by Marc Jedel
“Yes, it seems that way.” The officer gave an encouraging smile. “Did she have problems with any of the other skydivers or workers here?”
“You think someone did this to her?” Samantha frowned and narrowed her eyes angrily.
The police officer hurried to pacify her. “No, not necessarily. We want to conduct a careful investigation. By all reports, it sounds like it was a terribly unfortunate accident.” He winced before adding, “Skydiving is pretty risky.”
I found myself nodding in agreement before Samantha exploded, waving her arms as her eyes grew fiery. “It is not risky when you know what you’re doing. She’s done hundreds of jumps. She instructed new jumpers.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply—”
Samantha didn’t even notice he’d spoken. Her voice faltered as she dropped her arms in exhaustion. “Her main parachute and the reserve failed.” She paused, her face not yet frowning, but all the elements were gathering in case a frown was called upon.
“Yes, I heard.” The police officer continued in his calm yet direct tone. “How about before the flight? Do you remember anything unusual?”
“No way that happens …” Samantha was off in her own world. I recognized the signs, having traveled to my own planet on a regular basis.
The officer patiently tried again. “Did anything unusual happen before you went onboard?”
Samantha spoke as if to herself. “Her main chute was fine yesterday, and I know she repacked it herself because we did our chutes at the same time. And her reserve was recertified right before the competition.”
The police officer cocked his head. “We heard that the lines of her main parachute got twisted. Doesn’t that happen sometimes?”
Glaring at him and entirely unaware of his question, Samantha broke in, “You’ve gotta figure out what happened to Izzy.”
“Well, I’m trying to,” the officer retorted with a forced calm. “Can you tell me if anything unusual happened before you went up?”
Samantha refocused on him, looking as if she’d only now heard his question for the first time. “Well, it was a little hectic. The jumps were falling behind with more wind than expected affecting the drops. That happens sometimes.”
“Was anyone hanging around Ms. Martinez’s gear?”
“There were a ton of people milling around. Jumpers were piling up in the staging area. The staff moved in and asked all the later jumpers to take their gear away so the earlier jumpers could find our stuff faster and get into our planes.”
“So, you didn’t see anyone hovering around her gear?”
“No, not specifically. But with all the extra people, it took us a little while to find our gear. You know, like maybe someone moved it to make room.” She stopped again, her frown appearing.
“What?” asked the police officer, noticing her reaction.
“Well, it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes to screw with someone’s gear. That’s why the staging area is supposed to be secured. Ever since that guy in England almost killed his wife by fouling her chutes, competitions have become more security-conscious. A few minutes in the Porta Potty with a chute and you can snarl the main lines or cut some slinks.”
“What’s a slink?” I asked, the officer nodding in confused agreement.
Samantha looked startled that I’d interrupted, forgetting that I was still there. “Slink. Soft-link. It’s string that holds the risers to the suspension lines.” At our blank faces, she explained further, “They attach the harness to the lines of the parachute.”
String? I felt a little faint. String was all that attached the canopy to the parachute? My earlier conclusion held—skydivers were crazy.
Samantha looked at the police officer. “Someone could use a pocket knife to cut the slinks. Slinks never fail. I know I saw her yellow clips on her harness in the plane.” She paused to reconsider. “Well, I’m pretty sure I did. Let’s look at her chute to see if the clips are all still attached. And we should also check her reserve chute to see if the slinks are undamaged.” She lurched forward, but the police officer held up a hand.
“Hold on. I promise we’ll follow up on this, but I can’t let you near the evidence.”
“Why not? I know what I’m doing. I can surely tell if a yellow clip or a slink is there or not.” Samantha’s voice rose with indignation.
“I’m sure you can. All the evidence will be examined by independent experts, who aren’t a …” He trailed off awkwardly.
“Suspect? Are you out of your mind? How can you think I’m a suspect?” Samantha’s voice rose higher. “She was my friend. I … I …” She started sputtering.
I pulled her away before she did anything she’d regret. The officer gestured that we could leave. The Golden family had made quite the impression on the Hollister police today.
Even though the steam had stopped coming out of Samantha’s ears, she was still agitated when we got into her car. “They better figure out who did this.”
“Maybe it was an accident.” I didn’t add that I agreed with the officer that skydiving was crazy dangerous.
“Cuz, do you think I’m stupid?” Samantha snapped.
Her phone dinged from somewhere in the car, but she continued, “There’s no way both chutes fail for an experienced skydiver unless someone messed with them.”
“Never?”
“No!” she said in a strident voice. “We repacked our chutes in the packing tent together after yesterday’s jump. Izzy was always careful. And we both used the same pro to pack our reserve chutes. You don’t want anything to go wrong with that.” Her eyebrows knitted together. “This can’t have been an accident.”
I considered her words as her phone dinged again. I had felt the same way about Larry, and everyone thought I was crazy at first too. “Okay, I believe you. Who do you think might have wanted to kill her?”
Samantha sighed. “Everyone liked her.”
“I’ll tell you, I’m not sure about working for Sirius. It seems like a dangerous place.” I shuddered. “This is the second person from there who’s died this week. Did she know my friend Larry?”
She shrugged. “Izzy never mentioned him, but it’s not that big a company, right? So, she probably knew everyone.”
“Anyone give her problems at work?”
“Nah. She liked working there.” Samantha paused. “Well, all except for this young guy who thought he should run the place. Always saying bad things about her boss behind his back when he thought no one was around. She told me she’d called him on it last week and they got into an argument.” Her voice thickened. “Do you think that’s who did this?”
“Was his name Sean?”
“Maybe?” She shrugged again. “That could be it.” She pounded the steering wheel. “Oh, I don’t know, Marty.” A tear formed in her eye.
A third ding. She wiped her eye. “Are you going to check your dang phone?”
“It’s not mine.” Reflexively, I patted my pocket. “I thought it was yours.”
“Mine’s right here.” She pulled her phone from her pocket, then twisted around as she searched near her seat.
I checked around my seat as well, my hand landing on the smooth, metallic surface of a phone caught on the floor between my seat and the door. “Hey, here it is.” Using my fingers as tweezers, I pulled it up.
She grabbed it from me. “That must be Izzy’s phone. It must have fallen out when she got out of the car this morning.” She tapped to open it.
Does no one secure their phone?
“Ew.” She dropped the phone on her lap.
I picked it up to take a look. Someone … some man had sent her a picture of himself. More precisely, a close-up of a particular part of himself.
I flicked it away, trying not to touch even the part of the screen that had displayed the picture. I probably couldn’t catch a communicable disease from the phone’s display, but one could never be too careful. Another picture, from a different angle, appeared. I tossed the phone ba
ck to Samantha like a hot potato. “Yuck.”
“This must be that sexter Izzy told us about.” She tapped the screen to display the phone number. “Call him. Maybe he’ll answer when it’s not Izzy calling.”
My first reaction was to say, “You call him.” Given her current mood, though, I restrained myself and used my phone to call the number. No one answered. I waited a moment and tried again. After a few rings, a recording announced that the number was no longer in service.
“Not only is this guy gross, he’s also insensitive. It … it just happened.” Samantha choked up again.
The sexter couldn’t have known Izzy had just plummeted to her death, but this wasn’t the right moment to point that out to Samantha. I waited for her to regain control before commenting, “Yeah, an insensitive sexter. Who’d have ever expected that?”
Samantha gave a light snort. “Always with a joke.” She sighed. “Okay. Thanks. Distracting me helps. Let’s go home.” She started the car and pulled out of the parking lot.
12
Friday Late Morning
By midmorning, I was hard at work in my home office on some follow-up items from yesterday’s exec meeting at Rover. Izzy’s tragic death had given me bad dreams about Larry. Between that and my excitement over the outcome from yesterday’s meeting, I’d had a restless night and gotten out of bed earlier than normal.
In general, I tried to avoid becoming too insistent that everything remain in its proper spot. Too many engineers were labeled obsessive-compulsive, which I didn’t care for. We engineers just … liked everything in the right place. So, despite the early start this morning, things were back on track as I worked in my home office and a guest slept in my guest room. I stretched and nodded to myself in satisfaction.
I’d thrown on a comfortable Hawaiian shirt, not one of those cheap polyester types that people only selected for spur-of-the-moment decisions to buy a wacky design aimed at impressing their friends at the next party. Nowadays, everyone seemed to have a crazy Hawaiian shirt merged with a sports team’s logo or a bizarre hybrid animal. Amateurs. My shirts were all soft silk with the requisite palm tree, parrot, or pineapple. Professional.
The door to the guest room opened and Samantha stumbled out. Bleary-eyed, she stood leaning to one side as she regarded me in silence. Her hair looked like she’d fought with her pillow last night and lost. “Humph,” was her only comment as she padded off to the bathroom. Laney was the only true morning person in our family.
A while later, an assertive, “Cuz” startled me from my work. Samantha looked more awake, although her face appeared blotchy from tears. “We need to do something about Izzy.”
“Sure.” I shifted into problem-solving mode. “Does she have any family? I saw an ad for a funeral home we can call—”
“No. I mean we need to do something.” Her emphasis on “do” didn’t sound like she intended to visit funeral homes today.
I shrugged and spread out my hands. “What do you want to do?”
“Cuz, I thought you were some bigwig advisor to the San Jose detectives, like Sherlock Holmes? Practically an independent investigator. Didn’t you go on and on last month about your police award ceremony? I thought you were empowered?” Samantha’s technique of emphasizing certain words stung. She uncrossed her arms and moved them to her hips. The slight coloring of my cheeks must have made her suspicious.
I couldn’t meet her intense stare, because I had exaggerated my status with the police. “Independent investigator” might have been a slight embellishment of reality. And my award ceremony might have been more accurately described as a hearty handshake from Mace’s captain. Mace had shaken my hand as well, if that counted. Although the handshake had felt truly momentous to me back then, it now seemed a bit lackluster under this morning’s interrogation.
“So … you want to go to the cops?” I hedged, not sure if I had deduced her wishes correctly.
Samantha stuck her tongue out and blew a raspberry to show her disgust. “Cuz, I’m from Boston. Only wusses go to the cops. If you want something done, you do it yourself. I want to find the scumbag who killed Izzy and …” Her hands twisted an invisible someone’s neck.
“Do you have any idea who did it?” My extensive detective training had helped me zoom in on the critical missing component of her plan.
“Pfft.” Samantha gave a contemptuous roll of her eyes. “If I did, there’d be a real neck between these hands.” Already, Samantha’s short time with Skye had proven eye rolling to be infectious.
Pushing back on my keyboard tray, I took an extra-long moment to creak to my feet, trying to buy a few seconds to come up with an alternative plan. “You know, Izzy said she wrote everything down in that notebook of hers. Maybe we can go to her apartment and see if there’s anything unusual in it.” Plus, this would let me look for anything that Sean Peters might have told her about Larry. Nothing like killing two birds with one stone. I ignored the momentary flash of guilt at my own bad taste in idioms.
She latched onto my idea with alacrity. “That’s brilliant.”
I preened.
“But she said it’s at her office, not her apartment. We’ll get it from there.” She turned, missing my mouth falling open. “I gotta get some coffee if I’m going to function. Show me where your coffee is. I couldn’t find it yesterday.” She was halfway to the kitchen before I could recover.
I had to tell her we couldn’t waltz into Sirius Innovation’s offices without an invitation. This wasn’t like her psychology office, where each therapist met with their clients behind closed doors. Also, I feared that informing Samantha I didn’t have any coffee because I didn’t drink the stuff would yield an even harsher reaction.
I was right.
“No coffee?” Shock mingled with dismay in Samantha’s voice. “What kind of human being are you? Are you sure we’re related?”
“I like tea,” I mumbled. Coffee had too many options and was too complicated to order. And it tasted, well, like coffee.
“Tea’s fine for the Brits or for people who read cozy mysteries, but I need coffee if we’re going on this recovery mission.”
My explanation that our recovery mission wouldn’t be the slam dunk she expected went over as poorly as I had anticipated.
She growled at me. “This isn’t some Mission Impossible movie. You’re the smart one in the family, can’t you come up with a plan?” With her PhD and several other advanced degrees in the family, her flattery was a blatant attempt to manipulate me.
It worked. She had a doctorate in psychology, after all, while I had a bachelor’s in engineering. Really, there was no comparison. Whether by teasing or provoking a response, she’d always been able to get me to do something I shouldn’t have done.
This time, her movie reference inspired me. I looked out the window, trying to ignore the autumn leaves dropping in the light breeze, while I pondered how our strike team would penetrate Sirius’ heavily guarded offices. In quick succession, I considered and discarded several possibilities, in large part because we didn’t have a Star Trek transporter or a super-quiet spy helicopter and rappelling gear. Also, I was scared of heights, so that last idea was definitely out even if it had made an awesome movie. Although I had already figured out a simple way for us to get into the building, I still had fun brainstorming more ridiculous approaches and making Samantha believe this was hard work.
“Okay. I have an idea that might work.” I double-checked to make sure it didn’t involve any heights. With an impish smile, I decided to push my luck. “But I can’t tell you more without compromising the mission’s integrity. It’s strictly on a need-to-know basis.” If we were going to do this, at least I wanted to reenact some of my favorite heist/thriller movies.
“Okay.” Samantha stuck her head in the refrigerator. “Got any chow?”
I rocked back in surprise. “You’re … you’re not even going to ask?”
“Nope.” But a snort echoed from inside the refrigerator, ruining her atte
mpt to ignore me.
Somewhat mollified, I headed back to my home office. “I need to finish a few follow-up things from yesterday’s meeting first.” I also had to prepare something crucial for today’s mission. “Let’s get an early lunch and head over.”
*****
Samantha insisted on going to Starbucks for coffee, and since they also had some salads sitting in the refrigerator next to the cash register, we ate lunch there too, as she used some crazy excuse of saving time. But salad isn’t lunch.
I didn’t admit to her that arriving at Sirius during the lunch hour was a smart idea. With any luck, people would have left the area near Izzy’s office to eat, and hopefully none of her neighbors ate at their desk. People who ate at their desks always seemed to bring their smelliest leftovers, burnt them in the microwave, and then stunk up the whole floor for the rest of the afternoon.
We were sitting at our table in Starbucks, finishing our so-called lunch, when a hand slapped me on the shoulder.
“John, dude! How’s it hanging?” Brody, my friend, barista, and, most recently, kayaking partner stood beside our table with a broad smile on his tanned face. His orange-tipped hair still glistened from his morning surf, or maybe some hair product. His name tag had a smiley face drawn under his name that was a different color from the one he wore when I saw him last week. Paying attention to details was an occupational habit of a good engineer.
“Hey, Brody. We should go kayaking again soon. This time I want to try surfing the waves back to shore without tipping over.”
He laughed and slapped me on the back again. “Sure, man. I’m busy this weekend, but maybe next weekend?” Gesturing to Samantha, he asked, “Introduce me to your date?”
“No, man. Not a date. This is my cousin, Samantha. Samantha, Brody.” They shook hands.
“Nice to meetcha.” He gave Samantha a broad smile. “Okay, dude, I’ve got to clock in and get to work. I need a new board. It’s rad, man.” His hands waved as he waxed his pretend board.
