“We got her, Beau,” he said as we shook.
“Was she armed?” I asked.
“No, unless you consider the plane to be a deadly weapon.”
With the ghosts of 9/11 still in our heads, we both knew that using an aircraft to murder innocent people was an all-too-real possibility.
“At least not this time,” I replied.
“But without you and Ms. Winkleman here, there’s a good chance Shelley would have gotten away clean. Where is Twink, by the way?”
“Over there,” I said, nodding toward the Travelall. “The airport authorities are giving her hell big time about crashing through the gate.”
“I’ll leave Shelley to cool her heels for a while,” Marvin said. “Let’s go see if we can bail Twink out of hot water with the feds. They tend to take a very dim view of people busting their way onto airfields.”
When we fought our way through the crowd of people encircling the Travelall, I spotted a truculent Twink, arms folded stubbornly across her chest, standing guard next to her beloved vehicle’s left front fender, which had suffered some damage during its close encounter with the security gate. I surmised that the raised blade of the snowplow had tossed some of the flying debris in that direction. Knowing Twink, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised to find she had a spare fender lashed to the Travelall’s roof along with the rest of her vast collection of spare parts.
As we arrived on the scene, Twink was being berated by a towering, finger-pointing black man who turned out to be the airport manager—a guy by the name of Conrad Jones. Homer being Homer, Marvin and Conrad were on a first-name basis.
“Hey, Connie,” Marvin said, edging his way between them. “Don’t be giving her so much grief. Responding units were on their way, but if Ms. Winkleman here hadn’t acted in a timely fashion, our homicide suspect would have made good on her getaway.”
Mr. Jones was not mollified. “That damned snowplow not only wrecked my gate, it yanked two of the posts completely out of the ground, and it’s going to cost a good five thousand bucks to fix it.”
“And you know that because,” Marvin observed, “unless I’m sadly mistaken, a city-operated snowplow took out that very same gate sometime last year. I understand that you’ll have to deal with all kinds of paperwork. I’m sorry about that, but for right now how about if I have my guys help your guys set up a temporary barrier? Then we’ll need to haul that Piper out of the weather into an empty hangar so it can be impounded and processed for evidence.”
“What about her?” Conrad wanted to know, sending a glower in Twink’s direction.
“Believe me,” Marvin assured him, “I’ll have all her information available should it be needed.”
“Okay,” Conrad grumbled, “but she hasn’t heard the last of this.”
As the airport manager and Marvin walked away to deal with the barrier issue, my cell phone rang in my pocket. A glance at caller ID told me Nitz was on the phone.
“Danitza?” I asked.
“No, it’s me, Mr. Beaumont—Jimmy,” was the reply. “Mom’s busy with the EMTs right now. She asked me to call you.”
“The EMTs!” I yelped in alarm. “What’s happened? Did your mom have an accident on her way to the hotel?”
“No,” Jimmy answered, “she’s fine. We’re at her dad’s place. The EMTs are working on him right now. When we got here and found him, he was un . . . un. . . .”
“Unresponsive?” I supplied.
I had been too preoccupied with everything else to call for a welfare check on Roger Adams, but clearly someone else had done so.
“Yes, that’s what he said,” a shaken Jimmy agreed, “unresponsive. As soon as we got inside the house and found him like that, Mom called 911. They’ll probably take him to the hospital. She wanted you to know what’s going on.”
I felt a sudden surge of anger. Shelley Adams had struck again—or at least she had tried to—on her way out of town.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll come to the house as soon as I can, but there’s a bit of a hang-up on this end. If you wind up heading for the hospital before we arrive, call back and let me know.”
“Okay,” Jimmy murmured. “Will do.” He terminated the call.
The crowd around the Travelall had melted away along with Marvin Price and Conrad Jones, leaving just Twink and me. She was bent over, examining the damaged fender. She was also smoking a cigarette. What a surprise!