Free Passenger 13 by Scott Mariani Page B

that there shouldn’t have been.
    So much for R&R, he thought to himself. Something had got torn in there, but the stitches seemed to have held. He patted himself dry, dabbed antiseptic cream on the wound and put on a fresh dressing that he covered with a clean black shirt.
    By eight-thirty, the sun was already hot and he was back in the car, cutting northwards up the Seven Mile Beach road towards CIC. He walked into Nick’s old office without knocking and found Tamara sitting alone at the desk.
    ‘You’re up early,’ she said.
    ‘I’m up late. And you can forget about Julius T. Brigman.’ He sat on the edge of the desk and told her what he’d found out.
    Tamara leaned back in her chair and pursed her lips. ‘It seemed to make such sense. Who sent those guys to beat you up?’
    ‘Someone else,’ Ben said.
    ‘Where do we go from here?’
    ‘Somewhere else,’ Ben said.
    ‘Will a cup of coffee make you more communicative?’
    Ben shook his head. Gently so as not to yank his stitches any more, he reached into his back pocket for his whisky flask.
    Tamara wrinkled her nose. ‘Isn’t it a little early in the morning for that?’
    ‘Hair of the dog that bit me,’ Ben said.
    ‘You’ll wind up like Brigman.’
    He ignored her, unscrewed the little chrome cap and knocked back a slug.
    ‘I was awake all night thinking,’ she said. ‘Maybe the Brigman connection was too obvious. I had another idea. What if there was some fault with the aircraft and the manufacturers tried to cover it up to save themselves a bunch of lawsuits? Someone with a history of depression would be an easy target to pin it on.’
    Ben screwed the cap back on his flask and shook his head. ‘They’d pin it on CIC maintenance personnel, neglectful servicing. And I don’t think they’d be running around murdering their scapegoat’s relatives. A lot easier just to call their insurers.’
    ‘Then what?’
    ‘Something else,’ he said. He slid off the edge of the desk and started pacing up and down the office.
    ‘Does it really help you to pace like a caged tiger?’ Tamara asked him irritably.
    A caged tiger was exactly what Ben felt like, but Tamara was right – pacing wasn’t going to help. He stopped, looking around him for inspiration. His gaze locked on to the Escher print on the wall over the desk.
    The angels, then the demons. It was impossible to see them both at the same time. When you focused away from one, the other came into view, creating a whole paradigm shift, an altered reality.
    Sometimes it wasn’t what was there – it was how you looked at it. You just needed to look with different eyes.
    ‘We’re approaching this thing from the wrong angle,’ Ben murmured after a long pause.
    ‘Tell me what you mean,’ Tamara said. ‘And don’t say “another angle”.’
    ‘You have the passenger list on file?’ he asked.
    She tapped the screen in front of her.
    ‘Let me take a look,’ he said. ‘And maybe I will have that coffee after all.’
    Ben spent the next half hour studying the computer with such intensity that, watching over his shoulder, Tamara thought he might melt the screen. With the CIC files in one window and running web searches in another, he systematically checked each of the twelve passengers’ names against local and international news reports, as well as whatever else he could dredge up from the internet.
    He started with the four British nationals on the crash flight. Their profiles quickly came together. Colin and Sandra Hartnoll and their son Jamie had been on holiday from their home in Leeds: Colin Hartnoll had taught geography at a sixth-form college, Sandra had been a legal secretary, and Jamie had been taking a year off before University. The fourth Brit was Gordon Love, a retired private dentist who’d emigrated to Little Cayman some years earlier and had been travelling to London to visit his daughter, Helen, and her husband, Clive.
    Then there were the De Groots, a family of four from