He Shoved Her Into a Luggage Cart — Then Found Out She Owned Half His Private Jet

Chapter 05 - The Lawyer and the Mechanic

Priya arrived at eleven with a legal pad already half filled and a laptop bag she set down like it weighed more than it should.

Dale Whitfield showed up ten minutes later, summoned by a text that said only "need you in the office, nothing urgent" and clearly hadn't believed a word of it.

He was mid-fifties, gray at the temples same as half the men in this business, hands permanently stained at the knuckles from thirty years of engine grease that never fully washed out.

"Somebody die?" he said, trying for a joke, failing at the delivery.

"Sit down, Dale," Marcus said.

He sat.

Kayla watched his hands as Marcus laid out the folder, page by page. That was the thing about mechanics, they told you everything with their hands before their mouths caught up. Dale's fingers went still on the table's edge the moment he saw the fourth page.

"That's my flag," he said. "I caught that discrepancy myself. Two years back."

"We know," Priya said. "We also know three more discrepancies came through under your digital audit login in the eighteen months after that."

Dale's face didn't change right away. That was almost worse than if it had.

"I didn't forge anything," he said finally.

"Nobody said forge," Kayla said. "We said the login."

Dale looked at the folder, then at Kayla, then somewhere past her shoulder at nothing in particular.

"You want the truth," he said, "or you want the version where I still have a job next week."

"The truth," Marcus said. "Every time."

Dale exhaled long and slow, the sound of a man setting down something heavy he'd been carrying alone.

"Two years ago somebody came to me with a stack of sign-offs already filled out," he said. "Told me it was faster this way for high-volume clients. Told me the real inspections still happened, just, on a different schedule. Told me if I didn't process them the way they wanted, they'd make sure my daughter's tuition assistance through the union got flagged for review."

The room went quiet.

"Who," Priya said. Gentle, but not soft.

"I don't know his name," Dale said. "He came through Halsted Aero. Never gave a full name. Called himself Ray."

"Description," Kayla said.

"Fifties. Wiry. Talked like a man who'd read a compliance manual once and decided that made him smarter than the FAA," Dale said. "I only met him twice in person. After that it was all through a dispatcher I never questioned because I should have."

Marcus leaned forward. "Why didn't you come to me."

"Because you'd have believed me," Dale said, voice cracking for the first time, "and then you'd have fired me anyway, because a man who signs off on things he didn't inspect doesn't get to keep doing this job, threat or no threat. I know that. I've always known that."

Kayla thought of her father, who would have walked into Marcus's office the same night it happened, tuition threat or not, and taken whatever came.

She also thought that not everyone had the luxury of being Walt Reyes's daughter, with a safety net under the safety net.

"We're not deciding your job today," Marcus said. "But you're going to write down everything you remember about Ray. Every detail. Every date."

"And then what," Dale said.

"Then we find him," Kayla said, "before he finds out we're looking."

Dale nodded, hands finally steady now that the worst part was out of him.

Priya was already writing, legal pad filling fast, the shape of a federal whistleblower complaint starting to take form under her pen even as Dale spoke.

Kayla stepped outside for air, into a hangar loud with the ordinary sounds of the business continuing around a fraud nobody outside this room knew about yet, fuel trucks idling, a radio somewhere playing static and country music.

She looked toward Grant's grounded jet, sitting exactly where it had been left, cordoned off now with a strip of yellow tape someone had put up that morning.

*Fifteen aircraft.*