The Flight Attendant(59)

“I could really use a drink.”

“You could really use some common sense. It almost doesn’t matter if you are innocent: every single thing you’ve done has suggested you’re guilty. You fled the scene. You told no one you were in his hotel room. You lied by omission when you landed—”

“Not really. No one asked me anything.”

“Okay, fine. You lied by commission just now.”

“I know. I get it. It’s just…”

Ani stopped and turned to face her. Her eyes were wide with rage. “It’s just what?” she asked, her tone accusatory.

“It’s just that it was so clearly me in the photographs. It’s just that they probably have my lipstick already. And now it doesn’t matter, because I’ve admitted I was there.”

“So what? You take the Fifth. Besides, it isn’t clearly you. It’s likely you. Big difference. Very big difference. And your damn lipstick could be anywhere. Do you know what’s going to happen now?”

Cassie shook her head. She waited.

“They are going to confirm the approximate time of death with the coroner in Dubai. They won’t know the definitive time, but if they can show it was before ten forty-five in the morning, you are fucked. Pardon my French, Cassie, but you are fucked.”

Then they stood in silence for a moment, and Cassie thought she might get sick right there on the street. She looked down at the sidewalk and took a few slow, deep breaths to compose herself. Maybe she was self-destructing because she knew on some level that she had in fact killed him, and she was craving punishment. Justice. Across the street was a bar with a neon sign with a four-leaf clover. “Please,” she said, her voice quavering as she pointed at it. “I’ve got to have a drink. I really, really do.”



* * *



? ?

In a voice that was quiet but intense, a fioritura of frustration and fury only barely mollified by the gin and tonic she was finishing in great gulps, Ani explained to Cassie what she believed was likely to happen next, all of it contingent only on the time it would take for three people to connect as midnight neared on the Arabian Peninsula: the FBI’s legal attaché in the United Emirates, his connection at the Dubai police, and the coroner in that massive city by the sea. Last week, Ani said, after Alex Sokolov was found, the medical examiner had autopsied the body. He—and in Dubai, Ani supposed, it was more likely a male than a female coroner—had seen how much (if any) of the veal from dinner remained in Alex Sokolov’s stomach, taken the body’s temperature, and checked to see how far rigor mortis had progressed.

“I don’t know a hell of a lot about forensic entomology, but I can also see them examining the bugs that are starting to eat at the guy’s corpse. There probably weren’t beetles and there certainly weren’t maggots yet, but there may have been houseflies,” Ani said. “In any case, the coroner will have offered an approximate time of death.”

Cassie had downed a shot of tequila as soon as they arrived, and the warmth had helped. It was pretty good tequila. Smooth. She was calmer now, at least a little bit. The tequila reminded her of Buckley and dancing barefoot in the bar, a memory that was growing sweeter and fuzzier with time. She was almost done with the margarita she had ordered immediately upon finishing the shot. “You said it would be an approximate time of death. That means there’s a window. Do you know how big that window is? Are we talking an hour? Three hours? Five, maybe?” she asked. She sat back in her stool and swiveled so she was facing Ani. Sometimes she really enjoyed a place like this: dark paneling and little light, not quite a dive, but a far cry from Bemelmans at the Carlyle. There was a pair of older men in drab brown suits at the far end of the bar, but they were the only other customers here this time of the afternoon.

“Probably in the neighborhood of two or three,” Ani replied. “But decomposition isn’t really in my wheelhouse. It could be more. It could be less.”

“They found the body late in the afternoon, right?”

“Yes.”

A notion was floating just beyond Cassie’s reach. She thought she might be able to reel it in if she could talk the idea through. “So let’s say Alex was found at five p.m. You and I know he was killed before I woke up, and that was around nine forty-five in the morning. If the window is three hours, let’s hope he was killed an hour or so before I first opened my eyes.”

“Don’t get your hopes up. By eight forty-five in the morning, there were people in the hallways: Housekeeping. Guests checking out. Guests going to breakfast. No one commits a murder in a hotel room if they have to run a gauntlet of guests and maids.”

“There was no one around when I left the room about ten forty-five. And even if there were people in the hallways earlier in the day, doesn’t that help my case? People coming and going? A crowd? Maybe whoever did it counted on the crowds.”

Ani folded her arms across her chest: “I said there would be people. I didn’t say there would be crowds. I seriously doubt that the fifth floor of the Royal Phoenician is ever Penn Station.”

“Still. All we need is the window to work in our favor.”

“And to be big. Really big. Think picture-window big, Cassie.”

She nodded hopefully. “And they’re going to try and find Miranda now, right?”