The Undead Kama Sutra (12 page)

I
backed out of the
trailer and closed the door. I turned the hangar lights back on, dropped the padlock into an outside drain, and hustled to my car. The marshals by the Crown Victoria remained unconscious.

Each new thing that I learned so far—the murders, the aliens, my orders from the Araneum, the crashed airplanes—was like another big rock in my mental knapsack. More weight to carry to what destination?

I got back to Midway Airport, bought a round-trip ticket for Kansas City, and sat with a cup of coffee in the passenger terminal where the morning sun could hit me. I watched the red orb rise over the ragged horizon beyond the airport perimeter.

As a vampire, I’d seen the sunrise through the thick, dark
lenses of welder’s goggles, while wearing heavy clothing to protect my skin. Now I was so used to my human skin that I didn’t feel the slightest tremor of fear when the sun advanced past the edge of the earth. The sun grew bright enough to sting my eyes through the contacts and I looked away, a reminder that I only looked human. I felt the gentle warmth against my cheek and the back of my hands.

Because of all the stupid pain-in-the-ass security rules, I had to sneak blood with me. I hid three ounces of B-positive (a whole three ounces!) in a travel-size bottle of shampoo the TSA screeners had waved through.

I emptied the bottle into my coffee. The small amount of blood was enough to quench my vampire thirst until my next big fix. The rest of my supply had to travel in checked baggage.

Again, as before, the question was where to find Goodman. The man flitted before me, elusive as a mirage.

Once in the Kansas City airport, I scouted the counter for Prairie Air. I followed a maintenance worker to the men’s room, zapped him, pushed him into a stall, and took his badge.

I swiped the badge to unlock a door to the secure part of the terminal. The employee lounge for Prairie Air wasn’t anything fancy: two long tables in the middle, stackable plastic chairs scattered across the linoleum floor, a microwave, refrigerator, and coffeemakers. Copies of the
Kansas City Star
and the
Chicago Tribune
lay on the tables. Headlines on the newspapers announced yesterday’s crash. A wipe board on the far wall had been scrawled with red and blue markers:

NO MEDIA CONTACT, PERIOD
!

SEE YOUR MANAGER FOR NTSB GO TEAM

INTERVIEW NOTE CHANGES IN WORK SCHEDULE
!

There was a list of names with one crossed out. Karen Beck. Who was she?

Women and men in Prairie Air uniforms—shirts or blouses that were dusty brown at the shoulders and faded to a bleached straw color around the waists, plus meadow-green trousers or skirts—hustled through the doors leading to the check-in counters. Everyone looked busy and it would’ve been difficult to snag anyone without attracting attention. Maybe I could find someone outside on a smoke break or getting off work.

I went out the employee exit and stepped into the bright sunlight. I slipped the badge into my pocket. The smell of cigarette smoke lingered in the air, menthols and unfiltered, but the smokers had since left. A concrete walkway led to an employee parking lot on the other side of a chain-link fence.

The door opened behind me and slammed against the stop. A short blonde with a pixie cut, in her early thirties, slender, wearing the Prairie Air uniform, carried a cardboard box jammed with framed photos, stuffed animals, ceramic cups, her brown work shoes, and a wadded pair of panty hose. She was bare-legged. Cheap flip-flops slapped the bottoms of her feet. A paper visitor’s tag pinned to her collar had her name written with a felt-tip pen. Karen Beck.

She plowed past me. The box raked my arm and she didn’t even glance back to apologize.

I raised my sunglasses. Her aura looked like the surface of a red sea in turmoil. Tendrils of anger writhed from the periphery of the penumbra.

I lowered my sunglasses. “Ms. Beck.”

She kept walking.

I followed and repeated her name.

She stopped and turned around. Her green eyes burned like twin flares. “What do you want?”

“A talk.”

“I’m done with talking. If you need something to do, go fuck yourself.”

Interesting Midwestern pleasantry. I smiled to deflect her anger. “Need help with the box?”

She gave me the once-over. “I can manage.” Her voice softened. “Sorry. I had a really bad day. I just got fired.”

Was that why her name was crossed out on the wipe board?

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Not as sorry as I am, believe me. It was a shitty job but I needed the money.” Karen shifted her grasp on the box.

“Why’d you get fired?”

“The real reason? I work for a bunch of assholes.”

“Is there an official reason?”

“I wouldn’t cooperate.”

“With what?”

Karen opened her mouth and stopped. She closed her
mouth and her forehead creased in puzzlement. “Where’s your badge? Who are you?”

“My name is Felix Gomez.”

Had Karen gotten canned for refusing to cooperate with a crash investigation? What did she know or do that made it worth losing this job? The hunch returned and I decided to chance it.

“I’m here because of Vanessa Tico and Janice Wyndersook.”

The creases in Karen’s forehead deepened into a V. “Are you with the media?”

I shook my head. “I’m an investigator. A friend of the family hired me.”

Karen squinted suspiciously. “Which family?”

“Vanessa’s,” I lied.

“The crash happened just yesterday,” Karen said. “Seems pretty damn quick to hire an investigator.”

Time to redirect the conversation to the questions I wanted answered. “Were Vanessa and Janice on Flight 2112 to Chicago Midway?”

Karen looked past my shoulder to the entrance. “If I talk to you, are people going to get in trouble?”

“Some will.”

“Good.” She nodded toward the parking lot. “Let’s continue this discussion someplace else.”

K
aren loaded her fork
with cashew chicken, pea pods, and steamed rice. We were in the Ling Ding Chinese Palace and Karen was finishing her fourth plate from the lunch buffet. The torn remnant of the paper visitor’s tag dangled from a safety pin on her collar.

“Good thing it’s a big buffet,” I said.

Karen brought her hand to cover her mouth while she chewed. “Sorry, but I was starving.” Rice dribbled onto her blouse.

Having lunch had been Karen’s idea. If someone with information you needed wanted to talk, then put them in a comfortable environment and let them blab.

I moved food around on my plate and didn’t do much except pick at it. The buffet looked good enough, but with
out blood even the most sumptuous of gourmet meals tasted like wet sawdust.

“What do you get from all this?” Karen asked.

“It’s my job.”

“How did Janice Wyndersook’s parents get you on the case so fast?”

Had Karen forgotten that I said Vanessa’s folks had hired me or was she testing me?

“I work for Vanessa’s family.”

“Oh, that’s right.” Karen nodded. She looked away for a moment.

“You don’t act like you’re heartbroken about being fired,” I said.

“You can’t believe what they expected me to live on,” she replied. “I’m trying to get back on my feet financially, so I scrimp on everything. I’ve been living on cream of wheat and canned ravioli from the food bank.”

“Back on your feet from what?” I brought a helping of Szechuan pork to my lips and set it back on my plate.

“What else? An asshole criminal of an ex.”

“Criminal?”

“Really. A fucking crook. He cleaned out our joint bank account, maxed out our credit cards buying gold coins, and split town in
my
car with his cousin the stripper. First cousin, I need to add, the incestuous tramp.” Karen shoved food into her mouth between sentences. “God, if love is blind then my eyes must have been plucked out of my head on this one.”

“You needed the job at Prairie Air and yet you let yourself get fired.”

“As much as I’ve been butt-fucked in life, you’d think I’d be the last person to stand on principle on anything. But this was wrong.”

“In what way specifically?”

“The manifest on Flight 2112.” Karen put her fork down and wiped her lips with a napkin. I didn’t think she was done eating so much as taking a breather.

Karen set her elbows on either side of the plate and leaned toward me. “I got fired because I was asked to lie about the manifest. Vanessa Tico and Janice Wyndersook were booked for the flight but never boarded.”

“You sure?”

Karen grabbed a fried wonton and munched it. “Absolutely. When their names didn’t show up as having scanned their boarding passes I called the plane and spoke to the attendant. She gave me a head count. There were four empty seats out of twenty. Should have only been two. Wasn’t hard to miss.”

“Why did you go to the trouble of checking to see if Vanessa and Janice had boarded?”

“Because this was the first time I’ve ever had passengers miss a flight. Since they boarded on the ramp versus down a Jetway, there was the possibility they had gone out the door of another commuter airline. Not likely, considering security, but it has happened.”

“What were you asked to lie about?” I asked.

“That Vanessa and Janice had boarded and that the manifest reflected that.”

“Why and who asked you to lie?”

“The why I don’t know. The who were my boss and his boss.”

“Both employees of Prairie Air?”

Karen nodded. “Yeah.”

“Do they routinely deal with the manifest?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Is changing a manifest something out of the ordinary?”

Karen rolled her eyes. “Hell yes.”

“Why would your bosses ask you to change it?”

“That’s the why question, right? Like I told you, I don’t know. Maybe it was the feds?”

The question made me pause. “Feds?”

“One of those Go Teams arrived early this morning to investigate the crash. They did interviews and took records from the booking clerks and the maintenance crew.”

“And they interviewed you?” I asked.

“Not directly. They were in the office when my bosses were asking me to change the manifest.”

“But the manifest is on the computer, right? There would be a record that it had been altered.”

“That’s why they wanted me to go back and change it. To make it look like it had been my mistake by not putting those two passengers on the manifest. And they wanted me to sign an affidavit that I had made a mistake and not Prairie Air.”

“And if you didn’t cooperate?”

“I’d get fired for insubordination.”

“And these feds? What were they doing during the interview?”

“Just watching. Once they made me wait in the hall while they discussed something with my bosses.”

“How did you know they were feds?”

“Because my boss kept calling them ‘the feds.’ Two of them had NTSB badges and the other an ID with the initials RKW.”

Rockville Kamza Worthington. The consultant firm Goodman worked for. He was within tackling distance. Why was Goodman interested in changing the manifest? The corpses of Vanessa and Janice weren’t in the morgue trailer and, according to Karen, they had never boarded the doomed flight. So why the charade of claiming they had been killed in the crash?

My
kundalini noir
twitched with suspicion. What about the other crash, the Cessna Caravan? Were any of those victims missing?

I asked, “What did the man…it was a man who wore the RKW badge?”

“Yeah. About your height. More filled out. Short blond hair. Quiet. Late forties I’d guess. Looks like he works outside a lot. Wore one of those official blue windbreakers.”

Goodman, for sure.

“You get his name?”

“No. As far as I was concerned, he was just another bureaucratic busybody.”

“Your bosses threatened you with dismissal?”

“Not in those words. It was more like sign this or you’re out on your ass.”

“And your bosses were comfortable with this?”

“Charles, my immediate supervisor, wasn’t. He’s a nice enough guy otherwise but I could tell he didn’t want to join me in the unemployment line. My other boss is a real career prick. He couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t admit to making a mistake. Of course, I didn’t make a mistake. Even if I cooperated, I knew this wouldn’t be the end of the story. Something else comes up, a criminal investigation for instance, and do you think they’d admit to pressuring me to sign that affidavit?”

Karen and I locked eyes for a moment. I sensed her gratitude; she’d found someone on her side. Maybe she would extend that gratitude to the bedroom.

“Who else could verify the manifest?”

“The flight attendant. After the crash, now it’s just me.”

I tried to remember which of those corpses in the trailer belonged to the flight attendant. Not that I could’ve gotten her to talk.

I scooped rice with my fork and pretended it tasted good. “What now?”

Karen sighed. She ran a hand over her scalp and fluffed her hair. “Find work. And pronto. My rent is due at the end of next week and I won’t have enough to cover it.”

Karen had been more than helpful. Thanks to her, the light on Goodman shined even brighter. This Dan Goodman was my man.

I fished a roll of hundreds from my pocket and kept the roll below the level of the table so Karen couldn’t see what I
was doing. I removed twenty bills, cupped them in my hand, and offered them to Karen.

She stared at the money. “What’s that for?”

“To give you a little breathing room until you find more work.”

“What’s the catch?”

“There is none. My client gave me a good advance and so far, you’ve been my best lead.”

Karen took the money and counted it. “You sure about this?”

“Of course.”

She folded the bills and shoved them into her purse. “Don’t expect no quid pro quo. Like putting out.”

“Didn’t cross my mind.”

“Well, make sure that it doesn’t.”

The way she snapped at me meant I was wrong in thinking there was chemistry between us. How could I have misread her? Usually, when I’m with a woman alone like this, sex is not a matter of if but when. My vampire lure is always out there. Why wasn’t she interested?

The waiter came by and took Karen’s plate. She asked for hot tea. After the waiter left, she asked me, “What’s next?”

“After lunch?” I was hoping for a chance to check out Karen’s bra size, but considering her tone, I didn’t want a repeat of the debacle I had with Belinda in Oswego. “I keep going with the investigation.”

The waiter brought hot tea. Karen poured a cup and took a sip. “Got time for a break?”

“As in?”

“As in, I got the afternoon off. Duh.” She sipped again. “You play pool? There’s a sports bar about a half mile from here.”

“I can hold my own.” Okay, maybe I did have a second chance.

Karen laughed. “Hold your own. Good luck with that. I’m going to kick your ass.”

Did chemistry flicker between us?

I paid the check for both of us. Karen and I had come to the restaurant in separate cars; I drove a Monte Carlo rental, she a little Metro. Karen had taken the last spot behind the restaurant while I parked down the street. I went back to my car and would follow her Metro to the sports bar.

If the afternoon unfolded as I imagined it would, and we ended up together, I wouldn’t make the same mistake as I had with Belinda. Karen was getting a dose of vampire hypnosis.

A woman screamed.

The scream had come from Karen’s direction.

My fingers and the skin on my arms tingled with dread. My
kundalini noir
writhed in alarm. So much for my sixth sense giving me a warning. The scream I heard meant the worst had already happened.

I sprinted down the sidewalk and through an alley back to the tiny lot behind the Ling Ding Chinese Palace.

A woman stared pale-faced at the ground beside Karen’s Metro. Two busboys stood at the back door of the restaurant and also looked at the ground.

Karen lay on her back. Both legs were twisted under her hips. Her head faced the Metro and lifeless eyes gazed at the car door. Wet, shiny blood pooled around her head and matted the blond hair against the asphalt. Blood oozed from two small holes at the back of her skull.

Death had been lightning-quick. Karen had collapsed and rolled backward on her hip.

I panned the faces around me. “Anybody see anything?”

The two busboys shook their heads. The woman didn’t react to my question.

Karen’s key ring was by her right hand. Her purse remained tucked under her left arm. Nothing was taken.

I crouched and examined the bullet wounds in her skull. The holes were identical round punctures an inch apart. Too small to be 9 mm or .38. Most likely a .22.

I scanned the ground for the cartridge cases. Nothing but gravel, gum wrappers, and cigarette butts.

Why hadn’t I heard the gunshots?

A silencer? Of course .22s were easier to silence than larger-caliber weapons. And a couple of .22 slugs into the skull was enough to flatline anyone.

The shots looked expertly delivered. Karen hadn’t been simply murdered, she had been assassinated.