CHAPTER TWENTY
“Good evening, ladies! Welcome, welcome!”
Faith accepted the speaker’s handshake and braced herself for a challenging conversation. “Thank you.”
The owner of the enthusiastic voice and even more enthusiastic handshake was Donald Portnoy, Executive Director of the Maryland Aviation Administration, the governing body that oversaw Thurgood Marshall Airport.
He wore a bright smile underneath terrified eyes, their terror magnified by the enormous round glasses he wore.
A healthy sheen glistened on a perfectly symmetrical U-shaped bald spot that extended from the top of his forehead to his crown.
Thankfully, that sweat didn’t appear on his palms, which, though cold, were perfectly dry.
The investigators were here because after his firing from the airport, Robert Stevenson had disappeared.
His vehicle registration lapsed nine months later, and his car was repossessed without incident.
His apartment sat vacant for two months before the owners inspected it to find him gone.
Attempts to find him to collect back rent were unsuccessful, and his social security number hadn’t been used.
Faith hoped that talking to his former boss might help them get an idea of where he was.
And why he might have decided to start killing people.
Donald pushed open the door to his office in the administration building at Thurgood Marshall and waved them inside. “Come in! Come in!”
Faith had seen this behavior before from people who knew they’d been caught doing wrong but still clung to a thread of hope that this would all blow over. Hey! We’re excited to do this! This’ll be fun! We’ll get this unpleasant stuff out of the way, and then we’ll all be friends again!
The office was a typical unit, spacious, well-furnished, displaying a bookcase with titles such as 7 Steps to Success, The Right Attitude, and The Impactful Executive, a portrait of a woman Faith didn’t recognize but who she assumed was a former executive of MAA based on the maroon business suit with a small aviator’s pin over the breast pocket, and a modern minimalist desk with an enormous desk calendar-slash-placemat on one side and a desktop monitor on the other.
An ergonomic, mid-backed office chair sat behind the desk, and two chairs, nicely upholstered but not overly luxurious, sat in front.
Donald gestured to these chairs, and Faith and Jessica took a seat. Turk sat in between them, regarding Donald with alert eyes and upraised ears. He clearly didn’t trust the gregarious executive.
Donald sat behind the desk, sighed pleasantly, and placed both hands palms down on the placemat calendar, fingers splayed. “Okay! Let’s get this show on the road! You guys are here to ask about the unfortunate security incident that took place five years ago.”
“Correct,” Faith said.
“Well, I assure you—”
Jessica lifted a hand. “Let’s assume the assurances for the sake of brevity. We’re here to ask about a specific employee of yours, Robert Stevenson?”
“Yes! Just like the author, ha ha!” He swallowed, but tried to hide it, which had the unfortunate effect of making his neck ripple like a lizard choking on a cricket too large to swallow. “Yes, he was let go shortly after the incident, unrelated reasons.”
“What reasons?”
"Uh, well…" He swallowed again, this time not trying to hide it, and chuckled nervously. "Well, I can't disclose that."
“Any particular reason why not?”
He took a breath and started fiddling with his tie, another tell that the enthusiastic, overly friendly executive was struggling in the web.
“Well, it’s MAA policy. We don’t disclose termination reasons.
You understand, of course. People make mistakes, and we want them to have a chance to fix those mistakes.
I mean to move on from them. Just because their employment here didn’t work out doesn’t mean it can’t work out elsewhere.
Sometimes getting fired is the kick in the pants people need to do better next time. Sometimes…”
He seemed to realize he was talking too much and let his voice trail off. He smiled anxiously at the two agents. See? I’m a good guy. I tried to help him.
Faith twisted the screws a little more. “Mr. Portnoy, seven people died in that incident due to a failure of security—”
“Of the TSA,” he interrupted, lifting a pudgy finger. “Our security officers acted in exemplary fashion.”
“So why did you fire nine of them within six weeks of the incident?”
He took a deep breath, released it in a half-chuckle, and tapped his finger on the desk. “Well, for other reasons.”
“What reasons?” Jessica asked again. “The ones that required them to sign NDAs?”
“I can’t reveal them,” he said, not quite raising his voice. “Look, I can confirm dates of employment for Mr. Stevenson. That’s all.” He quickly added, “And I can confirm that no criminal activity took place while he was employed by MAA.”
Faith lifted an eyebrow. “Did criminal activity take place after his employment?”
Donald’s neck flushed as he realized his mistake. He swallowed again and said, “Look, I really…” He released another breathy chuckle, then finished, “I really don’t think I can help you.”
“You can answer the question,” Faith said. “Then we can tell people that you cooperated instead of impeding.”
The flush in Donald’s neck vanished. He took a shaky breath and said, “Okay. After Mr. Stevenson’s termination, there were letters—allegedly, letters—written to the supervisors involved in the incident.”
“What kind of letters?”
Donald’s fingers drummed on the desk again. “Threatening letters.”
“Can you be more specific?”
Donald released a brief bark of laughter. “I can’t be as specific as I have been. Look, we take the privacy of our employees very—”
“Yeah, that’s enough,” Faith said, chopping her hand in front of her face.
“I don’t give a shit about your reputation or MAA’s.
I need to know why someone’s murdering people and leaving bombs in their hands.
I’m being nice about it right now, but if I have to start putting official pressure on you, the niceness—”
“Okay,” Donald said quietly. “Okay.”
His face was crestfallen. He stared at Faith’s chest, but she was pretty sure he was avoiding her eyes, not ogling her breasts. The sweat on his head was pooling into thick blotches that clung to him like glue rather than sliding off.
“In the post 9/11 world, security incidents of the sort we suffered five years ago are catastrophic, not just for the airport affected but for air travel as a whole. If it was revealed to people that there were gaps in our procedures that led to this incident, then it could cause a two-hundred-twenty-billion-dollar industry to shrink drastically. When incidents of this nature occur, the root cause of the problem must be determined and addressed, yes, but it must also be kept secret from the public. You understand. You don’t release details of an investigation, or you have incidents like what recently occurred with your suspect at the Port Covington warehouse. ”
Faith bristled at that allusion, but she didn’t argue. Donald was working his way up to telling them what they needed to know. She would let him talk.
He took a deep breath and continued. “The event in question was complex. Blame was primarily placed on the K9 handler whose dog failed to locate the explosive, however…” His lips trembled, but he forced the admission out.
“There were multiple levels of failure. The TSA and the airport both have equipment that’s supposed to detect explosives.
The TSA’s equipment simply failed to detect the bomb.
Our equipment… was inoperable at the time. ”
“So you were conducting flight operations despite the fact that your security equipment was malfunctioning,” Jessica summarized.
He nodded glumly. "Yes. You have to understand."
"We don't," Faith interrupted. She couldn't handle justification anymore. "But we're not here for that. We want to know what happened to Robert Stevenson."
Donald took another deep breath. “Well, as you’ve learned, a number of security officers were terminated in the weeks following the incident.
They were…” He lifted a shaking hand to his head and tried to wipe the sweat off of his bald spot.
He succeeded in smearing it through the coarse remains of his hair.
“They were terminated because they were aware of the malfunctioning equipment and had voiced concerns several times about its ineffectiveness and the risks associated.”
Jessica scoffed. “So you paid them off so they wouldn’t go to the news with that information.”
Donald nodded. His eyes had dropped from Faith’s chest to her waist. “Yes.”
Faith let that admission hang in the air for a moment. She was here to solve the murders of Jackson Entwhistle and Raelynn Hayes, not hold the MAA to account for their mishandling of the incident five years ago.
Still, in a way, Donald Portnoy and his fellow executives were as culpable for those two deaths as they were for the seven who died when that bomb made it through security and exploded in baggage claim. And if that bomb had made it onto its intended flight?
She took a breath to let her emotions settle, then asked, “Why was no settlement given to Robert Stevenson?”
Donald’s eyes fell further. He was now staring at the small airplane-shaped magnet resting on the current date on his desktop calendar. “Mr. Stevenson was the maintenance technician for the detection equipment. He… We felt…”
Faith helped him out. “You figured you could save a few bucks by telling him that you’d blame him for the failure of the equipment, despite what I assume were repeated warnings on his part and repeated requests for the tools, time, and budget necessary to fix it?”
Donald nodded, now staring at his own lap.
Jessica scoffed. She shook her head at him, lips curled in disgust. “What would the settlement have been?”
His voice was barely perceptible. “Seventy thousand.”
“Seventy thousand dollars. And even though it was all your fault, you still chose to pinch those few pennies.”
He didn’t bother with an answer.
Faith let the silence hang for a moment longer, then asked, “Besides Jackson Entwhistle and Raelynn Hayes, who do you feel Mr. Stevenson might potentially target?”
He took a deep breath and lifted his eyes. “Well… There’s me, of course. Besides me, I suppose our former chief of security might be at risk.”
“Who’s your former chief of security?”
“James Hartford. He left MAA two years ago. It’s my understanding that he now works for the TSA as chief of security for Ronald Reagan Washington International Airport.”
Faith nodded. “We’ll arrange for increased security for both you and Mr. Hartford. In the meantime, why don’t you make a list of anyone else who might be targeted and send it to me so I can arrange protection for them as well?”
He nodded. “Sure. I can do that.”
She got to her feet and started for the door, Jessica and Turk following. Halfway there, Donald called, “Wait! I…”
She turned around. His eyes shifted to the left, then the right, then back down. His fingers fiddled with his tie. “What we discussed… This was spoken in confidence, of course.”
Faith’s lip curled. She didn’t dignify that with a response. She just left the office and left Donald to consider exactly what sort of man he was.