See one, think two, he said to himself. The philosophy had kept him alive on more than one occasion when others wanted him DRT: Dead Right There.
“I’m a doer, Mr. Hackman,” Carly said, momentarily startling Quinn with his alias. “Looking for clues on a dead body is a good start, but tell me what we have to do next.”
“First, we’re going to look for blood.” Quinn kept his voice low so Mattie couldn’t hear the gory details. “Whoever killed Foulger took a big hit of spray.”
“You don’t think he would have wiped it off by now?”
“I’m sure he would have tried,” Quinn said. “No offense, but it’s hard to wash all the soap off your hands in those little airplane sinks. The human heart pumps a lot of blood under substantial pressure. It has a tendency to go in unintended directions when something gets cut.”
“Something else in which you’re an expert?” Carly said, looking a little sick to her stomach.
“You might say that.” He nodded. “Anyway, we’re looking for a guy with blood on his left shoulder.”
Carly leaned around the bulkhead so she could look up the aisle. “So we just walk up and down trying to find someone with stained clothes.”
“I’d have the other flight attendants keep an eye out,” Quinn said. “But chances are our killer is wearing dark colors or someone would have pointed him out by now. Blood might be impossible to see with the naked eye. There are, however, devices that can pick it up, even on dark fabric.”
Carly gave an exasperated sigh. “We’re seven miles up in the sky,” she said. “You have one in your carry-on?”
“Not exactly,” Quinn said. “But I’ve been looking for a reason to show off for my daughter.”
It took ten minutes for Quinn to gather the materials he needed and bring them back to the couch below the stairwell.
As with any operation, his first priority was security. He posted Natalie at the bulkhead, facing forward so she could keep an eye on both aisles. There was a calmness to her demeanor that he supposed came from having seen it all over her years of flying. Quinn put two more flight attendants in the passenger lounge above, to make sure no one could sneak up on him while he worked. He left the body where it was.
Both Carly and Mattie stood beside him watching intently as he knelt in front of the couch and spread everything out on the tan leather cushions. Natalie sacrificed her small digital camera to the cause. Carly commandeered a DVD of the movie Titanic from a passenger. There was a roll of clear packing tape from the first-class galley, two malleable wax earplugs from his Popeye-chinned seatmate, and a set of tiny screwdrivers another flight attendant used for repairing her eyeglasses. The most difficult thing to find had been a blade — an item Quinn was rarely without on the ground. He ended up making do with a case knife from the first-class galley that was at least sharp enough to carve the filet mignon.
He pressed the power button on the camera, saw the battery was fully charged, and then turned it off again. Using the minuscule screwdriver, he removed the six screws that held the back in place and passed them to Mattie so they wouldn’t get lost — and so she would feel useful. The lens assembly was easy to find, but before he touched it, he located a blue insulated cylinder that resembled a stubby double-A battery. Two wires protruding from the base were soldered to a circuit board.
Careful not to touch the wires, Quinn pried the top of the cylinder upward with the point of his screwdriver. He bent it back and forth against the solder until it broke free, leaving two quarter-inch leads attached. He took one of the wax earplugs and used it to cover the wires before handing it to Carly.
“Careful,” he said. “That’s the flash capacitor.”
She smiled. “Like Back to the Future?”
“That’s a flux capacitor,” Mattie said, grinning that she’d gotten the joke.
“No kidding,” Quinn said. “Be careful with it. It powers the camera’s flash. There’s enough electricity stored in there to knock you off your feet if you make contact with the wires. You now have what we call a field expedient stun gun.”
Carly pinched the small metal cylinder by the insulated sides and held it away from her body. “What am I supposed to do with it?”
“You don’t have to be that careful.” Quinn took it back and held it in the palm of his hand. “It won’t bite you unless you give it a shove and push the wires through the wax. Put it in your vest pocket. You might be glad you have a weapon if things get hairy.”
Quinn checked his watch and then turned his attention back to the camera. Four more tiny screws allowed him to access the CCD, or charged coupled device, that was the brains of a digital camera. He lifted it out carefully to find what he was looking for.
“Wow,” Mattie whispered as if she was in church.
Quinn used the tip of the smallest screwdriver to lift the tiny square of glass far enough so he could get his fingers around it. He held it up to the light, turning it back and forth so it changed from green to shimmering purple, the colors of an oil slick on water.
“What is that?” Mattie leaned in, peering at the jewel-like treasure.
“It’s an infrared light filter,” Quinn said. He was never one to dumb down a conversation for his daughter’s sake. “It keeps the regular pictures from getting all hazy. When we take it out, the camera will let in light that we can’t see with our eyes.”
He used the tip of his thumb to measure the size of the interior lens assembly, and then set the camera aside. Ripping a piece of the clear packing tape, he stuck it to the media side of the DVD and smoothed it with a tissue from the lavatory. He was careful to keep his fingerprints off it as best he could. Once he’d burnished the tape enough that he was satisfied there were no air bubbles underneath, he began to peel it back, a millimeter at a time. A metallic layer of gold-colored film from the back of the disk came up fixed to the sticky side of the tape. It took a few minutes with the case knife, but he was finally able to saw out a square of the material the size of the little IR filter.
He used his thumbnail to rub off just enough of the foil backing along the edge of the tape that it stayed in place when he pressed it to the lens assembly.
Natalie’s curiosity got the best of her and she craned her head to get a better look from her security post by the bulkhead. “How can you take a picture now?” she asked. She frowned as if she disapproved of this science project when there was a murderer on the plane. “Won’t the foil get in the way?”
Quinn took the screws one at a time from Mattie and began to replace them as he explained. “With the filter gone, it will be too bright inside the plane to get a good image,” he said. “We need something to block out as much of the visible light as we can. They make special filters for this sort of thing, but we have to use what we have on board. The black ends of developed photographic film, the inside of an old computer floppy disk—”
“That’s a funny word,” Mattie said. “What’s a ‘floppy disk’?”
“Never mind,” Quinn said, tightening the last screw on the back of the camera. “You’ve heard of infrared light, but you don’t know what a floppy disk is…. It makes me feel old, but I guess they were before your time.” He held up the camera. “Okay,” he said. “I’ve got to get back to work. How about you go on and read some more of your book?”
Mattie skulked to her seat. She stared out the window, thinking, no doubt, of building her own infrared camera. She was like that.