Cliff Hanger

by Mary Feliz

  “What was the extent of the smuggling operation?” My question was directed at Diego, but I didn’t give him a chance to answer before interrogating him further. “Did the sheriff say anything?”

  Renée glanced at Diego. She answered for him. “That’s another thing we were trying to figure out when you arrived. From what we can piece together, they were using the barn to store contraband they were bringing in from fishing boats with kayaks. They’d pack heroin in regular strawberry boxes and layer the boxes in when they loaded the trucks. One truck would be pure berries, while the other would have both strawberries and heroin. The ordinary truck would go directly to the distributor as usual, but the mixed-load truck made a stop at a storage facility operated by the gang. They’d offload the heroin quickly, and then drive the second truck to catch up with the first one at the distributor.”

  “Did authorities find the stored heroin?” I asked.

  Renée frowned and shook her head. “No. And without it, I’m not sure they have enough evidence. It would just be the kids’ word against the adult gang members.”

  After pretending I knew nothing about the midnight raid, I couldn’t figure out a way to smoothly tell Renée that we’d seen the two men from the beach transport packages from the kayak up the hill. That heroin had to be somewhere between the beach and the barn. There weren’t that many hiding places unless you counted gopher holes and scrub brush. Any decently-trained drug-sniffing dog could surely have found any contraband stashed along the trail. Was the fact that it was missing an indication that the authorities were holding information back from the public? Or that Diego and Renée were keeping information from us?

  David jumped in with a question before I could formulate another one of my own. “But wouldn’t the numbers be off? A full truck leaves the field, but after the heroin is separated from the berry boxes, a not-quite-full load is delivered to the distributor. However they pay, by the pound or the box or whatever, one truck was going to be lighter than the other. Unless they had a way of topping off the strawberry boxes?”

  Diego’s face reddened further, and he pressed his lips together. “You’re right. And I should have checked the receipts and the payments. But one of the supposedly ex-gang members with an accounting background volunteered to take care of all the paperwork for me, and I agreed, thinking I was finally getting the hang of delegating. No part of this situation reflects well on me.”

  Renée touched his shoulder again. “But you didn’t know. Do you think the district attorney will charge you? Do you need a lawyer? Maggie’s got a good one if you do.”

  Diego looked increasingly uncomfortable, as though he were scrambling for an excuse to be anywhere but here. “I can’t afford a lawyer. I’m barely scraping by as it is. But the sheriff seemed to think that if I gave the forensic accountants full access to all my records, and I told them everything I knew about who was involved, they’d go easy on me.” He shook his head. “Cooperating with the investigation will be a hardship, too, though. I’ll have to spend time away from the farm, and I’ll have to make do with fewer workers now that my ‘grant money’ has dried up.”

  Poor Diego looked miserable. I shifted the subject. “But how does this tie into Jake’s death? Surely all this smuggling activity didn’t play out during the day. And Jake’s ultralight had no lights, so he wouldn’t have been flying over at night.”

  Renée, idly stroking Belle’s ears, spoke up. “Are we sure that’s why he was killed? Maybe all this has nothing to do with what happened to Jake. It could all just be a coincidence.”

  David shook his head. “Coincidences are unicorns. Our friend Jason, the police chief, says his detectives are more likely to find connections between two seemingly unrelated occurrences than they are to discover a real-life coincidence.”

  “But the missing memory cards—” I began.

  “—could have been misplaced or turned in to the professor who was overseeing Jake’s research,” Max answered my question before I’d decided how I was going to finish the sentence.

  I was stumped. Who had killed Jake, and why? We might have been instrumental in busting up a drug ring, but we were no closer to solving our more immediate problem, which was how to resolve the suspicions swirling around David and Brian regarding Jake’s death. The best way to do that would be to discover who’d plotted to crash the ultralight. But how? I opened my mouth to ask the question aloud, but Max beat me to it.

  “I think this smuggling business has derailed us from our real problem—solving Jake’s death. But I have an idea about that. We need to go back and talk to Stephen and Rocket, and we need to do that as soon as possible.”

  Brian caught a ride back with Renée. I’d considered asking Renée to drive us all back to the resort. Muscles I hadn’t used in a long time had stiffened up as we’d stood talking. But she didn’t have enough room in her car for all of us, and before I could ask, my phone rang. I glanced at the display. It was Jen Amesti.

  “Maggie,” Jen said. “I just got off the phone with someone from Jake’s department who handles the paperwork for their grants. He says that Kevin Rivers, who owns the organic farm on the hill, wanted to fund research into fungus-resistant strawberries.”

  “That’s generous,” I said. “It would help his organic farming efforts but where would he get the money?”

  “That’s a good question,” Jen said. “But I don’t think it’s the right one. Kevin outlined some interesting conditions he wanted the university to meet before he’d hand over the funds.”

  I could hear the excitement in Jen’s voice.

  “Conditions?”

  “Rivers told the guy I talked to that he wouldn’t hand over the money unless the university promised to cancel Jake’s ultralight photography research project. Rivers told him that there had to be any number of other ways for Jake to obtain reliable research data and that the ultralight soaring over his farm was driving him bonkers and disrupting his farm workers. He said he’d do whatever it took to get that flying lawnmower out of the sky.”

  “So, Rivers might have been motivated to find other ways to stop Jake in case the grant ploy didn’t work,” I said.

  “Exactly,” said Jen.

  Chapter 27

  Stash your phone in a zip-lock bag at the beach to protect the screen and keep it safe from sand, salt, and moisture.

  From the Notebook of Maggie McDonald

  Simplicity Itself Organizing Services

  Sunday, June 23, Early afternoon

  On our walk back to the condo, Max outlined his plan to identify all the people who had access to the kinds of tools needed to damage a propeller. He’d narrowed the group down to those who might be able to conceal evidence so well that even the persnickety Jake had overlooked it. “It has to be someone from the airport maintenance facility.”

  David wasn’t so sure. “Farmers must have to mend mechanical equipment all the time,” he said. “They must have at least some sort of limited machining capability on site. You never see a tractor up on blocks at a service station.”

  Max rubbed his chin. “True, but did any of the farmers or the people who worked there also have access to Jake’s ultralight? How well did they know Jake? As much as Rivers apparently wanted to shut down Jake’s operation, I’m not sure they ever met one another. It’s hard to drum up the kind of loathing that leads to murder—especially for someone you’ve never met.”

  “But not so difficult, if that person was threatening your smuggling operation,” David said. “Maybe Kevin Rivers was more involved than the guys we caught last night let on.”

  “What do you think happened?” I asked. “Let’s look at the whole picture.”

  David stopped walking, chewed his lip, and then continued. “Rivers told the university he wanted Jake’s operation shut down because it was annoying. But we don’t know whether that was Rivers’ real motive. Look, no one is
going to walk into the research department and say, ‘I want to give you a grant in exchange for getting rid of this kid who flies over my fields every day and is about to uncover my smuggling ring.’ Right?”

  “Good point. But if Rivers thought he’d solved his problem by funding the grant, why go to the trouble of fiddling with Jake’s propeller blade?”

  David scoffed. “Who am I, the local constable? I don’t have all the answers.”

  “What if Rivers was afraid Jake had seen something and suspected the farm was a locus of illegal activity?” I asked. “What if he feared Jake would go to the cops or the sheriff? He could have planned to damage the propeller to delay Jake’s next flight until after his guys had cleared out the evidence.”

  “But then why work so hard to hide the damage?” David said. “Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose? If Jake couldn’t see the damage, there’d be no reason to delay his flight.”

  Max shifted the topic so dramatically that I wondered if he’d zoned out of the conversation while he formulated his own theory. “Does Jen have access to Jake’s research notes?” He must have spotted the confusion on my face because he quickly fleshed out his idea. “Would Jake have recorded the times and dates that he flew? What if Rivers took advantage of one of these overcast mornings to shift the drugs? He could have assumed the fog would keep Jake grounded and that the gloom would hide his own illegal activities. But an ultralight flies so close to the ground, Jake might be able to get away with operating in limited visibility conditions that would ground more traditional aircraft. Or suppose Jake was squeezing in a flight at twilight and Rivers started moving his packages too early? Could we cross-reference Jake’s logs, the weather reports, and sunset?”

  David frowned. “You mean conditions were such that Rivers assumed he was safe, moved the drugs, yet Jake spotted him? And Rivers wanted to silence him? You don’t need his research notes. All you’d need is the photographs. They’re all time- and date-stamped. They may be location-stamped too, unless Jake turned off that function.” David whooped and punched his fist in the air. “That’s got to be why the memory cards have gone missing.” He held up his palm and Max gave him a high five.

  “If we find the photographs, we’ll have our murderer,” I said. “But who had access? Jen? Dot and Bill Peterson?” And then I remembered. Jen had told me that Jake rented a rundown old house in the hills with a bunch of other guys. I knew how those households worked. I’d shared an aging Victorian once with six roommates as an impoverished young adult. If Jake’s shared living situation operated the way mine had, a wide circle of friends might have copies of the keys or know the secret to unlocking a backdoor without a key. As remote as the house was, the residents probably weren’t conscientious about locking up. Great. That meant our pool of suspects had widened to include everyone. I groaned and filled David and Max in on my thinking.

  Max put his arm around me. “Don’t lose heart. We’ll solve this. But I want to start by talking to the mechanics again. I want to get Rocket to nose around while I’m keeping the mechanics busy. How ‘bout we head to the airport bar for lunch, and you can have a chat with the servers in the restaurant while we’re there?”

  “Good idea,” I said. “Mace, the bartender I spoke to at the restaurant, said that he tends to let students take the more profitable weekend shifts. The younger people might be more clued-in to gossip about the other kids working at the airport like Jake and the mechanics.”

  Stephen, Rocket, and Munchkin came to the airport but drove separately in Stephen’s big black SUV. We’d settled at a table when Stephen joined us, saying that Rocket had gone to check out the mechanics shed and a few other behind-the-scenes operations. “If there’s anything shady going on here, Rocket will find it,” Stephen said, opening his menu.

  * * * *

  After downing one of the best burgers I’d ever eaten along with too many onion rings and a local artisanal brew, I felt more prepared for a nap than for serious sleuthing. The bar was too busy and short-staffed for me to grill any of the servers. The boys ordered dessert. I requested coffee. Stephen, Max, and Munchkin left to track down Rocket.

  Jen entered just as they were leaving. I waved her over to our table. She eyed my coffee and the death-by-chocolate tortes a server had placed in front of each of the boys. “Looks good,” she said and flagged down a waiter carrying an enormous load of plates he’d cleared from the table of more than a dozen elderly men.

  “What are you up to today?” I asked Jen after she’d been supplied with coffee and cake. “Any luck tracking down the memory cards?”

  Before she could answer, David launched into an explanation of our theory that the time and date stamps on the photos could be incriminating, even if Jake hadn’t deliberately documented aspects of the drug scheme.

  Jen frowned. “I’ve looked everywhere and alerted all his friends, and his parents. I was careful at first, telling everyone that I was looking for his camera and stray memory cards because I wanted some photos I’d taken of him.” She looked down at her plate and twirled her fork as though she was toying with spaghetti instead of a slab of dark chocolate cake. Her face revealed the mixture of pain and love that the bittersweet memory had conjured. “That story was true. There are some great photos of Jake and me, and I’d hate to think I’ve lost them.”

  “But no luck so far?” I asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Any other leads?”

  Before I could stop him, Brian updated Jen on Max’s theory that the chief culprit in Jake’s death had to have had access to the maintenance shed. Until we were sure, I’d hoped to protect Jen from the pain of learning that one of Jake’s friends and co-workers had likely been responsible for his death.

  Jen scooted her chair back, with her arms stiffly extended in front of her. “That can’t be,” she said. “The airport mechanics were Jake’s friends. He’d known them forever. I mean, they were always kidding around, telling me that they were going to knock off Jake so they could have me to themselves, but they were joking. You know, the way guys do when they really care for one another. There’re no secrets there, I’m sure of it.”

  “But who else could have had access to both Jake’s ultralight and the materials required to damage the propeller?” David asked.

  Jen’s face telegraphed confusion, so Brian updated her on what Max had learned from Howard, the materials scientist—that the propeller blade had been weakened and then disguised to look freshly refurbished.

  Jen thought for a moment. “But whoever did that didn’t need access to the whole ultralight,” she said. “Didn’t they tell you? The guys in the shop? Jake had a friend, an old guy, who took care of his propellers for him. Jake had two used ones, and he was meticulous about checking them over. He’d take one in for Mr. Mason to work on in his machine shop in town while Jake operated the plane with the other one. Jake often landed in fields or empty lots, where there was loose gravel that could be kicked up and nick the blades, so he was always checking them.” She scooted her chair back in, confident in her assessment of the situation. “I doubt very much anyone could damage those propellers without Jake finding out. He was too careful.”

  Jen was still fragile. Still grieving. I didn’t want to push too hard against her assessment of the situation. But David wasn’t nearly so gentle. He pulled out his cell phone and swiped through the photos until he located Howard’s images documenting the damaged blade and showed them to Jen. Her face blanched. She gasped and touched the screen. “The only person Jake might have trusted enough with his propellers to risk giving them a cursory look was Mr. Mason. But it can’t be him. Why would he want to hurt Jake? Mr. Mason has been friends with the Petersons for decades.”

  “Does this Mr. Mason have a commercial location?” I asked. “Or is this a side business he operates out of his home or garage? Is he nearby?”

  Jen tilted her head and wrinkled her nose. “I c
an’t remember the address. I could give you directions.” She tapped and swiped at the screen of her phone, then shook her head. “The guys in the maintenance shed will have Mr. Mason’s card, I’m sure. That whole three-block section of Freedom Boulevard is full of auto repair and sheet metal operations, one right after the other. I can’t remember the name of Mr. Mason’s shop. It’s been in the family for generations and still has the original name.”

  I paid the bill, left a generous tip, and we trooped over to the hangar, looking for Rocket, Stephen, and Max. Several machines were competing for the loudest ear-splitting noise generator award. Our arrival went unnoticed in the din. Max, wearing ear and eye protection and a leather apron, was hunched over one machine that whirred and clunked and spit out sparks. When the machine stopped, he held up the gleaming metal device he’d been polishing and handed it to one of the mechanics for inspection. A tattooed man, still young enough to be struggling with acne, clapped Max on the back and yelled what I thought was good job, though it was difficult to hear. Max looked up and waved.

  Jen, who had apparently been a frequent visitor to the shop, stopped behind a yellow line painted on the floor that I assumed was a kind of safety barrier. “Hey Joe,” she said waving to an older man doing paperwork. “That’s Joe Fowler,” she whispered to me. “The manager.”

  Joe smiled, closed the book he was writing in, tucked it into the desk, locked the drawer, and then strode over to greet Jen with a hug. “How ya holdin’ up?” he asked her. Munchkin padded after him. Apparently Joe had been charged with keeping the big dog out of trouble and away from the machines.

  Jen shrugged and changed the subject. “I’d like you to meet Maggie and David.” She lifted her chin in the direction of the door. “Brian’s the one leaning against the door on his crutches. They’re that guy’s family.” She pointed to Max.