Davis watched Delacorte struggle to put it all together.
“If you think about it,” Davis said, “there’s only one person who could have made everything work.”
“Captain Reyna.”
“Exactly. I’m guessing he shot his copilot, probably before they even diverted to the remote airstrip. That way he gets no challenges about why they’re changing destination. When they land in the jungle, the two missing girls are taken off, and the body we found in the captain’s seat is brought on board. A John Doe already dead and dressed in a uniform that didn’t fit. That all works, but only if Reyna had help, somebody waiting for him on the ground.”
“C’est incroyable!” said Delacorte.
“No less incredible than the paperwork I came across two nights ago. Captain Reyna’s personnel file was altered so that his physical characteristics matched those of our mystery corpse.”
Delacorte’s gaze narrowed.
“I’m sure of it,” said Davis. “Major Echevarria is looking into the details, but the very fact that he hasn’t shot this down tells me we’re on the right track. Somebody with official access has been altering evidence. The way I figure it, when Flight 223 made its second takeoff that night, the girls were no longer on board and Reyna was in the cockpit with two dead men, probably behind a locked door. The part I’ve been wrestling with was Reyna himself — what happened to him? You just gave me the answer.”
After a long moment, an overwhelmed Delacorte said, “You are now going to tell me he used a parachute? Is that even possible?”
“D.B. Cooper thought so.” Delacorte stared a blank, and Davis realized his reference to the legendary hijacker had fallen flat. “It was back in the seventies. A guy hijacked a Boeing 727, said he was carrying a bomb. The plane landed, and Cooper ordered two bourbon and waters while everything played out, even paid for them and tipped the flight attendant. Once he had his ransom and the passengers were deplaned, they took off again and headed out over the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle. Cooper took off his tie, put on a parachute, and ordered the pilots to depressurize the airplane and lower the aft stairs. Then he jumped.”
“Yes,” said Delacorte, “now I recall. He was never found.”
“Nope. But if nothing else, D.B. proves our point.”
Delacorte wrestled with the idea. “Reyna kills his copilot and flies to a remote airfield where the girls are removed? Then he takes off again, depressurizes the airplane… and jumps leaving no one on board to fly?”
“No one except his dead copilot and a corpse that was put in the cockpit while they were on the ground — that made the body count nice and neat, and it would have worked nicely if the crash had created the usual fireball. After Reyna jumped the passengers had one last hope, a pastry chef who broke into the locked flight deck and did his damnedest to save the day. He didn’t quite do it, but he flew long enough to burn down fuel, and he probably guided the jet to strike at a relatively soft angle. That preserved a lot of evidence for us.”
“You are suggesting that Reyna sacrificed an entire aircraft full of passengers. How could any pilot do such a thing?”
“Morally? I have no idea. The more pertinent question for us is why he would do such a thing.”
Delacorte cast a critical gaze. “I have never heard such an outrageous theory in any investigation.”
“Neither have I,” Davis agreed. “Unfortunately, it’s the only solution that lines up with the facts.”
“Perhaps. But this theory you propose is convenient in one way, my friend. It allows a chance that your daughter is still alive. I must ask — could your heart be driving your solutions more than the evidence?”
Davis looked Delacorte in the eye. “I don’t know, Pascal. I really don’t know.”
Davis got up to leave, and as he made his way back to his room the burden of Delacorte’s question hung like a great weight. Which was leading? His heart or the truth?
At midnight Davis pulled off his boots at the foot of the bed. He was glad to have the Frenchman around. Even if Delacorte was an engineer by training, his instincts were good, and he had that flair of imagination found in all good investigators — the ability to ask with a clear mind, What if?
His own air conditioner blew like an Arctic wind, and he lay on the bed and tried for sleep. He plugged Jen’s songs into his ears, and like the last two nights a tiger-striped iPod became his last tenuous link to his little girl. His last link to sanity. He flicked idly across the screen and saw a camera symbol. He’d never realized the gadget had a camera. Something else he should have known. His thumb hesitated. Was it a violation to look at her pictures? Of course it was. Davis rationalized that if he ever had to explain, he would say he was acting in an investigative capacity.
He hoped to hell he would have to explain.
He tapped the button and began flicking through pictures. There were none of him, but he didn’t take it as a slight. He saw a selfie of Jen with her roommate. Jen with a pair of Asian boys he’d never seen. The oldest was from last Christmas, Jen with three of her old high school friends, all of them sporting Santa hats and shot glasses, a riotous party in the background. Davis held steady. The glasses were full, of what he could only imagine. He wrote it off for what it was — an inevitable rite of passage. Hadn’t he done the same thing at that age? A year ago, certainly two, he would have blown a gasket at underage drinking. Now? Maybe he’d mellowed. More likely — since she’d gone off to school he missed her desperately. Somewhere along the road of adolescence, Jen had grown up, become as much a friend as a daughter. Then again, if he ever caught her drinking and driving he would back her against the nearest wall and do his best drill sergeant impersonation — which was very good.
Davis reached the end of the picture show, the last frame apparently taken from inside her back pocket — what happened when you sat down with the camera mode active. He lowered the Touch briefly, then did a double-take. The last frame wasn’t actually a photograph — an arrow in the middle of the screen told Davis it was a video. He wondered when it had been taken, but there was no obvious date stamp. He hit the little arrow and the movie began to play. The video never changed, only a blank screen with a blurred tinge of brown on one side. The audio that came through the earbuds, however, nearly caused his heart to seize.
Jen’s voice. “I see men with guns outside.”
A different female voice replied, “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay.”
Jen again. “Is there an ambulance? They said the copilot is sick — maybe that’s why we landed here.”
Shouting in the background, loud and authoritative in Spanish. Then two unmistakable cracks, sharp and loud. Even through the earbuds Davis recognized the sound of gunshots, and he knew where they had been directed — Special Agent Mulligan. As if to confirm his conclusion, hysterical shouts followed, and then a shriek of, “Thomas! No!”
Jen’s voice came through, shakier now. “Oh my God! They’ve killed him!”
A man began shouting orders over the chaos: “No te muevas!” Don’t move.
Things fell quiet. The invaders had made their point, had assumed control. Davis heard the second, distinctive female voice fall to a whisper. The words were spoken close to the microphone, which meant they could only have come from Jen’s seatmate. The girl he’d seen her talking to in the boarding area video, and who Jen had mentioned in her final phone message.