Page 104 of Identity Unknown

My eyes are watering and itching from the dust. Daku walks us through a storage area, past a bathroom that Marino decides to use. He takes off his PPE, and I do the same.

“To leave you go through the door right there.” Daku shows me. “Walk through the hangar, and you’ll be outside a couple streets away from where you’re parked. You’ll have to walk a little way. But not too bad.”

“Who does your crop dusting?” I ask him.

“This really amazing scientist from Poland who’s also a pilot. Zofia Puda,” he says, and there’s no question that Carrie was here.

“What type of aircraft does she fly?” I ask as if it’s no great matter.

“The Cessna that’s in the hangar. But she’s in the process of switching over to the chopper in there.”

“Where is she now?” I ask to hear what he says.

“She doesn’t work every day,” he replies. “I’ve not seen her in a few days.”

“Thank you very much,” I tell him. “You’ve been very helpful.”

He disappears through the office, returning to the first building where we met him, I presume. I text Benton the latest update as I hear the toilet flush inside the bathroom. Water runs in the sink, paper towels yanked out of the dispenser. Marino emerges, his eyes everywhere as I tell him about Zofia Puda a.k.a. Carrie. She held Sal hostage here all night long, pumping him full of drugs to keep him sedated.

“Probably nobody here has a clue who Zofia Puda really is,” Marino says. “I wonder if the Brileys even know her real name.”

“I’m sure not. This way.” I head to the door that Daku pointed out to me.

CHAPTER 37

The instant Marino and I walk inside the hangar we’re hit by the sharply pungent odor of white vinegar. Dozens of big white plastic drums of it are on pallets against a wall.

… A pungent odor… Sort of vinegary,I remember Lucy describing what she smelled around Sal’s body at the scene.

I notice the single-engine Cessna plane Daku mentioned, and I suspect Carrie used it often to get around. Perhaps she’d fly it to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport when she had meetings with the Brileys or other business in that area. Marino and I walk past a windowless white cargo van with a folded ladder on top. It looks like the van I saw on Sal’s driveway and also inside my vehicle bay.

The van fits the description of the one Dorothy believed was following her. There are no license plates, front or back. Nearby is a ground power unit (GPU) cart that’s plugged into a weirdly configured single-engine Eurocopter Carrie was just starting to use for crop dusting. The four doors have been taken off and are stored in a rack.

The helicopter’s skin has a chameleon paint job that changes colors as we move closer. The point may be aesthetic,but the pigments reflecting light differently would interfere with radar. Bolted to the undercarriage is a metal spray system rig, and there are others on the floor near a workbench.

Stainless steel booms, some ten feet long, are equipped with multiple spray nozzles, and attached to either side of the helicopter’s chassis. I envision Sal’s contused upper leg. I remember the periodicity of the pattern, the four abrasions exactly the same distance apart. I dig a tape measure out of my briefcase, and the space between the nozzles is the same as the abrasions.

I look through the openings where the doors should be, and on the cyclic is the spray rig’s trigger. I wonder if Carrie accidentally hit it while struggling to push Sal’s body out of the left seat. Perhaps in the process she doused the scene with the vinegar solution. Or maybe when he struck the boom on his way down, that somehow released an acidic-stinking shower. Either scenario might explain why the odor was strong when Lucy and Tron first arrived at the Oz theme park.

Harnesses are fastened on top of the seats in front and back. That’s the proper way to crew an aircraft, and I remember the fastened seat belts inside Sal’s crashed Chevy pickup. It would be habit for Carrie to leave them like that, and I suppose that could be the reason. Or more likely, she didn’t want the seat belt alarm chiming while she drove Sal to an awaiting vehicle before sending his empty truck off the mountain.

I wander closer to the fifty-five-gallon drums of vinegar that would be diluted with water and pumped into the white plastic tank attached to the helicopter’s belly. As Marino and I continue searching and taking pictures, I’m glancing around for cameras, wondering when someone’s going to interfere withour snooping. Digging out gloves from my briefcase, I hand a pair to Marino and we pull them on.

We walk over to the workbench, where he roots through a pile of magnetic signs, one of them forBUGOFF, another forFIRSTFAMILYFLORISTS. There are shop cloths, tubs of grease remover, and a mechanic’s trolley case with drawers of aviation tools. I notice a box of transparent plastic food service mitts typically used in restaurants and delis, and they strike me as strange in this context.

I pull out one of the mitts, and it’s like a sandwich baggie, only mitten shaped. They make sense when preparing food but also would be a convenient way to safely handle certain materials and substances such as vinegar that can be caustic on the skin. Designed for one-time use, the mitts are inexpensive, two thousand to a box. Another benefit depending on who we’re talking about is the wearer won’t leave fingerprints, possibly not DNA either.

I think of the odd impressions lifted from the glass of Sal’s pickup truck. I envision Carrie’s left hand, the two missing fingertips, the scars on her finger pads and a thumb. Gloves wouldn’t fit her the way they once did, I’m explaining to Marino as I take more pictures with my phone. He’s looking through a stack of Virginia license tags that he guesses are stolen.

I look on as he riffles through a pile of aviation and agriculture magazines. They’re mixed in with other mail on top of the workbench. Picking up a manila envelope, he reads the address label.

“Zofia Puda,” he says, showing me the printed label:

Zofia Puda, Sabo Solutions, Aviation Unit Chief…

“Sabo Solutions hired her as their crop-dusting pilot, having no idea who they were tangling with,” I explain.

“Meanwhile, she’s stealing all their tech secrets, who knows what the hell else. And she targeted Sal Giordano,” Marino says. “Maybe she was out here when he showed up to do his fake moon dust research at some point.”

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