The Flight Attendant(74)
Bowden had offered no comment and the FBI had offered no comment, but an anonymous source with the Dubai police had confirmed that Cassandra Bowden of New York City was, at the very least, a person of interest. Another flight attendant could not corroborate the story but had volunteered that Bowden was “a bit of a party girl” and “kind of a wild woman.” She’d added something that on the surface sounded contradictory, but Elena understood how it made all the sense in the world and that in fact the woman had probably been coached: “Cassie is sweet and kind of a loner. When she’s home, she goes to this animal shelter a lot because she really likes the stray cats. I think sometimes she’s as depressed as they are. And when we’re working, she’s not always out somewhere going crazy until one in the morning. Sometimes she just clicks shut her hotel room door and sleeps. I mean, the job is just too demanding and that’s not how she’s hardwired.” Elena knew the ebb and flow of binge behavior, and the way a person sometimes just wanted to retreat into the bleached white sheets of a Hilton or into the fur of an equally needy, equally wounded cat. But she doubted that Bowden was actually depressed: that was expediency finessing the truth.
The article also quoted her lawyer: a woman named Ani Mouradian said that Bowden was cooperating fully with investigators and had absolutely nothing to do with Alex Sokolov’s death. Finally, a representative for the airline said the flight attendant had not been charged with a crime in either the United Arab Emirates or the United States and had violated no airline policy. And so they had no comment.
Nevertheless, the Post already had a nickname for Bowden and for the crime. Now that she was no longer a mystery woman, she was no longer a rather generic “black widow spider.” They knew she was a flight attendant, and so they had christened her the “Cart Tart Killer.”
It wasn’t brilliant, Elena thought, but it wasn’t bad. It had rhythm and alliteration, and best of all was the way it combined sluttiness and murder.
She closed the page on her phone and sat back in her seat. She thought of her brief time with Bowden back in Dubai: the woman was lit, sure, and dopey with drink. But so was Alex. But she’d also seemed rather kind and funny. And it was at that very moment, like a revelation, that Elena recalled the way Alex had become so attentive when Bowden said something about what her brother-in-law did for a living. It was the name of the army base. The fact, Bowden said, that he was more engineer than soldier.
She grimaced there in her seat at the obviousness of what she had missed. Sokolov already knew that. He knew all about Bowden’s brother-in-law. She must have said something on the flight to Dubai, and instantly he had connected the dots. It was why he had brought Bowden back to his room. This may have ended up a drunken romp with a hot mess, but that wasn’t how it had begun. She hadn’t seduced him; he, in fact, had seduced her. It was a move that simultaneously reflected his brilliance and his na?veté. The courier—whoever it was, because God forbid Viktor should ever violate his “need to know” policies of spy craft and secrecy and tell her—had sensed that the FBI was circling and grown anxious. So Viktor had enlisted Sokolov to make the handoff, an assignment he had gladly accepted because he knew how much trouble he was in with his Russian clients. And into his life walked a flight attendant with connections to Blue Grass who probably needed money. Bowden must have just screamed “recruit” to Sokolov; she was the perfect offering to bring to a Cossack crazy who was trying to weaponize a drone with chemical agents.
Elena’s father had one rule that he said had served him well both before and after the collapse: trust your instincts. He said it had saved his life when he was with the KGB, and it had saved his fortune when he was done.
The beverage cart was well behind her now, but another flight attendant appeared out of nowhere and offered to refill her glass. He was a handsome guy with a mane of tapered, coal-colored dreadlocks held back in an immaculate ponytail.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Absolutely,” he said, smiling. “Let me know if you need anything else.”
She raised her glass to him in gratitude, but already her mind was elsewhere. Nothing really was wrong, and nothing really was different, she told herself. But there it was, a beacon from deep inside her, a warning light now flashing red.
20
News spreads like an airborne virus in the digital age, and though Cassie knew not a soul in the crew on the overnight flight to Rome, they knew her. They had all read the story on their phones on the way to the airport or as they waited to pass through security or then as they waited to board. They had been directed to the story by friends and family and coworkers who had seen it on Facebook or Twitter. After all, she worked for their airline.
And while she wasn’t wearing a scarlet A—the uniform regulations would have prohibited that sort of accessorizing, Cassie thought darkly to herself—everyone watched her warily and she felt like Hester Prynne. No, the vibe of this madness was Russian. Anna Karenina, she corrected herself. But, of course, Anna hadn’t killed anyone. It was only her own life that she’d taken. The cabin service director, a fortysomething fellow named Brendon who was lean and stern and led spin classes in Buffalo when he wasn’t flying, asked her if she would be capable of working. She said yes. Of course. She said she knew this was coming. She added—and she said this so many times in the half hour before they walked down the jet bridge to prepare the plane for takeoff that she had begun to believe it herself—that Alex Sokolov had been alive when she had left his hotel room. She had no idea who had murdered him, which she also said with conviction, though mostly she was sure that she did know: it was either Miranda or someone Miranda knew. But somehow Miranda was involved.