The Flight Attendant(29)
She recalled him mentioning that his mother’s name was Harper, and Cassie was able to find her Facebook page quickly. She half expected to see a photo of Alex and a desperately sad in memoriam from a mother about her son. But there wasn’t. Harper Sokolov hadn’t posted anything in a week, since she had added a photo of herself, her husband, and another couple in tennis whites on the terrace of a country club. She looked wholesome and athletic and fit in the short dress. Cassie saw Alex in her smile. She searched among the woman’s friends for Miranda, though she wasn’t confident she’d be there: if Alex was meeting her for the first time that night in Dubai, why in the world would his mother know her? But she had to check. And as she expected, there was no one named Miranda among Harper’s friends.
Next Cassie visited the Unisphere website and typed the word “Miranda” into the search box. Nothing came up. The company was too big to include an employee directory. But there was a list of offices around the world, and while they didn’t have individual websites, they did list phone numbers. She glanced at the clock on the oven and saw that even eight time zones to the east no one would be in the Dubai office yet. But she could call them later and ask for Miranda. See what happened.
She refilled her glass a third time and placed Mayes’s business card directly beside Frank Hammond’s on her refrigerator. She had scribbled on it the phone number of the lawyer he had recommended, a woman with the melodious name of Ani Mouradian. She hadn’t heard from any reporters. The FBI hadn’t contacted her again. She tried to convince herself that Derek Mayes was wrong and she would never hear from the FBI again and she would never need to call this Ani Mouradian. But she guessed she would have to be a good deal drunker to believe that, and so she ran herself a bath and brought the bottle and the glass and her phone into the bathroom with her. There was no reason to be sober: she was alone, and she hadn’t touched alcohol since the small hours of Sunday morning. Forty-two hours. Almost two days ago now.
When she was settled under the bubbles, she closed her eyes and tried to lose herself in her ablutions—clearing her mind was of more importance to her tonight than cleaning her body—but it was impossible. She kept thinking of Alex and she kept wondering what would have happened if she had called the front desk at the hotel. But she knew. At least she thought she knew. Everyone would believe that she had killed the poor bastard—which, she had to admit, would be very difficult to refute—and she would be in jail in Dubai. She would know someone from the U.S. embassy very, very well, probably having grown acquainted with him or her from behind bars.
She noticed that the polish on her nails was reminiscent of the Chianti and that it was starting to chip. She would have to get a manicure tomorrow. The flight to Rome didn’t leave until seven p.m., so she could sleep late and still go to the gym and the salon. Easy.
She reached down and put her wineglass on the floor beside the tub and grabbed her phone. She decided to search Twitter for news stories about Sokolov, see if there was anything she might have missed, and scrolled through the ones that had been online for a day that she’d scanned just a few minutes ago in the kitchen. But then she saw a tweet from a news agency in Dubai that was only seconds old. She clicked the link and instantly felt her stomach lurch as if she were on a plane that had just dropped a thousand feet in a wind shear. There she was. There she was twice, as a matter of fact. There were two images of her. She wasn’t recognizable—at least not really recognizable, because the photos were grainy stills taken from the Dubai hotel’s security camera footage, and because in both images she was wearing sunglasses and the scarf she had bought at the airport when they had landed. In the first she was in the lobby, meeting Sokolov before they went out to dinner; they were near the entrance and she had hooked her arm around his elbow. She was smiling; they both were. In the second she was alone, exiting the hotel the next day. This time, her jaw was set. It was the scarf that had likely led the investigators to pick her out the second time.
The sunglasses were pretty common Ray-Bans—one of their classic black frames.
But the scarf? It was distinct. It was a red and blue arabesque with one large cluster of tendrils and palmettes in the center, and then a series of smaller versions framed along the four sides. Also, it had a series of small red tassels. The footage was black and white, but the pattern was vivid.
She’d been with Megan and Jada when she bought it. She’d been wearing it when she’d returned to the airline’s hotel. She’d been wearing it in the van with the entire crew Friday morning.
The article said the woman was not considered a suspect, but was merely wanted for questioning. Not a suspect? Ridiculous. Of course, she was. There was an image of her with Sokolov at the hotel at night and then another one of her leaving the hotel alone the next morning.
Almost desperately she reached for her wine, and in her haste, as she transferred the goblet from her left hand to her right, she managed to clang it against the porcelain soap dish built into the tile wall, shattering the glass and spilling the wine into the water. The soap bubbles had long vanished, and so she watched, absolutely immobile, as the red wine spread and then dissipated, leaving the water and the shards of glass—some resting on her thigh, some on her abdomen, some sunk to the bottom where she could feel the edges like pinpricks or rough sand—a soft, almost soothing pink.
It was only as she started to carefully pick the glass from her body that she saw the two long cuts on the side of her hand.