Page 38 of The Last Flight

Long ago, when she was a girl in the group home, Eva discovered that big feelings made most people uncomfortable, and she learned how to use anger or sadness to turn up the pressure, to maneuver people into a position where their only desire was to make the emotion go away. To stop the tears. To fix the fear. To placate the anger. Dex was no different. And Eva didn’t have to reach too deep to find the fear, to make a compelling case for why she might need details to reassure her.

In the distance, two women walked toward them on the path, deep in conversation, and Eva continued. “Everywhere I go, I wonder if I’m being followed. The man in line behind me, the woman on her phone…” Eva gestured toward the two women, closer now. “Even them. How do I know they don’t work for Castro?”

Dex took her arm and pulled her closer, hissing, “Calm down, Eva. Fuck.”

They stepped to the side and let the women pass, and when they were out of earshot again, Eva said, “So tell me. What does it mean, ‘Fish took care of it’? How? Because there’s a difference between a duty officer losing some paperwork and a sergeant or lieutenant calling off a federal investigation.”

Information about how Fish’s people operated inside the department wasn’t Eva’s end goal. It would be useful, but Eva was using it to warm Dex up. To get him to start talking. Like a crack in a wall, it would grow wider with time and pressure.

Dex looked away from her, his voice low, and Eva stepped closer to him. “The woman you met in the park was freelance,” he said. “Your instincts weren’t wrong. She was an addict, trying to curry favor in exchange for a lighter sentence. Fish’s people inside the department have successfully neutralized her as a source. Because you didn’t sell her anything, and no money exchanged hands, they have nothing to go on. They’re gone.”

They’d resumed their slow stroll, shoulder to shoulder, the wind now at their backs, the green hills of Berkeley rising in the distance. Eva picked out the Campanile, the stadium, and the white shape of the Claremont Hotel, and let Dex think she was absorbing what he told her. “So what happened to her?”

“No clue,” Dex said. “Jail or rehab, probably.”

Eva turned to face him, placing a hand on his forearm. “Look, you know me. I’m not prone to hysteria. But there’s no way I’m handing over drugs out in the open like this. Not until things settle down.”

Dex’s eyes narrowed. “You have an obligation. You don’t get to set the terms.”

“I think I do,” Eva said. “I’m the one with the skills.”

Dex peered down at her, anger radiating off him. “This isn’t a fucking game. Brittany might be dealt with, but it isn’t over. Now the cleanup starts, the deconstruction of what happened. Who else was involved, what they knew, and when. You being difficult right now puts me at risk too.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes, the wind whipping and grabbing the edges of her coat, before Eva asked her next question. “What happened to the chemist Fish had before me?” Dex looked at her, surprised. “You told me he was leaving the business. But that wasn’t entirely true, was it?”

“He refused to do what he was told,” Dex finally said. “I don’t want the same to happen to you.”

Again Eva let the panic she felt bubble to the surface, where Dex could see it, and pressed her lips together, as if she were battling to stay calm. “That body you showed me at the motel? Was that him?”

Dex shook his head. “No, that was someone else. The chemist was gone before you even came on board.” He lowered his voice, and Eva stepped closer to catch what he’d say next. “You’ve got to pull it together. For me as well as yourself. This is how mistakes are made.”

Eva nodded, as if she were making her peace with how things were going to be. She had enough for now. They’d reached the outer edge of the park, with nothing but black asphalt littered with trash between them and her car, and she reached into her pocket and pulled out an envelope. “Football tickets for this Saturday,” she explained. “We’re taking things in-house for now.”

In-housewas a term she and Dex used when they felt it was too risky for Eva to pass him his weekly supply in a park or restaurant. Many years ago, Eva had begun buying season tickets to football and basketball, though she rarely used them. But the purchase also included access to elite club-level venues that gave its members a sense of entitlement and security. Access to places an undercover cop couldn’t easily follow them.

At this point, she couldn’t stop making drugs for Fish. But if Castro was still watching, she wasn’t going to do anything to incriminate herself until she had something to offer him.

Dex slipped the tickets into his coat and put his arm around her shoulders, pulling her close. “Whatever you need to get the job done.”

Claire

Friday, February 25

Recovery workers report that your wife’s seat was empty.

I stare at that line from the NTSB, trying to make sense of it, my mind leaping between two competing questions—could Eva have somehow gotten off the plane, and what might Rory do when recovery workers tell him there isn’t any trace of me.

I open a new tab in my browser and GoogleRecovery of remains in a plane crash, ocean.At least twenty articles pop up about the crash of Flight 477, all of them written in the last four days. “The Latest: Searchers Recover Remains and Debris.” Another one is titled “Vista Airlines Crash: Flight 477 Goes Down off the Coast of Florida.” I try something else.How are human remains recovered after a plane crash?Again, I get a long string of articles updating the search and recovery efforts, outlining Vista’s poor safety rating, speculation as to the cause of the crash, but nothing that will tell me what I need to know—whether they will be able to definitively say I wasn’t there, or whether it’s possible that they can’t recover everyone.

And the bigger question: How could Eva have gotten off that plane? I try to imagine her out there somewhere, using my name as I’m using hers, flashing my driver’s license to check into hotels. Or perhaps she sold it the minute she landed somewhere else. I paid Nico ten thousand dollars for my Amanda Burns documents. I have no idea what a real driver’s license would sell for. Maybe identity theft was Eva’s side business, how she paid cash for a duplex in Berkeley.

I turn to Google again.Can you scan onto a flight but not get on it?I find a thread on a discussion board where someone is wondering if they can do this in order to get enough miles to bump them up to the next frequent flier level. But responses are not encouraging:

No way to get around the final head count. If it doesn’t match, everyone deplanes and they run everyone through security again. There’s no way to achieve that without screwing yourself and every other passenger on the plane.

Another response reads

It’s impossible to have your boarding pass scanned and then not get on the flight.Think about it. You get scanned about six feet from the Jetway. You think a flight attendant is going to scan your pass, then watch you walk away? This entire thread is stupid and a waste of mental energy.

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