Chapter 7

Helen stood inside the Roanoke terminal, eating a Dixie cup of generic strawberry ice cream with a flat wooden spoon. This stuff had tasted better when she was kid. Now, she was too used to Hagen Daz and other high-fat brands to have a palate for the big-name ice cream’s weaker cousins. Eric, of course, never touched any of it. Because creamy milk products weren’t good for you. She was sure that Dennis would react in the same way that Eric would if he spotted her eating this junk.

She finished, threw her trash in the bin, yawned, and walked outside. The time was eleven-thirty. Where was the FAA when you needed them for something other than making up complex regulations?

She had flown to Westchester the night before, where she felt that both she and the airplane were safest. Eric had called. He was going to be away a day or two more. She had actually been surprised that he was coming back that soon, but she didn’t tell him so. She attempted to seem disappointed at the lengthy separation.

He had sounded anxious about being away from her, as if she was going to be annoyed about it. She tried to let him know that she was busy doing things herself, without making him feel that she didn’t care whether he ever returned or not.

She did care, of course.

Katherine promised to take the day off on Wednesday to go with Helen for the car. How much in storage fees was that going to cost? She bet his Honda was all scratched up, too. Helen felt bad for Eric, she really did. She wouldn’t like it if she came to the airport and found her brand new jet all banged up and dented.

She was loving every minute of having the Cessna to tool around in. This was probably the best time she had ever had in her life. Having a plane of her own was a dream come true. She wasn’t a hotshot lawyer like Rotz or chemical engineer like Adams and didn’t make the big bucks that would support such an indulgence—but here she was.

She looked at her watch. Nearly twelve. Where was Dennis? She began to worry that he had decided to bail out. Then she felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned and he was behind her. “You scared me,” she said.

“All right, I’m here,” he answered grumpily.

She was pleased to see he had on a jacket, even though it wasn’t a suit jacket. What can you expect on a federal salary, after all?

“First we have to see the airport administrator, Cary Greenwild,” she announced. “We want to look at the record book pages that show when Lyle Adams’ plane came into this airport, and we want to see when the departure was. Good?”

“They sent me those facts,” Malloy objected.

“Even if they sent photostats of the originals, you’re better off seeing the originals. Making undetectable changes on the photostat is easier than altering a printout bound into a book. Right?”

“I don’t know who you think is hiding what,” he wondered.

She smiled. Why were guys always so crusty? “I don’t believe right at this minute that anyone is hiding anything. But I don’t like Greenwild, and I do want to see the records for myself. That is, of course, you do. You’re the FAA. You’re the one who wants to see them.”

Dennis nodded his head in agreement. “I’m the FAA,” he concurred. “I’m the boss. Greenwild must cower.” He finally looked the tiniest bit pleased.

“Exactly.” He had gotten her point!

They went in to visit Greenwild who was almost out the door on his way to lunch. That made the occasion even better, she thought. Let him go hungry. Helen gave Dennis the nod: this was the man. Greenwild saw Helen and appeared annoyed. He started to make some arrogant remark, she was sure, but Malloy didn’t let him get more than a word out of his mouth.

“Mr. Greenwild? I’m FAA inspector Dennis Malloy.” Helen relaxed. Dennis could handle this. She smiled at Greenwild.

“What can I do for you?” asked the administrator, beginning to show some deference.

“We’ve corresponded. I believe we spoke on the phone once as well. I’m investigating the death of Lyle Adams who supposedly brought his plane into this airport on March 23rd of this year.”

“I sent you the verification times on that,” Greenwild told him, aiming his eyes at Helen in an unfriendly fashion as he did so.

“Yes, that was good for my preliminary investigation,” agreed Malloy, smiling. “Now I’m doing my field verifications. I’d like to see the original log for the arrival.”

“I’d like to know what she’s doing here,” Greenwild interjected, bobbing his head in Helen’s direction.

“Miss Robbins, that is, Lieutenant Robbins, United States Air Force, is representing the Private Plane Pilots Association in this investigation.” Malloy’s simple, yet forceful pronouncement indicated that Helen’s presence was not to be questioned.

Greenwild took it in that spirit. Although he frowned, he conceded the point. “I’ll get the log for that date.” He noted that they were all still standing. “Please sit down,” he muttered, leaving the room.

As if by agreement, neither Helen nor Dennis said a word in Greenwild’s absence, although they smiled at one another conspiratorially. At the end of that smile, she cast her eyes down and smiled briefly to herself. She had won Dennis over. He was committed. Good man.

Greenwild came back with a notebook filled with pen-written markings. Helen and Dennis stood up again and Dennis took the ledger-sized volume in hand. “It’s not computerized,” exclaimed Helen in astonishment.

“No,” said Greenwild. “We’re still converting.”

The other two watched as Dennis leafed through the pages to March the 23rd. He pointed to the entry for Adams’ landing at eleven-seventeen in the morning and searched down for the takeoff. They found his departure listed as having occurred at four-twelve in the afternoon.

Helen stared at the page. Adams’ departure was listed prior to the takeoff of a Piper Twin Comanche at one-forty. “A Comanche,” remarked Helen, “an antique.” She and Dennis looked at one another again. Neither was blind. They had both seen it. The ink marking the time was smeared and the sequence of departures was idiotic.

“I’ll need to have your tapes from the tower on that date,” Dennis told Greenwild calmly. “You can give them to me, and I’ll give you a receipt for them, or I can return with a subpoena.”

“Nothing’s wrong with the log.” Greenwild gulped. “A drop of water might have fallen on the page, something like that.” He looked at Dennis fearfully.

Dennis refused to eat at the snack bar in the terminal building, so they stopped at a Denny’s on the road to Salem. There, he ordered turkey on whole wheat toast and a club soda. He let out a slight gasp when she ordered the fries and grimaced when she asked for the fried catfish sandwich. By the time she got to the soda, he barely flickered an eyelash.

“You only live once, right?” she asked.

“To begin with, that’s debatable,” he responded, “but whatever the case may be in that regard, we live more than merely a single year or two. If our lives encompassed that brief a span, I’m sure our livers, stomachs, adrenal glands, and so on would be able to stand up nicely to any sort of nutritional assault we subjected them to, to the end of our days. However, since most of us carry on for at least several decades after that, a simple matter of innate consideration for the vulnerable organs that serve us so well would mandate our laying off grease of questionable origin, bread without a lone nutrient remaining in the colon-coating flour, sugars that have been refined in a process that turns them into a substance as addictive as heroin, and caffeine—intended to drain the adrenals of a day’s production in one brief spurt.”

“Holy cow! Nice speech,” she admired.

They traveled on to Beaumont Aircraft, using the directions Helen had been given over the phone by the receptionist and a road map of Roanoke purchased at the airport. Helen grunted when they arrived at the gate. She knew a high-security profile when she saw one—tall fences with barbed wire at the top, lamps every few yards around the perimeter, and, down by the ground, inside the fencing where you might not look, an infrared sensor system.

The security guard was unwilling to allow them to enter without an appointment, although when Dennis produced his FAA identification, the guard called someone inside the building. After a short conversation with his superior, he raised the gate for them to enter and told them where the visitor’s parking was.

Inside the reception area, the two were given visitors’ badges to wear. Helen recognized the type from her security days, not so long ago. After a few hours, the paper would turn some color other than what it now was and would reveal the word “expired” underneath. She wondered if she would have time to meet the director of security today.

After they had sat for some twenty minutes reading aviation magazines, a woman, presumably Robert Avilla’s secretary, came to fetch them. She brought them into the senior vice president’s spacious suite and murmured the name of the middle-aged executive.

At first, Helen’s eyes were drawn only to the enormous picture window behind Avilla. Outside was a rolling lawn, leading to a grove of trees not far from a pond in which black swans paddled leisurely.

“I’m Dennis Malloy, an inspector with the FAA, and this is Miss Robbins,” said Dennis—as the two of them had agreed.

Helen pulled her gaze back into the room where it lit upon Avilla’s desk. She had never seen a piece of furniture quite like that before. Never. The top was enormous, made of wood, but only a thin layer of wood, the grain of which spoke of centuries.

She dared not cast her glance on anything else in the room, lest she be overwhelmed.

Helen looked at Avilla finally and realized, with a start, that she knew him from somewhere. But where? Where? She couldn’t make the exact connection.

“Where you in the Air Force, Mr. Avilla?” she asked absurdly.

“No.” He smiled.

“Are you an Air Force contractor?”

“We have fulfilled a number of contracts for the U.S. military,” he answered, seemingly puzzled by her question.

His accent, she caught at last, was Spanish. Avilla—the name was Hispanic, of course, but the twist in his English was subtle. He had worked to erase the sounds of his native country, or time had worn them away.

Dennis asked about March the 23rd, and Avilla pulled his appointment book from the corner of his desk and consulted it. Helen examined the grain of the desktop again. Fabulous. A sudden longing for untold wealth and luxury struck her heart. Oh, to live like that, to be surrounded by incredibly beautiful things. She struggled with the desire, then faced her life as it was. Oh well! She stared at her watch. Eric had bought it for her on her birthday. The gold-banded timepiece was very lovely—surely that was enough for her. And she had her luxurious little airplane. Good heavens, how spoiled must she be?

“I had an appointment with Lyle Adams, but he never showed up,” Avilla announced, looking up from his book.

“What was Lyle Adams doing for Beaumont?” Helen asked.

“Oh, helping us improve our processes,” Avilla replied vaguely.

“I don’t know Beaumont,” Helen commented. “You don’t manufacture commercial aircraft, and if you do produce something for the military, I don’t know that either.”

Avilla smiled at her. “I’m afraid I don’t want to be too specific.”

“I flew test planes out of Holloman for a while, so I do know most of the military contractors,” she continued. The Air Force liked women test pilots—good reaction times—and she had done it for more than a year, but as with everything else, she had grown restless.

“Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico,” Avilla clarified. Helen didn’t say anything. “Actually, Beaumont Aircraft is a start-up, a division of Rockerton. I know Holloman because I know White Sands.”

That explained why she didn’t know Beaumont. But Rockerton, she knew very well. The company had supplied missiles to the military and those missiles had been tested at White Sands—so close to Holloman that all you had to do was spit to hit the other from the one. Maybe Avilla was familiar because she had seen him around there in those days, she thought. But no, that wasn’t it at all. She had seen him somewhere much more recently. Or had she?

“I’m going to want to know exactly what Adams was working on with Beaumont,” announced Dennis Malloy, his voice unexpectedly breaking into the conversation.

Avilla turned to the FAA inspector. “Beaumont is working on a project for the Department of Defense. That contract is classified at the highest level. Adams was helping with that. The information is nothing I would be able to release to the FAA. Or, if I released the material to the FAA, I would have to give it to an investigator with top security clearance.” Malloy, despite being a representative of the federal government, was a nobody to Avilla.

Malloy tapped his foot on the Oriental carpet. He smiled. “Lyle Adams departed the Roanoke airport at four-twelve in the afternoon the day he was slated to visit you. If he wasn’t here, where was he?”

“I’m glad you made me come,” Dennis told her. He had asked Helen to drive them back to the airport in his car because he wanted to make some immediate notes about their interview with Avilla. “We didn’t get anything at Beaumont, but we were able to hone in on the records being altered at the airport.” He patted the log, which he had set on his lap to facilitate his writing. They had noted without much effort that the departure sequence was either out of synch or the time of Adams’ flight had been changed. “Didn’t Roanoke Regional used to be called Woodrum Field, by the way?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I guess so. But don’t focus too much on the time being fudged in the book. Because the person who did that knew that the time wouldn’t make a bit of difference in an investigation. First of all, the alteration would be found by anyone glancing at the log for more than a second. And, secondly, even if we continued to think that Adams had flown out of here at after four in the afternoon, what difference would that make?”

“That’s the question,” Malloy argued. “What difference would that make? Whose alibi would the correct time destroy?”

“My gut instinct is that the change was made as a show-off-y gesture. See, not only can I kill a man and steal his plane, but I have access to the airport logs.” Helen nodded to herself. She believed this because she had met the skyjacker and because he struck her as someone who thought in that manner.

At just that second, she heard a loud pop like the sound of a gun with a silencer being fired. She felt the tire blow out. “Down, get down,” she called to Dennis with intensity. The left tire was gone, and the car pulled to the left, into an oncoming lane. Helen yanked the wheel to the right, steering strongly against the pull. She knew enough not to put on the brake, but simply to try to stay in her lane, while slowing down a little at a time.

Her strategy would have worked, too, if the driver behind her had been paying attention. The car in back rear-ended theirs and their car spun out of control, winding up headed east on a north-south roadway. Traffic came to a halt. “Damn,” swore Helen.

“The tire blew,” offered Dennis.

Helen reached for the Beretta in her purse. “I think someone shot at us,” she informed him tensely.

Dennis looked at her and looked at the gun. “Those are pretty old tires,” he told her. “Sort of bald.”

“Stay down,” she hissed, opening the car door and getting out in a crouch. The back of her neck prickled. She wondered if she was in some revolutionary skyjacker’s crosshairs.

A motorist emerged from his car and came up toward her, then saw the gun in her hand and knelt behind her car as well. “Are they shooting?” he asked. He was willing to believe it. “I called it in on the car phone. The state troopers should be here any minute now.”

Maybe the tire had blown, but she wasn’t convinced. At any rate, no one was charged in the accident, and no one had been hurt, but Dennis’s car wouldn’t be ready for a couple of days. He was horribly upset.

“I’m not going to be able to drive home,” he complained. They were standing at the gas station and Dennis seemed to have taken a chill. He had his arms wrapped around himself like someone who was freezing. The temperature seemed warm enough in the sun to her.

“Perhaps you can take the train,” she suggested.

“The train doesn’t come anywhere near Roanoke,” he rebuffed her, stricken. “Amtrak travels down the eastern side of the state.”

Helen was reluctant to state the obvious, that she could fly him back to Washington, and even down again to Roanoke in a few days to pick up his car. She didn’t say anything.

“I don’t want to,” he answered, without a word from her.

“It might be best. I’d try awfully hard not to crash the plane.” She giggled quietly.

“I’m feeling a lot of anxiety right now,” he complained. “Joking is not helpful.”

“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “All we can do then is hail a cab to the airport and take off. The sooner we leave, the sooner you’ll be in the comfort of your own home. You can warm up some brown rice with veggies for dinner and then play a tape of Buddhist monks chanting until you fall asleep.”

She was about to call a cab when one pulled into the gas station to fill up. Helen leaned in to speak to the driver. “Can you take us to the airport?” she pleaded.

“Cost you eleven-fifty,” the driver bargained. “People usually tip me, too.”

Dennis climbed into the plane without much prodding. In fact, he was in such a state that he couldn’t really protest her taking charge of him. He could barely answer “yes” or “no” to her questions about his needs.

She buckled him into a seat, skipped the safety drill about the oxygen mask, but did take the time to show him where the toilet was. She patted him gently on the head. He was balding a little, she noticed. Not at the crown, but at the temples. “Don’t worry. I’ve been flying for years and years and years. Nothing bad’s ever happened to me yet.” Except that one engines-out landing as she was coming over the Sierras.

But he didn’t need to hear that story today.

She started to whistle “Here we go, into the wild blue yonder” as she made her way to the cockpit and thumped into her seat. She called the tower, hoping that Greenwild wasn’t sitting up there with vengeance in his heart. She was still whistling as she sped down the runway and pulled back on the throttle for liftoff. An idyllic day. Aside from a little traffic accident, no problemo. She climbed and then cut back on the engines as she leveled off. She hand-flew it through that sea of wild blue for a while, then put it on autopilot so she could go back and check on her passenger.

As she headed out into the cabin, she could see that Dennis Malloy had resettled himself. He was in the aisle, lying on the floor face down with his jacket pulled up over his head.

“Are you breathing in there?” she called to him.

He groaned. “Go. Fly the plane,” he uttered painfully.

“Everything is fine,” she assured him. “I have a bottle of spring water up here, if you’d like some.” Her passenger groaned again.

She returned to her seat, swigged some of the water. He wouldn’t want it anyway, since she had already drunk directly from the bottle, but she had thought she should offer.

She mused over their dialogue with Greenwild and with Avilla. Then she thought about her conversation with Dennis as to the importance of the time being altered in the log. Someone like Greenwild was in a position to change the book. And moreover, he was the one who had written to Dennis, saying what Adams’ time of departure was. Surely he would have noticed a discrepancy in the sequence of departures, even if he had believed that the mark on the log was merely a water stain.

Her mind switched to Beaumont and Avilla. Avilla hadn’t expressed any regret about the death of the man he had been working with, although others had praised Adams for his kind heartedness to children and his perpetually pleasant demeanor. Avilla hadn’t said any such thing. She zeroed in on her reaction to Avilla. She had seen him very recently, but not him exactly. Someone in a dream. No, someone in real life, someone very much like Avilla.

She heard Dennis in the cabin groaning again. Maybe groaning helped. She concluded suddenly that his phobia was an anger reaction at having to work for the FAA. Obviously, he was sick of it. What a clever deduction! She was pleased with herself. She had taken several semesters of psychology in college until she had decided the military would be a cheap way to learn how to fly.

With the explanation for Dennis’s phobia in focus, everything else snapped right into place. A chill went through her, and her face flushed heatedly. She felt sick. She knew where she had seen Avilla. She hadn’t seen him at all. She had only seen a version of him. A very close version. A man who looked almost exactly identical. The handsome young, well-dressed skyjacker. He was Avilla’s double—but about twenty years behind on the timeline.

She nearly swung the plane around to return to Roanoke in order to question Avilla again. But she couldn’t do that to the moaning wreck in the cabin behind her—the Federal Aviation Administration inspector who was terrified of air travel, somehow the perfect partner for her in this investigation.

“We’re doing great,” she shouted back to her new buddy, Dennis Malloy. “Believe it or not, Dennis, we’re still alive.”