9780743439770: Flight
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0743439775 ISBN 13: 9780743439770
Verlag: Pocket Books, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Edgar Award-winning author Jan Burke, acclaimed for her Irene Kelly novels, hits the ground running with a harrowing thriller featuring homicide detective Frank Harriman. When the wreckage of a small plane belonging to a Las Piernas Police Department detective who disappeared a decade ago is discovered in the San Bernardino Mountains, an emotional and disturbing triple-homicide case is reopened with a vengeance. Was the pilot a sellout who murdered a key witness? Alone, following his instincts, Frank traces the path of his predecessor to uncover the truth -- and comes face-to-face with a madman whose killing intent has just taken off.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jan Burke is the author of a dozen novels and a collection of short stories. She is the founder of the Crime Lab Project and is a member of the board of the California Forensic Science Institute. She lives in Southern California with her husband and two dogs. Learn more about her at JanBurke.com.

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Chapter One

Sunday, June 3, 11:35 P.M.

Las Piernas Marina South

Blissfully unaware that the moment everything would change was near, they were bickering.

"You should have to do the kitchen, Seth," Mandy said, drying a tumbler. "I shouldn't have to do it just because I'm a female."

"Female," Seth scoffed, securing the latch on a compartment beneath a berth. "Not like anyone could tell you are. You're still an 'it.'"

"An it!" Mandy snapped the towel at the seat of his pants. She hit her mark, then squealed in dismay as he turned and easily grabbed her weapon away from her.

He grinned as he saw the belated realization dawn on her face -- it had been a mistake to attack him within the confines of the yacht. She cowered, waiting for his retribution. He laughed and tossed the towel in her face. "Half the other girls in ninth grade have bigger boobs than you do, Pancake."

She shoved at him, and as he fell back in mock surrender, he knocked over a set of cookware she had not yet put away. In the silence after the crash and clatter, they each covered their mouths and repressed laughter.

"Quit the horseplay down there!" their father's voice called.

Seth glanced at the companionway, but their dad was too busy with his own work above to continue scolding. Seth looked at his watch. They probably wouldn't be at their dad's house until almost one o'clock in the morning -- they had a lot to do before they could even take their dad's new boat back to number 414, its own slip.

Seth knew that some boat owners would have taken their yachts into the slip at any hour and cleaned up there, but his father never showed such disregard for others. Whenever he got into the marina after nine or ten o'clock at night, Trent Randolph, in consideration of the live-aboards whose boats occupied the slips nearest his own, always docked here first, next to a bait shop at an isolated point on the far end of the marina. "You wouldn't turn on bright lights and wash and vacuum a car at midnight on your driveway at home," he would tell friends who asked about this habit. "People live even closer together here."

They hadn't taken friends with them this time. This weekend's sailing trip to Catalina Island had been fun -- especially, Seth thought, because it had just been the three of them. Trent Randolph had finally dumped Tessa, his lowlife girlfriend, not long ago. Seth hated her. She was the one who had split his folks up two years earlier, but that wasn't the only reason he didn't like her. She bitched about Seth and Amanda constantly, and Seth was almost positive she was playing his dad. He had no proof, but once or twice when his dad wasn't around, Seth had overheard her talking on her cell phone in kind of a lovey-dovey voice, all sexy and everything. And he knew she hadn't been talking to his dad. So maybe his dad had caught her at it, too -- or just finally wised up.

He knew his dad wouldn't get back together with his mom. He knew they weren't happy together. And he wished he could stop wishing they would get back together anyway.

Better to think of good times. Like this weekend. Seth, Mandy, and their dad even spent a night camping on the island, something they had not done since the divorce. "It was like he could be a dad again," Mandy confided to Seth when they left Avalon. He had rolled his eyes, not willing to agree openly with her. One reason he liked the new boat was that he figured his dad had used it to get rid of Tessa -- Seth recalled that she had been just about as pissed as his sister had been pleased with the yacht's name -- Amanda.

"I still say you should help with the kitchen," Mandy whispered now as they picked up the fallen pots and pans.

"It's a galley, not a kitchen," Seth corrected. "You always say it wrong."

"Whatever. You should have to do it."

"Quit whining or I'll make you clean the head."

"The bathroom?"

He nodded.

"Why call it 'the head' and not, you know, something like 'the ass'?"

"Don't be a trash-mouth, Mandy," he said, turning away so she wouldn't see him laugh.

"It's not trashy. Even donkeys are called asses."

He wouldn't take the bait, and so they worked quietly for a few minutes. They heard their father's footsteps as he moved overhead, heard the thumps and thuds and other sounds of gear and life vests being stowed, rigging secured, decks hosed and scrubbed. Seth carried two duffel bags filled with camping gear toward the hatch, setting them near the companionway to be carried up later.

He was athletic; broad-shouldered and tall for sixteen. Dark-haired and green-eyed and a little shy. Mandy could make him blush furiously by using one of her nicknames for him: Mr. Babe-Magnet. "Every girl who becomes my friend develops a major crush on you," she once complained to him, "unless she already had one on you and became my friend just so she could get next to you."

"No, they like you for yourself."

She shook her head and said, "Right. Try to catch the next flight back to planet Earth."

He still thought she was wrong. At fourteen, she was slender but gawky, more bookish than he. The only reason he had started lifting weights was because he worried that without his father in the house, the duty of fighting off her unworthy would-be boyfriends would fall to him. He expected them to arrive by the busload once his redheaded little sister filled out a little. The only after-school fight he had ever been in -- the one their mother chalked up to "Seth adjusting to the divorce" -- had actually started when the other kid made a "see what develops" crack about Mandy. Seth had pummeled him.

"Where does this go?" Mandy asked, startling him out of his reverie. She was biting on her lower lip as she held up an oven mitt. Fretting over exactly where everything belonged. He didn't blame her. No use shoving things any-old-where they would fit. Their dad was a neat freak. Seth showed her the compartment where such things were stored and went back to work cleaning the head.

"Mom's probably called Dad's house," she said as Seth started polishing the mirror. When he didn't respond, she added, "She's going to be mad."

"Mom's always mad," he said, not pausing in his work. "He'll take us to school on time tomorrow, don't worry. She doesn't need to know we're up this late on a school night -- right?"

"Right," Mandy agreed. "But if she calls -- "

"Even if she finds out, she'll still have to let Dad take us every other weekend."

Mandy gave a little sigh of relief, a sound not lost on her brother.

A noisy boat pulled up nearby. They could hear the loud thrumming of its engines. A little later, above them, mixed in with the engine noise, they heard voices. Male voices. Their father and another man.

"Who could that be?" Mandy asked, moving toward the companionway.

Seth shrugged. "The guy from the other boat, probably."

The voices grew louder. They heard snatches of conversation, their father's voice as he strode angrily past the hatch: "...trouble...get up...not what police should...you think I'm going to...then..."

"I'm going to see who it is!" Mandy whispered.

"Some politico," he said, using a term they applied to most of their father's newest associates. "Can't you tell? Dad's making a speech to him."

"At midnight?"

"They bug him at all hours. Stay put."

They both listened, but the men seemed to have stopped talking.

"I'm going to go see," she said. She was up the companionway before he could stop her. The men were still quiet, so he thought Mandy was too late anyway -- the other man had probably left. He squirted some toilet bowl cleaner into the bowl and began to scrub -- let Mandy get in trouble for not working.

He heard a loud thud and wondered if his...

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Verlag
Pocket Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0743439775
ISBN 13 
9780743439770
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
560
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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