The Buzzard Table - By Margaret Maron Page 0,86

the exit. Opposite this waiting area was an unlit, vacant gate where no one was seated. “Let’s move to where we can talk,” he said.

“If you wish.” Crawford closed his laptop, slid it into a side pocket of his carry-on, and followed them over.

“Why the hurry to leave the country?” Dwight asked him.

“Hurry? No hurry.” Crawford sat down and looked up at Dwight calmly. “I booked this flight Friday morning.”

Dwight and Sigrid took seats across from him and Dwight said, “After killing Frank Alexander the night before? You didn’t waste any time.”

“Frank Alexander? Was that his name?”

“Or did you know him as Alexander Franklin?”

“I repeat: are you here to arrest me?”

Dwight glanced at Sigrid. Her neutral look told him nothing.

“Shall I assume then that you haven’t told the FBI about me?”

Dwight gave an impatient wave of his hand. “All I want to know is what was in that file the Harper boy copied.”

Crawford made a show of looking at his watch. “They’ll be calling my flight soon. Will I be on it?”

“Yes,” Sigrid said, even though she and Dwight had not discussed this.

Her cousin lifted an eyebrow. “Thank you.”

He turned back to Dwight. “I believe there’s enough time to tell you a story. Let’s say there were once two little boys who met in Egypt. One was from Islamabad, the other from London. Both were lonely and both liked to watch birds. They bonded over a wounded Egyptian vulture that they nursed back to health. They met again at Cambridge and took rooms together. After leaving university, they were recruited by an agency that thought their language skills would be useful. They were still young and idealistic and they believed they could help make the world a better, safer place even if, as time went on, they were repelled by some of the things that agency occasionally condoned.”

Across the way, a flight clerk had arrived at the departure desk and the passengers there were gathering up their belongings, stashing them in their carry-on bags, and starting to move restlessly.

“Fast forward to last spring,” Crawford said. “One of them was anxious to get home to his wife and teenage son, so he hitched a ride on an unscheduled flight even though he’d heard rumors about the copilot’s sadistic practices on powerless…shall we call them passengers?”

“Passengers or prisoners?” Dwight asked.

Crawford ignored his question.

“Both the passenger and the hitchhiker died on that flight, but it was hushed up and the copilot reassigned. When the hitchhiker’s friend tried to learn what had happened, he wound up in front of a bus and was left for dead.”

“Was that hitchhiker the other ‘Arab’ in Somalia?” Sigrid said.

Her cousin nodded and stood up as the departure clerk announced that the six o’clock flight to London was now boarding.

“So that’s why you killed Alexander Franklin,” said Dwight as he and Sigrid stood, too.

Martin Crawford gave an ironic smile. “When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. Isn’t that what they say?”

Sigrid was not a demonstrative person, but she put her hand on Crawford’s arm. “Thank you for what you did back then, Martin. For saving my mother’s life.”

He covered her hand with his. “My dear, how could we not?”

As he headed toward the queue now passing through the boarding gate, he turned and said, “Bryant? Do me a favor? Ask your wife’s nephew to sling an occasional squirrel or rabbit onto my vulture table for me?”

Dwight gave him an affirmative salute.

“Oh, and my aunt has something for you.”

The drive back to Dobbs took the full fifty-five minutes. Except for leaving Deborah a message that he would be late getting home and could she pick up Cal, neither Dwight nor Sigrid had much to say and they rode mostly in silence.

“Will Deborah understand why you didn’t call the feds or try to stop him?” she asked as they neared the courthouse where her car was parked.

“I don’t know,” he answered candidly. “But it wasn’t too long ago in this county when a valid defense for some murders was that the victim needed killing.”

He checked by his office, then followed Sigrid back to Cotton Grove in his own truck.

The iron gates had been left open and Anne met them at the door.

“Mother’s asleep,” she said, “but Martin gave her this as he was leaving and said it was for you.”

“This” was a plastic flash drive.

“Let me get my laptop,” Sigrid said.

Minutes later, they were looking at a slide show of turkey buzzards in flight above