The airport manager sniffed it carefully and looked dubious. “I don’t know.” He held it up, holding a flashlight off to one side. “Auto gas is red, avgas is blue. Maybe this is a mix. Who the hell can tell in this light?”
“But it could be,” Estelle prompted.
“It could be.” He walked to the engine cowling and stooped down, drawing another sample. “If she was running on avgas when she was parked, and then the wing tanks were filled with auto gas, we might be able to tell-maybe.” He shot a skeptical glance at Estelle. “If our lab was good enough.” He eyed the engine fuel sample, then flipped it out on the concrete floor.
“These are ladder marks?” Estelle asked, playing her flashlight on the floor where scuff marks were obvious.
“Most likely,” Turner said. “But I clean off the top of that wing, and I check the filler caps every time I fly. Them could all be mine.”
“Huh.” She stood back and regarded the airplane. “Eleven hours, you say?”
“Damn close.”
“Is maintenance on the aircraft done here, Mr. Turner?”
“You bet. Jimbo here does it all for me.”
“Then chances are good that I’ll want to see your logs, and the maintenance records. We want to nail down exactly when you last flew, when Jim last worked on the aircraft…simple things like that to give us a window of opportunity.”
“Okay. We can do that. All that’s in the airplane. And after all this, I’m going to have Jimbo go over this old crate with a finetoothed comb after you’re through with her. Make sure someone hasn’t monkeyed with anything. Hell of a note.”
“The hangar door is always locked?” Estelle asked.
“Yep. I go in the side door there, which is dead-bolted. We can only access the main door from inside. It’s got that big slide bolt.”
“Go ahead and open that.”
She watched as Turner pushed the massive door to one side. It rolled easily on well-greased wheels. She beckoned to Bob Torrez, who broke off his conversation with the State Police lieutenant.
“Bobby, I don’t think we’re going to find much on the floor, but it’s worth a try. We could use those portable lights.” She held up both hands, framing the airplane. “If we set them up off to the left there, we can get a good angle. If there are any interesting shoe prints on the floor, they might show up better.”
“God, I hate to put you to all this trouble,” Turner said. “It’s not like we found a corpse or anything inside the plane, after all.”
“No trouble, sir.” She smiled at him. “And you never know what we’ll find. I’m going on the assumption that you’re correct about someone using your plane. There’s no reason why you would be wrong about something like that. If someone used it, that means they had a way to gain access without breaking down the door. They took it, flew somewhere, landed, and then returned, and tucked the plane back in its hangar here, with no one the wiser.”
“Remember those three teenagers who stole a plane down in Houston, was it?” Turner said. “Someplace like that, several years ago. One of them was a student pilot, and he took his friends up for a nighttime joyride around the city.”
“They were all drunker’n skunks,” Bergin added. “Tower had to talk ’em down. That sure as hell isn’t what’s going on here, though.”
“And that was in a little puddle jumper,” Turner said. “A trainer. Someone with just a few hours could fly one well enough to get her off the ground and back again, with a little luck. But it’s a different story with this one.” He nodded at his aircraft.
“This is a…” Estelle prompted.
“Turbo 206,” he said proudly. “There’s a lot of horses under that cowl, and she’s a complex, heavy airplane. It’s not something a kid is going to take on a joyride.”
“And worth some money, I imagine.”
“Sure. This is probably the most popular model to steal, especially along the border here,” Turner said. “Good freight hauler.” He paused with evident pride. “We got us right at eighty grand parked here.”
“And you don’t keep it locked?”
“Nope. Somebody gets in this hangar, I don’t want ’em ruining the aircraft door to get in. You know how much that would cost to fix?”
“There is that,” Estelle said. She pushed the door open and looked inside. The ignition key was in place, a small evergreen air freshener and a second key hanging from the ring.
“Do you normally leave your key in the airplane, sir?”
“You know, I do….” Turner hesitated. “Stupid, huh?”
“Yep,” Sheriff Torrez said, and his one-word utterance jerked Turner around as if he had forgotten that Bob Torrez was standing nearby.
“But see, I look at it this way,” he said. “The hangar’s locked. Always locked. I make sure of that. It’s a steel building with a dead bolt on the access door, there, and steel lock bolts on the main door. I figure that if someone is going to go to the trouble of breaking in to steal my airplane, then what the hell. They’re going to take her whether there’s a key in the ignition or not. Airplane’s just about the easiest thing next to a power lawn mower to hot-wire.”
“Uh huh,” Estelle said, keeping her tone neutral.
“And what the hell. Jim, your Citabria?” he called to Bergin, who stood just outside the open hangar door. “That doesn’t even have an ignition key, does it? Just a couple of switches.”
“True.” Bergin sounded noncommittal.
“What’s the second key on the ring for, sir?”
“Well, now I’m going to sound even stupider,” Turner said. “That’s an extra door key.”
“You mean for the hangar?”
“Yes. Well, hell. That way I know where it is.”
“I see,” Estelle said, managing to keep the amusement out of her voice. People routinely did dumb things, but that never seemed to lessen the umbrage when their habits caught up with them.
“Well, now…” Turner started to say, then bit it off.
Estelle added the dangling keys to the list of photographs that she wanted Linda Real to inventory.
“What’s all that tell you?” Turner asked. “Are you able to do anything with that grass sample?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Estelle said. “Grass is sort of a ubiquitous thing, you know. And the red dust on the propeller? I wish we had a magic computer where we could feed a sample into a program and it would instantly locate where in the world it came from-but that’s still Hollywood sci-fi.”
“The grass caught in the wheel skirt could tell you something, couldn’t it?” Turner persisted.
“I suppose it could, if it turned out that it was a rare, endangered species that grows only on a small peninsula in the Yucatán.”
“What you’re saying is that we may never figure this out,” Turner said.
“Been known to happen,” Torrez said. “Just for fun,” he continued to Estelle, “let’s go over the inside with black light when you’re all done lookin’ for hairs and fibers and all that shit.”
“What’s that do?” Turner asked.
“Shows some interesting things,” Torrez said, and let it go at that.
“Body fluids show up,” Estelle added for Turner’s benefit.
The possibilities of that weren’t lost on the aircraft owner. “Well, yuck,” he said with a grimace. He’d grimace even more if he knew about the family of corpses currently reposing in the basement morgue at Posadas General, she thought.
“Let me ask you something, sir,” Estelle said. “How long could this airplane have been missing without you noticing?” When he didn’t answer immediately, she added, “From the last time you closed and locked the door to right now.”
“Well, like I said-I guess when Jim and I flew down to Cruces. That was last month sometime.”
“Early in the month,” Bergin said. “Today’s the ninth of May. That’s a month.”
“I guess so,” Turner said. “About a month.”
“Ay,” Estelle whispered to herself. “That’s quite a window of opportunity. All these nice flat surfaces can gather a lot of dust in a month.”