I was starting to gather my stuff so I could go home when Zari told me that she and RaeLynn were looking for the pilot.
“Haven’t we always been doing that?” I asked, continuing to move around the office, packing up and picking up. I put some notes I’d been jotting down in a ‘Work In Progress’ bin I had sitting on the shelves next to my desk.
“RaeLynn is getting me into several agencies that have lists of pilots. Right now I have not found one with easily accessible pictures, but we are sorting through men that fit the profile of this pilot and are cross referencing them by their driver’s licenses. I think we are getting closer.”
“That sounds like a lot of work,” I said, thinking of the numbers that could be involved. I wondered how many licensed pilots there were. Additionally they wouldn’t have to be located in Washington, so that made the search even broader. If at least half of the licensed pilots were men, which was a good guess, that likely didn’t narrow things down much. Zari was fast, but even with her speed this could take a long time.
“Are you saying I should stop packing and perhaps call in for dinner?” I asked. Zari readily agreed.
Sitting back down at my desk, I considered where I could call. Zari had had tuna last night but I was thinking sushi was my main choice. Pizza would have been easier, but since being attacked by a vampire after eating at Capriole’s, I’d not been very excited about going there, although Peter still enjoyed it. Zari A, would, of course, prefer the sushi.
I stuck my head in Kyle’s office, telling him what I was up to and what Zari was doing. “You want to add anything?” I asked.
He grinned at me. “I’m always up for sushi if you’re paying. Spicy tuna?”
I nodded. “Naturally.”
“Tiger Roll?”
“I’ll add it to the list.”
“Gyoza?”
“Do you think one order is enough?”
“Get two. RaeLynn and I both really like it and so do you,” Kyle said. Both RaeLynn and Kyle had been known to fight over the last dumpling on other occasions when I’d ordered in.
I went back to my office and called in the order. They knew it was me when I ordered a bit of the sashimi tuna without any rice. That was for Zari A. They told me they’d add in some tempura mushrooms at no charge. I thanked them and paid with a credit card, leaving a tip over the phone. I’d add in some cash when the delivery person got here. Given how much Zari enjoyed this treat, I wanted to be sure I kept the business happy.
“Do you suppose the pilot is a contractor or a standard employee?” Kyle asked standing in the door.
“Could be either I suppose, why?”
“Well, if RaeLynn downloaded the employee files from Langea, we could start by finding out who has a pilot’s license and rule them out first. We could cross reference other pilots against anyone employed by some sort of local aviation business that we can find. It seems like our best chances are if the pilot is local, don’t you think?”
“It seems like a way to narrow things down,” I agreed. I heard a murmur from Zari, which suggested she agreed, although she sounded rather distracted.
“I think Zari’s going to do it,” I said.
Kyle nodded, thinking. “How big is this company?” he asked.
“Not very. I was looking through their financials and what not and they’re pretty small. Why?”
“Well if they are that small, how are they masterminding this? It seems like a big cover up of some sort, where you have test pilots afraid of getting caught after crashing. There’s the potential government involvement as well. It doesn’t quite add up for me, if you know what I mean.”
“I keep getting the sense that this is a company designed to stay under the radar,” I said. “Almost as if they were a front.”
“And if they are, could the big things, like the pilot, be hired out to a larger company? Or even be paid through a larger company?”
“We might be able to find that out once we find the pilot. Zari has several of Dillon’s photos enhanced by Peter’s images, so even if the pilot image online is a poor match, she’ll get it.”
Kyle nodded, although he seemed hesitant about it.
“Langea paid our machinists.” I made a note on a pad of paper of things to research. I wanted to ask Kyle about his hesitation but wasn’t sure I wanted to add another worry or another way of searching to Zari’s list.
“Once,” Kyle said. For someone who wasn’t on this case, he was frighteningly astute. He had to have been working on this while he was at his desk. Well, he was Meg’s employee, not mine, so she would be the one to challenge him on what he was doing.
“So you think that might have been an oversight of some sort?”
“Maybe. Or maybe they did just use them once, but it might be worth looking into the types of jobs Taylor and Sons did in general. See if there’s anything that could suggest Langea used them before, but paid them from an account that went through a parent company. I’d concentrate on planes and stuff like that.”
“RaeLynn has notes that the police aren’t finding your lab tech. We can add him to our list of disappearances,” I said, looking at my stuff. The guy who had worked with Blayn G had been Kyle’s idea to check on. Now he was missing too.
Kyle nodded making a note to himself.
I made a few notes of my own. If Zari wanted to keep working later on into the evening I could be her hands. RaeLynn would need to go home and rest. Likely she would dig into some of these questions in a way I wasn’t able to after she went home to relax. She enjoyed her computer sleuthing way too much.