15th Affair (Women's Murder Club 15)

CHAPTER 47

MONDAY MORNING, I cracked my eyes open around 3 a.m.

Joe’s side of the bed was stone cold and I heard Julie crying from her room next door. I rolled gingerly out of bed, trying not to press hard on my full-body bruises, and within a couple of minutes, I was cuddling with my daughter in our favorite rocker. I even sang her back to sleep with one of my mother’s Irish lullabies.

Mission accomplished, Martha and I grabbed another couple of hours in the big bed before our nanny rang the bell.

I left Mrs. Godsend in charge of the baby and the border collie, and at 8 a.m., I was having breakfast with Conklin.

The crummy break room looks its best on Monday mornings. It wasn’t Muller-Khan clean, but at least it didn’t look like potbellied pigs had had a party in there.

I made a fresh pot of French Vanilla roast to go with the bag of churros my partner had brought with him. We were soaking up the relative calm while waiting for Brady to get out of a meeting with the brass and the NTSB on the WW 888 disaster.

Conklin had the morning paper and opened it to Cindy’s column on page eight. She’d run the pictures again of the young snoops in room 1418, asking for anyone who recognized either of them to please come forward.

“They’re from out of state,” I said. “Or out of the country. Could be tourists, right? Any other time, we’d have an ID, but…” I didn’t have to say the obvious. The city’s agonized attention was focused on the crash and the ongoing search for answers. Of which there were none.

Richie closed the paper, straightened out the sections, and said, “I’m just going to float something. Blue sky. Don’t jump all over me.”

I said, “Go ahead.”

“It’s about Joe.”

“OK.”

“He’s an airport security consultant, right? He’s working on something related to the crash. That’s what he said in the message he left you.”

“Right.”

“So we see him on the hotel security tape. We see him outside the Chan house. Why? What if Joe had high-level intel that a Michael Chan was involved in terrorism? He finds out that there’s a Michael Chan in Palo Alto. He goes out there and follows Chan back here to the hotel, OK?”

“OK, OK, I’m with you.”

“So Joe’s waiting in the lobby for Chan to leave, say, but instead, we arrive with CSI and Claire, et cetera, heading up to the fourteenth floor. Joe can’t get involved in that, but he drives out to the house in Palo Alto the next day—”

“Why does he do that?”

“He doesn’t know Chan is dead. He’s waiting for him to come home.”

“OK.”

“And he sees our car in front of the house and peels off. Hell, maybe when he looks into the van’s lens, he knows full well that it’s doing surveillance on Chan.”

“So you think Joe’s on assignment to bird-dog Michael Chan?”

“Yeah. Then, two days later, the plane goes down. And now Joe’s got the same passenger manifest Claire’s got. And Michael Chan is on the plane. And he can’t call you,” said my partner. “There’s some blackout protocol, whoever he’s working for. They don’t want to be hacked by terrorists.”

“That’s good, Rich. I like it.”

And I did. It was the first meaningful and still innocent explanation for where Joe was and what he was doing.

It made sense.

So why wasn’t I buying it?

Brady appeared in the doorway of the break room.

He gripped both sides of the doorjamb for a couple of seconds, just long enough to say, “We’ve got Alison Muller’s lease car. Brown Lexus. Left in a parking lot at Seattle-Tacoma International. It’s white-glove clean, like it was detailed inside and out. No prints, no trash, no body in the trunk. No nothing. And Muller’s name isn’t on any airline passenger list.