you put rat poison into someone’s veins, ’stead of medicine? That’s warfarin, in case you didn’t know: stops lots of folks from dying of heart attacks. Or what if you close your eyes and try to see something with your ears? That’s radar.

  ‘So I went into this thinking there could be something to it, but not thinking for certain sure I knew what the something was. And then I talked it over with a good friend of mine, Mizz Eileen Moggs, who writes for our local paper and is the smartest person I know. And she said they always do this, after a disaster. She put it down to something called the news cycle: and the way that works is if they got to report a story but nothing happened since the last time they reported it, they just go ahead and make something up. Like, people want to keep hearing about this stuff, and that’s a hunger that’s got to be fed. You come across that notion?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kennedy said. ‘I think your friend is right.’

  Gayle seemed pleased by this response. He wagged a finger at her. ‘Ah, but then I showed my friend all the stuff I collected up – all these bits and pieces I took off the internet and places like that – and she started in to thinking about it herself. And she said this time is different.’

  ‘Different how, exactly?’

  ‘Well, maybe you’ll get to hear that answer from Eileen herself, Sergeant Kennedy. I’d really like to introduce the two of you, if the opportunity comes up.’

  It was way past time, Kennedy decided, to start imposing her own agenda on all this. ‘Well, that would be great,’ she said. ‘I’d be very happy to meet Miss … Moggs? But as you know, I’m sort of on the clock here. And my main concern is to pursue some information pertaining to my murder inquiry.’

  ‘Stuart Barlow and subsequent addendums. Yeah, I read the case files you forwarded. Something of a head-scratcher.’

  ‘That’s putting it mildly, Sheriff Gayle.’

  ‘And you say our investigation into the plane crash might could help you out, in some way.’

  ‘That’s what I’m hoping, yes. One of the passengers on CA 124 was a man travelling under the name of Michael Brand.’

  ‘That “under the name of” kind of implies it wasn’t his actual given name. Is that the case?’

  ‘We can’t really say. We were totally failing to run him to ground in Europe when we learned that he’d died over here. We don’t know much about him at all, except that he’s got a career that goes back a fair few years and includes crimes other than murder.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Kidnapping, maybe. Gun-running, maybe. Involvement in drug trafficking.’

  ‘All maybe?’

  ‘Mostly hearsay, and the source is a CI I can’t even name. But the grounds for my being here relate entirely to the Barlow case. We think there’s plenty in that case file to justify our concern and our approaching you with a request.’

  Gayle scratched his chin – a pantomime of deep and weighty thought. ‘Yeah, I guess I’d have to agree on that. Your multiple homicide has got to count as a good reason to k
nock on all the doors you can think of. We’re pretty stretched here, but I think I can give you a couple of days at least.’

  The implications of that took a second or so to sink in. ‘A couple of days?’ Kennedy repeated, inanely.

  ‘After that I’ll have to get back in here and do some desk stuff.’

  ‘A couple of days of your own time? Sheriff, that’s a lot more than I ever expected. Are you sure you can …’

  He was waving her silent, smiling a wide, self-deprecating smile. ‘We’re more than happy to do what we can, Sergeant. So tell me what you had in mind.’

  Kennedy took a second to pull her thoughts together. She’d expected to meet indifference, if not outright hostility. Instead she’d found a friendly obsessive who wanted to be a part of her investigation because he hadn’t been allowed to pursue it as his own. It was such a thoroughbred gift horse, she had to fight the urge to wrestle its mouth open and take a better look. ‘Well, what I was hoping to do,’ she told Gayle, ‘first and foremost, was to find out whether anything came out of your investigations here that could throw light on Brand’s origins or possible confederates. Like, for example, if any of his clothes or belongings were retrieved, and if so, whether they’d still be available for me or my colleagues to examine. And likewise, if any forensic data were available on the body itself, or if he filed an address with your civil aviation authority when he purchased his ticket. Anything like that.’

  Gayle was nodding along to this list. ‘I don’t see how any of that would be a problem. I can tell you now there isn’t much, but they did an autopsy, and there’d be photos and records pertaining to that. Clothes and belongings would have been logged into evidence – both the ones we could definitively match up with a particular body and the ones we had to give up on. Most of that stuff is up north of here, in a storage facility that we rent from Santa Claus.’

  ‘From Santa Claus?’ She’d have to watch this tendency to become a choric echo.

  ‘The municipality of Santa Claus,’ Gayle clarified. ‘Sorry, Sergeant, that doesn’t even raise a smile around here. Santa Claus is a town about ten miles out from Peason, just inside the county limits. A ghost town, these days. They got space to rent for next to nothing, and we got a space problem, so we use them for all kinds of overspill stuff. Okay, what else?’

  ‘Depending on what I find – if I find anything – then maybe you’d be prepared to act as liaison. You know, talk with other US agencies or bodies, send information requests. I know that’s a lot to ask, and if you prefer I can bounce through Interpol instead. It’s just that I don’t have any jurisdiction out here and it would be great to pick up a thread and just follow it, if we’re lucky enough to turn up something worth following.’

  ‘That’d have to be case-by-case,’ Gayle told her, ‘but we can probably lend you a deputy and a desktop, if it comes to it.’

  ‘That’s really kind, Sheriff Gayle. Thank you.’

  ‘My pleasure. Now why don’t I drop you at your hotel? I think I come near to talked your legs off and you probably need to get some rest after that flight.’

  Kennedy made some token resistance and was overruled. Sheriff Gayle got up to leave and as she followed him out into the reception area, he counted off on his fingers the items on the agenda. ‘So. Autopsy records. Victims’ possessions. Paper trail. Would that be it for now?’

  ‘That would be plenty for now, Sheriff.’

  ‘We’ll do it in the a.m. Connie, I’m going to drive Sergeant Kennedy out to her hotel. I’ll be back in thirty.’

  The bulldog looked at Kennedy and then at him. ‘Okay,’ she said, after slightly too long a pause. ‘What shall I tell Eileen Moggs if she calls?’

  Kennedy detected a sly intonation to the question, as though it was designed to catch the sheriff slightly off balance – to sucker-punch him. If it was, it didn’t work. Gayle just shrugged. ‘Tell her I’ll call her back,’ he said. ‘I’ll be seeing her later on anyway. Come on, Sergeant.’

  Kennedy made one more token protest. ‘I can take a cab …’

  ‘No, no. We aim to send you home with good memories of Arizona.’

  Kennedy smiled and nodded, as he hustled her out the door. Privately, though, she thought that might be asking a lot.

  At the hotel, Kennedy got herself in the mood for sleep by breaking out a bottle of Dos Equis from the room’s mini-bar and soaking in a hot bath while she drank it. Perversely, it made her feel wired and restless rather than pushing her jet lag towards the edge of the catastrophe curve so that she could sleep.

  There were still too many hours of daylight left, and nobody she knew in this place and nowhere particular to go. Even the What’s On in Peason? magazine on the bedside table pretty much shrugged its shoulders, turned out its pockets and came back with the answer: nothing. She’d just missed the flower show, apparently, and the next cultural landmark was the Hardyville Days, over in Bullhead, which wasn’t until October and seemed to lean heavily on the entertainment concept of ugly men in drag. She was planning to be long gone by then.

  So what sort of innocent fun could she get up to in her hotel room?

  She took out her laptop, actually her sister Chrissie’s, logged on to the wi-fi network and accessed her email account. There were four items in the inbox, the first three from DCI Jimmy Summerhill, with the tone creeping up the scale from professional detachment to foam-flecked stridency. Into the wastebasket with those: she was paying for this connection by the hour after all.

  She also had an email from Izzy, who had agreed to look after Kennedy’s dad until Chrissie came to collect him at the weekend – assuming Kennedy wasn’t already back by then.

  You left so suddenly. Gonna miss you, while you’re away. And, you know, hope nothing’s wrong.

  She started a reply but scrapped it; started another that went the same way.

  Lots of things wrong, she eventually wrote. But I’m still on the case. Maybe tell you about it over a drink some time?

  After that, and with no real hope at all of getting an answer, she sent an email to Leo Tillman – the latest in a series – telling him where she was and what she was doing. It was terse, but it covered the bases.

  Leo, as per last message I’m out in Arizona chasing the Michael Brand connection. No real news as yet, but I’ve made contact with local law enforcement and they’re being really helpful. Hope to have a lot to report tomorrow. In the meantime, am attaching AGAIN the analysis Doctor Gassan gave me of the Dovecote Farm files. Maybe you’ve read them already, but if you haven’t, you really should. This whole thing could maybe break wide open any time if we find the right crowbar – and everything suggests that Brand is it. Deal still stands. Let me know if you have anything to share.

  – Kennedy

  She attached the files and hit SEND. She could think of nothing else to do with Tillman now, other than to keep pinging him and hope that in the end she got some faint echo back.

  And now, since the files were there, she opened them again herself. She felt like she knew the contents by heart, but rereading them kept it fresh – taking her back, every time, to her first and last face-to-face meeting with Emil Gassan, in the dismal, dilapidated safe house where they were keeping him until they certified his real life free from risk.

  The one in which Gassan told her about the Judas tribe.

  40

  ‘So it is a gospel?’ Kennedy demanded, bewildered.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean, the translated version is still a gospel? Barlow puts together a crack team, dedicates years of his time – sacrifices his life, in the end – to translate a gospel into another gospel?’

  Emil Gassan shrugged, a little impatiently. They were sitting in a bare, bleak room: four tables, eight chairs, walls painted in the shade of dark green that exists nowhere outside of Victorian buildings that have become hospitals, police stations or lunatic asylums. A poster on the wall advocated safe sex with the aid of a cartoon unicorn wearing a condom on its hor
n. Gassan’s right hand rested on a slender, black-covered notebook, as though he were about to swear an oath on it.

  It was ten days after Dovecote: ten days after the fire, and Combes’s death. Nine days and some odd hours, then, since she’d sent her own copy of the Dovecote disc to Gassan and asked him to put the files on there together into something that made sense. Gassan’s haggling had been minimal: he’d wanted chocolate – Terry’s Chocolate Oranges – some bottles of a good French Meursault, and the last three issues of Private Eye. Remind me that the world is still out there, he’d told her, essentially – and I’ll solve your puzzle for you. Hearing the tremor of eagerness in his voice, she’d gotten the impression that she could have refused him on every count and he’d still have agreed.

  ‘Yes, Sergeant,’ Gassan said, with petulance in his voice. ‘He translated a gospel into another gospel. But obviously I didn’t manage to make myself clear. What Stuart has done is … remarkable. Almost unbelievable, really. And if it weren’t for the fact that the side effects would include my now being dead, instead of merely in Crewe, I could wish with all my heart that I’d said yes when he approached me. Also, if it weren’t for the fear of those same side effects, I’d be running with this to every journal on my Rolodex, telling them to hold the front page into the foreseeable future. Not that I have access to my Rolodex, in this godforsaken place. Or a phone.’

  As though complaining about the stringent security had made him aware of its temporary absence, Gassan got up, crossed to the door and opened it. A stolid constable sitting just outside nodded civilly at the professor, who closed the door again without a word.