Francisco instantly shook his head. “It’s just for her.”
“What if she wants to record it, so she can hear it whenever she wants?”
Francisco’s eyebrows almost met in the center of his nose, and then he brightened with a wide smile. “Then she’s got to learn to play it,” he said. “I’ll teach her.”
“Would you like someone else telling you what you must play, hijo? Wouldn’t it be nice to play the piece for her, and then give her a copy so that she could hear it again whenever she wants?”
“Yes,” Francisco said, the thought that Melody Mears might not want his composition never crossing his young mind. “But I don’t know how to write it down.”
“Before long, you will, hijo. You will. But for now, a CD would work just fine. Then, if she wants to play it, she’ll have something to listen to.”
“I’ll play it for her on Tuesday, at my lesson,” Francisco said, the matter settled in his mind. Estelle watched him carefully close the black hinged cover over the keyboard, and made a mental note that it might be productive to change Francisco’s music lesson day to another day of the week, a little bit more removed from the creative Pitney’s teenaged conspiracies.
“Bed now,” Estelle said, and kissed him on the forehead.
“Okay,” the little boy said. He made it across the living room, then leaned heavily against his father’s left leg. That comfortable contact flipped the switch on his overtaxed system. Francis knelt down to gather up the little boy, whose eyes were already shut. Her husband glanced back at Estelle as he headed down the hall with his cargo. “You, too,” he added.
Estelle watched them go, wondering how much she should burden her husband with her plans. The clock ticked to 11:40, and she rose from the piano bench. In a moment, Francis reappeared, shutting the boys’ bedroom door carefully. “Out like a light.”
“Querido, I need to go back out again.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“Progress? Do you know who the three are? Were?”
“Not a clue. But we’re following up on some other ideas.”
“None of which can wait until morning.”
She snuggled against him. “Actually, no. There’s some aerial surveillance that Jim Bergin has agreed to fly for us. That has to be done at night.”
He looked askance at her. “You’re going along, I gather.”
“Yes.”
“Do I want to know more?”
“Just that I think this is very important, and that we’ll be very careful.”
“Oh, I trust Jim,” Francis said. “If he says it’s safe, it’s safe.”
Well, he didn’t say it was safe, Estelle thought. “I told him I’d meet him at the airport at midnight,” she said instead. Francis walked her out to the car and held the door for her. “Irma is spending the night,” he said. “If I get a call, we’re covered.”
She took a deep breath and put her hand over his. “No calls, please.”
“Not until tomorrow, when we have more cliff divers.” He laughed.
Chapter Twelve
Jerry Turner’s plane waited on the tarmac beside the fuel pump island. The aircraft looked a good deal smaller out of its hangar. Bergin had fussed over the Cessna, including taking the time to drain any suspect fuel from the wing tanks and refill them with fresh avgas.
Bergin stood under the left wing, one hand resting on the strut. “All set?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” she replied, and clambered inside.
“All the way across to the right seat,” Bergin said.
“Odd that there’s no door on the passenger side,” Estelle said, feeling claustrophobic immediately. As she strapped herself into the cramped confines of the Cessna, she felt a surge of adrenaline. Had the killer strapped himself into this same seat, in command of the situation? Or had he curled up in the back with the others, smelling their sweat, their excitement, eventually their fear?
She turned and looked back through the empty cabin, trying to picture how the three people had squeezed some comfort out of the cramped quarters, with nothing but the flat aluminum floor to sit on. Only the two front seats remained-Turner had taken out the other four when he and Jim Bergin had flown the new beacon back to Posadas.
And not a scrap of luggage-not even a plastic bag filled with underwear and socks to use as a pillow.
Her position suggested one small answer, even as Bergin climbed into the left seat. If the killer had ridden up front, as she was doing right now, he would have had two choices when the aircraft stopped-squeeze into the back between the two front seats or wait for the pilot to exit the plane, allowing the killer to follow.
The other choice was simple enough: the killer had piloted the airplane. Perhaps the father had ridden in the right seat up front, leaving only the woman and her son to make do in back.
“You thought about the route you want to take?” Bergin asked. He held a small flashlight and scanned a printed checklist clipped to an aluminum thigh-board.
“I don’t think it matters,” Estelle said. “We’re betting that the victims came into the country from the south-nothing else makes sense to me. Whether they flew across to the east, over by María, or through Regál…we have no way of knowing. What doesn’t make sense is thinking that they came in right over the top of the mountains.” Looking through the freshly polished windshield, she could not see the San Cristóbals, but she knew they loomed ahead to the southwest, a long dark lump of rock waiting to reach out and grab aluminum.
Bergin held both hands out to form the shape of a football. He lifted his right. “Regál’s at one end of the mountains.” He lifted his left hand. “María’s at the other. You want to try west?”
“That’ll work.”
He nodded and returned to his preflight chores. As an afterthought, he said, “And the mountains don’t matter, Estelle. Not with this airplane. She’s got the power to handle anything, even loaded on top. If they wanted to come straight in over the mountains and then drop down, well…that’s easy enough. A lot of folks don’t understand mountains. As long as you don’t fly into one, it don’t matter a whole hell of a lot how high they are, or how rugged. To an airplane that can easily top sixteen, eighteen thousand feet, a ten-thousand-foot mountain doesn’t amount to a thing.”
He finished the first portion of the list, scanned the dashboard again, and then started the engine, coaxing it gently to life. The big six-cylinder shook the entire airframe until it settled into quiet idle. Bergin relaxed the brakes and let the plane move away from the fuel island. As they rolled down the taxiway, he continued his checklist, glancing ahead now and then to make sure some night beast wasn’t standing in the middle of the taxiway. As they neared the turnaround donut at the east end, he turned and glanced at Estelle. His voice through the headset was relaxed.
“You want me to use the runway lights? We turn ’em on with the mike,” and he held up the handset. “But I don’t think someone comin’ in with a stolen plane would do that. He sure as hell didn’t have lights at the gas company’s strip.”
“Whatever you think is best,” she said.
He laughed, the crackle of the radio making his voice sound metallic and artificial. “What I think is best is to be home and curled around a nice glass of bourbon.”
“Afterward,” Estelle said.
“Yeah, sure.” He completed the run-up, the plane shaking against its brakes, watching the rpm’s carefully as he checked each magneto and cycled the propeller three times. Finally satisfied that the engine would behave itself, he toggled the mike button on the control yoke. “Posadas Unicom, Cessna niner two Hotel is taking two seven. Lights inoperative.” The words shot out into the electronic airways, and Bergin waited for a moment, the Cessna parked perpendicular to the active runway. “He wouldn’t have done that, either,” he said after a minute. “You all set?”