Gate 76 Page 4
Today, Leon’s at his desk with his back to the room, running background checks, digging through social media profiles and local news accounts. He’s got days of work ahead of him, and he seems to like it that way.
Bethany’s eating a bran muffin.
“Hey, Freddy.”
“Hey, Bethany. Find anything interesting yet?”
She shakes her head and explains how they triaged the passenger list: they’re looking first at males traveling alone or with other males, followed by anyone under sixty-five traveling without children. Families and the elderly come last.
I find the list in my email. It shows the name, address, date of birth, and seat assignment for each passenger. It takes me five minutes to figure out that the blonde I’m looking for is Anna Brook. I saw her holding a DC license in the security line, and there were only two women on the flight from DC. One of them was forty-five years old. Her profile photo on LinkedIn shows a heavyset woman with dark hair and small brown eyes.
The other woman, Anna Brook… Well, it’s funny about her. She doesn’t have an online profile. Anywhere. All I know about her comes from a search of public records, and from the credit bureaus. She’s twenty-nine. A little younger than I thought, but maybe a few years of hard living have started to take their toll.
She was born and raised in Staunton, Virginia. She worked in a bar in Richmond, Virginia, and then she moved to Baltimore, where she worked in a strip club. She moved to DC about a year ago, where she has no employment record. But she pays her bills, so she must have some money coming in.
I found a mobile number for her. She doesn’t have a landline. I want to give her a call, but… take a minute to think this through, Freddy.
She’s running from someone. Maybe whoever she’s running from has taken her phone. If that’s the case, I don’t want them tracing the call back to me. They don’t need to know a detective is looking for her. So I head over to the Metro station at Foggy Bottom and use the pay phone. Remember pay phones?
After six rings, it goes to voicemail. “Hey, this is Anna. Leave a message and I’ll call you back.” Her voice is smooth but a little high, tinged with a strain of anxiety. My mind flashes back to that image of her in the airport, looking over her shoulder as she boarded the flight to Chicago, when the strength I saw in her seemed to vanish all at once. This is the voice of a woman who’s been looking over her shoulder for a long time.
I hang up without leaving a message. When I’m back above ground, I open the browser on my phone. The Staunton News Leader has an article describing the promising young woman who died in the plane crash. It’s the usual stuff: good student, well-liked, bright future, et cetera. It also says the family will be holding a memorial service, time and place to be announced.
Anna Brook is survived by her mother and sister. The News Leader prints their names. Her mother lives in Staunton. Her sister lives in Richmond and works at a flower shop. In five minutes, I have both phone numbers, and I give them each a call. There’s no answer at the mother’s house, and the sister’s line goes to voicemail after a few rings.
“Hi, this is Julia. I’m sorry I missed your call. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” She’s a little more cordial than her sister. Their voices are almost identical, but where Anna’s sounds burdened and anxious, Julia’s is warmer, more carefree. I hang up without leaving a message. What do I have to say to her?
When I get back to the office, I find a new email from the airline with some information I requested this morning. Video footage from the TSA security line in San Francisco, the seating chart from the Hawaii flight, and a list of passengers on the Chicago flight that Anna Brook boarded. They asked why I wanted info about the Chicago flight. I told them I like lists.
I skim through the security video until Anna and her tall, greasy friend get to the front of the line. That’s when they’re closest to the camera. I freeze the video and take a screen shot. He’s got her by the arm and he’s leaning in to whisper something. I save the photo to a folder on my computer called Gate 76.
When I zoom in on their faces, the picture gets a little grainy but I can still make him out. His features are angular and sharp. And her… That face, with its mixture of strength, endurance, strain, and beauty. What kind of life produces a face like that? That’s what haunts me about her. I know exactly what kind of life produces a face like that.
You get in with the wrong person at the wrong time, like my mom with my dad, like me with that bastard promoter Slim and that idiot DiLeo, like Anna Brook with this clown… Maybe they catch you in a moment of weakness, or maybe they catch you before you have enough experience to know better. Maybe they just know what you want, and they offer it to you in a way you can’t resist. The whole downward spiral starts there.
* * *
Me and Alvin Perkins, the heavyweights, were the main event on Friday Night Fights, up at the Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut. I don’t remember the walk into the ring, but if you watch the video, you can see my nerves were tight. My eyes were wild and glazed, and I was pacing back and forth before the opening bell like a caged tiger.
Perkins hit me with a hard shot to the jaw in the first five seconds of the fight. That woke me up and brought me right into the present moment. I hit him back a couple shots to the body, and then I was totally at ease, just kind of feeling him out, figuring out where the danger was and where the opportunity was. The guy kept his guard up so high, I had no trouble digging hooks in under his ribs. All he could do was hit me with jabs. But they were good jabs. Quick and sharp.
By the end of the first round, I knew he was in a different class than the last six losers Slim had put me up against. I also knew I could handle him. The work I had done with the new trainer was worthless, but all the years Rizzardi put into me were about to pay off.
Perkins was strong, fast, and solid. And I had his number. He spent so much time protecting his head, he neglected his body. I started working him over in the second round. More body shots in the third. He’d catch them a little on the elbows and take some of the snap off of them, but they were bothering him. I know, because in the third he started dropping his guard, trying to protect his ribs, and then I’d hook him to the side of the head. He didn’t like that. I gave him more of the same in the fourth.
At the end of four, I went back to my corner, and my trainer was looking worried. “What’s the matter?” I said. “I’m killing this guy.”
“I know,” he said, and he didn’t sound too happy about it. He pulled my mouthpiece out and squirted some nasty sports drink in my mouth. It was clear like water, but it had a funny orange flavor. I never drank that stuff during a fight. In the corner, it was water only.
I spat the orange stuff onto the canvas. Then he tipped my head back and squirted in another mouthful. He pushed his hand up under my chin, forcing my mouth shut until I swallowed.
I didn’t think about that at the time. Cornermen work on fighters the way pit crews work on racecars. They have less than sixty seconds to patch up whatever damage your opponent just did to your face, so there’s no time for coddling. If your eye is swelling, the cutman pushes the lump back down with a bar of chilled steel called endswell. If your nose is bleeding, he’ll shove a big cotton swab of adrenaline hydrochloride up your nostril and push it against the broken blood vessels. You get a gash above your eye, he’ll jam a swab of epinephrine into it to reduce the blood flow, followed by Avitene to coagulate the blood. While he’s doing that, your trainer is dumping water on your head, into your mouth, even down your shorts to cool you off, and he’s talking the whole time. You tune out all the physical discomfort and focus on what he’s telling you.
“Any advice?” I said. A trainer always has a different perspective on the fight, seeing it from outside the ring. A good one will pick out opportunities and tell you something like, follow with the uppercut, or slide to your left after you throw that hook. But this guy had nothing to say.
At the end of the fifth, he pulled the same crap with the bottle. Forced me to swallow another mouthful.
“That stuff tastes like shit,” I said. “Gimme some water.” I didn’t think he heard me.
In round six, I came out OK, but after the first thirty seconds, my stomach felt off, and this achy fatigue came over my whole body at once, like when you get the flu. I lost that round.
In round seven, I couldn’t get my punches off, and Perkins kept popping that jab in my face. When I go back and look at the video, there’s a noticeable difference in that round. I’m not the same fighter. It’s like all the wind went out of me. You can see in the recording, right near the end of the round, Perkins hits me three straight jabs to the face, followed by an uppercut, and then he eases off and says something. I remember his exact words. “The fuck happen to you?”
At the end of the round, I told my trainer I was going to kill him. I even took a swing at him while I was on the stool. The cameras caught it and replayed it twice, with the announcer saying it looked like Ferguson’s corner was falling apart under the pressure of a fight gone wrong.
“He had a plan when he came in here,” the commentator says on the video. “But after a few good rounds, he just couldn’t execute, and now he’s taking it out on his trainer. This is not the mark of a quality fighter. This is a troubled fighter. He should be swinging at his opponent.”
Now I happen to like that commentator, but when I watch the video and I hear him saying it was my fault, I want to punch him too.
Rounds eight through twelve, I got the crap beat out of me. I was plodding around flat-footed, getting hit with everything, and I could barely keep my hands up in front of my face. Any other trainer seeing his fighter take that kind of beating would have thrown in the towel. But my guy couldn’t do that. If the corner quit, it would look too much like a fix. Slim, the bookie, needed me to lose convincingly. And I did.
I spent the final round clenching my ass, because whatever was in that orange drink was about to give me the runs.
Perkins saw how bad I looked, and in the last minute of the twelfth, when he had that round and the whole fight in the bag, he eased up. Like I said, he’s a good guy. I’m glad he went on to do as well as he did.
The judges said I won the first five rounds and he won the last seven. After the ref announced the decision, the ESPN guy put the mike in my face and asked a few questions. Did I think I had him in trouble in those early rounds?
“Well, it’s like chopping down a tree,” I said. “You just keep swinging, and eventually it’ll go down.”
“What happened in the sixth?”
“I don’t know. It all went to hell, that’s what happened.”
“Will you fight again?”
“Shit! Do I look that bad? Of course I’ll fight again. I’m gonna be the champ one day.”
Then I ran back to the dressing room, to the toilet, and let that nasty orange drink do its number on me. When I came out, my trainer said, “Tough fight, kid. Take some time off. We’ll pick up in the gym after you get some rest, and I’ll see what Slim can line up for you.”
“If I come back to the gym, it’ll be to rip your fucking head off, you lowlife piece of shit.”
“Take it easy,” he said. “You’ll win the next one. Slim knows he owes you.”
The fight doctor checked me out and asked if I wanted to go to the hospital. I said OK. As bad as I looked, I didn’t have a concussion, and my ribs weren’t broken, though they sure felt like it. I was dehydrated, and my muscles were cramping. As I lay there in the ER soaking up an IV, I knew I had to get back to Rizzardi, the one and only person who could take me to the top.
My trainer, that bastard, he went back to New York.
When I got back home, I was bitter about the way it all went down. I made a mistake one day and let that bitterness get the best of me. And I regret that. I mean, Chuck DiLeo—I have no regrets about him. He had it coming from a long line of people. I just happened to be at the front of that line on a day when my heart was black and full of rage.
* * *
Looking at the photo of Anna Brook in that security line, I wonder what her dream was. If she ever had one, you can’t read it on her face. She has the face of a survivor. The energy normal people invest in dreams, she puts into getting through the day.
I close the photo of her and open the second attachment in the email from the airline. The seating chart. It’s a color scan of a paper document that was marked by hand. It looks like one of those diagrams you see when you book a flight online and get to pick your own seat, with the wings and the aisle and the exit rows all drawn to scale. I was expecting a computer printout, but this looks like it came from some stewardess’s clipboard.
Right away, I see there’s something wrong. Every seat on the chart is marked occupied. The marks come from different pens. The seats in first class are checked with blue ink. The coach seats are checked in black. Except seat 32B. Anna Brook’s seat is marked in blue. I put in a call to my contact at the airline—a snippy, short-tempered woman.
“Where did you get this chart?”
“Excuse me?” I can hear she’s annoyed. There’s a lot of chatter in the background.
“This seating chart,” I say. “Where’d you get it?”
“Who is this?”
“Freddy Ferguson. The investigator. You just sent me a passenger manifest and a seating chart.”
“I got the chart from the main office here at SFO.”
“When?”
“Five minutes before I sent it,” she says with annoyance.
“Any idea who saw it before you got your hands on it?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Is there a problem?”
“Who else has a copy of this?”
“You need to work on your manners, sir.”
I can hear a keyboard clacking near the phone.
“Who else has a copy?” I ask again.
For a second, she doesn’t respond. Then when the typing stops, she says, “Everyone. TSA, FBI, NTSB, the airline’s own investigators. Everyone’s combing through the same list.”
“Can you find out who touched this seating chart before it was scanned?”
“What’s the problem?”
“Well, for one thing, all the first class seats are checked in blue, and the coach seats are checked in black.”
“So?” she says. “First class boards first. The first class attendant checks off her passengers and gives the clipboard to the attendant in coach.”
“Don’t they use an iPad or something for that?”
“They use the scanner at the boarding gate, when it’s not broken. When it’s broken, they use paper.”
“All right, so why is one coach seat marked in blue?”
She lets out a little sigh and then speaks slowly and deliberately, like she’s talking to a child. “The head of the cabin crew does the final pass for the seating chart. If anything’s empty back in coach, she’ll double check it before she gives the chart to the ground crew.” Then she adds in a condescending tone, “Is there anything else I can help you with, Mr. Ferguson?”
“Look, I get that you’re stressed out,” I say. “I get that nobody’s having a good day here, and I appreciate your help. So just bear with me for a minute, OK? I’m trying to get to the bottom of something.”
She sighs.
“So maybe 32B wasn’t in her seat when they did the first check,” I say. “Maybe the first class stewardess did a second pass and checked her off with the blue pen.”
“It’s pretty common,” she says.
“Then why doesn’t the ink match?”
“Pardon me?”
“First class was all checked off with bright blue ink from a fat ballpoint. Thirty-
two B was checked with dark blue ink from a thin ballpoint.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ferguson, I don’t think this is a good use of my time. We’re trying to—”
“Can you find out who had their hands on this manifest before it was scanned?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean no,” she says. “It’s a madhouse here. We’re still running flights and we have investigators, reporters, lawyers, and a thousand other people coming and going. Try doing your job in the middle of all that.”
She hangs up.
Now who would go and check off Anna Brook’s seat on that chart? Why would anyone besides her want the world to think she was on that plane?
5
The passenger list for the Chicago flight is a whole other problem. Anna Brook’s name wasn’t on that list, not that I expected to find it there. If she was running from someone, she wouldn’t leave such an obvious clue.
She checked in for the Honolulu flight under her own name, so when she went through security, she had an ID to match her boarding pass. That got her into the terminal, and once she was in, she could go to any gate, with any boarding pass, because they don’t check IDs at the gate. As long as the boarding pass scans, you’re good to go.
So on this list, I’m looking for a woman traveling alone, name unknown. I should be able to rule out three quarters of the passengers off the bat. Half should be male, and a bunch of people would be traveling with relatives who have the same last name, so I can tell they’re not alone. The laws of probability say I should have, at worst, forty or so names to look into.
That’s how the numbers should play out. But wouldn’t you know it? 128 of the 159 passengers on that flight were women traveling alone. How the hell does that happen?
It takes a little bit of digging and a call to the airline to figure it out. It happens when a nursing conference with three thousand attendees ends that day in San Francisco, and all those nurses fly back home at once. Anyone going east of Kansas is going to connect through Chicago. Anna Brook sure picked a good flight to cover her tracks.