Marino met me at the gate. For once he seemed to sense my mood and followed me patiently and in silence through the terminal. The Christmas decorations and merchandise in the airport’s shop windows only fed my depression. I wasn’t looking forward to the holidays. I wasn’t sure how or when Mark and I would see each other again. To make matters worse, when Marino and I got to the baggage area we spent an hour watching luggage make its lazy rounds on a carousel. It gave Marino an opportunity to debrief me while I got increasingly out of sorts. Finally, I reported my suitcase missing. After the tedium of filling out a detailed multiple-part form, I retrieved my car and, with Marino once again tailing me, drove home. The dark, rainy night blessedly obscured the damage to the front yard as we parked in my driveway. Marino had reminded me earlier that they’d had no luck locating Frankie while I was away. He wasn’t taking any chances.
After shining his flashlight over my property in search of broken windows or anything else hinting of an intruder, he took me through my house, turning on lights in each room, checking closets and even looking under the beds.
We were heading to the kitchen and thinking about coffee when we both recognized the code blaring out of his portable radio.
“Two-fifteen, ten-thirty-three–”
“Shit!” Marino exclaimed, snatching the radio out of his jacket pocket.
Ten-thirty-three was the code for “Mayday.”
Radio broadcasts were ricocheting like bullets through the air. Patrol cars were responding like jets taking off. An officer was down at a convenience store not far from where I lived. Apparently he had been shot.
“Seven-oh-seven, ten-thirty-three,” Marino barked to the dispatcher that he was responding as he hurried to my front door.
“Goddamm it! Walters! He’s just a fuckin’ kid!”
He ran out cursing into the rain, calling back to me, “Lock up tight, Doc. I’ll have a couple uniform men over here right away!”
I paced the kitchen, finally sitting at the table nursing straight Scotch while a hard rain drummed the roof and beat against windowpanes. My suitcase was lost and my .38 was inside it. It was a detail I had neglected to mention to Marino, my mind dulled by exhaustion. Too jittery to go to bed, I flipped through Beryl’s manuscript, which I had been wise enough to hand-carry on the plane, and sipped my drink waiting for the police to arrive.
Just before midnight my doorbell rang, startling me out of my chair.
Looking through my front door peephole and expecting the officers Marino had promised, I saw a pale young man wearing a dark slicker and some sort of uniform cap. He looked cold and wet as he hunched against the blowing rain, a clipboard held against his chest.
“Who is it?” I called out.
“Omega Courier Service from Byrd Airport,” he answered. “I’ve got your suitcase, ma’am.”
“Thank God,” I said with feeling, deactivating the alarm and unlocking the door.
Incapacitating terror seized me as he put down my suitcase inside the foyer and I suddenly remembered. I had written my office address on the lost baggage claim I had filled out at the airport, not my home address!
17
Dark hair was a stringy fringe beneath his cap, and he did not look me in the eye as he said, “If you’ll just si-sign this, ma’am.”
He handed me the clipboard as voices played madly in my mind.
“They were late coming in from the airport because the airline lost Mr. Harper’s bag.”
“Is your hair naturally blond, Kay, or do you bleach it?”
“It was after the boy delivered the luggage …”
“All of them gone, now.”
“Last year we got in a fiber identical to this orange one in every respect when Roy was asked to examine trace recovered from a Boeing seven forty-seven …”
“It was after the boy delivered the luggage!”
Slowly I took the offered pen and clipboard from the outstretched brown leather-gloved hand.
In a voice I did not recognize, I instructed, “Would you please be so kind as to open my suitcase. I can’t possibly sign anything until I make sure my belongings are present and accounted for.”