Jad closed down the video and dragged the file to an icon labeled DESTROY. Software flames consumed the files.
The videos might be permanently destroyed, but they were part of me now.
I couldn’t forget them if I tried.
CHAPTER 74
THE WIND HAD picked up during our fifteen-minute meeting in the parking lot, whipping the young trees standing in their concrete planters on the sidewalk as traffic illuminated the six-lane Embarcadero.
It looked like any normal summer evening in San Francisco, but nothing would ever be normal for me again.
Joe had prior knowledge of a plane crash that was shaping up to be one of the worst air disasters on record.
Cindy and I got out of the backseat of her car. Jad told Cindy that his phone number was now a nonworking number, and that no offense, he would stand there and watch us leave so that we couldn’t follow him.
We all shook hands, and Cindy wished Jad good luck. I wondered if Jad’s superiors actually believed his recording equipment had failed. Or if they were following him even now, watching Cindy and me as we climbed back into her car.
Cindy was practically bug-eyed as she drove us away from the parking lot.
“Check me on this,” she said to me. “The dead kids were taping Chan and Muller. They were told to hit the kill switch, and they did. During the blackout, someone came in and shot them and maybe killed Chan, too, right? That guy talking to them…?”
“That was Joe.”
“I know his name was Joe,” Cindy said. “Wait. Lindsay.” She turned to look at me. “You don’t mean that was your Joe?”
“Off the record. That was him.”
“Oh, no. Please don’t tell me that.”
“Cindy. Watch the road. Yes. That was Joe Molinari.”
“But what does Joe have to do with those people, Lindsay? I don’t get this at all.”
“I’m thinking,” I said.
My thoughts were scrambling for cover, but they couldn’t hide.
What role had he played in the lives and deaths of Bud, Chrissy, Chan, and Maria Silva? Had he killed them? Were he and Muller working this operation together? And I had to know—what had Joe known about flight WW 888? And what, if anything, had he done with that information?
I couldn’t share these thoughts with Cindy, not yet.
“Lindsay, are you thinking Joe is the killer?” Cindy was staring at me again, her eyes as big as headlights.
I said, “No—look, no. Joe’s a freelancer. It’s more like he was hired to monitor the action in Chan’s room. So what if, as Joe was going up to supervise those kids, someone heard him say he was going upstairs and sent a ‘go’ signal to the killer?”
I was winging it, but I was imagining it, too. I kept talking. “And so the kids were expecting Joe, but the killer knocked on the door and they let him in.”
Cindy said, “Yeah. Yeah. I’m following you. The killer shoots them, shoots Chan—and Joe got there after the shootings?”
“It’s a good theory,” I said, while wondering, Is it?
“What happened to Joe? And what happened to Ali Muller?”
“I wish I knew,” I said sincerely.
“According to my calculations,” Cindy said, “the plane went down about sixty-two hours later. Right?”
I nodded, remembering the run-up to that crash vividly.
I’d worked the hotel crime scene with Conklin, Clapper, and Claire, and that night, Joe had come home very early on Tuesday morning, two days before the crash. We’d made love and had breakfast together and I’d told him about the hits at the hotel. We talked about it.
Then I’d gone to work.
That day, we got an ID on Michael Chan. Conklin and I had driven out to Palo Alto and notified Shirley Chan that her husband was dead.
And except for the recording of Joe watching us at the Chan house, I hadn’t seen him again. As Cindy had said, two and a half days after the shootings in the hotel, WW 888 had blown apart.
Cindy was doing her best to drive and process everything we had just seen on Jad’s fifteen-inch laptop.
She said to me, “Look, I have a problem writing this story. Joe is pivotal. He talked about the plane from Beijing. That information, if it had been used properly, might have saved a few hundred lives. So how do I write about that? I have no fricking evidence. I can’t print this as a rumor.”
“Can you sit on this for a day?” I said.
“Why?”
“Because I have to get some answers.”
“From whom?”
“I’ll tell you as soon as I can tell you.”
“Lindsay.”
“You don’t have to say it, Cindy. I promise. You get the exclusive. If I find out anything at all.”
CHAPTER 75