“So the living version of Debbie, the jumper, is not the original, not the one who left Portland on that flight, and the one we have in the cooler is.”
“Okay. And Mr. Gonzales said someone had swiped and switched his wife,” Bohannon said, flipping a turn signal. “So the version we have in the morgue is probably the wife he knows.”
“Exactly. It seems likely all of the dead bodies are the originals and the ones who are running around out there are copies. We should probably continue down the list of passengers to see if we can confirm that somehow,” Suter said. “Again a quarter of them aren’t even from the Portland area. If we need to, we can make discrete arrangements to have the out-of-towners interviewed, but I’d rather not involve more people in the investigation. The more people involved, the more complicated this will get.”
“You are not going to keep the news of a building-scaling woman or an egg-laying, acid-spitting man quiet for long,” Bohannon said. “And worse, imagine what happens to us if they ever get connected to their cadaver clones back in the hangar.”
“It’s not going to be as hard as you think. We know how these people are connected—the flight that crashed last week. That’s a pretty tenuous connection, and who’s going to connect Newsome’s physical abnormalities to being a passenger on a certain flight on a certain day?”
“You’re just going to let these clones, or whatever they are, run around doing God-knows-what, content that no one will connect them to your crash investigation?”
“Of course not. First, not all of the passengers appear strange. Second, my point was, we can keep the investigation quiet even if some of the passengers draw attention to themselves. It is unlikely anyone will connect them to the flight. That will give us the most latitude to find out what is going on.”
“How do you know some of the passengers aren’t strange?”
“Pirelli let me borrow a vehicle the other night, and I checked a couple out on my own. Just a little surveillance. I didn’t talk to them. I don’t think all of them are as off-the-wall as the ones we’ve met. I could be wrong, but I suspect that is the case, or we would probably be seeing some of them on the news.”
“I don’t think keeping this under wraps is the way to go,” he said.
“Okay, let’s call a press conference tomorrow. What are you going to say that isn’t going to land you in a psychiatric ward? We’ve got cadavers and clones? A mind reader, a gravity-defying housewife and one dude a-layin’? That’s your plan?”
“I don’t know.”
“Look, our job is to work the case. Holding press conferences is not our call anyway. Move on.”
“Okay. Okay. I’m moving on.” Bohannon pulled into a sandwich shop. “First off, I would not assume the one body we don’t have washed away in the river.” After parking, he turned off the car and did not move to get out.
“Why is that?”
“Because if someone caused this to happen and they were on the flight, wouldn’t they make sure they were not affected? Thus your missing body. Might have swept away in the current, but I don’t think we should assume it, especially in light of recent events.”
“Possible. So we figure out who is missing from the morgue and go talk to him.”
“Her,” Bohannon corrected. “The missing body belongs to someone named Mara Lantern.”
CHAPTER 19
MARA GROANED AND smacked the uncooperative roller drum of Mrs. Dalton’s ditto printer with a purple-stained palm. It slipped cleanly into its brackets and rotated freely a few degrees, then stopped. She grabbed the crank, and it turned easily.
“Yes!” She pumped a fist into the air, grabbed a rag hanging on a hook behind the wooden counter and wiped her hands. She rummaged around in the shelves below the counter and found the supplies Mrs. Dalton had left behind. Setting them on the edge of the counter next to the printer, she opened the stationery box and removed one of the spirit master sheets. She grabbed a pen, drew a smiley face on the blank master and tore away the purple-inked backing. Flipping over the white master, she held up a reversed image of her drawing.
She turned the crank handle until she saw the lip, lifted it with a fingernail to slip the edge of the master sheet underneath and rolled the drum until the sheet wrapped all the way around. Grabbing the bottle of duplicator fluid, she opened the lid and was about to lift it to her nose when a powerful astringent aroma wafted up. She jerked her hand back, decided against a sniff. She poured the liquid into the printer’s reservoir.
The bell over the shop’s front door jingled.
Ping walked in, wearing a white apron over matching pants and a T-shirt. He looked like a Chinese Pillsbury Doughboy.
“Good afternoon, Mara.” He smiled and waved a chef’s hat that, judging from the unruly strands of gray and black hair sticking up around his bald crown, he had just removed.
“Hi, Mr. Ping. Problem with the power again?”
“Forget about the circuit breakers, Mara. That’s old news,” he said, munching on a blueberry muffin. “What are you working on there?”
Mara loaded some paper into the feeder tray and cranked the machine several times. It scooped up a sheet with each crank and spat it out on the other side of the drum into a flat receiving tray.
“It’s not working,” she said, holding up a sheet with a barely discernible purple smiley face on it. “Maybe there’s some kind of setting on here I need to adjust.”
“Dittos? You’re kidding,” Ping said. “Just give it a few more cranks. It’ll start printing, I bet.”
Mara cranked it a dozen more times and then the machine spat out a clearly printed purple smiley face. Ping grabbed it, held it to his face and inhaled. He sighed.
“What are you doing, trying to get high? It says online that stuff is toxic.”
“Toxic. Everything’s toxic nowadays. Don’t you love the smell? It reminds me of being in school when I was a kid. Can I keep this?”
“Knock yourself out. You want some more? I can make up to five hundred without reloading.”
“No, one is enough.”
“What’s up? I’m assuming you didn’t come over here to catch a buzz from sniffing my smiley faces.”
“Actually I have two jobs for you.”
Mara frowned. “I told you guys I’m not interested in your blue ball of light or any of that other hinky stuff from our last conversation,” she said, pointing a screwdriver for emphasis.
“No problem. Sam and I ran up to Seattle yesterday to a restaurant surplus supply warehouse and bought some equipment, which they already dropped off this morning. Unfortunately the mixer they delivered emits a burning smell when it is running. I hoped you would have time to look at it. I’ll pay your going rate.”
“Why don’t you bring it over, and I’ll take a look,” she said, continuing to work on the old printing device, tightening some screws on the paper-feeding platform.
“That would be a little inconvenient. It is an industrial floor mixer. It probably weighs as much as a small car.”
“Oh, sorry. Of course. I’ll come over in about an hour. I’ve got to finish this and work on a projector, then I’ll be good to go.”
“Excellent. It is much appreciated.”
“What was the other thing you wanted me to do?”
“Other thing?”
“You said you had two jobs for me.”
“Oh, right. I have some coffee samples for you to try out.”
“Perfect timing. I’ll be ready for my afternoon pick-me-up.”
*
Ping’s ceramic store was gone. Crews had cut huge holes from the exterior walls of the building, framed them with aluminum and mounted sheets of glass over the entire front and sides of the establishment. Inside, all the walls had been removed and the old retail shelves were gone. Carpenters pounded away walling off the kitchen in the back from the customer area where new counters and lit display cases had already been installed. The space already looked more like a bakery than the retail
ceramic-tile-and-fixtures business it had been.
Sam, wearing a blue Woody Woodpecker T-shirt, looked up from a counter and waved. “Hey, Mara. Ping is in the back. Just go through there.” He pointed toward a wide opening in the wall behind the counters.
Mara nodded at the inside of his forearm, to an illustration of a serpent wrapped around a staff. “I didn’t notice that before. Aren’t you kind of young to have a tattoo?”
“My mother didn’t think so. She had it done when I was born.” Sam lowered his arm and held it to his side, hiding the drawing. His face turned pink, and the sprinkle of freckles on his cheeks darkened.
“I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I wasn’t being critical. I like tattoos if they are well done. That one looks very artistic, well rendered.”
“Thanks.” Sam looked away.
Mara placed her tool kit on the floor next to a counter. “What have you been up to over here?” She looked around the room.
“Oh, man, all kinds of stuff,” he said. “You see that light fixture there?” He looked up to a flat white saucer at the end of a chrome tether. “I installed that.”
Sam took her on a quick tour of the new bakery, detailing where all the counters, fixtures and tables were to be placed. He paused several times to talk more about the projects he had completed himself.
Mara smiled and nodded appropriately. After the quick tour, he returned to work, and she walked into the back to find Ping wiping out newly installed metal cabinets. She smelled coffee, dramatically raised her nose to the air and smiled. “That smells wonderful.”
“Help yourself,” he said as Mara crossed the room to a counter holding a bank of four coffee brewers and six pump carafes next to a tray of cups, lids and condiments. “There are four brands for you to try. I’m sure you are familiar with most of them, but I thought a taste test would be fun.”
She walked over and fixed a cup. “Where is this mixer that is too big to move?”
Ping pointed to another corner.
The mixer stood nearly as tall as Mara and featured a red Hobart label screwed onto the rounded gray housing hanging over a huge metal mixing bowl. Her eyes widened. “That is a big mixer. I see why you wanted a house call.”
“Have you ever worked on one before?”
“No, but a motor is a motor. Let me drink some courage here, and we’ll see what we can do to tame that beast.”
*
After spreading the bowl, beaters, casing, plates and assorted other parts across the floor, Mara examined the inner workings of the mixer. She confirmed the appliance gave off a burning smell when powered up. It might just be grit or dust in the mechanism that would burn off after one or two uses, or it could need a new coil.
“Does it bother you if people talk to you while you work?” Ping asked while she eyeballed some of the appendages extending from the motor.
“Depends on what they are talking about, I suppose.” She didn’t look at him.
“Have you always had an aptitude for mechanics and technology?”
“As long as I can remember, I always loved taking things apart and fixing them.”
“So is your interest in seeing how they work or in repairing them?”
“What’s the difference?”
“One is about curiosity, how things work. The other is about satisfaction, making broken things work again. Which is it?”
“I suppose I’d go with the second option. I generally don’t take things apart that work simply to figure them out. I like the challenge of fixing things. Figuring out how they operate is usually not that much of a challenge. I have a knack for that. Making something work again after it’s been damaged, that’s the challenge.”
“So you’re a mechanical healer of sorts.”
“That’s an overly romanticized way of putting it, I guess.” Mara stopped working for a second and rested her arm on top of the mixer. “If something is broken, I fix it. It’s what I do. I’m not sure there is more to it than that.”
“Oh, I suspect there’s great deal more to it than that,” Ping said, smiling. “Tell me, do you have an aptitude for mathematics?”
“I never struggled with it in school, but it didn’t interest me particularly. Why?”
“What about music? Do you play an instrument? Any talent there?”
“No. Again I never had an interest. The odd thing is I learned to read music very quickly. I had a friend who played the clarinet, and she taught me in a couple minutes.” Mara pushed herself up from leaning on the mixer. “I can still read it and hear the tune in my head. Weird, huh? Again, why do you ask? I feel like I’m being assessed.”
“I was trying to get to know you better. Mechanical abilities are not that far removed from mathematical or musical abilities. Although I have to admit, your talents are more practical than the typical mathematician or musician, not to say those don’t have their practical applications occasionally.”
Mara raised an eyebrow at him. “Anyway, you need a new coil. I can order it for you and let you know when it can be installed.”
“What do you—”
A crash of glass reverberated throughout the empty shop. Mara and Ping ran to the front. Sam stood red faced on a ladder. The top of one of the glass display cases was shattered.
“Oh, man, I am sorry,” he said. “One of the construction guys left a hammer up here on the ledge. I climbed up to get it and dropped it.”
“Are you all right?” Ping asked.
“Yes, but—”
“Don’t worry about it. We can get a new plate of glass cut for the case. No big deal,” he said.
“He is a one-man wrecking crew, isn’t he?” Mara asked, smiling.
“He’s just at that age where his arms and legs have more length than coordination,” Ping said.
“Hello, I’m standing right here,” Sam said, climbing down the ladder.
Pushing open the glass front door with his forearms, Bruce stepped into the bakery holding up black-smeared hands in front of a green T-shirt bearing a bicycle and the caption Sit on Your Butt and Do Something.
“Wow. You have really ripped this place apart.” He smiled at Ping, then turned to Mara. “A couple cops are next door asking for you.”
CHAPTER 20
THE PHONE RANG as Mara squeezed past the two men in suits milling around the shop. Once she stood behind the counter, she faced them, held up a finger and picked up the black handset. The older of the two investigators, the one with the military haircut and the dead eyes, looked put out. He stared at Mara, furrowing his brow. His lips were pressed together, and his square jaw jutted. She confirmed to Mrs. Dalton that her mimeograph and projector would be ready by Friday noon and hung up.
“Ms. Lantern, I’m Ethan Suter with the FBI, and this is Detective Daniel Bohannon with the Portland Police Department.” He tilted his head toward the burly sandy-headed man next to him. “We are working with the NTSB to investigate the accident on Flight 559 last week.”
“Okay. What can I do for you?” she said.
“We’re interviewing some of the passengers to see if we can determine the cause of the accident. We’d like to ask you a few questions about the flight and what you remember.”
“I’m not sure how much help I would be but ask away.”
“Do you remember seeing anything unusual as the plane departed and took off?”
“Unusual how?”
“Anyone acting strangely? Any events occur that were out of the ordinary? Anything odd at all?”
“Not that I recall. I settled in for a nap as soon as I sat down. I didn’t see anything leading up to the crash.”
“You’re saying you slept through the whole thing?”
“Pretty much.”
“Ms. Lantern, from what we understand talking to other passengers, there was a period of pandemonium in the cabin prior to the crash. You don’t recall any of that?”
“I don’t. I took a nap, and then I woke up in the hospital with a head injury. If I woke u
p before that, I don’t remember it.”
“So you don’t remember seeing any lights in the cabin? People panicking?” Suter asked. Mara shook her head. “Did you see a red-headed boy running in the aisle or anything like that?”
“Absolutely not.”
The bell above the front door jangled, and Sam stepped in, holding Mara’s coffee she had left at Ping’s place. “I thought you might want this,” he said, walking over to the counter.
The two investigators glared at him.
He set the coffee down and backed away. “Sorry for the interruption.”
“What’s your name, young man?” Suter asked.
He hesitated for a second and then said, “Sam.”
“What’s your last name, Sam?”
“Lantern.”
Mara’s heart skipped a beat.
“You’re her brother?”
“Yes.”
“Were you on the flight to San Francisco with Mara last week?”
Mara held her breath.
“No, I was not on the flight to San Francisco,” Sam said.
She let the breath go.
“Are you sure? We have witnesses who said they saw someone who looks like you running on the plane.”
“I’m positive.”
“You can check the list of passengers. Sam was not on the flight with me,” Mara said.
“Can I go now?” Sam asked.
Suter nodded, and Sam bolted for the door.
The FBI man turned back to Mara. “Do you recall how you got your head injury?”
“No. It must have happened during the accident, but I don’t remember it.” She bent down, lifted a mounted magnifying glass out of the cabinet beneath the counter, and placed it in front of her. “Pardon me, I promised to have this done today. But continue, I’m listening.”
“We have a witness who says she saw a young lady matching your description in the back of the plane before the explosion,” Suter said, trying unsuccessfully to lock eyes with her.
“I don’t see how that’s possible unless I was sleepwalking. I guess I could have gotten up to go to the restroom and don’t remember. One second, I’ll be right back.”
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