Doug and the others fed all the information back to the team to try and figure out if someone was wandering close to or with the crew to get the information fed back quickly. Scanning the thousands of hours of footage from security cameras would be a nightmare. If they could narrow down facial recognition, it might help.
“Wait, you’re saying that this would all move faster if you had photos of the employees of Coastal Air?” asked April.
“That’s exactly what we’re saying. Especially flight crews but we’re not ruling out maintenance and support staff as well,” said AJ. “If I had the photos, the scans of security footage would focus on their faces and then allow me to see if there is someone common in all the footage.”
“I can get you those,” she smiled.
“You can? Even being terminated from the company?” asked Quinn. She smiled, nodding at them.
“Yes. I’m a stickler for remembering faces and names, so every time I met someone I would ask to snap a picture of them, then put a photo of them in my phone contacts next to their name and number. Some of them would already have photos that were contacts via social media sites.”
“Smart girl,” smirked AJ.
“Wait. Damn,” she muttered. “My phone is lost. I don’t know where it is.”
“That’s the easy part of all of this,” said Hiro. “I can download your contacts from the cloud and whatever attachments you had in your address book.”
“Oh, wow,” said April. “Well, if you can do that you’ll see that I have their faces attached to their contact card.”
“Honey, you’re a genius,” smiled AJ. “While I work on this, you guys can start looking for similarities in flights, flight crews, patterns, that type of thing.”
“We’re already doing that,” said Charlotte. “I’ve taken the list of employees, pilots, flight crew, cabin crew, even mechanics and created a spreadsheet that’s working an algorithm to see if there were any commonalities.”
“Anything so far?” asked Quinn. Charlotte looked at him, then at April.
“Sorry, honey but the only thing so far is there were a lot of flights with April and Jerry together. But there must have been a reason for that,” said Charlotte.
“Obviously they were using me for something other than my language skills,” frowned April. “I guess I was the naïve, stupid woman that didn’t see anything wrong with what we were doing.”
“April, don’t be so hard on yourself,” said Ham. “You were a focused, dedicated flight attendant who was paying attention to her customers, nothing else. That’s what you were supposed to be doing. You couldn’t have known about the bags.”
“I know that. I agree with that. I would never have known that something was different in the bags. But why did Jerry swap bags with me in the first place? Did he know that the bag was about to break and didn’t want to fool with it, did he break it intentionally, or was there something else he was doing?”
“We’ll figure that out but there are a millions possible scenarios,” said Gator. April raised her brow waiting for a further explanation. “I mean, maybe he was throwing suspicion off himself. Maybe he did do something to the wheel to make it break and force you to hide it.”
“But he couldn’t possibly have known when or where that wheel would break. And how do we know whether or not the other case didn’t have something in it they wanted. More importantly, where is my bag? It didn’t have much in it but I’d be curious to know if it was tampered with as well.”
“I don’t know, honey,” said Gator shaking his head. “Part of our challenge is that you all had the same suitcases. Even what was carried inside was similar. You packed uniforms with maybe one civilian outfit and pajamas but that was it. It’s possible that someone was duplicating what you were carrying.”
“You know, something is bothering me about the broken wheel,” said April. “A good quality, standard suitcase is fitted with wheels that are similar to those used on rollerblades or skateboards. They’re very durable but of course the bearing can break or the wheel itself can crack over time.
“But the bags that flight crews use are designed to really take punishment. We often drag our bags across miles of pavement, cobblestone, tile and carpet and so much more. For that wheel to have broken, someone must have tampered with it.”
“Where’s the bag now?” asked Ham.
“Victoria had it last. She found the fibers and started removing a few to examine them further. I think that’s about as far as she got,” said Gator. They’d no sooner spoken when Victoria and Hayes walked in, carrying the bag with Beast following them.
Beast was one of the many animals on the property, this one a massive dog skilled in drug, weapon, and cadaver detection.
“Shit, don’t tell me you’ve found drugs,” said Gator.
“No, but Beast definitely found something. At first we were confused,” said Hayes. “There’s no trace of drugs, we tested the lining and outer layer. But there were traces of two other things and we had to dig for it.”
“Please don’t keep me waiting,” said Ham exhaustively.
“Cadaver parts and missile parts.”
“Say again?” frowned Quinn.
