17

KNOLL LOWERS THE MONITOR. “Now what?” His voice is low and grave. He knows what the match really means. “There are a dozen other serial numbers we can look for. Do we just keep at it and take the whole plane apart out there?”

There’s got to be a better way. Serial numbers can be faked.

It’s not a Flight 19 plane we should be matching.

The pilot. He’s the key.

I remember the girl in the cemetery. Her hands had been stripped raw of flesh so we couldn’t fingerprint her.

On the monitor, the pilot’s hands look intact.

I get an idea and turn to the naval officer we spoke with earlier. “Lieutenant Droves, does the Navy still have the fingerprint files of the pilots?”

“We had them digitized a few hours ago and e-mailed to the FBI prints division,” he replies.

I turn to Knoll. “We need a print off the pilot. If it doesn’t match, then we know the Warlock is going to want to cover his tracks. Maybe have the body rigged so that when we remove it the whole thing will explode.”

Knoll shakes his head. “Blackwood, the robot can’t take a print. And if we use it to pull the body out, we’re still going to have to deal with things possibly exploding.” He looks at all the bystanders. “This is not a contained environment.”

I’ve already thought this through. I don’t know how else to say it, so I just lay it out there. “We just need the robot to cut off a thumb.”

Everyone standing around Knoll gives me a strange look. The thing about being an attractive female is that if you say something morbid, people get this look like they’ve finally figured you out. A little bulb in their head lights up and they go, “Of course, she’s crazy.”

Knoll doesn’t look at me like I’m crazy, surprising me. He gets it. He turns to the lieutenant, as if he needs to ask permission from the Navy.

The lieutenant nods his head. “I think we’re better off cutting a thumb off a dead man than putting everyone in harm’s way.”

“All right. Let me clear it with upstairs.” Knoll makes a call on his phone. While he’s waiting for a reply he asks the lieutenant another question. “How would the Navy handle this?”

“The easy way. We’d blow it up ourselves and go look at the pieces the seagulls didn’t get. Of course, we usually have the advantage of knowing who the bad guys are.”

Knoll puts away his phone and picks up the radio. “Hey, robot boy, let me ask you a question. Are you the squeamish type?”

TWENTY MINUTES LATER the robot drives to the edge of the sandbar, away from viewers on the beach, and drops something into a bag held by a bomb tech waiting on a boat. He places it into an evidence bag, then into a toolbox, and brings it back from the sandbar. The thumb is rushed to a mobile forensic lab before the media have any idea of what a grisly thing we’ve just done.