‘Pretty much. ’Cept for the body, y’know.’

Tom and Suarez nodded almost unconsciously in sympathy.

Finally Tom moved to the pad.

‘Those them?’ Suarez said and Tom grunted back in the affirmative.

He leaned close to the pad as if clues might be written on the forms. Each one had space for a serial number in the top right-hand corner. Each one would eventually be stamped with the number of an approved WAE part as it rolled out of Quality Control.

Or not.

Not if it was stolen first. Then it could be matched to anything. Any cheap, low-grade Tonka-toy part from anywhere in the world.

And here was the beautiful thing: the paperwork was all that made that piece-of-shit part worth top dollar. Once the parts were papered, airline companies trusted that they had been manufactured to the highest standard. So a fan disc manufactured for a hundred and fifty dollars in a Shanghai sweatshop or a Rio slum would fetch three and a half thousand from Boeing or Airbus, on what was supposed to be one of the most tightly controlled and safest markets on the planet.

The part would look the same. It would feel the same. An experienced engineer would receive it from a reputable source and check the paperwork. Then he would place the fake part into the bowels of a passenger-jet engine and put a flag on the computer that it should be inspected every thousand cycles, replaced after twenty thousand.

And it would fail at twelve.

‘You okay?’

Tom looked up to see Suarez eyeing him intently, and realized he was shaking. He sat down in Annette Lim’s chair. ‘Yeah. Fuck.’

The serial numbers on Annette Lim’s pad did not include 501. But those forms would have been taken from another pad two, three, maybe four years earlier. There was no doubt now in his mind that the paperwork on the flawed fan discs had come from WAE; no doubt that it had been stolen.

‘That what you were looking for?’

Tom nodded mutely. He didn’t trust himself to explain the pictures that now crowded into his head.

Pictures of rudder servos jamming, relays sticking, flaps ripping loose.

Pictures of planes splitting open in the skies and bodies showering to Earth like bloody confetti.

‘You okay, man?’ Suarez repeated.

‘I get you some water or something?’ Nicholas Nicholas was staring at him too, plainly concerned.

‘Yeah,’ said Tom, dully. ‘I need a drink.’

*

Tom drank to get drunk. Suarez listened to his fears while he watched over him, like a hen over a day-old chick, then drove him from the bar to a motel near the airport.

The detective insisted on coming to the room with him and was surprisingly tender in making him drink about a gallon of water before helping him into bed.

When Tom woke around four, desperate for a piss, he found Suarez snoring loudly while wedged bolt upright in the only easy chair in the room.

Even Suarez was a goddamned wife, thought Tom. But sometimes that was nice.

He shook the big man awake. ‘Hey, Suarez. I’m okay. I’m not gonna drown in my own sick. Go home, man.’

Suarez got up, half asleep, and stumbled to the door.

‘Don’t forget to fingerprint the ARC pads,’ Tom reminded him.

‘I’ll give you a call,’ mumbled Suarez. ‘We’ll work it out.’

‘Yeah,’ said Tom. ‘We’ll work it out.’

Tom was still a little drunk, but even that wasn’t enough to let him imagine in his wildest dreams just how he, the goofy Halo Jackson and the corpulent Ronaldo Suarez were going to work out this fucking mess.

*

Tom couldn’t get back to sleep. Because it was a Motel 6, he thought of Lucia, which made him feel guilty.

Ah, screw her, he told himself.

Then he remembered her sister was dead and he felt guiltier.

He sighed and checked his watch.

04:22.

He should call Ness, let her know where he was, that he couldn’t get a plane out until tomorrow, make sure she was okay.

But he didn’t.

He checked his watch again.

04:29. This was pointless.

He got up, walked to the airport, and paid a fine for leaving his rental car outside Irving police headquarters. Because he felt like shit, he bought five Dunkin Donuts in an attempt to soak up the booze, then settled down in an orange plastic chair where the angles were deliberately wrong to deter sleepers.

Even so, he was dozing again when his new phone rang and Pete LaBello told him to go to Oklahoma where a pipeline had ruptured and killed some cows.

Tom could barely focus to scribble down a few details, then got up shakily and traded in what was left of his LA ticket for one to Tulsa.

While he waited for the over-bright girl behind the counter to rearrange his flights, Tom surreptitiously sniffed his armpit and sighed at the thought of getting straight onto a job without even a brief stopover at home. No fresh underwear for him.

What a goddamn life.

30

DEAD COWS DIDN’T sound like much over the phone but the reality took Tom’s breath away. Literally. He covered his mouth and nose and glanced at Everard Goby, the farmer and owner of the cows.

Goby nodded sadly. ‘I’m used to it now,’ he said quietly.

There must have been five hundred.