Night Watch (Kendra Michaels #4)(17)

They walked toward the building and glanced through the glass door to see a dimly lit office of three desks. The room’s only occupant was a young man peering intently at a laptop. Kendra tried the door. Locked. Lynch rapped on the glass, and the man stood up and came to the door.

He unlocked it and pushed it open. “May I help you?”

Kendra’s eyes flicked to the name plaque on his desk. “You can if your name is Matt Paulsen.”

“Uh, yeah. That’s me.”

“Good. I was told you could help us.” She pulled out her phone and showed him a photo of Waldridge. “Did you see this man arriving here in the last couple days?”

He squinted at the phone. “I’m not sure. I don’t see everyone who comes through here. You might ask some of the ground crew. There’s no way to know for certain—”

“He was probably on a charter,” she interrupted. “He might have transferred from LAX or another international airport. He has an English accent, and he would have been pulling a brown-and-black rollerboard—”

“Wait.” He studied the photo for another moment. “I do think he was here.”

“And what makes you think that?”

“I remember the accent. Kind of upper-crust. It was the night before last. Somebody met his plane.”

“A limo?” Lynch asked.

“No. It was another English guy, and they seemed like they were friends. The guy picked him up in an SUV.”

“What color?” Kendra asked.

“It was dark. Maybe green.”

She turned to Lynch. “Sounds like the same car Waldridge was driving. His rental car was a dark green Explorer.”

Lynch leaned closer to Paulsen. “What can you tell us about the plane that brought him here?”

The young man hesitated.

“Not sure? You’ll probably need to check your files.” Lynch pushed past him and strode confidently into his office. “Come on, Kendra. We’ll wait inside, out of the cold.”

Paulsen frowned uncertainly as he watched Kendra enter the office. “Uh … I’m not sure I can talk to you about this. I mean, do you have some kind of warrant?”

Lynch took a step forward, instant dominance and aggression. He must be getting impatient. He was usually much more diplomatic. Kendra raised a hand to stop him. She reached into her pocket and produced Detective Shea’s card. “We’re working with the Santa Monica Police Department on an investigation. If you have any concerns, please call this number. But we need this information immediately, so if you want to call now, we’ll wait.”

Paulsen looked at the card for a long moment, giving Kendra time to wonder how Shea would react if he actually decided to phone. Paulsen finally waved the card away. “It’s okay.” He moved to the front desk and jiggled the trackpad of a laptop to wake it up. “It’s all part of the public FAA record. We log all the flights here. It wasn’t from any of the charter companies that usually service the airport.” He studied the screen. “Hmm.”

“What?” Lynch asked.

“It’s a tail number. I cut and pasted it into the FAA registration database, but it’s not coming up as a valid entry.”

“Like it doesn’t exist?” Kendra asked slowly.

“Exactly like that.” Paulsen tried it again, this time making sure that he had inserted all of the characters. The monitor flashed: NUMBER NOT VALID.

“Could it have been changed?” Kendra asked.

Lynch shook his head. “Even if it had, this registry would still show us every plane that had ever carried this number.” He turned to Paulsen. “Are you sure this is correct?”

He shrugged. “There’s always the possibility of a mistake, but I doubt that. We check and double-check these things. Homeland Security pretty much demands it. No, I’m sure that’s the number on the plane that brought him here.”

Lynch turned toward a bank of three monitors mounted high on the office wall. Each camera showed a night-vision image of another part of the tiny airport. “What are chances of one of these capturing the plane’s arrival?”

“Not great. Those cameras are more for loss prevention. They might have caught your guys coming or going in the car, though.”

Lynch and Kendra exchanged a glance.

Kendra studied the monitors. “How long do your recordings stick?”

“They sit on a hard drive for seven days.”

“Good,” Lynch said. “Take us forty-eight hours back.” Lynch fired it more like an order than a request, but he correctly predicted it would be the surest way to get Paulsen to immediately comply.

“Okay.” Paulsen leaned over a computer desk beneath the monitor bank and used a trackpad to move back the surveillance camera’s timeline. He stepped back and looked at the screen. “There. Too bad it wasn’t during the day, but the night-vision camera helps a bit.”

Kendra studied the image, which at the moment only showed the familiar SUV. “That’s definitely the vehicle that Waldridge was driving,” she said. “Right down to the scrapes on the right-wheel hubs. As if someone had ground them against a tall curb.” She pointed as two men stepped into the frame. “That’s Waldridge.”

“How about the other guy?” Lynch asked.