A somber crowd accompanied me in the Savannah Airport. People stared apprehensively at the various monitors scattered throughout the concourse.
A commuter plane had crashed en route from Kansas City to Chicago. The news programs showed the crash site from a distance, a smoky black smudge rising behind a stand of trees. There were shots of ambulances and police cruisers parked along a road, and of the response team from the National Transportation Safety Board disembarking from a helicopter.
The news announcer described the doomed aircraft, a Raytheon Beech King 1900D twin turboprop, as its photo flashed to one side of the screen. The airliner belonged to a small regional service, Prairie Air. All on board the small commuter, the crew of three and sixteen passengers, were accounted for. No survivors.
Even I got a case of the nerves. Nothing like a plane crash to temper the romance of flying.
I remembered the Araneum’s message with the article about the charter plane that had gone down. That airplane had been a smaller Cessna Caravan, a completely different type from the Beech King 1900D. Were these two crashes related? Were aliens involved? How so? For what purposes?
If the aliens suspected that I was on their trail, how vulnerable was my airliner? The UFO in the gulf had stalled my Wave Runner and paralyzed me. Had they done the same thing to the Beech King and crew?
Our flight to Chicago was especially quiet, which made the groans and squeals coming from the belly of the Boeing 767 that much louder and more worrisome. The attendants did a brisk business keeping the adults, including me, medicated with alcohol.
While I killed off a trio of Smirnoff miniatures, I thought about how I would find Goodman. Okay, so he was in Chicago. What was I to do? Put his face on a milk carton? Go out to Wrigley Field and announce, “Has anyone seen Dan Goodman?”
I paid the extra five bucks to watch the TV display attached to the back of the seat in front of me. While I wanted to distract myself from thinking about a plane crash, I kept flipping back to news about the wreck anyway, partly out of morbid fascination and partly out of superstition that watching the news would protect me from a similar fate.
Every fifteen minutes, CNN kept showing the same clip, a fast-paced montage that implied detailed reporting. (The commercials were from Rizè-Blu.) First CNN showed the smoke above the crash site, then stock footage of passengers boarding a Beech King 1900D turboprop, emergency technicians donning hazmat suits, and finally police escorting grimfaced investigators past a barrier of orange cones and yellow tape.
About the sixth time the clip repeated, I had memorized the choreography and could pick out more of the details.
One. Like the way the smoke above the crash curled into the shape of a chicken head.
Two. In the stock footage, there were sixteen passengers on the Beech King (in appropriately politically correct demographics), eight men, eight women (wearing enormous shoulder pads), six of the group black, three Asian.
Three. The emergency techs slipping into the blue hazmat suits were two men (the dumpy guy in the foreground had a walrus mustache) and a muscular blonde who looked like she ran marathons while French-curling an anvil.
Four. A state trooper parted the way for two men to pass through the barrier and a gauntlet of onlookers. The clip showed the men from the back. Both wore dark windbreakers. The second man glanced to the right for an instant before the clip ended.
It was him.
The tousled mat of blond hair, a flat brow, the chiseled nose, a well-defined jaw with a fleshy pan on his dimpled chin, the tanned complexion.
Dan Goodman.
The image of his face sobered me right up. I waited anxiously for the clip to be shown again.
The sequence returned. Smoke. Airplane. Hazmat suits. Trooper. Second man turns his head.
Goodman.
As a vampire, I have a kundalini noir. And as a private detective, I also have an internal stink-o-meter. Right now that stink-o-meter jumped to the red zone.
Gilbert Odin had been killed by an alien blaster.
He gave me the name of his killer: Goodman.
One of Carmen’s chalices showed up dead from a blaster wound.
The man who had found the dead chalice was a dirty cop, now also dead, named Deputy Toller Johnson.
On Johnson’s body I found a business card for a golf pro named Dan Goodman.
This Dan Goodman, a retired U.S. Army colonel, moonlighted for a secretive defense contractor.
Now Goodman was involved in the crash investigation of a commuter airliner.
A big fat why hovered in my brain.
And even more sinister, Goodman had left for Chicago yesterday. The plane crash happened this morning.
Coincidence? Not according to my stink-o-meter.
Did that mean Goodman either knew of or was responsible for the plane crash? How?
And how did that tie into the other mission Gilbert Odin handed me, to save the Earth women? What about the Araneum’s alien connection?
My first task was to track Goodman. He sat in the middle of the bull’s eye. I’d start right where the TV showed him to be. The crash site south of Oswego, Illinois.