smatterings of despair. Loudest of all was a simple consideration: What if they were chasing this guy around the world just to give him the time he needed to flee somewhere else? A perpetual game of cat and mouse where the mouse was always three steps ahead.
Bodies would fall, agents would follow, and the killer would escape.
They couldn’t keep doing this. They needed something—a lead, an idea, a clue, something to narrow the gap.
Adele could feel a bit of sweat now forming on her forehead and she opened an eye, glaring angrily up at the malfunctioning air nozzle. She sighed as discomfort settled complete. She stretched, reaching up and twisting at the nozzle a few more times—but no air, no luck.
Adele’s eyes lowered and she glanced across the aisle, perhaps in search of something to envy—some passenger comfortable beneath a stream of air watching their working TV.
Instead, though, her eyes skimmed over a couple of sleeping passengers and a large man who took up two seats, and landed on a small girl.
The girl was watching Adele, her nose scrunched in curiosity.
Adele smiled and mimed fanning her hand at her face and then sticking her tongue out and panting like a dog.
The young girl giggled, but then returned her attention to the item in her hand. Adele went still all of a sudden, her silly expression fading. The young girl had a small Carambar beneath her fingers. She was rolling it along the table, half-unwrapped.
When she noticed Adele staring, the child extended the candy, offering it across the aisle.
Adele shook her head and exchanged a small smile in return. She turned away from the young girl now, troubled, her mind spinning again. Carambars. The only lead she had in her mother’s case. A memory in a memory buried in a coffin of memories.
She swallowed and winced, trying to focus. Derailing now wouldn’t help anything. Try as she might, though, Adele couldn’t focus. Like watching a projector playing bits and pieces of one movie, then switching to another, then back.
She opened her eyes again, glancing toward the little girl. She was sucking on a straw, a small box of juice pressed and crushed beneath her small hand. The girl no longer seemed to notice Adele’s attention. But Adele, for her part, stared at the juice box.
Her mouth went dry. The heat from the failed nozzle above had also caused her to be parched.
Wine…
Why wine?
She stared as a small little red splotch appeared on the corner of the young girl’s lip. She reached up, wiping it away, then with a sucking sound suggesting she’d emptied her juice box, she pushed against her sleeping father’s form next to her, whispering for another.
Wine. Red wine.
That’s what the amateur had the ingredients to make. Some sort of red wine… The sommelier had served something to the killer… a single glass—only carrying the girl’s prints though. But the glass… it had red wine in it. Just a bit, only a small amount remaining, but wine all the same. Again, red.
Why wine?
Adele fished her phone from her pocket, frowning. She cycled to her settings, connected to the airplane’s Wi-Fi, then, desperately, focused, she scanned to the file John had sent her the day before. Her eyes flicked down the device, searching…
***
John jerked up, blinking and wincing against the buzzing light emanating from the seat next to him.
“Adele?” he grunted.
She looked up, her face haggard, but her eyes wide with excitement. Her phone was bright and luminescent against a backdrop of a mostly quiet plane now. The lights had been dimmed and even most the personal TVs were off.
John grunted. “What are you doing?”
She waved her phone at him, nodding to herself, then, as if wanting to include him in the joy of the gesture, nodding to him as well. “I found it,” she murmured. “I found it.”
John raised an eyebrow, turning fully now to face her. He reached up and rubbed at the side of his forehead, feeling the ridge lines where his skin had indented from pressing into the plastic window. Ahead, the chair had leaned back, scrunching his long legs. He wished he’d insisted on the aisle seat. But also, he got sick on planes and windows helped. He hated flying, though he’d be damned if he ever let Adele find out. He’d never hear the end of it.
“Do you know what type of grapes the German farmer cultivated?” she said, maintaining somewhat of an effort to keep her voice down.
Judging by a couple of nasty