Following my afternoon meeting with Len Brimer, I went back to the Major Case squad room. Parked in my cubicle, I was drinking a Diet Mountain Dew and polishing off the last crumbs of a Cronut when I received an email from the hotel with the additional footage I had requested.
With the new whistle-blower angle Brimer had told me about still fresh in my mind, I wanted to take a closer look at the other two guys who’d been in the bathroom with our mysterious John Doe.
I watched the video over and over again. John Doe goes in, followed by a big blond dude and a shorter guy with dark hair. The short guy waits in the hall. As I looked more carefully, I noticed the short guy in the hall checked his watch twice before going in. I also noticed the way he was standing in the hall, head slowly swiveling back and forth like a guard or a sentry. As if maybe he knew that his big buddy was dealing with John Doe and was making sure no one intervened.
After John Doe came out, the expression on his face might not have been embarrassment at throwing up, but panic after barely fighting off two attackers. The two guys who came out about a minute after him didn’t look too beat-up, I saw, as I let the tape run on. But the quick, determined way they split, the short one going to the front desk and elevator bank as the other bigger guy headed up the back stairwell following John Doe, was definitely of note.
About seven minutes later, the big blond guy came back out of the rear stairwell, met up with the short guy, and then they left.
I thought about that. Two men go into the back stairwell that leads to the roof and only one leaves seven minutes later? I couldn’t say for sure if the blond guy had thrown our John Doe off the roof, but I couldn’t rule it out.
I was still sitting there letting these new concerns sink in when my desk phone rang with a muffled chirp.
“Mike, I don’t know how you jumped the line,” Medical Examiner Dr. Linder said in my ear. “But in my hand, I hold the hot-off-the-press report from our latent lab. Today’s your lucky day, Mike. You have a hit on your mystery man jumper.”
“Tell me this isn’t a practical joke. What’s his name?”
“One Stephen Eardley,” she said. “It says here, he’s in the Air Force. His prints actually came from the FBI database off his 2001 Armed Forces application. I’ll email the whole report to you just as soon as I’m done scanning it.”
“You’re the best. I owe you, Clarissa. Talk to you later,” I said, already bringing up a search engine to find Stephen Eardley.
As soon as I hit Enter, my jaw fell open. I collapsed back into my office chair in wide-eyed wonder as the search results continued.
I didn’t think this case could get any stranger, but it had.
I clicked the first link and read a news article from the Ogden, Utah, Standard-Examiner dated May 20, 2007.
The small town of Liberty in northwestern Ogden Valley is in mourning today as a native son, Air Force pilot Stephen Eardley, was put to rest at the Liberty Cemetery. Eardley, who played football and baseball at Weber High in Pleasant View, was killed in action on Friday, May 3, 2007, when his C-130 aircraft crashed thirty-six minutes after takeoff from Balad Air Base in northern Iraq.
An on-board flight fire that was speculated to have been caused by an electrical short circuit forced Eardley to attempt a crash landing. The pilot was trying to lose altitude quickly in a maneuver known as a side slip when the plane went out of control, inverted, and crashed in the desert. Eardley, a five-year veteran pilot attached to the elite Air Force Special Operations Command, was thirty-two years old.
Killed in action! I thought, as I sat there grabbing the sides of my head. How? How the heck could that be?
How could Eardley be killed in action in a plane crash in the Iraq desert in 2007, and then end up dead again in Midtown Manhattan?