“Talk in words, like real talk?”
“Yes. I’ll tell you all about it when you find me. But you need to hurry, Katie. And you can’t rely on anyone else. My little Wild Irish Kate.”
The phone alarm rang again and I sat up, the dream so fresh I could still taste the words in my mouth. I remembered what he said, but I had no idea what he meant. Between Annalise and Nick, it would help if I could get one straightforward message. Here I was again, confounded and panicked. And very, very sad.
One hour later, Victor met us outside the hotel, and ten minutes after that he deposited us at the entrance to Terminal Three. We bid him adios as he went off to park and await our call. I smoothed my green-checked capri pants down and tucked in my white sleeveless blouse again. My pants felt looser today; nothing like a stress and terror diet. I adjusted my straw-brimmed hat, which I’d purchased for an exorbitant sum straight out of the hands of a woman in the hotel lobby that morning and tucked every last strand of my red hair into.
Today, as part of our safety strategy, Kurt and I intended to blend in, just in case someone was looking for me. Or us. His version of blending was donning a fisherman’s cap, an untucked tropical shirt over baggy Tommy Bahama khaki shorts, and a pair of new deck shoes. Atrocious white tube socks with three red stripes around the tops were my touch. In a normal environment we would have attracted attention, but in this crowd, our outfits camouflaged us perfectly.
We had arranged yesterday to meet Gabriel at eight a.m. We walked at tortoise-like tourist speed to Gabriel’s office, but it was locked up tight. He might be helpful and friendly, but he was still a native of the islands, and lived and worked on island time.
“Dammit!” I said.
“I could use a coffee. Want one?” Kurt asked me.
“No, I want to wait here for Gabriel.”
He scanned the terminal. “We really need to stay together. Just because we don’t see anyone that looks scary doesn’t mean you aren’t at risk.”
He was probably right, and my tight capris weren’t really suited to high karate kicks if self-defense became necessary. After one more look around the terminal for the tardy Mr. Marrero, I walked with Kurt to the cafeteria and we picked up heavenly-smelling Arabica coffees. The young man we’d spoken to the day before waved to us discreetly from where he was clearing a table in the dining area. I waved back. Kurt didn’t notice him and walked to a nearby newsstand. So much for staying together.
The young man looked around, right and left, left and right, then darted over to me. He wore dark sunglasses and a circa-1990 walkman that had round ear-sized headphones with spongy covers. I expected to hear Dominican music blaring from them, but instead I caught a snatch of “Hotel California” before he turned it off. I hoped it wasn’t prophetic.
“Hey lady, your husband, the man who eat here?” he asked me in English so guttural I would almost have understood his Spanish better.
“Yes, what about him?” I asked.
“Tú hablas español?” He asked me if I spoke Spanish.
“Un poco,” I said.
“OK, I tell you. Your husband, he no talk, but the other man did.”
“What other man?”
“The man that walk behind him and his amigos?” he said in the form of a question, begging me to understand.
Walk behind? I formed a mental image of men walking behind Nick. Aha! “Men following him?”
He looked relieved that I understood. “Sí. A man following your husband. I see him and he watching them in the gift shop. Like on TV.” He leaned toward me and said, “I want to be a detective, like Magnum, P.I.” Vintage American TV was a staple on Caribbean stations. I didn’t comment, so he went on. “Then he follow them here and talk on his phone.” He frowned. “Same man following me last night. I no tell you about them, so I happy to see you today.”
“Why did he follow you?” Fear tingled its way up my arms from my fingers, all the way to my face, where it settled in my lips, leaving them numb.
“He ask if I know who he is. I say no. I not stupid.” He smiled with the confidence of youth. “He ask if I tell the Americanos about him. I say, ‘Tell who? Tell what?’ He say good, but if I do, he kill me. He and his partner beat me up so I know he’s true.” He thumped his chest primally and took off his sunglasses to show me his two black eyes.
Shit! What if those men were watching us now? We had to finish this conversation, fast. This kid was doing exactly what the men had warned him not to do—talking to me. I could not let myself worry about what might happen to this boy later. Or at least, I would try not to.
I kept my English simple. “When he was here in the cafeteria, did you hear him say anything?” I tried it in Spanish for good measure, hoping I said it right. “Él habla?”
“Sí. He talk on the phone, in English, but like from the islands. He tell his boss man that the plane no fly to Mexico now, and he back very soon. He laugh. Ha ha.”
Everything in the terminal moved in slow motion as I considered this. If he was right, the man had followed Nick and his passengers, and he had told his boss that Nick, Elena, the man, and her mother would not fly to Mexico, and laughed. It sounded like the man thought the group was going to try to go to Mexico.
“Did he say why Nick could not fly to Mexico?”
“He say, ‘Sylis fix the plane. We careful. No one see us.’”
Sylis? Did Sylis and this man cause Nick not to make it home—or know why he hadn’t made it? I yelled for my father-in-law. I needed Spanish-speaking reinforcement, fast. “Kurt, can you come over here?”
Kurt put up the newspaper and made his way over.
But at about that same time, the cafeteria manager realized his employee was not working. Personally, I didn’t think that was such a big deal in the islands, but el jefe came after the busboy with a rag, flicking it at his thighs and shouting, “Trabaja ahora. Ahora!” You get to work, NOW.
The young man raised his palms, shook his head back and forth and mouthed, “I’m sorry,” in Spanish.
“What did the man look like?” I yelled.
“Negro,” he mouthed, disappearing into the cafeteria’s back room.
I felt my knees buckle.
“What’s up?” Kurt asked as he stepped forward just in time to catch me.
I held on to him and rallied as best I could. I almost couldn’t get the words out between my panicked gasps. “The busboy from yesterday that saw Elena and Nick? Well, he told me just now that a man followed them to the cafeteria and told some ‘boss man’ that a guy named Sylis fixed Nick’s plane so it wouldn’t make it to Mexico.”
“Did he describe him? Or say how they fixed the plane?”
“Negro—which means black, right?—is all he said. He didn’t say how they fixed the plane, and I’m not sure how much more he knew. Kurt, he had two black eyes—the guy found him last night and told him he would kill him if he talked to us. The man already knew he talked to us yesterday!”
Kurt stroked his thumb across his lips over and over. I hoped he was thinking and not having an aneurysm, like I seemed to be. “We need to talk to that kid some more, Katie.”
“Yes, we do,” I said. Movement near Gabriel’s office caught my eye. “Look, there’s Gabriel, finally.” I pointed far across the terminal floor. “We’ll have to come back to the kid later. We need to get on the phone with the FAA, ASAP.”
Kurt nodded. We tried to tourist-walk again, but I found it really hard to walk like a turtle when my heart was racing like a rabbit. We rushed into Gabriel’s office just seconds behind him. Gabriel smiled when he saw us, the kind of smile that covers your whole face. His white teeth gleamed against his dark skin and hair. Apparently, he had forgiven or forgotten my outburst yesterday.
“Kovacs, please come in. I trust your evening was a pleasant one? May I get you an espresso?” Gabriel put down his briefcase and turned on a small espresso machine, betraying absolutely no sense of urgency. I wanted to scream.
“No,
thank you,” Kurt and I said at exactly the same time.
I continued. “We are fine, but we have learned several new things that we think will be helpful. We really need to get in touch with the FAA for a status report immediately. And with the Coast Guard so we can stay abreast of their search.”
“Please, tell me your news so we can make the phone call,” Gabriel said. He pressed brew on his machine and turned toward us.
I gave him the short version of the information gleaned from Victor and the busboy, omitting the black eyes and death threats.
“Your news about the men following Mr. Kovacs is interesting. Very, very interesting.” Gabriel dialed his phone and said, “I will talk to the FAA. I have some ideas about—” Gabriel changed paths mid-sentence. “Oh, hello, yes, this is Gabriel Marrero, Punta Cana International Airport, manager of Terminal Three. I am with the family who has reported its plane missing, registration number RJ7041.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece as if to speak to us, then put it back and said, “So the Coast Guard is searching the waters off the west side of St. Marcos? Do you have a contact name for me with the Coast Guard, and a phone number?” He spoke perfectly clear English with a thick Dominican accent. “I understand they know how to reach us, but we would like to make contact with them ourselves.” He scribbled something on a sticky note and hung up the phone.
“Well?” I asked.
“They said the Coast Guard is searching near St. Marcos this morning and will work their way towards Puerto Rico. But they were quite reluctant to give me a name and number for the Coast Guard, other than their central number for Puerto Rico. They finally gave me a number for the operations desk.” He dialed again. “So we will give it a shot, no? Hello?” He repeated his introduction and requested to speak to someone with an update. “I appreciate that someone will call us if they find him. But we would like to be able to share information, if and when we come across it, directly with the Coast Guard searchers. I see. Well, we will call this number then. Can I confirm you have the right contact information to reach us? Thank you.”
He hung up the phone, glowering this time. “Not helpful at all. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
Kurt said, “I have a good contact, very high up, within the Coast Guard. If we need to use him later, we can. For now, I don’t know where else to tell them to search. I assume they will make their way east along the flight path from San Juan to St. Marcos, taking into account elapsed time, weather conditions, and the movement of the water.”
“One would assume,” Gabriel said. “Hopefully we will hear from them soon. While we wait, I had a thought that maybe you would like to talk to some of our employees who work in the area where your plane was tied down while Nick was here? Maybe someone saw one of these two men that the busboy saw, down near Nick’s plane?”
I realized I had gripped a handful of capris in each hand while Gabriel was on the phone. I let go now and exhaled through my mouth. I willed all the tiny muscles in my face to relax. I rolled my neck and it made several popping sounds. I heard Nick’s voice again: “Don’t rely on anyone else.”
Kurt said, “Yup. We would.”
I added, “Thank you for letting us talk to them directly, Gabriel. Sounds like a great idea. Let’s get moving, the faster the better. We have to find Nick.”
The men stared at me. Only for a few seconds, but long enough to let me know that my optimism about finding Nick alive was mine alone.
“Let’s go, gentlemen.” I led the way.
Chapter Seventeen
The smell of jet fuel polluted the air outside the terminal. We weaved in and out of doorways, across the tarmac, and finally into the open bay of a cavernous hangar. I couldn’t hear a word Gabriel said over the planes’ engines as we walked, but I got the impression he was narrating our tour. He pointed to a door in the deep end of the hangar that turned out to open onto a small windowless office. Metal desktop, too many chairs, utilitarian. No less stinky, but quieter.
“I bring people to talk to you now, no?” Gabriel asked.
I thought carefully through all I had learned from watching Nick conduct investigations. “How do we know whether these people worked the right day and shift to cross paths with Nick or the plane? And how do we talk to the ones who were on shift then, but aren’t now?”
Kurt nodded and I felt a shiver of pride. Gabriel raised an index finger and tapped the length of it against his nose. “I can compare schedules for you. We will call anyone we need to talk to who’s not working today.”
“Good. We’re ready as soon as you can round the first person up,” I said.
“One more thing,” Gabriel said. “I need to be present for these interviews. Since I’m arranging them, and these are our employees, well, I am sure you understand.”
I understand they won’t want to talk in front of the terminal manager.
I would have done the same thing as an employment lawyer in my old life, but I still didn’t like it. “If you must, but speed is critical,” I said. “As is obtaining accurate information, and all of it. My husband’s life is at stake.”
“Good. I’ll ask Nancy to help with the schedules,” Gabriel said. “She can start calling people in immediately.” He left the office.
“Have them bring any records or logs of their work so we can check for our registration number,” I called after him.
He turned and flashed me an OK sign.
For the next twenty minutes, Kurt and I talked out our theories and planned our questions, which I jotted in the notebook. Then the employees began to arrive. The three of us—Gabriel, Kurt, and I—talked to every employee that Gabriel and his assistant thought had possible access to the planes tied down around Terminal Three. Kurt took the lead with the Spanish speakers and I led for those that spoke English. For the next two hours we spoke to mechanics, men that drove the gas truck, shuttle drivers, baggage handlers, and skycaps, with barely a minute of downtime between subjects. Sometimes they stood in a line outside the door. None had seen any black island men lurking about. No one had seen anything out of the ordinary.
A few did remember our plane—the fuel truck operator remembered filling it up, and showed us our registration number and some Spanish script I couldn’t decipher in his log book—but none of them had seen anyone working on it. No one knew how many people had boarded it for departure or where it went.
Meanwhile, our phones remained stubbornly silent with no word from the Coast Guard or FAA. My iPhone notifications remained at zero, which really bothered me. I hoped my messages could get through. Nothing was going our way.
My frustration level crept up as I poked at my phone between interviews. I looked up and saw a woman walk by pushing a cart laden with a large trashcan, a mop, dustpan, and broom.
“What about her?” I asked Gabriel.
“The janitor? She doesn’t work on the planes,” he said.
“So? Does she have access to the hangar?” I asked.
“Yes,” he admitted.
“Well, anyone could have seen something. It doesn’t hurt to talk to her.”
He shrugged. “As you wish.”
Gabriel disappeared for five minutes and returned with the woman. She was middle-aged and thick through the waist, which gave her short body a squarish shape. She did not look up or greet us when she came in.
Gabriel bade her sit down. The language switched over to Spanish, so Kurt handled the questions. I was surprised by how much more I understood today than I had the day before. The accent confused my ear less, and the meanings of words in context were more evident to me. I’d be fluent by tomorrow at this rate. My high school Spanish teacher would be proud.
Kurt learned that the janitor had worked from eight a.m. to five p.m. three days before and lunched at one o’clock, right after Nick took off. She worked alone during the day shifts to keep the hangar tidy; the custodians reserved deep cleaning for the nighttime, when they could work without disrupting business.
In Spanish, Kurt
asked, “So you pick up trash, clean spills, empty garbage? What else?”
She agreed and added that she kept bathrooms stocked and clean.
Kurt nodded. Gabriel and I took notes.
Next, Kurt described our plane and Nick. Had she seen them? She said yes, she had seen the plane, but not Nick. She liked the little plane with the blue stripes. She remembered the Stingray logo, a magnifying glass over a fish’s dead eye.
I shifted forward in my seat. She was the first person to mention the logo. An observant woman.
Kurt noticed, too, and spoke with more energy. “So if you didn’t see anyone that looked like Nick, did you see anyone else around the plane?”
She had. She saw the gas truck service it. This jived with the account from the truck driver. But before that, she’d seen another man working on it, one she didn’t recognize. He was a black man, and he had on the coveralls all the other workers wore, so she guessed he was new.
All the mechanics had sworn they had not touched the plane. Their manager had brought the service log for that day, and no one had recorded any work on RJ7041.
Gabriel broke in, his voice higher than before. “Are you sure? A man wearing our coveralls serviced the plane? In what way?”
She would not look at Gabriel, and her voice shook. Surprisingly, she started to speak some English. “Sí. He pour something in the tanks.”
Now she had us all quivering. Gabriel continued to take the lead, but switched to English, too. I bit my lip to keep from interrupting him. “Could you see what it was? Could you see the containers?”
“No. I was too far away.” She dropped her face. “Lo siento.”
Collective deflation.
So close. I sighed heavily. “It’s OK,” I said. “You’ve done well. Bueno. Did you see anything else? Anything not normal, anything different, strange?”
“I found something in the trash later, señora,” she said, speaking directly to me for the first time. “Maybe important, maybe not, but a little strange,” she added.
Just like that, we all quickened again. “Yes?” I urged her.
Finding Harmony (Katie & Annalise Book 3) Page 13
