The Dead Sea Deception (50 page)

She stood, ready to leave either on her own or in his custody, but Gayle broke into a chuckle at her strained, solemn face.

‘Sit down, Sergeant,’ he told her. ‘I don’t see what you said as a lie, so much. I reckon there’s some people are cops before they get a badge, and they go on being cops after they give the badge back. Or they never get a badge, like Moggs here, but still got the instincts and the way of looking at the world.’

‘It’s in the blood,’ Moggs said, immodestly. ‘Seriously, Ms Kennedy – I guess I shouldn’t call you sergeant – I wasn’t trying to rub your nose in any of this. I was just telling you that we know. We figured you out. But you don’t have any jurisdiction over here anyway, and I know for a fact that you were working this case until your last day on the job. All you done wrong, in the world’s eyes, is not to stop. And the other thing is, Web hasn’t broken any rules in helping you. All of this is public domain stuff, as far as that goes. The County Sheriff can tell who he likes about a case in progress, if they ask.’

‘Although he generally doesn’t,’ Gayle interjected. ‘I wouldn’t want you to think I’d be this indiscreet with anyone who just walked in off the street, Sergeant.’

‘Hell,’ said Moggs, ‘the plain truth of it is, you’re working on our very own favourite cabbage patch, and that’s why we wanted to break bread with you, and that’s why I want to share with you. So what do you say?’

She thrust out a hand. Still blushing, Kennedy took it – not in a formal shake but in a slap and thumb-lock that felt a lot more intense and reassuring.

‘Come on through to the living room,’ Moggs said. ‘And I’ll show you what I got.’

She led the way back through the curtain and across a narrow hall into the warm and welcoming space, full of soft furniture and sunset colours. A massive sofa wore a crocheted throw adorned with a stylised but splendid American eagle. ‘Actually,’ Moggs said, as soon as she had Kennedy sat down on the sofa, ‘this might be the kind of thing where we need to fortify ourselves with some more coffee. I’ll go brew a fresh pot.’

She scooted back through into the kitchen and after a minute Gayle followed her, muttering something about helping to carry the tray. Left alone, Kennedy read the walls while her heart rate slowed to normal. The walls were covered with photographs, and Eileen Moggs herself showed in none of them. There was a wall of portraits, some of which Kennedy recognised: Webster Gayle (twice), George Clooney, Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton, Bono, Donald Rumsfeld scowling like the devil on crack. The facing wall was all places: the Grand Canyon, Route 66 complete with iconic sign and biker flotilla, Anasazi ruins, cactuses, the state legislature being mobbed by hundreds of demonstrators, and one very disturbing image of
a desert setting where a group of uniformed police or state troopers (Kennedy didn’t know the uniform code well enough to tell for sure) posed solemnly around the corpse of a black man.

Gayle came in carrying three mugs on a tray, backing through the beads with his head ducked down. Moggs followed with a plate of cookies and – a little incongruously – a bottle of Jim Beam. Gayle set the tray down and Moggs twisted the cap off the bourbon. ‘I usually have a shot of this in my coffee,’ she said to Kennedy. ‘Just a small one. Symbolic, really, but it takes the edge off edgy things.’

She spiked her own drink, looked at Kennedy with the bottle raised and ready.

‘Are we going to be talking about edgy things?’

Moggs grinned. ‘Didn’t we already?’

‘Go ahead,’ Kennedy said, and Moggs poured.

‘I’ll pass,’ Gayle said. ‘I gotta go back to work after this.’

‘I’m still on the clock,’ Moggs growled.

‘Sure. But everyone expects a newshound to be drunk.’

They ribbed each other with the easy intimacy of lovers. They didn’t need to laugh at each other’s jokes. Moggs went across to an over-sized L-shaped desk in a corner of the room and returned with a very thick olive-green file folder, which she put down on the table between them, pushing the plate of cookies over to one side to make space: the pièce de résistance.

‘Okay,’ she said, with the air of someone getting down to brass tacks. ‘This is our dead-men-walking file.’

Kennedy hadn’t been feeling any thrill of anticipation, but experienced a sinking feeling, all the same. ‘The ghosts of Flight 124?’ she said.

‘Absolutely,’ Moggs confirmed. ‘Take a look. I promise you revelations, signs and wonders.’

‘I’m … not a believer in this stuff,’ Kennedy protested, queasily but without much force.

‘Oh, me neither, Sergeant. Read it anyway. Then we’ll talk.’

A half-hour later, Kennedy was still reading, watched by her indulgent hosts – but the signs and wonders had yet to put in an appearance. In fact, the contents of the file were exactly what she would have expected them to be: a warmed-over soup of urban legends, done-in-one-sentence spooky stories and sad self-delusions.

All the usual suspects were in there: the man who sent emails full of indecipherable gibberish from his office computer when his body was lying on a slab in an Arizona morgue; the woman who felt her dead husband’s hand on her shoulder and his kiss on her cheek at the exact moment that the plane went down; the car left running on a driveway in the middle of the night (‘My wife’s keys were in the ignition – she had them on her when she died, I swear it!’); the mother-and-child stick figures drawn in the condensation of a nursery window, and the sweet old lady identifying them unhesitatingly, and tearfully, as the work of her granddaughter (‘She always drew herself with curly hair, even though she grew the curls out a year ago’). And so on, and so forth, with minor and uninteresting variations. The tales people tell each other to convince themselves, against all the odds, that death is not the end.

Kennedy closed the file, still only half-read, to signify that she was done with it. If anything, she’d drawn it out because she felt more or less convinced now that Gayle and Moggs were evangelists for one of the more surreal American churches and she was about to have to tell them both that their sandwich quotient was deficient for picnicking purposes. ‘Like I said,’ she repeated, as neutrally as she could manage, ‘I don’t really subscribe to the
whole life after death thing. This is interesting, but it’s really not my kind of—’

‘Interesting?’ Moggs was incredulous. ‘Why would you say that, Ms Kennedy? Why, most of this is the same garbage the supermarket crap-sheets try to feed us every damn day of the week. It’s so far from interesting, I can’t get through six pages of it without losing the will to live.’

‘Well, then …’ Kennedy foundered. ‘Why show it to me?’

‘That’s the right question,’ Moggs said. ‘And I’m gonna answer it with another question. What do you notice about this nonsense? What’s the pattern?’ There was something a little sly or smug in her voice: the tone of the teacher who already knows the right answer and is waiting for you to chip in with the wrong one.

Kennedy went back to the file, scanned the first few pages again with no more enthusiasm than she’d managed the first time. ‘No actual sightings,’ she said. ‘Not much that’s verifiable. Nothing at all that couldn’t have been faked or imagined. It’s perfect tabloid-fodder: facts and names kept to a minimum, so it’s hard to cross-check anything and there’s maximum room to manoeuvre. Stories from one agency picked up and polished by another …’

‘Absolutely,’ Moggs said. ‘I’ve seen it all before, Ms Kennedy. Listen, can I call you Heather? Thank you. I’ve seen it all before, Heather, and it sounds like you have, too. But like they say, you have to look to the exception to prove the rule – and this time around, the exception is a pretty big, glaring one.’

Kennedy shrugged with her hands. ‘I’m not seeing it.’

She could see Gayle yearning to break in but holding himself back – presumably seeing this as Moggs’s show rather than his own.

‘The truth is,’ Moggs said, backing off just a fraction, ‘it took
me a pretty fair time to see it, too. Web was driving me crazy with this stuff. Even when he wasn’t talking about it, he had a look on his face that said he was thinking about it. So I picked up this here scrapbook, basically so I could beat him round the head with it – show him all the different ways it was moonshine. Then it hit me – I think because it was all in the same place, and Web had tried to sort it by date and time and everything. That was sort of the key. Go back to the start, Heather, and bear in mind that the file’s in chronological order.’

The first article concerned Peter Bonville, the clerk whose work routine was so powerful that death couldn’t hold him back from turning up at the office, fixing himself a cup of coffee, firing up his computer and working through his inbox. Something nagged at the edge of Kennedy’s attention. She checked the dateline: the fifth of July. Three days after CA124 went down.

‘This isn’t the first,’ she said. ‘There was one datelined on the fourth.’

‘Sylvia Gallos,’ Moggs confirmed, approvingly. ‘Right. That threw me, too, at first – but it’s a parallax error. You see, Gallos called into a local radio station – late-night talk show, same night it happened. So there’s no time lag. It happens on the fourth and it’s filed on the fourth. The Bonville story hits a day later but it happened two days earlier. It’s just that it didn’t turn into news until someone thought to notice.’

Clearly, they were getting to the meat of the matter now. Moggs didn’t actually lower her voice but she leaned in close as though what she was about to say deserved the theatrical attributes of conspiracy. ‘There were a lot of different versions of Peter Bonville’s story, with a crazy range of details about what he supposedly did when he checked into work that day. Like, Bonville swiped in with his own ID. Wrong. No one found any
evidence of him coming or going. Bonville fixed himself a cup of coffee and left it half-drunk in his cubicle. Wrong. As far as I can tell, only the office area, which was open-plan, got a visitation: the kitchen space was elsewhere and it wasn’t touched. Bonville talked to some of his fellow employees, who didn’t know they were seeing a ghost until later. Wrong. Nobody saw him. All the evidence that he’d been there came from his computer, his workstation, which had been turned on and used.’

‘Used for what?’ Kennedy asked. She felt a prickle of tension on the back of her neck, on her forearms. Was there actually some pea of truth buried under the damp mattresses of all these lazy, overused fairy tales?

‘Well, again, there’s different versions,’ Moggs said. ‘Some of them have Bonville surfing porn sites. Most of them say he sent emails: either full of random gibberish or scary complaints about being lost in a desert somewhere where the sun never comes up. Again, I checked all that with Bonville’s employers, the New York Department of Public Works. They didn’t have to talk to me, of course – wouldn’t even have had to talk to Web, if he’d called, because his jurisdiction ends at the county line. But they wanted to talk. They were kind of griped by all the crazy stories going around and they wanted to set the record straight. They said Bonville’s mail program hadn’t been opened and neither had his browser. All he did – all whoever it was did – was access a few files and delete them. So they assumed it had to be a routine hacker attack rather than a ghostly visitation.’

That preliminary prickle had become something a lot more urgent now, which had Kennedy sitting forward too, as though she was about to lean across the table and kiss Moggs – which might have caused Sheriff Gayle to revise his good opinion of her. ‘Which files? Do we know what they were?’

‘No, we don’t. And they don’t – because the department’s
main server got a big viral infection later that day and all the back-up storage got wiped clean before they could do anything about it. All that was left was a registry table with the names of some of the files on it, but they’re not informative. Data 1, data 2, data 3, stuff like that.’

Kennedy’s first thought was an obvious one:
Rotgut?
But no, that was vanishingly unlikely. If anyone on Stuart Barlow’s team had been talking to a minor official in a public agency in New York, she would have come across the data trail long before now. This was different: not Rotgut. But sufficiently like Rotgut for the response to have been the same. Send in Michael Brand.

Moggs was still talking. ‘So there’s not much to work from at that end. But here’s what got me going, Sergeant. I said this was the earliest of the ghost incidents. I didn’t tell you just how early. That registry table had precise date stamps for the last time each of the files was modified – which was when they were deleted. They’re clustered really tight together, in a five-minute period starting at 11.13 a.m. on July the second. In other words, the files got wiped while Flight CA124 was still in the air: a good ten minutes or so before Peter Bonville became a ghost.’

Kennedy checked the times for herself and then observed a minute of silence for Moggs’s detective work: or five seconds of silence, anyway. ‘You’re right,’ she said, full of admiration. ‘You’re totally … you nailed it, Miss Moggs. Eileen. This was a pre-emptive haunting.’

Moggs laughed, clearly liking both the term and the praise. ‘Pre-emptive haunting, then two days of nothing, then all these other ghost stories kick in. So by the time Bonville’s supervisor figures out they’re missing some files and tells head office, all this other stuff is already starting to come out. And that’s how it was reported – another ghost from Flight 124.’

Kennedy nodded slowly, thinking backwards and forwards
along that chain of logic. ‘That’s actually really clever,’ she murmured. ‘You cover your trail as far as you can, but when you realise it’s not covered enough, you throw out a whole lot of false trails so it looks like it doesn’t lead anywhere.’