I rewound. Played it again at normal speed. Single rider on a motorcycle. Dark clothes, dark helmet, hugging the tree line to stay out of the camera’s main frame. This wasn’t somebody lost on a country road. This was somebody who knew where the cameras were and knew how to avoid them. They came to the property when it was empty, when nobody was there to see or hear them, and they had all night to do whatever they needed to do in that hangar.
They almost got away clean. Almost wasn’t good enough.
My jaw locked. Motorcycles. Every time something bad happened to this family, there was a motorcycle involved. Bryce and his crew used them when they torched the warehouse. Rios’s people used them when they tried to snatch Mehar on Route 50. And now a motorcycle on my brother’s empty property two nights before his plane went down. That wasn’t coincidence. That was a pattern, and patterns don’t lie. I’d built my entire career on reading patterns in numbers. This one was screaming at me.
I saved the footage and screenshotted the clearest frame and was about to call Prime when my phone buzzed with a FaceTime from Storie.
I almost ignored it. But she was my daughter and even in the middle of this I couldn’t not answer because the day I stopped answering my kid’s calls was the day I became the kind of father I swore I’d never be.
I picked up. Her face filled the screen, hair freshly braided, Erika’s living room in the background. She was wearing a smile I hadn’t seen on this girl in months and that immediately toldme she wanted something because Storie did not smile at me for free.
“Hey Daddy.” Sweet voice. Syrup dripping off every syllable. “How are you? I miss you.”
“What do you want, Storie?”
“Why I gotta want something? Can’t a daughter just call her daddy to check on him?”
“A daughter can. You, specifically, are calling because you want something. So skip the warm-up and get to it because I’m busy.”
The smile dropped about thirty percent. She regrouped quickly though, I’ll give her that. “Okay so, I was just thinking, since everything is going on with the family right now, maybe I should come home early? To be there for support? Auntie Erika said she’d drive me back this weekend if you said it was okay.”
“Auntie Erika did not say that.”
“She did!”
“Storie, put Erika on the phone.”
“She’s… in the shower.”
“Mmhmm. The answer is no. You’re staying in Pittsburgh for the summer. The situation with the family is being handled by adults and you are not an adult. You are fourteen. Your job is to enjoy your summer, listen to your grandmother, stay off your phone past ten, and stay away from Jaylen. That’s it. That’s the whole job description.”
“But Daddy?—”
“Storie. No.”
She stared at me through the screen and I stared back and we had our second standoff of the week except this one was digital. She was good, I’ll admit. The concern-for-the-family angle was smart. Most parents would’ve folded at a kid wanting to come home to be supportive during a crisis. But I knew my daughter and this had nothing to do with support and everything to dowith Jaylen and the fact that Pittsburgh didn’t have whatever this boy had that made my child lose her entire mind.
“I love you,” I said. “Stay in Pittsburgh. Kiss your sister for me. And if I find out you’re texting Jaylen from Erika’s Wi-Fi, I’m driving up there myself and it won’t be to pick you up. It’ll be to deliver a message. We clear?”
“We clear,” she mumbled. The FaceTime ended without a goodbye because Storie communicated her displeasure through abrupt disconnection.
I shook my head. That girl was going to be the death of me. But right now I had bigger problems.
• • •
I forwarded the motorcycle screenshot to Prime with a message:Somebody was on the property two nights before they left. Motorcycle. No headlights. Hangar has no cameras. This wasn’t an accident.
Prime called me immediately.
“When I find out who did this, I’m killing them,” I said. Calm. Matter of fact. The same tone I used when I read quarterly projections to the board. “I need you to understand that. This isn’t Quest talking. This isn’t rage. This is me telling you, as your brother, that whoever crawled under that plane is not going to be alive when this is over.”
Prime was quiet for a second. Then: “Aight. So let’s find them.”
We had a blurry screenshot of a motorcycle and a short list of people with access to this property and knowledge of Quest’s travel plans. Every name on that list made my stomach turn because they were all people we knew. This wasn’t a stranger. Strangers don’t know where the cameras are. Strangers don’t know the gate code. Strangers don’t know when Quest is flyingout and where he’s going. Whoever did this was close enough to have that information and cold enough to use it.
My phone rang again. This time it was a 305 area code, which was Miami. It was the Coast Guard.
“Mr. Banks, Lieutenant Commander Reyes, Coast Guard District Seven. I’m calling with an update on the search for tail number November-Seven-Two-Quebec-Bravo.”
