Chapter 5
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Flint heard the SUV pull up to the curb and cut its engine. He’d been waiting since her call. Forty minutes, she’d said. More than an hour had passed.
He was at the front door before she knocked. He opened it and stepped aside.
Scarlett walked in without a word. She carried her bag over one shoulder and moved stiffly, as if she’d been injured. Jeans, sweater, sneakers. A brown leather blazer over a shoulder holster. Her eyes were bloodshot and she favored her right hip, limping a bit as she walked.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Guy got into my garage tonight. He was waiting behind the storage shelves when I left the office. He lobbed a flashbang before I could put him down.”
“A flashbang?”
“He wore goggles and ear protection.” She nodded, delivering intel the way she’d deliver a field report.
Flat. Factual. Already past it. “While I was dealing with the flashbang, he took my SUV. I tracked it, killed the engine remotely, and picked it up off Navigation Boulevard. He was already gone.”
“You get a look at him?”
“No, unfortunately. But I have video. I’ll run it down when I have the time.” She clenched her jaw. “That’s not why I’m here.”
Flint let it go for now. She’d handle the break-in her way and on her own time. That’s how Scarlett operated. The look on her face said the conversation was over.
He led her into his living room. Flint poured two whiskeys. He handed one to Scarlett and returned to his chair. A laptop rested on the ottoman.
She set her bag on the floor and reached into her blazer pocket. She pulled out a USB drive and handed it to him.
“This dropped through the mail slot at my office two days ago. Padded envelope. No return address. My cameras captured a kid on a bike when he dropped it off,” Scarlett said. “We’re trying to find him.”
Flint plugged the drive into his laptop and waited for it to load. A handful of files popped onto the screen.
“Open the large one,” Scarlett said, taking another gulp of the whiskey, which had seemingly started to work its magic on her tension.
He clicked to open the file.
A Gulfstream in flight against an azure sky captured from a distance. The image quality was sharp enough that it had to be satellite. The aircraft was cruising at altitude, steady and unremarkable.
Until the Gulfstream exploded miles above the ocean.
The fireball bloomed orange and white and swallowed the aircraft whole. The initial blast ruptured the fuel tanks. Then thousands of gallons of Jet-A fuel atomized and ignited, ripping the aircraft apart from the inside.
Fragments trailing smoke and flame arced toward the water and hit the surface within a minute.
He hit the replay. Once again, the Gulfstream exploded. Burning wreckage slammed into the water and scattered across miles of open ocean until only smoke and flame and debris drifted on the ocean’s surface.
The explosion was catastrophic and total. Nobody could have survived that.
To confirm, he watched it a third time, paying close attention to the sequence.
A fuel-tank rupture would usually start in the wings, and the breakup pattern could be different.
This looked more like a device. Something placed inside the aircraft and detonated at altitude.
But he couldn’t say for sure without examining the wreckage. Which was impossible at the moment.
He’d seen enough combat footage and crash investigation reports to know a fuel-air explosion expanded relatively slowly and tore a plane apart in stages.
This explosion seemed to be instantaneous.
The aircraft was intact one frame and gone the next, which was the signature of high explosives, not mechanical failure.
“Where did the footage come from?” he asked.
“It was on the USB drive with the news clips. I don’t know who shot it or how they got it.
Satellite coverage of the Pacific is constant, but this kind of resolution isn’t publicly available.
Gulfstream G650,” Scarlett said. “Private. En route from Houston to San Diego and then on to Honolulu. Four souls on board. Two pilots and a married couple. No survivors. No distress call.”
Flint knew the G650. Rolls-Royce engines.
Seven-thousand-nautical-mile range. Houston to Honolulu was less than half that.
These aircraft were meticulously maintained and flown by experienced crews.
A catastrophic midair breakup of a G650 in cruise was not something that happened without a damn good reason.
“What does the NTSB say?” Flint asked, referencing the federal agency that investigates plane crashes.
“Still open. The preliminary report says explosion consistent with a fuel-tank rupture, but they haven’t determined the ignition source.
Wreckage recovery is minimal because the Pacific is deep and the debris field is wide.
The flight recorders are on the ocean floor, and the NTSB has other priorities at the moment. ”
“That’s all they have?”
“So far,” she nodded. “The investigation could take years. Overwater crashes with limited wreckage recovery are among the hardest cases the NTSB handles. They’ll get there eventually, but they’re in no hurry.”
“Who were the passengers?”
“Craig Keane. Texas real estate developer. Built strip malls and mixed-use retail. Made a lot of money. Kept a low profile. His wife Nancy.”
Scarlett clicked through to one of the news clips on the drive with a photograph. It showed a man in a dark suit and a woman in a black dress, slightly out of focus behind him, at a charity gala.
“The explosion story lasted half a news cycle. Private plane, rich couple, empty ocean. Not much there to hook or sustain audience sympathy,” she said. “When no evidence turned up right away, the world moved on.”
Flint nodded. “And you verified this?”
“Yes, on the NTSB filings and federal aviation records. I confirmed the satellite imagery through a military intelligence contact. The video is authentic. The timeline checks. Everything checks,” Scarlett replied, leaning her head back to close her eyes for a moment.
Flint settled deeper into his chair and looked at her. Scarlett had been carrying this for two days and she hadn’t told him until tonight. She’d been trying to work it alone first, which was typical. She’d hit a wall, which was not typical at all.
“I gather none of the names connect to anything in your files,” he said.
“Craig Keane. Nancy Keane. Both pilots. I ran all four names through every database I have access to. Nothing.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Flint drained his glass and set it on the side table. “Why did someone send this to you?”
Scarlett reached into another pocket and pulled out a photograph. An old Polaroid. Polaroids were making a comeback, but this one was decades old, square, and faded. She handed it to him.
Flint studied the photo under the desk lamp. The image revealed a tree trunk, old and deeply furrowed. Carved into the bark were two hearts joined at the side, pierced by a single arrow. Inside one heart, the initials KS. Inside the other, NW.
He turned it over. A phone number written in blue indelible ink using neat block letters.
“KS,” Flint said. “Katie Scarlett. Who’s NW?”
When she spoke, Scarlett’s tone was quieter than before, keeping emotion under control.
“Nora Weiss. She was at the Lazy M before you. We were close for about two years. The way foster kids get close. Fast and hard, because you never knew how long you had.”
Flint had met Scarlett at the Lazy M when he was eight. She was ten and already the queen of the place. She’d spent years of her life at the ranch before he showed up, and she almost never talked about them.
“Nora was two years older than me. She’d been there long enough to know how everything worked.
Who you could trust. Where to hide when things went sideways.
She taught me to swim in the stock tank behind the barn.
Both of us screaming at the cold and the mud between our toes.
” Scarlett’s eyes were on the photo in Flint’s hands.
“We carved that tree together on her last day. She was twelve. I was ten. The state moved her to a group home in Lubbock. We both knew it was permanent.”
Flint could hear the kitchen clock ticking down the hall. “What happened to her?”
“Years later, after I opened the agency, I ran a search. She had two more placements after Lubbock before she aged out of the system at eighteen. I found no records of college enrollment or military record. No marriage license either.” Scarlett paused.
“The last document I located was a death certificate filed in El Paso County. Nora Weiss. Dead at twenty-three. Accidental overdose.”
“What did she take?”
“Dunno. I haven’t found an autopsy report.” Scarlett shrugged. “She was a foster kid who aged out and fell through the cracks. I’ve seen that story a hundred times. Maybe more. We both have.”
Flint nodded. Kids who survived the group homes and the shuffling from one stranger’s house to the next, only to lose the fight after the system turned them loose.
They had no family or money and no safety net.
Some made it. But sadly, many ended with a death certificate in a county clerk’s office with nobody around to notice.
He considered the facts they knew. A plane exploded over the Pacific and a tree carving from a foster home in West Texas. Two things that had nothing obvious in common except the envelope they’d arrived in.
“The polaroid is old, which suggests someone has been holding onto it for a long time,” Scarlett replied.
“How many people watched you carve the tree?”
“Nobody. It was just us. Behind the equipment shed.”
Flint turned the possibilities over a few times. “The Gulfstream investigation notes so far say Nancy Keane was on board. Not Nora Weiss.”
“I know.”
“Nora Weiss is dead of an overdose. Nancy Keane is dead in the Pacific. Two dead women. One old polaroid that anybody could have taken and kept all this time.” He held up the photo and tapped the phone number on the back. “Have you called?”
“No.”
He looked at her. Scarlett didn’t leave leads sitting for two days. She ran everything down immediately and without hesitation.
“I didn’t know enough,” Scarlett said. “I still don’t.”
Flint picked up the photograph and turned it over again, studying the phone number.
“Two days ago someone drops an envelope through your mail slot. Tonight someone breaks into your building with a flashbang and a messenger bag.” He looked at her. “You don’t think those two things are connected?”
“I don’t know. The intruder took something from my building. I won’t know what until I go through every room tomorrow.” Scarlett finished her whiskey. “Could be connected. Could be coincidence. I don’t like either option.”
“Coincidence would mean two separate people targeted your office in the same week.”
“Which is worse than them being connected,” Scarlett said.
Flint understood. He placed the photograph on the coffee table between them.
Before either of them spoke again, Scarlett’s phone buzzed. She looked at the screen. Her expression didn’t change but her body went still.
She turned the phone so he could see the display.
The number matched the one written on the back of the photograph.