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39.
Linsey Simon drove the unmarked car, a loaner from the SDPD Detective Bureau, with Cleve Bartlett riding shotgun. Cleve had chucked the uniform for a handsome tan twill suit with blue shirt and dark blue tie. She wore her preferred blouse and dress trousers that covered her Doc Martens boots.
She and Cleve pulled up on a quiet, sunny street in Serra Mesa and got out. "Hi there!" she called out toward sky so blue it almost looked dark blue, matching Cleve's tie, but that was an illusion of pupil-overload.
A shadowy figure on a rooftop waved back.
Moments later, Max Juergen and Fritz Waldmeister clambered down the ladder and joined Linsey and Cleve on the sidewalk. Linsey had arranged the meeting by cell phone.
"Oh yes," Max said, "what a shame. He was such a nice young man." He and Fritz looked 30ish, blond, in good shape. They had that dark-red look of fair-skinned people with chronic sunburn, despite wearing broad-brimmed straw hats, long-sleeved shirts, and long pants.
"Did you know Hugh Milton long?"
Fritz said: "He worked with us for a few months and he was doing well. College dropout—looking for himself, as they say— had a nice girlfriend."
"Annie," Max said. "We saw her at the funeral. Very sad."
"Was he ever sick? Miss a day now and then? Drug problems? Did he drink too much?"
"No, nothing," they both said. "Few hangovers now and then, but we probably caused most of those with our beer drinking. We are German, you know. Beer is our second bread."
"The report from SDPD, or actually from the Fire Department, a hazardous materials incident report, says you saw planes that appeared to crop dust."
"Half of San Diego saw them," Max said.
"At least, half of the people around Mission Valley."
"Did you see any markings on the planes? Numbers, symbols, anything meaningful?"
The two men looked at each other. Fritz said: "I think they had large black letter N or NT followed by a hyphen and some numbers and a red ball with a diagonal line through it."
"Can you remember the numbers?"
He did, and he told her. It was all the information they had. Various police agencies had made reports on the planes, but these were the first two witnesses who could offer details. It hadn't occurred to them to come forth with the information—they'd assumed the police already had the information.
As many witnesses explained it, the planes appeared to be systematically flying back and forth over Mission Valley in a grid pattern. San Diego Police and County Sheriffs had compiled a kind of map, of which she had a copy, showing similar activity on that day—that day only—in several canyon areas stretching from the coast inland about five miles, and from Del Mar in the North to Otay Mesa almost on the Mexican border.
"If we knew where those planes landed," Cleve said after they bade the two men goodbye and drove away. "Where they refueled, where they came from."
"This information might help," she said. "Can you call the local FAA office and scare someone up to investigate this?"
Cleve spent a half hour on the cell phone and used the car computer to FTP information. Meanwhile, Linsey drove to a shady place under a large tree in the Harbor district. She had another line of inquiry going—background on the Lima Voyager. Cell phone squeezed under one ear, she brought coffee and one donut each back from a bakery. Cleve groaned guiltily but grabbed his sugar donut. With the two of them talking simultaneously, the car was like a small office. The computer screen flickered with changing images, and the car printer chirred out little printouts on cash register style paper.
In the end, Cleve related: "There were probably as many of five nearly identical one engine Cessnas in the air. The registration number clue is frustrating. None of the airports in the region has any planes with that prefix registration. In fact, the FAA guy I spoke with at Lindbergh Field guessed that we were dealing with a temporary registration that could have been issued anywhere in the region. The block of numbers used is probably fake. We don't know the fuel capacity, load condition, or any other information about those planes. All we do know is that they did not originate or land at any of the airfields like Brown, Montgomery, Lindbergh, or any of the military air stations. But they couldn't have flown too long without refueling."
Linsey related: "I found out Lima Voyager is under Liberian flag, and she's in limbo. She's in the middle of a bankruptcy case involving her owner and several creditors. The owner is a XenoX Shipping out of Seattle, and nobody there has answered a phone in months, so the creditors' lawyers tell me. It's a mess." As she spoke, she looked at the pile of printouts on the console tray between them. The car had a sort of miniature desk with a lamp over it, and the computer in a steel framed case that could swivel to face driver or passenger. As she ran through the litany of woes about the ship, her subconscious mind was on an divergent thought track. "I did manage to get a list of the captain and crew, with addresses and phone numbers, courtesy Louise Trost and the FBI. So we can start running through those one by one in hopes of finding the guys that were on the ship. There is no record of the cargo other than Cargo: Industrial, Cleared (meaning the Coast Guard has checked and found no bombs, drugs, parrots, or other no-nos), General. Cleve, what's that?"
"Huh?" His eyes roved to a pile of papers where she pointed.
They reached for a printout with a round dot in the logo. Cleve said: "Wow, Linsey, the logo. you're on to something."
She snatched it from him. "It's an attachment from one of the creditors up in Seattle, and it's an invoice by which XenoX is obligated to pay the sum of $1.3 million on demand in return for the cargo of Lima Voyager, again unspecified but mentioned in broad terms as Chemical, Cleared, Class [something or other, long numerical identifier]. Look at the logo. It's a circle with two Xs in it and the letters ENO through the middle. ENO is the smallest, the second X is larger, and the largest is the first X, whose northwest/southeast legs poke slightly through the circle." She grabbed a clipboard and drew the logo on a piece of scrap paper. "Maybe the planes had that XenoX logo on them in black, like it is here, and someone painted over it. Why wouldn’t they just use the same dull white as the planes?"
Cleve shrugged: "Maybe fresh white paint would have stood out too much? Maybe red was all they had?"
"Good enough for me." She whipped out her phone and called Louise. "This is Lieutenant Linsey Simon of the Harbor Police in San Diego. I'm on an important investigation. Is there a XenoX company or corporation in San Diego County, or maybe in Riverside, Orange, or Imperial Counties?" Two minutes later, she had the information.
"Cleve, XenoX is a chemical company here in San Diego County. They are a subsidiary of Anaconda Chemicals, which also has plants here in San Diego and over in Brawley. Brawley is the home office."
After bouncing around through the bureaucracy of the huge corporation, Linsey finally got through to the Public Relations Officer in San Diego, a youngish man named Ricardo Chavez. "How can I help you, Lieutenant?" asked the ebullient Chavez.
"Mr. Chavez, I wonder if you can tell me—does your company own any aircraft?"
"Aircraft? Sure, lots of them."
"Lots?" Her heart nearly skipped a beat.
"You mean corporate jets, experimental craft, what?"
"Crop dusters?"
"No, none at all. We don't even make agricultural products here in SoCal. We do have a Chicago subsidiary that makes fertilizer boosters. I don't know how that's delivered, though. I think farmers use a tow spreader on the back of their tractor."
"You have any planes at all in the county?"
"Let me look through my fact book. Here. We have two corporate Lear Jets, one at Lindbergh and the other at LaGuardia in New York City. We lease those out to other companies because we're on sort of a tight budget. We have a rain making division outside Borrego—east of the Volcan Mountains."
"You do? Rain making?" Linsey gaped.
"Oh yes, it was one of Mr. Collwood's pet projects. He is quite an innovator. Actually, I think it's been shut down for some time because of tight funding."
"Mr. Collwood?"
"The CEO of Anaconda Chemicals. He's the big boss. Our CEO, Henry Morton, is under him. We are a wholly owned subsidiary. Say, Miss-?"
"Lieutenant Simon."
"Lieutenant, would you like to come tour our San Diego plant? It's right up here in lovely Mira Mesa."
"I may take you up on that soon. Thanks."
"What was that all about?" Cleve asked.
"Ready for a little overtime?"
He shrugged. "My wife has tuna casserole tonight. One of my favorites, but it gets better each time it's reheated."
"Good," she said. "Gimme your trash." She took the empty coffee containers and donut bags out to the trash can. "We are taking a drive out to Borrego, my friend. I'll explain as we go."
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