Final Approach Read Free

and we ascended through spotty clouds. I peered through the window at the snowy landscape below.
    “On jump runs, we go to fourteen thousand feet,” I said. “Much higher, we’d need oxygen masks. Much lower, we’ll complain we’re not getting enough altitude for our money.”
    I turned from the window back to Richard. “What’s our cruising altitude today? Thirty, thirty-five thousand? That’d be about two minutes of freefall, Richard.”
    He swallowed again and nodded. When he stole a glance at the puke bag in the pouch in front of him, I decided against taking this much further.
    I switched gears. “Do you believe the parents?”
    His eyebrows twitched. “I never met Eric. I’m taking their word.”
    A baby in the front of the cabin cried out, and I ached for it.
    Richard continued, “If Eric didn’t take the boy, police are wasting valuable time.”
    I heard his words, but my attention had shifted to the crying in the front of the plane. Most passengers worry the fussing will be everlasting. My take is that there isn’t much about young kids that’s everlasting. If I could hear my daughter’s noises again—any of them, good or bad—you can bet I’d listen up in a heartbeat.
    Richard was still talking. “If somebody else has Casey, the sooner that trail is picked up, the better. So it doesn’t really matter who I believe. I’m one more person looking for this kid, and that’s enough for me.”
    I wondered whether his devotion could be some sort of penance. Was he making up for the mess he’d made of the Shelton case? Or was he trying to gain back my trust so I’d give him my full effort?
    “What do you know about Karen Lyons?”
    “Only what’s in her report. She woke up late on Saturday morning and knew right away something was wrong. It was 7:45 and Casey hadn’t woken her up yet. When she checked his room, he wasn’t in the crib.”
    I flashed on a similar event in my own past, and my chest felt like it was being squashed. The scenario Richard described—an intruder slipping unnoticed into a protected home and targeting its most vulnerable occupant—was personal. I’d lived it, and Richard knew that. I resented him for pulling me back into an emotional viper pit, and when I looked at him this time I could feel my face was flushed, and it wasn’t from the heat in the cabin.
    His eyes leveled on mine. A confrontation was brewing, but neither of us would initiate it. I avoided it because it was too painful. I figured Richard avoided it because he was a coward.
    A flight attendant’s call bell sounded, and Richard jumped. His fingers fumbled across his lap until he found his seatbelt buckle, then he pulled the belt tighter. He took a slow breath.
    He added, “No prints were lifted from the home. The family hasn’t been contacted. No ransom demands, threats…nothing. HPD canvassed the neighbors and are looking for Eric’s vehicle. But the Lyonses think police are barking up the wrong tree. They’re worried sick about their son and grandson.”
    I remembered Keith and Nora Shelton, my friends from Cleveland, and the extra investigators they’d hired when Mattie disappeared.
    “Why do you suspect a skydiver?”
    “Couple things,” he said, tugging at his folder again. He opened it and searched its papers until he found a 5”x7” color print of a paper chit. Its ink had run and the text was partly smudged, but I recognized it.
    “A jump ticket,” I said.
    I’d used my share of jump tickets, but that was the first time I’d seen one photographed and enlarged, looking like evidence. It was weird.
    Richard said, “This was in Karen’s landscaping. Police bagged it, but don’t think it’s related. It could have come from anywhere, maybe blown across the neighborhood from someone else’s trash. It could have been stuck in the mulch for days or weeks. Karen didn’t recognize it, and neither did her neighbors.”
    The plane lurched and Richard reached to turn the overhead knob