Mara Lantern: Broken Realms Part 11

"Don't go looking for problems. Let's just find out what they saw."

"How did Pirelli find out about Newsome at the hospital anyway? It isn't like there's a hotline set up for tracking pa.s.sengers from the flight."

"He's got folks monitoring calls going into the local police and emergency lines," Suter said.

"An NTSB investigator tapping the local cops? That sounds odd. He's not really NTSB, is he?"

"Actually he is. But you could say he's other things as well."

"I guess those doc.u.ments I signed don't ent.i.tle me to know what those things might be."

"You guess right."

Jill O'Donnell brushed blond bangs off her forehead, and smoothed her navy jacket and skirt in one motion as she stood on the far side of the bed when Suter and Bohannon walked into her husband's private room. Apart from a chrome bed railing and the florescent tube light mounted on the wall over the bed's wooden headboard, the room could have been part of a suite in a nice hotel. Mauve drapes covered the windows, and tasteful artwork hung from the walls. Bohannon almost tripped, stepping from the linoleum-floored hallway on to the carpet in the room.

The head of Peter Newsome's bed was slightly elevated, but he appeared to be asleep, on his side curled around a sizable lump under the covers.

"Are you Mr. Suter?" she said, looking tired.

"Yes, ma'am. Special Agent Suter. This is Detective Bohannon."

She looked back at her husband. "We've been through so much this past week with the accident and everything going on in our lives."

"Yes, ma'am. Do you have a few minutes to talk?"

"Yes. Let's step out into the hall so we don't wake him."

"No, that's okay. I'm awake." Peter Newsome lifted himself and rubbed his eyes. "You guys can talk in here."

"We just have a few questions about the flight and anything you might have seen."

The young woman sat on the edge of her husband's bed, running her hand through his unruly hair. "We saw a red-headed boy running toward the back of the plane. He carried this strange orb-looking thing that filled the plane with spinning light. It was very disorienting. Two girls, older teens, followed him. I think they might have been twins or sisters. They looked a lot alike. One was a little more dressed up with a skirt and jacket. The other wore jeans."

"Can you describe these girls?"

"With all the lights and panic, it was hard to tell. They were both, maybe, medium height, not real tall. I would guess brown hair. It was a little long and wavy. Not permed or anything, just a natural wave to it. The cuts were a little different, but both were longish, shoulder length."

"Were they thin, fat, how old?"

"I would guess sixteen, seventeen at the most. Trim, not model skinny. Definitely not fat."

"So this boy. How old was he?"

"Definitely younger. Probably a teen too but younger, still a little boyish looking."

"You said these girls were following him. Were they chasing him, or were they just going to the back of the plane with him?"

"I'm not sure."

"This...o...b..the boy carried, did you get the impression it was some kind of explosive? Could it have been what caused the accident?"

"I don't know. I've never seen anything like it. It produced an incredible amount of light. It was almost blinding, so bright it filled the cabin. I didn't get the impression it was dangerous per se, just disorienting."

"Did you see what happened to this...o...b.."

"It looked like they were struggling with it or over it. The girls may have been trying to take it from the boy. There was a blinding flash of light, and all h.e.l.l broke loose. The cabin decompressed, and the plane went into a dive. I think by that time, we were on our way back to Portland."

"Did you see the orb after that, when the plane was going down or after the crash?"

"No. I don't remember anything after that until I was in the water."

"Have you ever seen these girls before?"

"No. Never."

"How about you, Mr. Newsome?"

"Jill saw a lot more than I did. She likes to sit on the aisle. I was in the middle seat and didn't see any of that. I heard some of it, but I didn't see it," he said.

"Did you see this...o...b.."

"No. I saw the light in the cabin, but not where it came from."

"So you never saw this...o...b..yourself?"

"No. Like I said, she was on the aisle."

They thanked the couple and stepped into the hall. Suter's phone rang, and he stepped into an empty waiting area for some privacy. Bohannon waited at a nurse's station next to the elevators. A bing toned, and the elevator doors slid open to reveal the older doctor Bohannon had met Sat.u.r.day.

"Detective Bohannon. I see you're visiting our patient from this weekend," he said, leaning on the counter.

"Yes. His wife called and had some information related to our investigation," Bohannon said.

"What is the nature of your investigation? Can you say?"

"Not really. Why do you ask, Dr., ah...?"

"Samuelson. Paul Samuelson. After he was tranquilized, we examined Mr. Newsome."

"And?"

"Normally it would be inappropriate to discuss a patient's personal medical information, but you're already aware of some of the anomalies related to his case. And, to be honest with you, I think I should tell someone about what we found. First, you must agree to keep this in the utmost confidence. This information cannot be traced back to me."

"Okay, Doctor. What did you find?"

"Mr. Newsome appears to be perfectly normal and healthy. He has a radical mutation in his reproductive system and some unusual glands just below his sinuses, but it appears to be how he was born. The acid he spewed came from those glands. The mutations are not the result of surgery or some pathological condition. They appear normal for him. There is no mention of this in his medical records."

"What about the egg?"

"The egg is an egg. It's a girl. And she appears to be human, with some of the same variations present in her father, or maybe he's the mother. Who knows?"

"So she is going to hatch?"

"I would a.s.sume."

"What are you going to do?" Bohannon asked.

"There is nothing to do. Mr. Newsome is checking out in the morning. He has requested to be discharged, and we don't have any reason to keep him here. What are you going to do?"

"What do you mean? He hasn't broken any law that I'm aware of."

"I just thought perhaps his status had something to do with your investigation."

"Not at all."

Bohannon braked the Caprice at the stop sign at the exit of the hospital parking lot. They faced a row of mirrored office buildings across Burnside Road that reflected the dense clouds that were rolling in behind them. He turned to look at Suter in the pa.s.senger seat. "Where we going next? Another pa.s.senger interview?"

"We need to identify that boy and those two women. We figure that out, I think we have a shot at solving what brought down the plane," Suter said.

"And where would you like to do that?" The detective pointed fingers left and right above the steering wheel.

"Oh, let's just drive around for a minute. I need to think this through."

Bohannon turned toward downtown and said, "At this point, the accident seems incidental, don't you think? We have a plane full of people switched for altered versions of themselves. Don't you think we should be looking into that? I don't think proceeding like it was a run-of-the-mill bombing or a mechanical failure is going to get us anywhere."

"I think whatever, or whoever, caused the explosion caused the switch. If we figure out what blew a hole in the plane, I bet we'll find out what caused the rest of it," Suter said.

"I don't know. You're a.s.suming there's a connection, and that is premised on accepting that we have two sets of pa.s.sengers for one flight. I just don't understand how you can accept that so easily."

"We have no choice. We do have two sets of pa.s.sengers for one flight. I accept the facts we find. We can't stop to hyperventilate every time we encounter something that's a little odd, so let's go over what we've got."

"All right."

"The body of Debbie Bartkowski in the cooler looks like the woman we met at the apartment complex," Suter said. "But it's obvious the woman we met was something other than what we would expect, agreed?"

"Yeah, I would say so."

"So the living version of Debbie, the jumper, is not the original, not the one who left Portland on that flight, and the one we have in the cooler is."

"Okay. And Mr. Gonzales said someone had swiped and switched his wife," Bohannon said, flipping a turn signal. "So the version we have in the morgue is probably the wife he knows."

"Exactly. It seems likely all of the dead bodies are the originals and the ones who are running around out there are copies. We should probably continue down the list of pa.s.sengers to see if we can confirm that somehow," Suter said. "Again a quarter of them aren't even from the Portland area. If we need to, we can make discrete arrangements to have the out-of-towners interviewed, but I'd rather not involve more people in the investigation. The more people involved, the more complicated this will get."

"You are not going to keep the news of a building-scaling woman or an egg-laying, acid-spitting man quiet for long," Bohannon said. "And worse, imagine what happens to us if they ever get connected to their cadaver clones back in the hangar."

"It's not going to be as hard as you think. We know how these people are connected-the flight that crashed last week. That's a pretty tenuous connection, and who's going to connect Newsome's physical abnormalities to being a pa.s.senger on a certain flight on a certain day?"

"You're just going to let these clones, or whatever they are, run around doing G.o.d-knows-what, content that no one will connect them to your crash investigation?"

"Of course not. First, not all of the pa.s.sengers appear strange. Second, my point was, we can keep the investigation quiet even if some of the pa.s.sengers draw attention to themselves. It is unlikely anyone will connect them to the flight. That will give us the most lat.i.tude to find out what is going on."

"How do you know some of the pa.s.sengers aren't strange?"

"Pirelli let me borrow a vehicle the other night, and I checked a couple out on my own. Just a little surveillance. I didn't talk to them. I don't think all of them are as off-the-wall as the ones we've met. I could be wrong, but I suspect that is the case, or we would probably be seeing some of them on the news."

"I don't think keeping this under wraps is the way to go," he said.

"Okay, let's call a press conference tomorrow. What are you going to say that isn't going to land you in a psychiatric ward? We've got cadavers and clones? A mind reader, a gravity-defying housewife and one dude a-layin'? That's your plan?"

"I don't know."

"Look, our job is to work the case. Holding press conferences is not our call anyway. Move on."

"Okay. Okay. I'm moving on." Bohannon pulled into a sandwich shop. "First off, I would not a.s.sume the one body we don't have washed away in the river." After parking, he turned off the car and did not move to get out.

"Why is that?"

"Because if someone caused this to happen and they were on the flight, wouldn't they make sure they were not affected? Thus your missing body. Might have swept away in the current, but I don't think we should a.s.sume it, especially in light of recent events."

"Possible. So we figure out who is missing from the morgue and go talk to him."

"Her," Bohannon corrected. "The missing body belongs to someone named Mara Lantern."

CHAPTER 19.

MARA GROANED AND smacked the uncooperative roller drum of Mrs. Dalton's ditto printer with a purple-stained palm. It slipped cleanly into its brackets and rotated freely a few degrees, then stopped. She grabbed the crank, and it turned easily.

"Yes!" She pumped a fist into the air, grabbed a rag hanging on a hook behind the wooden counter and wiped her hands. She rummaged around in the shelves below the counter and found the supplies Mrs. Dalton had left behind. Setting them on the edge of the counter next to the printer, she opened the stationery box and removed one of the spirit master sheets. She grabbed a pen, drew a smiley face on the blank master and tore away the purple-inked backing. Flipping over the white master, she held up a reversed image of her drawing.

She turned the crank handle until she saw the lip, lifted it with a fingernail to slip the edge of the master sheet underneath and rolled the drum until the sheet wrapped all the way around. Grabbing the bottle of duplicator fluid, she opened the lid and was about to lift it to her nose when a powerful astringent aroma wafted up. She jerked her hand back, decided against a sniff. She poured the liquid into the printer's reservoir.

The bell over the shop's front door jingled.

Ping walked in, wearing a white ap.r.o.n over matching pants and a T-s.h.i.+rt. He looked like a Chinese Pillsbury Doughboy.

"Good afternoon, Mara." He smiled and waved a chef's hat that, judging from the unruly strands of gray and black hair sticking up around his bald crown, he had just removed.

"Hi, Mr. Ping. Problem with the power again?"