Page 24 of Cowboy

“Okay,” said Gwen, stepping forward, “this is my domain, so let’s see what we have here. French, Italian, Brazilian, and Chinese fashion magazines. Four beauty magazines, two from the U.S., one from France, and one from India. And several catalogs from designers.”

Gwen took the first one from the stack and slowly began to flip the pages. The others watched as she did. As she got ready to flip the page, Autumn gripped her wrist.

“Wait. What’s that?” she asked, pointing to something on the page. Gwen held up the magazine, turning it carefully.

“I don’t know. Maybe a print error?” she said, frowning.

“No, I don’t think so,” said Autumn. Taking the magazine, she stared at the dress, not able to clearly see the blemish there. “Can you put this on the screen and enlarge it?”

“Definitely,” said Sly.

He grabbed the magazine and then flattened it to the scanner, showing the designer dress on the big screen. It was a wide skirt in a beautiful cream wool. The whisper-thin model was looking upward, her hand artfully placed at the side of her face. Autumn stepped closer and closer, staring at the grouping of numbers.

0605|137652|KMT451|CSS|1550|21SEP01|LAS|MCO

“It’s a flight plan,” she whispered. “That’s a flight plan. It’s not on a form or anything, but that’s what it is. The four numbers are the time it was filed. Then the ID of the person who filed it, aircraft ID, type, time of departure, date of departure, departure city, and arrival city. Someone was going from Las Vegas to Orlando on thetwenty-first at three-fifty p.m.[PC2]”

“Damn. You’re right,” smiled Chipper. “That was awesome.”

“What does it mean?” she asked the others.

“Let’s see if there are others before we jump on this. We might have something, but we may not,” said Eric.

It took them five hours of passing the magazines around so they had different pairs of eyes on the pages. Each time, they discovered that someone had missed the hidden numbers, despite knowing what they were looking for. The items on the pages expertly hid the flight plans.

“How many do we have?” asked Luke.

“A total of forty-seven,” said Cowboy. “And they were going everywhere. There are no two cities the same. But all the dates reflect flights in the last two years.”

“What the hell is this?” muttered Cam. No one seemed to have a response to his question, just staring at the grouping of numbers.

“Did we get through all of the magazines?” asked Hex.

“All of them,” said Autumn. “Could someone be tracking people? I mean, if I think about the people I flew back and forth to Vegas, L.A., and other big cities, they were all high-profile businessmen and women, business owners, that sort of thing. Maybe my plane was targeted because of Mr. Liconitis.”

“Maybe, but why?” asked Cowboy. “I mean, were they hoping to kill him? Kidnap him? His team, or at least we think it was his team, got him out of the plane, so what did it prove?”

“I have no idea,” said Autumn, shaking her head. “But it also kind of hurts my feelings that they didn’t try to get me out of the plane.” She gave a wry smirk, and the others chuckled at her ability to laugh at this.

“I think we need to dig into Liconitis’s business,” said Luke. “We know he owned those casinos in Vegas, but he had other businesses as well. Everything we heard was that he had some questionable practices, but you told Cowboy that he wasn’t what everyone thought.”

“No. He wasn’t anything like what Cowboy said. The man I knew, and I’ll include his wife, because they were always together. The man I knew gave to charities all the time. He would surprise a mother in need with a new home, fully furnished. Annette would make sure the children had clothing and toys. This was often, not just one time. He was like a secret Santa.

“I remember one time dropping him off in Vegas, and he was going to be there a few days with Annette. They invited me to be their guest at the hotel, gave me a suite, and everything. It was wonderful for me because I wouldn’t have been able to afford that by myself. Anyway, Annette knocked on my door late one night and said they had to fly someone to the East Coast.

“I raced downstairs, and in the limo was a woman with a small child. The stepfather had beaten the child to the point of a traumatic brain injury. The best pediatric neurosurgeon was in Baltimore, and they wanted to get him there.”

“That’s admirable,” nodded Cam.

“It is, but you need to know that they didn’t even know the woman. She was a prostitute that the bodyguard, Liam, found on the side of the road crying, begging for help. No one would even stop for her. Her son was inside, bleeding and dying. She’d been waiting almost thirty minutes for emergency services to arrive.”

“Did the bodyguard know the woman?” asked Cowboy.

“No. They saved that boy and then bought the woman a home in a new state, got her enrolled in school so she could finish her education, and provided a trust for the boy. I found out later that they paid the bodyguards extra to find people in need. The Liconitis’s didn’t have any children of their own, and they were determined to give away as much as they could.”

“Well, you’re right. He sounds very different from what we all knew of him.” Autumn nodded.

“I know that he wasn’t always that way. Annette told me once that he changed with the death of their little girl.”

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