Read Diagnosis Murder 4 - The Waking Nightmare for Free Online

cords."
    "Did anyone see a skydiver close enough to Brant to stab him before he opened his chute?"
    "If they did, no one is admitting it," Steve said.
    "Leading to your theory that they all did it," Mark said.
    "No," Steve said. "It's desperation that led to that theory."
    So far, chronology and choreography weren't helping Mark much. Perhaps it was time to consider what happened before they even got on the plane.
    "Who packed Brant's chute?" he asked.
    "There's a guy at Airventures who does nothing but that," Steve said. "He didn't keep the packs under constant super vision. It's possible that someone could have gone in and sabotaged Brant's pack. There's just one problem."
    "Just one?"
    "SID says there's nothing hinky with Brant's pack," Steve said.
    "Hinky?"
    Steve shrugged. "I watched a lot of seventies cop shows."
    "It explains your hair," Mark said.
    "I see you've learned a few things from Amanda, too," Steve said.
    "Amanda couldn't be here tonight," Mark said. "She's stuck doing the Brant autopsy, so she asked me to pinch-hit for her."
    "You can tell her my hair looks great. Retro is in," Steve said. "The way things are going, pretty soon it will be cool again to have your shirt unbuttoned to show off all your chest hair."
    "You don't have any chest hair."
    "Neither do you," Steve said.
    "I'm not the one wondering when it'll be stylish to walk around with his shirt open to his navel," Mark said.
    "I didn't say I wanted to do that," Steve said. "You want to know about the chute or make fun of my hair?"
    "Can't I do both?"
    "The chute and all the other equipment appear to be in perfect shape, nothing out of the ordinary. Except for Winston Brant getting stabbed to death ten thousand feet in the air." Steve shook his head and frowned. "How the hell did the killer pull that off?"
    They sat in silence for a few minutes, thinking about the case, sipping their coffees, and enjoying their pie. Mark mentally reexamined Brant's corpse and went over every detail Steve told him. He visualized the entire jump in his mind and tried to see who had the best opportunity to stab Winston Brant in the chest.
    "I think they all did it," Mark said.
    "Really?" Steve asked.
    "Nope," Mark sighed. "I'm desperate."
    "Like father, like son," Steve said.
     
    When they got back to the beach house, Mark and Steve watched the video that the skydiving instructor shot of the jump. The camera work was shaky, but that was to be expected when the photographer is falling at 125 miles per hour and the camera is mounted in his helmet.
    Events played out exactly as Hemphill, Perrow, Nyby, and Justin Darbo said they did. The five men jumped out of the plane, joined hands to form a rough, free-falling circle, and then let go, flying out of frame.
    Justin Darbo tracked a few of them with his camera, but since they were all wearing identical helmets, goggles, and jumpsuits, it was virtually impossible to tell who was who. Perhaps, Mark thought, that was significant. Whether the confusion was intentional or not, it could be the first clue towards unraveling the mystery. Or it could mean nothing at all.
    None of the four men were caught on camera when they pulled their rip cords, and when Justin pulled his, the camera jerked wildly. The camera tilted up as Justin examined his own chute and rigging before he bothered looking around again to find the other skydivers. What the camera captured was four colorful parachutes and not much, if anything, of the skydivers suspended beneath the canopies. Two of the parachutes seemed to drift close together, but Mark couldn't be certain if they actually were near one another. He knew the camera's perspective could be playing tricks on the eye, making the genuine distance of objects relative to one another hard to gauge. Considering the camera, and the skydivers it was filming, were all in motion, it was hard for him to judge the speed, distance, or the true size of anything they saw.
    The rest of the footage wasn't much more