"What's the significance, Doctor?"
"They all had the chicken," he said.
That stopped me for a moment.
"Rather unlikely, wouldn't you say?" He was still waiting for a comment.
I was suddenly angry. Not at him. But why wouldn't this case follow a decent, reasonable line? "Unlikely," I conceded. "Not impossible."
"It's stretching the laws of chance. I have about a hundred stomachs to look at yet "
" and the next one might be beef."
"Or the diet plate," he said, helpfully.
Then I had it.
"There must have been a mix-up in New York," I said. "They loaded too many of the chicken dinners. They didn't find out till they took off. So everybody who was hungry ate the chicken, and if they'd landed Pan Am would have heard a lot of bitching."
"What about first class?"
Screw first class. "I don't know. I do know there's always a reasonable explanation." I swallowed again, wondering what in hell I really knew. "I'll have somebody check it out with Pan Am catering in New York. They'll straighten it out."
I hung up on him.
Then I stood there, thinking it over, knowing I was going to need an Alka-Seltzer for dessert. I seemed to have this compulsion to throw dirt over the problems and pretend they weren't there. The thing was, they were such crazy problems. Seventy-three stomachs full of airline chicken. Watches that were fortyfive minutes fast. Watches that ran backwards when I was looking, and reversed when I turned my back. A beautiful imposter dressed up like an airline employee.
And a voice on a tape. They're all dead. They're all dead and burned.
It was about that time Gordy Petcher arrived. I sent him off with my team leaders so they could fill him in. At the moment, I had no use for him at all. The bastard couldn't come when the rest of us were walking around in the mud and gore; now here he was to take credit for the findings. At least he could handle the press conferences.
We had another, slightly more informative one, after the nightly meeting. Gordy wanted to give the media something to chew on, so Tom and Eli and I worked out the short list of the things we were pretty sure of, cautioning Gordy to preface them all with words like "There are indications that " or "We are now looking into " or "The possibility has arisen "
Hell, he was good at it, I'll give him that. He was a lot better than I was. He knew how to hedge his statements, how to avoid libel. The only thing that worried me was his tendency to grab for a headline, but he didn't this time. The press seemed satisfied with what it had, and gradually everyone began to file out.
Before long I was the only one left in the large conference room. It's amazing how empty a place like that can look.
She hadn't really said where she'd meet me.
The hotel, I thought. She'd be at the hotel, or leave a message.
There was no message at the desk.
I went up to my room. The maid had picked up Louise's clothes and put them in the closet. I was thankful for the clothes. Without them, I would have started to wonder if she'd really existed.
I'd had an hour's sleep one night, and about four hours the night before. I'd slept two hours on the plane getting to California. I was stone sober and I didn't feel the least bit like sleeping.
I paced the room for a while, then I went down to the bar, but it depressed me. I got in my car and drove back to the airport, out onto the field, up to the big doors of the hangar that held the remains of the two jumbo jets.
There was a human-size door set over at the side. It had a glass window, with wire mesh in it. I knocked on the door, pressed my face up to the glass, and looked inside.
"Hey, what are you doing here?"
The guard was outside, coming up behind me. I turned slowly, not wanting to make him nervous there in the dark. He was probably a retired cop. There was the name of some security agency on his shoulder, and a .38 on his hip.
I got out my I.D. and showed it to him. He looked at it, and at my face, and relaxed.
"I saw you on television the other night," he said.
"How come you're here?" I asked him.
He shrugged.
"The company pays me to watch this hangar. Usually they've got real planes in there, you know. They don't want no monkey business Funny thing, tonight I got an extra guy with me.
He's on the other side, on the other door. Hard to figure, ain't it?"
"What do you mean?"
He looked through the glass.
"I mean there ain't much left to steal."
"No, I guess not."
"It's an awful thing, ain't it?"
"Yeah. It's awful." I pointed to the big padlock on the door. "You have the keys to that?"
"Sure do. You want in?"
"Yeah. You can call your employer if you want to, but I can tell you what they'll say. Let him do whatever he wants. Until I write my report, those planes belong to me."
He looked me over, and nodded.
"I expect you're right. Though I don't know what you'd want with them."
He unlocked the door, let me through, and locked it behind me. He told me to knock again when I wanted to be let out.
I wandered around without the slightest idea of what I was looking for. All I had was the memory of that first time I saw her. She had been here, in this big barn, and she'd been looking for something.
I stopped by a massive shaft from a General Electric fanjet. All the blades were snapped off, but the heat of the fires had done nothing to it..Compared to the temperatures that shaft had been designed to take, crashing and burning was nothing at all.
I went over to where the bags of debris had been. She'd been looking at those bags. I could see it clearly now. I'd called to her, she'd looked at me, and she'd run.
The bags were gone. In their place was a series of folding tables with twisted metal piled on them. I walked along the endless rows, sometimes recognizing something, mostly having no idea what I was looking at. There's a lot of metal in a plane.
Farther along were tables holding the remains of luggage. Suitcases in pieces no bigger than your hand. Mounds of shredded and burned clothing. Squashed cameras, splintered skis, lumps of plastic that had been calculators. Even an unbroken bottle of perfume.
A red light caught my eye. It was very faint, buried under a lot of other stuff. I reached for it, and unidentifiable flotsam clattered on the floor.
First impression: a child's toy. A ray-gun. It had a plastic case that was half-melted, blackened on the outside, cracked open. The red light seeped through the crack.
Like so many things on this case, this toy didn't add up. I peered into the crack. It looked like coherent light to me: laser light. I'd never heard of a child's toy that used a laser.
There was a Swiss Army knife in my pocket. I pried out the longest blade, and stuck it in the crack. I twisted, and the plastic case popped open. I took a long look at the insides of the thing. I didn't know what the hell it was, but it wasn't a goddam toy.
Okay. Finally I had something concrete. It made me sadder than I can say to have found it, but there it was. This was some sort of weapon. It had come from the place Louise had been so interested in yesterday morning. All I could do was assume she'd known it was there, that she'd been looking for it. It was time to call Special Agent Powers. Weapons were out of my jurisdiction.
There was a phone on the wall about twenty feet away from me. I was going to call, I really intended to, but the red light was still hidden from me. It came from beneath what might have been a circuit board. I started to pry it up with my knife. I wanted to know what was making that light.
I was flat on my back on the floor. I couldn't move. I was very cold, and the back of my head hurt.