“Wait on those for a minute,” she suggested. “Since I don’t understand yet what I’m supposed to see.” She saw the look of impatience flash across the man’s face. “Let’s step outside and you can tell me what happened here, Mr. Turner.” Until she had heard the full story, she was loath to have an audience tromp around the inside of the hangar, planting size 12’s over any evidence that might remain. Enough of that had happened already.
The big man turned his back on the plane and followed the sheriff and Estelle outside.
“Look,” Turner said, holding out both hands in exasperation, “Bobby here called me and said that he wanted to check out my plane. I don’t know why, and he sure as hell didn’t say why. So I come out and open up, and you’re probably going to think I’m nuts, but sure as I’m standing here, someone has used that airplane.” The outburst subsided for a moment. “And yes…by that I mean they used it. There’s damn near eleven hours on the Hobbs that aren’t mine-I can sure as hell tell you that. Now I need to know what the hell is going on.”
“How did you happen to notice all this?” Estelle asked.
“All you got to do is look,” Turner snapped. “I don’t go drivin’ her around in the dirt.”
“In the dirt?”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Turner barked. “Yes, the goddamned dirt. You want to see?”
“In a minute.”
Bob Torrez had said nothing, but stood bemused, hands in his back pockets, regarding the interesting surface of the tarmac. “Excuse me, will you? Give us just a minute.” She left Turner fuming and with a hand on Torrez’s elbow led him a few yards away, toward the corner of the hangar. A light breeze from the west whispered around the building.
“You think this is it?” she asked, keeping her voice low.
“Could be,” Torrez said. “Measurements fit. Our tire cast is for shit, but this one’s got rubber that’s consistent. That’s the best we’re going to get. Wheel base is right on the money. Lemme show you something.” At the same time, another set of headlights pulled onto the airport apron, and when it passed under the first sodium vapor light by the fuel pumps, Estelle saw that it was Tom Mears.
“Let’s wait for him,” Torrez said. He motioned for Mears to park beside his own vehicle. “Truck smells like perfume,” he added. “You didn’t bring her majesty along?”
“She’s at the concert,” Estelle replied. “How did you stumble on this?”
Torrez flicked his flashlight beam toward the corner of the hangar. “I’ll show you.” When Mears joined them, he nodded at Turner, who had retreated to his BMW, where he leaned on the front fender, arms crossed over his chest, in conversation with Jim Bergin. “Stick with him,” the sheriff said to Mears. “There’s some things we don’t know yet.”
He motioned with the flashlight. “Jimbo? Come on back with us. Step kinda careful.”
Saltbrush, koshia, ragweed, and a host of other opportunistic weeds surrounded the hangar, a crackly dry barrier just beginning to green up after the rare May precipitation. Estelle followed the sheriff closely, stepping in his footprints. He led them around the building to a point about a third of the way along the back wall, stepping carefully and avoiding open patches of ground that might yield shoe prints. He stopped like a proud guide about to expound on the next attraction on the tour. “Check this out,” he said. Before she pressed forward, Estelle played the light carefully under the base of the creosote bush that grew tight against the hangar’s back wall. Seeing no short-tempered reptiles coiled in the shadows, she pushed the bush to one side and stepped closer.
Torrez waited until she had regained her balance and then pointed at the wall. A football-sized rock had been rolled against the bottom of the corrugated siding in an attempt to hold in place one of the steel panels whose bottom and a portion of the side seam had been pried loose. Elsewhere, rusted pop-rivets secured the siding where it wasn’t spot-welded to the hangar’s steel skeleton. Running diagonally downward from above the loose seam was a subtle disruption in the sheet metal’s surface, the sort of mark left by gently folding the metal back without creasing it.
“Move the rock and you got a six-foot-high section that can fold back out of the way,” Torrez said. “I would bet far enough to slip through.”
“I’ll be goddamned,” Bergin muttered. He reached out a hand, but Estelle caught him gently by the forearm. He jerked back as if stung. “Somebody sure as hell has been busy,” he said.
Without touching either rock or hangar, Estelle examined the sheet metal closely for a moment. The evidence of a fold in the metal extended all the way down to the foundation. And once folded, the steel panel would never close back against the stud properly. At midpoint, it gaped more than an inch. When folded back, the panel formed a clever entry, but one for a pint-sized intruder. Someone as burly as Jerry Turner would have created a far larger doorway than this, where the rough edges of the metal would grab and tear at fabric or skin.
She pivoted and surveyed the jumble of scrub behind the hangar, looking out toward the roadway. Twenty yards of open space separated the row of hangars from the dilapidated chain-link boundary fence. Unless the intruder stood up and waved his arms, he would blend with the shadows and scrubby vegetation, impossible to see. At night, a simple crouch would make him invisible.
During their patrols, sheriff’s deputies routinely swung into the airport. Sometimes it was for a quick cup of coffee with Jim Bergin, sometimes just to check for vagrants or unlocked hangars. If the security gate was open-as it always was if airport manager Jim Bergin was working or if one of the aircraft owners was on the premises-the officers would drive onto the tarmac. If the gate was closed, deputies turned around in the parking lot, using the vehicle’s spotlight to inspect each of the buildings and the gate.
Despite the fence, with its three loose strands of barbed wire atop six feet of chain-link, the airport was not a secure area. Each aircraft owner had a key to the main gate, as did the county manager’s office and the sheriff’s department.
The gate was left open as often as not. Estelle had found it so a dozen times herself. In addition, the security fence did not extend the length of the taxiway, but marked only the perimeter of the outer parking lot. If the facility was locked, anyone wanting access had only to trot west a hundred feet and slip through the four-foot-high barbed-wire property fence.
Estelle turned back and looked at Bergin. “This isn’t something that Mr. Turner had told you about before?”
Bergin scoffed. “Hell, no. If this was flappin’ in the wind, he’d likely say something. But who’s going to notice?”
“This isn’t a setup for a one-time thing, though,” Torrez said. “Someone made themselves a door. Pretty clever.”
Estelle examined the undisturbed rivets beside the suspect panel, comparing them with the bright-rimmed holes left when the metal was pried loose. “Planning ahead, it looks like,” she said. “Interesting, interesting.” She stepped back and looked at the rock-strewn gravel that passed for prairie soil. “The only way we’re going to find tracks that amount to anything is to pour some plaster and hope they come back and step in it tonight.”
Bergin chuckled. “Now that’s a thought. I wondered how you guys did that.”
“How’d you happen to notice this?” she asked Torrez, and the sheriff just shrugged.
“Drivin’ in. Spotlight picks it up.”
“I wouldn’t have noticed it in a thousand years,” Bergin said.
“And you say Turner wouldn’t have seen it, either, at least under normal circumstances. How often does he use this airplane?”
Bergin’s left eyebrow drifted up. “Not nearly enough. But that’s true of most hobby flyers.”
“Once a week? Once a month?”