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“Chrissy is a junior in college now; Sam’s a freshman. They’re both great. Technically Sam’s still a teenager, but he’s out of the worst of it.” Actually, both of them had turned out pretty damned good, considering their parents had been divorced for a dozen years and their father was out of the country a lot. To a large degree that was because their mother, bless her heart, had steadfastly refused to make him the bad guy in their breakup. He and Amy had sat the kids down, told them the divorce was for a lot of reasons, including getting married way too young, blah blah blah. Which was all perfectly true. The bottom line, though, was that Amy was tired of having a husband who was mostly somewhere else, and she wanted to be free to look for someone else. Ironically, she hadn’t remarried, though she dated some. The kids’ lives hadn’t changed all that much from when he and Amy were still married: they lived in the same house, went to the same school, and saw their father just about as often as they had before.
If he and Amy had been older and wiser when they married, they never would have had kids together, knowing how his work would affect their marriage, but unfortunately age and wisdom seem to increase at about the same rate and by the time they were old enough to know better, it was too late. Still, he couldn’t regret having his kids. He loved them with every cell in his body, even if he got to see them only a few times a year, and he accepted that he wasn’t nearly as important in their lives as their mother was.
“One can only do one’s best, and pray the demon seed eventually morph back into human beings,” Murray observed as he turned down a short corridor. “Here we are.” He blocked the view of a keypad and punched in a code, then opened a plain steel door. Inside was a vast array of monitors and sharp-eyed personnel watching the ebb and flow of people inside the huge airport.
From there they went into a smaller room, which also had several monitors, as well as equipment for reviewing what the numerous array of cameras caught on film. Murray seated himself in a blue chair on wheels and invited Swain to pull up another one just like it. He typed in a keyboard command and the monitor directly in front of them glowed to life. Frozen on it was a frame of Lily Mansfield getting off the plane from Paris that morning.
Swain studied every detail, noting that she didn’t wear any jewelry at all, not even a wristwatch. Smart girl. Sometimes people would change everything except their wristwatch, and that one detail would trip them up. She was dressed in a plain dark suit and wore low-heeled black pumps. He thought she looked thin and pale, as if she’d been sick or something.
She didn’t look left or right, just walked with the rest of the crowd getting off the plane, and went into the first restroom she came to. A steady parade of women came out of the restroom, but none of them looked like Lily.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “Run it again. In slow motion.”
Murray obligingly set the video back to the beginning. Swain watched her come off the plane carrying a medium-sized black tote, the kind that didn’t stand out because millions of women carried them every day. He focused on the tote, looking for any means of identifying it: a buckle, the way the straps fit, anything. After Lily vanished into the restroom, he looked for that tote coming out. He saw a lot of black bags of all sizes and shapes, but only one looked as if it might be that particular one. It was carried by a six-foot-tall woman whose clothes, hair, makeup all shouted, “Look at me!” But she wasn’t carrying just that tote, she was also hauling around a carry-on bag, and Lily hadn’t had one of those.
Huh.
“Run it again,” he said. “From the beginning. I want to see everyone who got off that plane.”
Murray obliged. Swain studied every face, and particularly noted what bags they carried.
Then he saw it. “There!” he said, leaning closer to the screen.
Murray froze the image. “What? She hasn’t come into view yet.”
“No, but look at this woman.” Swain jabbed his finger at the screen. “Look at her carry-on bag. Okay, let’s pay attention to what she does, too.”
The stylishly dressed woman was several passengers ahead of Lily. She walked straight to the restroom, which wasn’t unusual. A fair number of women from that flight did the same thing. Swain watched the video until the woman left the restroom—without the carry-on bag.
“Bingo,” he said. “She took the bag in; the clothes for the disguise were in it. Back it up some. There. That’s our girl. She has the bag now.”
Murray blinked at the fantastic creature on the monitor. “My word,” he said. “Are you certain?”
“Did you see this particular woman go into the restroom?”
“No, but I wasn’t looking for her.” Murray paused. “I could scarcely have missed her, could I?”
“Not in that get-up.” The feathered earrings alone would pull a second look. From the short red spiky hair to the stiletto boots, that woman w
as an attention-getter. If Murray hadn’t seen her enter the restroom, it was because she hadn’t. But no wonder Murray’s men hadn’t seen beneath the disguise; how many people, trying to hide their true self, would invite scrutiny like that?
“Look at the nose and mouth. That’s her.” Lily’s nose wasn’t exactly hooked, but it was the closest it could get and still be feminine. It was thin but strong, and oddly appealing when paired with that mouth, with the full upper lip.
“So it is,” Murray said, and shook his head. “I’m off my game, not to have seen it before.”
“It’s a good disguise. Smart. Okay, let’s see where our Technicolor cowgirl goes.”
Murray worked the keyboard, pulling up the necessary video to follow Lily’s progress through the airport. She walked for a while, then went into another restroom. And didn’t come back out.
Swain rubbed his eyes. “Here we go again. Just concentrate on finding those particular bags.”
Because of the swarm of foot traffic occasionally blocking the camera’s view, they had to watch the tape several times to narrow their list of possibilities down to three women, and track them until they could get a better view. At last they had her, though. She had long black hair now, and was wearing black pants and a black turtleneck. She was shorter, the stiletto boots gone. The sunglasses were different, too, and the feathered earrings had been replaced with gold hoops. She still had those two particular bags, though.
The cameras tracked her to another gate, where she boarded another plane. Murray swiftly checked which flight had left the gate at that particular time. “Paris,” he said.
“Son of a bitch,” Swain uttered in astonishment. She’d gone back. “Can you get that passenger list for me?” It was a rhetorical question; of course Murray could. It was in his hands a few minutes later. He skimmed down the names, noting that neither Denise Morel nor Lily Mansfield was listed, meaning she had yet another identity going.
Now would come the fun part, going back to Paris and going through this same process with the authorities at de Gaulle airport. The prickly French might not be as accommodating as Murray, but Swain wasn’t without a few resources.
