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But what could she do? Lyon was a big city. How could she possibly find this mysterious redhead? And even if she did, it would probably be just another dead end. The ingredients were in the refrigerator. Someone had to have known he had that morning drink, and poisoned it on the second day.
As the cab let her off in front of the plane, and Arlo waved at her, something else occurred to her.
Not only did the killer have to have been on the plane, but it had to have been someone who knew he planned to drink that morning drink.
Someone he knew. Someone he was even friends with.
Deep in thought as she approached Arlo, she barely heard a word he said until she was sitting in her seat in the prop plane. “You’re onto something, aren’t you?” he asked her as he fiddled with the switches on the control panel.
“Yes, actually,” she said, before putting the headphones on. “I was just thinking, who would have access to the area where the drinks are prepped?”
He thought for a moment. “Well, it’s not under lock and key. But the only people who usually go back there are the flight attendants.”
“Did you see him bring the bag with the ingredients for his morning drink on?”
Arlo nodded. “He gave it to Darla. We all saw it.”
“And you all knew what it was for.”
“Yep.” He wrinkled his nose. “Well, maybe not Bernie, because he didn’t know Franklin Tate the way I did. Or Erin, one of the flight attendants. She was busy in the conference room, getting stuff ready for the party.”
Two people she could knock off her list. But as she thought about it more, it seemed right. If Franklin Tate had no qualms with cheating mafia guys who could seriously hurt him, he could possibly have even fewer reservations about cheating friends. Maybe there was some bad blood between friends.
“Look up!” Arlo suddenly shouted.
She did, in time to realize he was holding a phone out in front of them, taking a selfie. He snapped it and inspected his handiwork.
“That’s a keeper,” he said, giving her the thumbs-up. “You ready to take off?”
She stared at the phone, confused. It wasn’t like they’d formed some special bond that he’d want to remember forever . . . had they? “Yeah . . . but why did you take that picture?”
“I take them during all the trips I pilot. It’s kind of a hobby of mine. I like to look back and see where I’ve been, who I’ve been with.”
He started to pocket the phone, when something occurred to her. “Wait. Can I look at your photos? Did you take pictures of that night?”
“Oh, actually,” he said, handing it to her, unlocked. “I didn’t take them because I was at the controls, but Bernie took some when we were coming back from Lyon. He said it was getting wild back there and wanted to film it for insurance purposes. But I think he was just being nosy, wanting to see what kind of trouble the guys were getting into.”
Her heart skipped a beat as she put her headphones on and started to scroll through the photographs. A lot of them, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. A broken chair. Scattered crushed chips and an overturned vodka bottle, its contents soaking the plush carpet. A pile of what looked like vomit.
She winced. “Wow.”
“I know,” he said, his voice being piped into her earphones. “They pretty much wrecked the plane.”
She looked up, surprised to find that they were already in the sky, gaining altitude. She hadn’t noticed the plane even gathering speed to take off. Scrolling some more, she noticed a picture of a blonde woman in a dark blue suit, looking exhausted. “Who’s this?”
“That’s Darla.” He pointed to a woman who could be seen in profile, behind her, standing on her toes to pull something out of an overhead bin. “And Erin.”
She tilted the phone to get a better look at it. She noticed a blender on one of the counters. “Behind them, right there. That’s the place where they prepared the drinks, right?”
“That’s right.”
She studied it more closely, trying to determine if this photograph was taken before or after the drink had been prepared. It might have been the shadows, but the glass container of the blender looked like it had some substance in the bottom of it.
She scrambled to find the timestamp.4:21am
According to Darla, she’d already made and delivered the drink to Franklin Tate.
As she was about to scroll through, she noticed something, or rather someone, behind Darla’s form. She could only see an outline, and bit of the person’s arm . . . but the person was standing behind Erin, not five feet away from the blender.
