Colleen did not open her eyes when she heard the sound of a car coming up the street toward her, did not even open them when the car came to a stop just in front of her house. It wasn’t until the driver’s-side window rolled down and a man’s voice said “Mrs. Banks?” that she opened her eyes.
“Yes,” she said. She stood up and picked up her suitcase and walked toward the taxi without looking back. “I’m ready.”
Chapter 3
By the time the sun had broken the horizon over the tree line, Winston and Glenn had given up trying to find fingerprints inside the airplane. All they’d managed to do was rouse two deputies from bed and call them out to the airport. Deputy Billy Englehart, a small, nervous man in his mid-thirties who’d been with the sheriff’s office for just over a year, had arrived first, and he’d brought a tarp with him to cover Bellamy’s body. When the other deputy arrived, a slightly older man named Isaac Kepler, who was tall and skinny and hardly ever said a word to anyone unless it was over the radio during his patrol, he and Englehart set up a perimeter using stakes and crime scene tape that encircled both the far end of the runway and the area around the body. In the weak morning light, Winston and Glenn and the two deputies had bent toward the earth in search of shell casings, and Winston had sent the two deputies down into the high grass alongside the runway, and he’d heard Englehart cursing and complaining the whole time.
Just before dawn, Winston and Glenn had found a set of tire tracks that ran from the parking lot out across the runway, right up to the end of it where they’d found the plane. With the morning light they’d been able to find where the tracks turned in a wide circle back toward the parking lot. It looked like whatever vehicle had driven out there had been pulling something behind it, probably a trailer.
“Somebody was waiting for this plane,” Glenn said. He removed his hat and wiped his forearm across his forehead even though it wasn’t warm enough for him to be sweating.
“And something got unloaded,” Winston said. “The tracks heading out of here are deeper than the ones coming in. And Bellamy’s car didn’t leave these tracks. They’re too far apart, the tires too wide. Somebody else was waiting for this plane when it got here. Figuring out what kind of tires left these tracks will tell us what kind of vehicle they belong to.”
“I bet it was drugs,” Englehart said.
Winston turned and looked at Englehart. He and Kepler had taken a break from searching the area. Now Englehart just stood there, slowly winding crime scene tape back onto the spool. He’d pushed his hat off his forehead so that Winston could see his straw-colored hair.
“Yep. Could’ve been drugs,” Winston said.
Englehart adjusted his hat’s brim, pulled it down to block the faint sunrise.
“Ain’t no other reason to abandon an airplane and disappear,” Englehart said. “If it wasn’t drugs it was something else: illegals or guns, one.”
“More money in drugs,” Kepler said, the first words Winston had heard him utter since arriving.
Englehart looked down at the tarp that covered Bellamy’s body, spoke to it as if the man beneath it could hear him. “That’s the damn truth, ain’t it, Rodney.”
A call had gone out just before dawn that Rodney Bellamy’s wife had contacted the sheriff’s office to report him missing. According to her, he’d left home in the middle of the night for diapers and never returned. Winston had spent the hours since trying to figure out how Rodney had ended up here.
“Maybe ‘diapers’ is the coloreds’ code word for ‘cocaine,’” Englehart said. He laughed and looked around at the gathered group, but no one showed any sign of thinking his joke was funny.
“Knock off the jokes, Englehart,” Winston said. He looked over at Kepler. “Y’all get back to processing this scene.”
Englehart’s face went flat as he finished winding the yellow tape. Winston had never liked the man, but he needed deputies, and he’d overlooked Englehart’s laziness and off-color jokes for as long as he could. He wanted to snatch the tape from the man’s hands and embarrass him by sending him home, but he knew that dark humor was how some men on the force dealt with death and uncertainty; they laughed at it because there was just no other way to make sense of its randomness, and this death felt particularly random, and there was a lot Winston had to make sense of. It was bad enough that Rodney Bellamy was Ed Bellamy’s son, but now he’d also be breaking the news to a wife who’d be left behind with a baby. He knew Englehart could laugh about a thing like this only because he’d never get any closer to it than he was right now, but Winston would only grow closer. He dreaded it, dreaded calling Ed at the high school, dreaded breaking the news to him and asking him to meet him over at Rodney’s house so his widow wouldn’t be alone when Winston told her.
Winston looked past his three officers and saw two men walking down the runway toward them. “Shit,” he said. It was Leonard Dorsey, chair of the county commission, and Hugh Sweetney, the airport manager.
He’d known Hugh Sweetney for several years. Sweetney had served as a pilot in World War II, and he’d come back to the North Carolina coast after the war was over and worked odd jobs until the county had built the municipal airport before deciding they needed someone to run it. Sweetney was quiet and reserved, but Leonard Dorsey was just the opposite: a loud, sweaty, nervous man from Raleigh who’d followed his elderly parents to the coast when he was in his thirties. He was past fifty now, and he’d made his money selling insurance and knowing everyone’s business, and that money and knowledge had given him political power.
“Morning, Sheriff,” Dorsey said. “Looks like somebody almost ran out of runway last night.” He smiled an awkward smile, the kind of smile somebody smiles when they know they’re interrupting something they shouldn’t be interrupting. He walked past Winston and the other men and looked at the plane, and then he looked back at Sweetney. “What are we working with here, Hugh?”
As Sweetney passed, he nodded and smiled at Winston by way of Good morning, and then he stood beside Dorsey, crossed his arms, and looked at the plane, its mirrored body reflecting the early morning light. Sweetney freed one hand and rubbed at the gray stubble on his cheek.
“That’s a DC-3,” Sweetney finally said. “Been modified with those cargo doors. They stopped building them in 1950. It’s a good aircraft.” He looked behind them where the runway rolled toward the waterway. “Didn’t have no business on a runway this short, though. Whoever flew it in knew it too, but it’s a good landing, considering.” He turned his head and stared at the place where the back wheel had collapsed. “It’s a tail dragger, and they snapped the rear landing gear trying to turn it around here at the end. Lucky they didn’t ground-loop it.” He looked at Dorsey and then at Winston. “Plane seems okay, though, and that landing gear shouldn’t be too hard to fix.”
“Well, good,” Dorsey said, as if something had been settled. He looked at Sweetney, spoke only to him. “We can get it out of here today, right?”