Crashers (14 page)

He stopped at a space and slid the dark blue Caprice into place. But before they stepped out, Lucas turned to Ray and said, “You've got a thing for her?”

Ray barked a laugh. “No. I'm her handler.”

“As it were . . .”

“No! Seriously. She's . . . she's a hand grenade in high heels. Who needs the trouble?”

“Sure.” Lucas let it slide. They stepped out and joined each other on the sidewalk. He glanced up, realizing that the rain had stopped.

They both checked the sky. The radio had said that L.A. was in for some hot weather by the end of the week. Still, they stashed their umbrellas for good luck.

WALTER MULRONEY STOOD BACK, fists on his hips, and studied the three visible sections of the jetliner. Four of his structures crew stood with him, two of them drawing sketches and trying to calculate the stress factors, for when they brought in cranes to pick up the fuselage. He checked his twenty-year-old Timex. It was going on 12:30
P.M.

The six-two Kansan looked around, found one of the state-police troopers, and waved him over. “Officer, know where they found the other wing?”

The cop pointed across Interstate 5 and upward, to a two-story farmhouse atop a small hillock. “Dropped straight down in some guy's barbecue pit.”

As Walter squinted in that direction, he caught a glimpse of two state-police cruisers and a white Sentra arriving at the farmhouse. That would be Peter, he thought.

Peter Kim took three of his power-plant team and four state-police troopers to the home of Bud and Irene Wheeler to begin the process of securing
the starboard wing. They couldn't move it, of course, but they could make sure it remained untouched.

Bud Wheeler met them at the front gate of his property. Behind him, they could see the white-painted, two-story house with its majestic stand of oak trees. The Vermeer wing wasn't visible from where the cars had stopped. Peter and the others climbed out.

Peter walked up to the gate. “Excuse me. Are you the owner of this property?”

The elderly man on the other side of the wooden gate glowered at him, arms folded across his ample chest. “I am. Bud Wheeler. And you are . . . ?”

“My name is Peter Kim. I'm a chief investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. We're here to check on the wing, and we want to leave one of these troopers here to secure the area, if that's all right with—”

“Nope,” Bud Wheeler said. “You can turn yourselves around and get off my property. Right now.”

Peter blinked at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“Just turn your little Japanese butt around and get off my property, Mr. Safety Transportation Board. I've contacted my lawyer in Portland. He's on his way. And until I speak to him, nobody's stepping on this property.”

Peter's face slid into a soft, predatory smile. He enjoyed confrontation. “First, sir, I'm Korean American. Second, this is a federal investigation. You can't keep us out. And third, what do you need an attorney for? You haven't done anything wrong, have you?”

A thought fell into place and worry flickered in Peter's eyes. “You haven't, have you? You haven't touched anything or tried to take any souvenirs. Right?”

“Get the hell off my property,” Bud Wheeler repeated. “Somebody's gonna pay for destroying my barbecue. I'm going to sue the airline company and the people who made the wing and the people who made the engine. I'm gonna sue the Portland airport. I'm gonna sue the captain and his crew. And in about ten seconds, I'm gonna sue your ass, too. Now get off my property before—”

“Officer,” Peter Kim turned to one of the troopers, “arrest this man.”

The troopers eyed one another. “I'm not sure we can—”

“This is a federal investigation,” Peter almost growled back at him. “Yes, you can. Do it.”

And they did. Irene Wheeler stood in her bedroom and watched
through her window as troopers handcuffed her husband and eased him into the back of their prowl car.

She hit the Redial button on her cordless phone and called their attorney.

Susan said, “Has anyone seen Peter Kim? He went after the missing wing.”

One of the engineers shrugged. “He and his guys aren't back yet.”

Susan had just arrived at the crash site. She'd picked chocolate suede boots today. As usual, her ensemble was splendid and stylish. Absolutely nobody noticed.

She turned and found a stranger approaching. He was a tad overweight, wore thick glasses, corduroy slacks, tennis shoes, and a frayed green sweater. He carried a largish computer bag slung over one shoulder. “Are you Miss Tanaka?” he asked.

“Yes. You are—?”

“I'm here about the Gamelan,” the man replied and smiled broadly.

As far as Susan knew, a gamelan was an Indonesian musical instrument. She said, “Excuse me?”

“The Gamelan,” he repeated. “It's the flight data recorder. It monitors all the automated, preflight, and in-flight indicators on board the jet. My company makes the interface controls right here in Oregon. Beaverton, actually. Anyway, my company sent me to help the systems crew figure out what went wrong.”

“Good. Do you have a card?” He handed her one. Susan dug out her notepad and pen. “Your crew chief is Walter Mulroney. I'll introduce you. We'll have our first major debriefing this evening around eight. I don't know the venue yet. We'll be in touch, Mister—”

She read the card. “Mr. Silverman.”

“Dennis,” he said, and smiled.

SUSAN! HOW ARE WE doing?” Kiki Duvall asked as she and John Roby climbed out of the rental. They had just arrived, and with Kiki was the digital recording of the cockpit voice recorder. Susan had been talking to an overweight, nerdy-looking guy with a laptop-size messenger bag. She was pointing across the field toward Walter, and the nerdy-looking guy headed that way.

John Roby moved off into the field, too.

Susan Tanaka removed her ear jack and frowned.

Kiki blinked at her. “What's up?”

“That was Peter on the line. He's got the missing wing but there's a complication. He said he didn't want to explain over the line. All he said was, we should expect a call from Farmer Sloyer.”

Kiki said, “Who's Farmer Sloyer?”

“I don't know. Peter sounded royally pissed off.”

“Whose farm did they go out to?”

Susan said, “Wheeler. Bud Wheeler.”

Kiki said, “Not Sloyer?”

“No, Wheeler.”

Kiki's ability to discern patterns in acoustical signatures kicked in. She said, “Oh, crud.”

Susan said, “What?”

“Not Farmer Sloyer. Farmer's lawyer.”

Susan said, “Oh, crud.”

Walter Mulroney squinted up at the darkening sky and said, “Crab cakes.”

“ 'S all right.” John Roby stepped up next to him. “You can say
crap.
We're in a farmer's field. People will think you're making an observation about the soil.”

Walter glowered at the small, compact Englishman. “Tomzak is a pathologist. He can't run this Go-Team.”

John shrugged. “You think?”

Walter said morosely, “What do you know?”

“I know there was no bomb.”

There was something about John Roby's casual certainty that drove Walter nuts. “You can't know that until you've done a forensic investigation. Dang it, Roby, this is serious business! We're not goofing around out here.”

John patted him on the shoulder, not in an unfriendly manner. He really didn't want to be the enemy of the crew boss of the structures team. “If there was a major explosive on board, I'd smell it. It's a distinctive aroma, that.”

“This field stinks of oil and death.”

“True. But high explosives also leave fairly obvious visual clues behind, and there's none to be seen on the fuselage. Don't care if you're talking about the CIA's fanciest designer explosive or five-for-a-penny fuel-and-nitrate pipe bombs made in someone's flat. I've walked the perimeter of this beast,” he said, and motioned toward the three major sections of the Vermeer 111. “No soot deposits higher than the burning grass. No radial streaks on the surface. No blast cratering. No gas wash.” He shrugged.
Elementary.

Walter didn't know what most of that information meant, but he had to admit that Roby seemed casually adamant about his knowledge. They both looked up as a younger man approached. He was egg shaped and wore thick glasses and wrinkled, baggy clothes. His hair was disheveled.

“Sorry, mate,” John said. “We can't blame any terrorists for bringing down this jet.”

.   .   .

The tubby man with thick glasses approaching Walter and John now offered his hand and smiled big. “You're Walter Mulroney?”

Walter shook his hand, nodded his jowly head.

“Dennis Silverman. Gamelan Industries. We design the—”

Walter smiled. “A Gamelan! I've been hoping to see if these are all they're cracked up to be.”

John said, “Sorry?”

“John Roby, bomb expert. Dennis Silverman. His company makes a state-of-the-art flight data recorder that stores a thousand telltales.”

Dennis shrugged. “About two thousand, really.”

Walter pointed to the Vermeer. “Best of my knowledge, this is the first jetliner with a Gamelan recorder to go down.”

Dennis beamed. “Y'know? You just might be right.”

 

Five minutes later, Walter Mulroney and Dennis Silverman knelt in the churned-up soil, Dennis on his haunches, Walter down on his hands in the dirt, his head only ten inches off the ground. He was staring at the surface of the twisted gob of aluminum, steel, and glass that had been the nose of the jetliner. John Roby had walked to the other end of the field and was doing yet another walkaround of the empennage, or tail cone, looking for any signs of a midair detonation and finding none.

Dennis said, “Do you see it?”

“No good news,” Walter said. “The infrared input node is there but it's busted up. No way you can access the FDR from here.”

Dennis smiled amiably. He stood, hands stuffed into the pockets of his cords. “That's all right. I can hardwire the Gamelan and take out all the information she's carrying.”

Walter stood up and clapped the caked dirt off his hands. “Thank God for that, son.”

One does not get to be an intake clerk at a medical examiner's office without having a strong stomach.

Today, that was being put to the test. The day-shift clerk for the medical
examiner's office for Multnomah County had never seen so many bodies at once. His intake area held fifteen corpses. And he knew that this was a small percentage of the cadavers heading his way.

Before his brain could begin to register those numbers, double swinging doors burst open and the medical examiner entered, along with a wiry guy with an NTSB jacket, lanky hair that hung into his eyebrows, and the kind of buzz about him one gets from too little sleep and too much caffeine.

The medical examiner, Dr. Ellis Ridgeway, carried a clipboard and his reading glasses. “We've got pathologists and coroners from every corner of the state, as well as Washington, volunteering to help. If we keep our suites operating around the clock, I can autopsy the victims in . . . three, maybe three and a half days.”

“Good,” said the stranger with a Texas twang. “Y'all got mass spectrometers?”

The examiner nodded. “We have one that—”

“You're gonna need more. Every bit of metal that entered these folks, we gotta take out.”

“Ah . . .” Ridgeway started to respond.

“Got X-ray machines?”

“Again, we have one—”

“That's gonna be a choke point for getting these folks through,” the Texan said, then made eye contact with the intake clerk. “Hi. Tommy Tomzak. NTSB. You're . . . ?”

“Jeff Tr—”

“Jeff, call some hospitals. Get us portable X-ray equipment.” He turned back to Dr. Ridgeway. “Everyone gets X-rayed twice. From two angles.”

“Twice? I don't—”

The Texan picked up a slim metal ruler from the clerk's desk. “There's aluminum inside these poor, dumb bastards. This thin, maybe thinner. Shoot the X-rays from the wrong angle . . .” Tommy turned the ruler sideways.

Dr. Ridgeway nodded.

Tommy eyed the intake clerk. “How you doing, Jeff?”

He wet his lips. “That's, ah, a lot of bodies.”

Tommy slapped him on the shoulder. “Fuckin' A.” He turned back to the coroner. “First thing up, we need tox tests for both pilots. Check for everything: alcohol, street drugs, meds, poison.”

“Poison?”

“Rule out nothing. Also, we're getting the medical files for 'em both. Check the pilot, Meghan Danvers. Find out how tall she's supposed to be.”

“Supposed to be? I don't—”

Tommy said, “I got five bucks says she's two, three centimeters short. Wanna know why?”

Both the medical examiner and the intake clerk nodded, realizing that they were in way over their heads here.

Tommy mimed holding the yoke of the jetliner. “If she was trying to bring up the nose of that plane, she'd've planted her boots and hauled on the stick like a sumbitch. When the plane hit, it would break her spine in enough places to shorten her. If she's presenting compression fractures, it'll tell us shitloads about the last seconds.”

Dr. Ridgeway and Jeff looked at each other. They were in the tall weeds.

“ 'Kay, folks!” Tommy checked his watch. “Let's rock 'n' roll.”

It was 1:30
P.M.

 

Traditionally, autopsies go like this: X-rays, visual inspection of the epidermis, open the chest, then open the skull.