The aircraft door opened onto a jet bridge with two uniformed officers, a woman in plain clothes carrying a folder and an airline security officer standing slightly apart. Watching the cabin the way someone watches a door they already know is about to matter. None of them look toward row 14. They look toward first class. "Officer Doss," the woman in plain clothes said, stepping onto the aircraft before the first economy passenger had unbuckled.
"I need you to remain seated a moment." Doss stood anyway. "I requested ground coordination." "This is an internal review of liaison credential access," she said. "Yours."
The words landed slower than they should have. Doss looked past her toward the open door toward the two officers who hadn't moved toward the back of the plane at all. "There's a passenger. Two passengers I flagged." "We're aware of what you flagged."
She held up the folder. Didn't open it yet. "We're also aware of what the flag was based on and that your credential access occurred outside its scheduled activation window." Marsh didn't look at his partner. He'd already given his statement to Captain Reyes, and there was nothing left to add that the record didn't already hold.
Doss's voice found something harder. "That docket is connected to her. I found it myself." "You found a docket," the investigator said. "You didn't confirm what it was before you built a report around it."
She opened the folder, checked something against it. "It belongs to an aviation compliance investigation. Miss Bell was the investigator, not the subject." For the first time since the gate in Charlotte, Daniel Doss had nothing to say. He was still in his seat when the investigator finished reading through the folder.
Almost a minute passed before she spoke again. Long enough that Marsh, a few rows up, stopped watching him and looked down at his own hands instead. "Your liaison credentials access will be suspended pending the outcome of this review," she said. "Your report stays in the file, but it's flagged unverified, not corroborated, not to be treated as established fact until this closes." "That's it?
A flag on a report?" "It's not just a flag, Officer." "It means every access you make through this system gets a second set of eyes until this closes. It means your department gets this file with Officer Marsh's statement in it before you get the chance to give them your version first." She closed the folder.
"You had three points where you could have stopped. He told you at each one. That's in the record, too." Doss looked toward the back of the cabin where Naomi and Nadia were still seated, still waiting to be told they could go. He didn't say anything to them.
Nothing he could have said would have sounded like more than paperwork at this point, and some part of him seemed to understand that. Marsh gathered his bag slowly, unsure for a moment whether he'd be asked to stay behind, too. Nobody asked him to. The investigator only nodded once in his direction, not thanks exactly, just acknowledgement that his statement had done what it was supposed to do, and let him go. Three rows back, Naomi and Nadia hadn't moved.