“Can you get back to whoever gave you that information and ask for a little more?”
“That depends,” Ralph replied. “What kind of information?”
“I need the tail number on the plane,” I said. “I also need to know the names of the pilots—names and addresses, too, if you can get them.”
“That might be a little more difficult,” he allowed, “but I’ll see what I can do and get right back to you.”
I closed my phone. “I don’t remember asking Ralph about the flight to Cancún,” Mel said absently.
It was, as I mentioned earlier, the Ides of March. “It was when we were talking to him about everything else,” I said. “It must have slipped your mind.”
Before anything more was said, Ross called me back. Now the conversation with him, one I had dreaded, came as a welcome diversion. I spent the next ten minutes telling him what I could about what was going on in the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab under Destry Hennessey’s dubious leadership.
When I finished, he let out a long sigh. “Damn,” he said. “But you and Mel are right. Doing anything to try to secure those rape kits right now is going to set off alarms for whoever’s involved. We’re just going to have to leave them for the time being. And maybe when some of the dust settles, we’ll be able to talk Mrs. Kim into coming back and helping us sort it all out.”
“If it gets rid of whoever’s been responsible for moving her stapler, I’m sure she’ll be happy to.”
“Her stapler?” Ross asked.
But call-waiting was calling. “Sorry, Ross,” I said. “Gotta go.”
Ralph Ames was on the other line. “Here are the names of the pilots,” he said. “Diane Massingale and Trudy Rayburn. The plane’s a Hawker 800XP. Tail number is N861AB—that’s November eight six one Alpha Bravo.”
“Excellent, Ralph,” I told him. “What about addresses on the pilots?”
“Didn’t get those,” he said. “The FBO in Cancún might have some information on that.”
“FBO?” I repeated. “What’s that?” It sounded as though we had landed back in Analise Kim’s world of LIFO/FIFO.
“FBO stands for Fixed Base Operator,” Ralph explained. “They handle ground operations for general aviation—fuel, catering, landing facilities, ground transportation, car rentals, all those kinds of things. The FBO in Cancún is called ASUR. Again, that’s A-S-U-R. Got it? If the pilots purchased fuel there, they probably have a record of the credit card transaction. They would also know if there was a rental car involved and maybe even what hotel was used.”
“So FBOs are all over?”
“Sure,” Ralph said. “There are only about three hundred airports in this country that handle commercial jet traffic, but there must be at least five thousand that serve the private, corporate, and charter-jet end of the business. Every one of them has at least one FBO. Some of them have several.”
“And they keep a record of planes that land and take off under their auspices?”
“Especially if landing fees or fuel purchases were involved,” Ralph said. “Why? What does any of this have to do with the price of peanuts?”
“I’ll tell you later, Ralph. Right now I’ve got to go.”
I closed the phone and turned to Todd Hatcher. “Do you happen to have your spreadsheet handy?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Why?”
“You know what an FBO is?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” he returned.
So I explained it as well as I could, bearing in mind that I had only heard the term for the first time a few minutes earlier. “I want you to go to each of the crime scenes we know about, the ones you’ve been putting in. Then I want you to locate all the FBOs in the area and find out if a plane with the tail number November eight six one Alpha Bravo was anywhere in that vicinity at the time of any of our mysterious deaths. Ditto the case in Salt Lake City,” I added.
“The one I read about in the Destry Hennessey stuff?” Todd asked. “The Escobar murder?”
“That’s the one.”
“What do I say if they ask me who I am or what right I have to ask for any information?”
“Tell them you’re a cop,” I told him. “You work for the Special Homicide Investigation Team, an arm of the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. And if they give you any trouble, tell them to call Ross’s office and check. Tell them to call collect.”
While I had been talking to Todd, Mel had located a phone book. “Here,” she said. “T. Rayburn. She lives in Kent.”
“Don’t pilots all have licenses?” I asked.