“So somebody could have come in here the night before the crash, taken some tools out of your cabinet, and done something to an engine?”

Simpson gazed into the middle distance for a moment before answering. “Yessir, I guess somebody could have done that. But there isn’t no one on this island who would want to do that to Chester.”

“How about to his passengers?”

“I can’t speak for the white lady, but I knew the black one well, and everybody liked her. Anyway, if somebody wanted to kill her, he wouldn’t kill Chester doing it.”

“Is there anybody on guard out here at night?”

Simpson shook his head. “Nope. There’s a couple of people in the airport office, through there,” he said, pointing at a door that led from the main part of the hangar to the offices, “but they wouldn’t be out here at night. The runway lights are pilot-operated, you see. The approaching pilot just tunes in the local frequency and clicks his mike three times, and the lights come on.”

“I see,” Stone said.

“Mister, this is not the first time I’ve thought about this,” Simpson said. “I been over it in my mind a few times. I thought about how it was the morning of the crash, and everything was just like I left it.”

“Did Chester make it a habit of doing a runup before takeoff?”

“Well, he made it a habit sometimes, and other times he didn’t,” Simpson said. “If you know what I mean. Chester been flying that Cessna a long time; he didn’t have much use for checklists no more.”

He didn’t have much use for runups, either, Stone thought. A runup might have saved his life and those of his passengers.

“Chester was a good pilot, though,” Simpson said. “A natural-born pilot.”

“Right,” Stone said. Chester had been a cowboy; Stone had flown with him in the right seat when he had come to St. Marks, and the man was strictly a seat-of-the-pants pilot—no checklists. Stone walked over to the tool cabinet and looked at the array of tools inside; then he saw something familiar on the cabinet door. He touched it lightly. Fingerprint powder; he had seen enough of it in his time. “The police have been here?” he asked.

“Sure have; looked at everything, asked a lot of questions, took my fingerprints.”

Stone nodded. “Well, Harvey, thanks for your time.” He shook the man’s oily hand and walked back to the car thinking, I’ll never fly an airplane off a runway without doing a runup first. Not as long as I live.

He got into the car and headed back to English Harbour. He didn’t want to think about Allison right now; he tried thinking about Arrington instead and found that he missed her. He still hadn’t rewritten his letter to her; he would do it before the day was out.

Chapter
43