I walked over to the desk, picked up Claire’s worn, oil-stained maintenance binder, and pressed it against my chest. The rain outside was still falling, hard and continuous, but the engines of Flight 614 were cold, the bay doors were locked down under county seals, and the stolen ledger would never leave this runway.
CHAPTER 4: What The Cold Rain Left Behind
The fluorescent lights in the annex did not dim when the sun came up, but the glass turned from greasy black to the dull, curdled gray of an Illinois November dawn. By six-thirty, the rain had tapered into a cold, needle-thin mist that hung over the runway, blurring the strobe beacons of the ground trucks still stationed around the nose gear of Flight 614.
Frank arrived at a quarter to seven. He came through the annex security door with his beige trench coat unbuttoned, water dripping from the brim of an old wool cap, and two heavy leather briefcases banging against his shins. He did not ask me if I was all right. He took one look at my wrists—still banded with red, ridged imprints where the handcuffs had bitten—and then looked past me to the corner table where Officer Miller was cataloging the three safety-deposit lockboxes, the corporate share registries, and the foil-wrapped server drives under the watchful eye of an FAA field investigator who had driven through the night from Rockford.
"They're charging Julian with transport of stolen property across state lines, felony corporate fraud, and three counts of falsifying federal aviation records," Frank said, setting his briefcases flat on the bench beside me. He smelled of diner coffee and damp wool. "The Cook County state's attorney signed the warrant at five this morning. When the sheriff's deputies searched his townhouse on Lake Shore Drive an hour ago, they found the master keys to the corporate safe empty on his kitchen counter and his passport sitting next to a one-way ticket to Zurich routed out of Pearson International."
I didn't answer right away. I was watching Arnie through the partition glass. The line mechanic was still sitting at his console, holding a white paper cup between both palms, staring blankly at the flight-tracking monitors as the first commercial departures of the morning began to crawl across the radar screens.
"What happens at nine o'clock?" I asked.
"At nine o'clock, Judge Halloran sits down in probate court on the twelfth floor of the Daley Center," Frank said, pulling a yellow legal pad and two thick manila folders from his bag. "Julian’s firm filed an emergency petition forty-eight hours ago claiming Claire was non compos mentis when she restructured Meridian's voting shares last spring. They had three paid affidavits from junior accountants saying she had failed to attend quarterly board reviews and that the corporate assets were in danger of abandonment. Julian's lawyer was scheduled to stand up before Halloran, enter those affidavits, and walk out with an uncontested order granting Julian sole conservatorship of every hangar, every engine, and every patent in the Meridian inventory."
Frank tapped his fountain pen against the heavy blue leather binder Miller was currently photographing on the evidence table.
"Instead," Frank continued, his voice dropping into a flat, steady register, "I am going to walk into Halloran’s courtroom with Captain Reynolds's sworn incident log, the airport authority's chain-of-custody receipts, and the original corporate charter Claire locked inside that box yesterday morning before she checked into Saint Jude's. The petition will be dismissed with prejudice before ten. By noon, the chancery division will place Meridian under a court-supervised receiver, and Julian will be sitting in a holding cell at 26th and California waiting on a federal bail hearing that his high-priced counsel cannot win."
We left the airfield at seven-twenty. I drove my station wagon out through the security gate while the FAA tow team was still hooking the heavy tractor to the nose gear of the Gulfstream, dragging it slowly toward the impound hangar on the north perimeter. The red emergency tape fluttered along the passenger door handle where Julian Drake had tried to climb aboard six hours earlier.
The Cook County courthouse was already humming with the gray, wet misery of morning traffic by the time Frank and I reached Clark Street. In courtroom 1204, the mahogany benches were nearly empty. Julian’s lead attorney, a man named Sterling who wore a tailored chalk-stripe suit and carried an embossed leather portfolio, stood alone at the petitioner’s table. He looked around the room every three minutes, his phone buzzing repeatedly against the green baize table covering, waiting for a client who was currently being fingerprinted in the basement of the central police headquarters.
The hearing lasted eight minutes.
Judge Halloran did not raise her voice. She adjusted her reading glasses, listened while Sterling attempted to request an emergency forty-eight-hour continuance on the grounds of "unforeseen client unavailability," and then turned her gaze to Frank.