Brass in Pocket

by Jeff Mariotte

  Greg caught Riley’s glance. There was a smile lurking just behind her lips, but she was professional enough to hold it back. “That would help a lot,” she said.

  “Well, that there Piper belongs to Jesse Dunwood,” Patti said.

  “Where is Mr. Dunwood now?” Greg asked. “Is he here?”

  “Well, he’s inside it.”

  “He’s—”

  “We figured there was no point in calling a bus,” one of the unis said. “Coroner’s on the way but I guess they’re a little backed up tonight.”

  Every night, Greg thought. Las Vegas’s murder rate, like its traffic, had swollen along with its population. “The coroner?”

  “Maybe you’d better take a look, sir.”

  Greg and Riley walked toward the front of the aircraft until they could see inside through a side window.

  The victim—Jesse Dunwood, according to the woman—was alone, sitting in the pilot’s chair on the left side of the plane. He was a middle-aged white man, a little on the meaty side, with neatly cropped reddish-brown hair. His head was tilted back against his seat, his mouth hanging open, blue eyes wide and glassy. There was a slight flush to his skin, or else he might have been recently sunburned, but over a deep brown tan. He wore what looked like an expensive silk shirt, designer jeans, and loafers.

  “That man is definitely dead,” Riley said.

  “No sign of foul play, though,” Greg said. “That we can see from here, at least.”

  “Could be natural causes,” Riley said. “Heart attack, stroke, something like that. But he’s dead, no getting around that.”

  “Why don’t you finish telling us what happened, Ms. Van Dyke?” Greg asked.

  “Well, Stan here was in the tower, not me. I mean, I was up there part of the time, but not the whole time. I’m more of a grease monkey.”

  He had been hoping to hear the whole story from a single witness, but he had to take what he could get. “Okay, Mr. Johnston then. What happened?”

  “Jesse went up for a sunset flight,” Stan said. “He likes to do that, or else night flights. Looks at the lights of Las Vegas—city’s a lot prettier at night than during the day, he always says.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” Riley said.

  “Sometimes he takes a lady up there, to show it off,” Stan continued.

  “The same one?” Greg asked. “Or a different one each time?”

  “Oh, different ones mostly,” Patti said. “Sometimes two or three at a time. The airplane has four seats.”

  Other people, also airport employees from the looks of them, started to gather around. After Greg had the general outline down, he would have to separate them, because the detectives would want to interview them individually, without letting their versions of the story be shaped by what they had heard.

  “Okay,” Greg said, trying to steer the conversation back to basics. “So he went for a flight. When was that?”

  Stan looked at his watch. “Wheels up about seven-fifteen,” he said. “Landed just over an hour later, eight-twenty, eight-twenty-five or so. I can get you the exact times in the tower.”

  “We’ll need that,” Riley assured him.

  “Then what happened?” Greg prodded.

  “Then, nothing. He brought her in for a beautiful landing, as smooth as butter. The airplane taxied, slowed, and stopped. Jesse’s been flying all his life—he used to be a fighter pilot in the Air Force. He could handle an aircraft like nobody’s business.”

  “But then he never got out of the plane,” Patti said. “That’s when I thought maybe something was wrong. I went up to the tower and told Stan, ‘Hey, you think something’s wrong with Jesse? He’s just sitting there on the runway.’”

  “There sure enough was something wrong,” one of the newcomers said. He was dressed in a janitor’s gray coveralls, and although he looked short, Greg realized it was because his spine was bent almost in half and his left leg was enclosed in a steel brace. Straightened out, he would have been just over six feet tall. His hair was wispy and gray and his face was all edges and angles, with more than a day’s stubble covering cheeks and chin, except where a puckered scar ran from the edge of his mouth to his right eye, like a fat white earthworm had settled onto his cheek to take a nap.

  “Who are you?” Riley asked him.

  “I’m Benny. Benny Kracsinski.”

  “Benny’s a night janitor,” a tall, heavyset African-American man said. He wore a striped dark blue jumpsuit that didn’t quite hide the grease stains. Greg noted that his fingernails were extremely short, either bitten or seriously pared back. His shaved head gleamed in the light.

  “Look, we’ll get statements from all of you,” Greg said. “But I’d like to do it one at a time. Is there someplace that the rest of you could wait while we talk to Mr. Johnston here?”

  “Sure,” Patti Van Dyke said. She pointed toward the tower. “The office is right over there, we got chairs and stuff.”

  Greg gestured to one of the uniformed cops. “Officer, can you escort these folks over there, and keep them separated once they get there?”

  “Gotcha,” the cop said.

  “Before you go, though, let me know who you others are. I want to be able to keep your names straight.”

  “I’m Jamal Easton,” the big man said, rubbing the palm of his hand across his head. “Anything I can do to help, just let me know.”

  The last person to identify herself was another Caucasian woman, small, dark, and taut, with a ready grin and an open manner. “Tonya Gravesend,” she said. “I hope you find out what happened to Jesse. We all liked him.”

  “Amen,” Jamal said. “We’re like a little family here, we all get along.”

  “Strange family, then,” Riley said.

  “Someone will talk to each of you soon,” Greg told them. “In the meantime, don’t talk about this among yourselves, please.”

  “Don’t want us to fix our stories, do you?” the janitor asked. Kracsinski, Greg remembered. Benny. “Makes sense, I guess.”

  “Please, just… go with the officer.”

  “This way,” the uni said. Benny, Jamal, and Tonya followed. Riley had to twitch her head toward the others to get Patti to take the hint and go along.

  “Now, Mr. Johnston, please continue,” Greg said when the rest were out of earshot.

  “There’s not much more to tell,” Stan said. “Like I told you before, Jesse landed, then his aircraft just sat there on the runway. Patti came up and we talked about it. There wasn’t likely to be any more traffic in or out tonight, but still, we were getting worried, and you never know when someone might need to make an emergency landing. I called him on the radio, you know, a few times, but he never answered me. I told him I needed the runway cleared, even though I didn’t really. Finally I sent Jamal over to check on him.”

  “Jamal works for the airport?”

  “He’s a mechanic. Private, but he mostly works here. And like he said, we all know each other and look out for each other.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Riley said. Greg couldn’t tell if she meant it or not.

  “Well, soon as Jamal got to the airplane, he called us over. Jesse, he was just like you see him there. Dead, no question about that.”

  “And no one had approached the plane?” Riley asked. “Until Jamal did?”

  “Not a soul. It’s mostly quiet around here this time of night. We’re busiest on weekends, and on weekdays it’s the mornings. A few people are like Jesse, enjoy night flying, but for the most part we’re used for tourist flights over the Grand Canyon or short business trips, you know? That’s all daytime stuff.”

  Headlights speared through the night. “Coroner’s here,” Riley announced.

  “It’s about time,” Greg said. “Can you open the airplane, Mr. Johnston?”

  “Is it okay to?”

  “You mean legally? Yes, it’s fine. Just get it open and then stand back, and don’t touch anything you don’t have to.”

 
“Got it.”

  While he opened the cockpit, Riley moved close to Greg. “If he was murdered,” she said in a low tone, “then we’ve got the ultimate locked-room mystery going here. Because not only was the victim alone in the room, but the room was five thousand feet in the air.”

  “Gives a new meaning to the mile-high club,” Greg answered. “And not nearly as much fun as the old one.”

  4

  “THIS REMINDS ME OF THE time in high school when we put a pig in the girls’ locker room,” Greg said as he and Riley retrieved their field kits from the Yukon.

  “A pig?” Riley asked.

  “There were some farms on the outskirts of Santa Gabriel. We paid a farmer a hundred bucks for one of his old pigs one night, and took him to school in the back of a pickup truck one of the guys had. We opened the locker room door and led him in. Then we bolted the door from the inside, climbed up on the lockers, and went out through the ceiling panels. When the coach opened up the gym in the morning, he had to get a custodian to cut through the bolt with an acetylene torch, which of course freaked out the pig even more than spending the night alone in a locker room had.”

  “This was you and those zany kids from Chess Club?” She had heard stories about Greg’s younger days, not all of them directly from Greg.

  “Hey, I had other friends.”

  “Sure you did, Greg.”

  Once Jesse Dunwood’s body had been removed, they started to process the airplane like they would a car or any other vehicle. First they photographed it from a variety of angles, inside and out, then they inspected it with alternative light sources in hopes of pinpointing fingerprints, fluids, or fibers.

  It was during this process that Riley found the tube. “Greg,” she said. “Take a look at this.”

  Greg had been in the back, on his hands and knees examining the passenger area. When Riley spoke, he turned around, put his hands on the seat backs, and leaned forward. Riley trained her ALS inside the air vent above the instrument panel, moving it slowly back and forth so he could see what had caught her attention. “You see that?”

  “There’s something in there.”

  “Not just something,” she said. “I think it’s a hose or a tube of some kind.”

  Greg moved up front for a closer look. “You could be right. What do you think it’s connected to?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “But it doesn’t belong there. You can see the sides of the ventilation tube, and it’s not part of that.” If she had already found the murder weapon, maybe this night would be easier than she had feared. She wasn’t used to Gil Grissom being out of town, and since Warrick Brown hadn’t been replaced yet, Gil’s absence left the night shift crew especially shorthanded. “We’ve got to find the other end.”

  Greg stuck his head out of the plane and called to the uniformed cop remaining outside, whose name, they had learned, was Morston. “Can you get Jamal Easton back out here? He’s an airplane mechanic, and I think we can use him.”

  “No problem,” the cop said. He hurried off toward the airport office.

  Riley and Greg continued their routine while they waited for the mechanic, collecting fibers and fingerprints and whatever else turned up. The airplane appeared to have been maintained regularly, cleaned thoroughly inside and out, but there was a trash receptacle on board with some cough drop and gum wrappers inside it. The wadded-up chewing gum, like everything else they found, was collected in evidence bags.

  The uniformed officer returned shortly with Jamal Easton. Riley showed him the hose she had found, through the vent. “Can you find the other end of this thing?” she asked. She already had a hunch where it might lead, but her expertise at identifying aircraft—familiar ones, anyway—didn’t extend to tearing them apart. “Without touching anything you don’t absolutely have to.”

  “I can do that,” Jamal said. He gestured toward her gloved hands. “You need me to put on some gloves or something?”

  His hands were huge, the kind that could palm a basketball. She suspected latex gloves might just split if he tried to put them on. But Greg took a pair from his kit and handed them over, and Jamal’s hands reminded her of the resilience of that particular petroleum product.

  Gloved up, Jamal opened the canopy. “I’ll try to be careful,” he said. Riley watched closely and made mental notes of any place he touched, in case she needed to explain why evidence had been smudged or otherwise obscured. Hands at his sides, Jamal peered at the engine, moving his head around to get different angles on it. Several times he asked for flashlights to be beamed inside, pointing to what he needed to have illuminated. “There you go,” he said after a few minutes.

  “What is it?” Riley asked.

  “Light,” he said. Riley pointed her mini Maglite where he directed. “That thing right there?” he said. “Thing that looks like a muffler? That’s the engine exhaust collector.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The muffler.”

  He hadn’t cracked a smile. She was beginning to like this guy. “And that thing sticking into it—”

  “Through a crudely punched hole. That’s right. That’s the end of your tube.”

  “Carbon monoxide,” Greg said at her shoulder. She hadn’t even noticed that he’d gotten out of the plane.

  “Looks that way. Postmortem hypostasis will be easy enough to read when they get the victim’s clothes off at the morgue,” Riley said. “Could this really blow enough carbon monoxide into the cockpit to kill him, though? It’s only coming in one of the vents, so there’s other ventilation at work.”

  Her question had been intended rhetorically, but Jamal Easton jumped in with both feet. “That depends on how the airplane is flown,” he said. “In Jesse’s case, I’d have to say yes, it could.”

  “How it’s flown?” Greg asked. “What do you mean by that?”

  Jamal took a deep breath and let his weight rest against the side of the plane, making himself comfortable. He gave every indication of having addressed this general topic more than once, and at considerable length.

  “You folks ever heard of the great LOP/ROP debate?” he asked. Riley supposed they showed him blank faces, because he continued without much of a pause. “LOP means ‘lean of peak.’ ROP means ‘rich of peak.’ It describes two different flying techniques, and if you were to go into the airport office where everybody is waiting around and ask the people there about their preferences, I guarantee you’d start an argument that’ll last until dawn. If not longer. I strongly urge you not to do so, because frankly I’m sick to death of it. Stan and Patti are both LOP folks, while Tonya and Benny are ROP types. To me, it all comes down to the individual aircraft and its pilot. Jesse knew what he was doing, no two ways about that, so I respected his decision.”

  “Even the janitor has a viewpoint on this?” Greg asked.

  “It’s hard to find any airport rat who doesn’t.”

  “What does this have to do with the victim?” Riley asked. She was starting to fear that the man’s explanation would last until dawn anyway, even without the argument.

  “Jesse Dunwood flew ROP. He was devout about it.”

  “What does it all mean?” Greg asked. “You kind of lost me.”

  “Sorry.” Jamal straightened up, and the airplane shifted without his weight against it. He moved his gaze between Greg and Riley and blew out a faint sigh, reminding her of a college professor addressing a pair of substandard students. “They’re adjustments the pilot can make in the engine’s exhaust gas temperature. We call that EGT. As you lean the mixture, adding more air and less fuel, your EGT gets higher. Keep leaning and it drops again, so that midpoint, just before it drops when it’s running as hot as it’ll get, is the lean of peak. Rich of peak means that the pilot likes to keep the fuel-to-air mixture on the rich side. Heavy on fuel, lighter on air. The increased fuel flow keeps the EGT down, but it obviously burns more fuel. On the flip side, the LOP folks claim that they have the smarts and the instrumentation to risk runnin
g a little hotter, knowing they’re not going to erode their exhaust manifolds or set their engines on fire, and they’ll save fuel in the bargain. As you might imagine, when fuel prices shoot up but air is still free, LOP gets more popular, and when fuel prices come down, you might see a little increase in ROP.”

  “I think I get the gist of it, but I’m not clear on how it ties in,” Greg admitted. Riley knew that was hard for him to say—he was a brilliant guy, and he was usually the first to admit it. “Can you bring this back around to carbon monoxide?”

  “Sorry,” Jamal said. “I guess we all get carried away when we go there, even me. Like I said, Jesse Dunwood is a serious ROP guy. A richer fuel mixture is going to generate much more carbon monoxide than a middle-of-the-road mixture or a lean of peak mix. A lot more. If he had been flying LOP, there might not have been enough of it blowing his way from the muffler to do any damage, given the other ventilation. But as it is, he was blasting almost pure carbon monoxide right into his face throughout his flight. The surprise isn’t that he died, it’s that he managed to complete the flight and bring the aircraft down for a landing before he died, instead of plunging it down in a residential neighborhood or into one of those high-rises on the Strip.”

  “That is a plus,” Riley said. “Thanks, I think we get it now. If you could go back to the office and wait—without discussing this with the others, or starting the LOP versus ROP wars going—we’d appreciate it.”

  “Glad I could help,” Jamal said. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t dare bring that old chestnut up tonight. I will miss old Jesse, though.” He nodded his big head and ambled off toward the building.

  “Good work, Riley,” Greg said. “I think we have a cause of death and a murder weapon now.”

  “Carbon monoxide poisoning and a rigged muffler.”

  “Exactly.”

  Officer Morston strode across the tarmac toward them, as energetic as if his shift had been just beginning. He was a tall, burly guy with a dark complexion and a preternaturally cheerful mood, especially for a patrol officer on the graveyard shift.