Crashers (15 page)

After an airplane crash, it's slightly different. First comes a proper videotaping of everything, plus a sketch of all external wounds. That's followed by a mass spectrometer or metal detector, to look for fragments. Then come the X-rays and the rest. The process is time consuming. But the trajectory and resting patterns of the shrapnel are as important in a crash investigation as the bodies themselves.

 

The medical examiner's team started on Captain Meghan Danvers by taking samples for the toxicology screening. They drew blood directly from her heart to check for bacteria. They also drew urine, bile, and a little of the fluid from her left eye.

The morgue was crowded. Half of the MEs who had traveled to Oregon Health & Science University for the convention had called their bosses and spouses and told them that they would be staying on. Most of them looked like physicians and dressed like physicians. They drove expensive cars and lived in fancy homes. Tommy Tomzak dressed—and swore—like a dockworker half the time. The other medical examiners played golf or yachted. Tommy played pickup ball at the Y; half-court,
three-on-three, make it–take it and call your own fouls. He was an atypical doctor, but there was absolutely no question about who was in charge.

He changed to scrubs, then sketched Captain Danvers's external wounds, front and back, as the morgue attendant shot video of the whole scene. When he was done, Tommy reached for the heavy scalpel. He began by making the classic Y-shaped incision from shoulders to midchest, then down to the pubic bone. Normally, he would have used shears to snip through her rib cage and breastbone, exposing the abdominal organs. In this case, the airplane yoke had staved in her ribs. The existing wound finished the downstroke of the Y incision.

Carefully recording everything into the dangling microphone, Tommy snipped out the heart and lungs and inspected their mass. They were severely deformed or perforated from the cracked ribs and hydrostatic shock. He weighed them. Next, he took out the kidneys, liver, and spleen. Each was visually inspected and weighed, and each was put in its own Tupperware-like plastic container. Each of the containers went into a self-sealing biohazard bag.

Tommy removed the smaller organs, the adrenals and thyroid, and a medical technician weighed them on a much smaller, triple-beam balance. Tommy removed his goggles and wiped his brow. His gloves were fairly clean; there's almost no bleeding in an autopsy because the fluids have settled and there's no blood pressure. After gulping water from a bottle, he moved up to her head.

“The scalp is reflected, revealing contusions with associated subgaleal hemorrhaging over the right occipital region,” he said into the mic. “The basilar skull is lined with fine fractures. The calvarium has fewer fractures. We got us one big, badass hematoma on the right side. Subdural, covering most of the right temporal lobe. Figure that alone would've killed her. The spinal cord is intact. Okay, someone want to do the honors?”

He stood back as a lab assistant powered up the skull saw.

IT WAS GOING ON 2
P.M.
when Daria Gibron found the first of the Irishmen. He was a massive, thick-boned man with no neck. The night before, the others had called him Johnser. He was the one who had won a bet in the bar. Daria started asking around the neighborhood and heard where a couple of standing poker games could be found. That had produced nothing but the names of some bookies who could be counted on to run some lines. She'd had no luck there, but had been pointed to a sports bar. No luck, but another tavern was named. This one had five television sets showing five sporting events. And there was Johnser, at the grungy, Formica-on-particle-board bar, slapping down a hundred bucks and grumbling about a just-completed golf game.

“Fucking wanker!” he bellowed at the set. No one in the bar seemed to disagree.

Dressed up for her meeting with the Egyptian and the Englishman, Daria was as conspicuous in the dingy sports bar as a clean glass would have been. She found a booth near the women's restroom and ordered a vodka straight up and watched Johnser bet on a bowling tournament.

During the next hour, three men tried to pick her up. She told each that she was waiting for her husband. Johnser was so absorbed in his winnings and losings, he never came close to noticing her.

Just a little past three in the afternoon, a man slid into the booth opposite Daria. He was blond and had a crooked smile and a chipped tooth and a nose broken and badly repaired, but he was handsome for all that, and he knew it. He wore a Blue Devils sweatshirt under a black leather biker jacket, the sweatshirt hood hanging outside the jacket. He held a plastic, ivory-colored toothpick in his mouth. It was the kind that came in some pocket knives, along with little scissors and a screwdriver. “I am madly in love with you,” he announced.

Across the bar, Johnser stood up and paid his bar tab.

“I've got to go,” Daria said.

“Hey.” The blond man reached across and trapped her hand on the table. He winked at her. “You've been here for at least forty minutes, and I can't take my eyes off you. C'mon. This place is a shit hole. Let me buy you a nice drink.”

“Please,” she said, and smiled at him, shrugging in apology. Johnser was halfway to the door. Daria pulled her hand back but the blond man didn't let go.

“Ah-ah,” he said, still smiling. With his tongue, he shifted the ivory toothpick to the other corner of his mouth. “Come on. One drink. We could go around the corner, to my place. It's clean.”

Johnser was nearer to her now, so Daria leaned back into the booth, hiding from him, and pretended to think about the offer. “Well . . .”

“There you go,” the blond man said, winking. “We'll have a couple of shots, you'll tell me your life story.”

Daria heard the little bell over the door, knew that Johnser had stepped outside. She leaned forward and laid out her other hand, palm up. The blond man smiled contentedly and moved his hand, grasping the one that she offered.

Daria said, “Maybe another time.” She twisted sharply, her elbow in the air. The blond man's thumb broke. Two thin bones in his wrist sheared. His eyes bulged, his tongue moved as if to warble but he made no sound.

Daria stood and was across the room, her hand on the door, when she heard the blond man puke.

The most disturbing thing about the encounter, Daria knew, was that on another day, she might well have said yes the first time he asked.

Donal O'Meara set two six-packs of Samuel Adams on the middle of the little round table and said, “Help yerselves, then.” Back home, of course, it would have been Harp or Guinness. But he'd soon figured out that the horse piss they passed off as Guinness in the States was a faint fake compared to the real thing. He vowed not to taste the deep, dark brew until his feet touched the soil of Northern Ireland again.

An Ireland free from the grasp of Rome.

“Ta,” said the smallest in the group, a wiry little man from Derry named Feargal Kelly. He was a fine gunman, O'Meara thought, both a gifted sniper and good at up-close wet work. A little crazy, but then who wasn't? Next to him sat Keith O'Shea, who'd been born on the beautiful Antrim Coast and who'd learned to hate the Catholics after his father and older brother were slaughtered by a bomber in Kilkeel. O'Shea was a fighter, pure and simple. He liked a knife but could use the machine pistol with the best of them. These two, with Johnser Riley's bulk, fighting skills, and pure meanness, made for a good quick-strike team.

“So it worked,” Kelly said, draining a third of his beer.

O'Meara nodded. “Our friend sounds like a right wanker but he delivered. Simple as that.”

They clinked the necks of their beer bottles together.

“But can he do it again?” O'Shea asked. “Can he bring down the plane we tell him to?”

“Fella says he can,” O'Meara said, and shrugged. “Got no reason to doubt him so far. The flight happens in a couple of days. When it does, we let our friend deal with it. That'll put things right.”

“Aye,” the others chimed in, just as the door of their hole-up opened. Johnser Riley rolled in with that John Wayne walk he was perfecting.

 

On the street below them, Daria made note of the address. The building looked like it was deserted. No life was evident from the street, but this was where the big Irishman had gone.

She tried the door, found it locked. He must have had a key.

She found a space between the apartment building and the next one, too narrow to be called an alley. The space was cobwebbed and no wider than her shoulders. The narrow shaft of air was dark, the ground cluttered with beer bottles and bricks. She started edging her way down the space,
walking sideways, the front and back of her sporty jacket quickly growing filthy with soot. Rats squealed, dodging over and around her open-toed slingbacks. She wished she hadn't worn a short skirt. The thin space smelled of urine. She got to the end and found a narrow courtyard tucked among all the tall buildings. No sun had touched the ground back here in generations. A rail-thin cat arched its back and hissed at her. Stained mattresses were stacked up, reeking of mildew. A child's Big Wheel lay on its side under a fine layer of dust. More rats skittered away; some stood their ground and stared at her with red eyes.

Daria found a window low to the ground and broke it with her elbow. She used a bit of brick to clear it all away. She buttoned up her black leather Versace jacket—it was ruined anyway—then got down on her stomach and climbed into the rank darkness of the condemned apartment building, wiggling through the window headfirst, her body blocking all light.

EXCUSE ME?”

The bartender, a thick cube of a man with a cauliflower ear and a marine buzz cut, turned to the two men in blue suits. One suit was off the rack and generic. A big guy wore that one. The other was hand-tailored and unique. A black guy wore that one. Both held badges.

“Yeah?”

Ray Calabrese pulled the photo of O'Meara out of his jacket pocket. “We're with the FBI. We're looking for this man.”

The bartender slipped on a pair of bifocals, the earpieces held together with black tape, and took the photo, holding it at an angle to negate reflections from the overhead lights. “He's a mick?”

Ray said, “Yes, sir.”

“Yeah, he and his buddies come in here a lot this week. Real full of themselves, you know? All piss and vinegar. Sometimes they pick up ladies, sometimes they just sit in the back and make fun of American beer and baseball and shit.”

Lucas Bell pulled an envelope out of his pocket and produced eight more photos, all taken at British prisons. It hadn't taken him five minutes on the computer to come up with O'Meara's likely collaborators. “Do you recognize any of these men?”

The bartender scanned them all. He selected three. “Yeah. These guys hang around with the first guy.”

Ray said, “Were they in here last night?”

“Yeah.” The bartender didn't seem too happy about it.

“Was there trouble?” Lucas asked.

The big man shrugged. “One of them made a bet, is all. He cleaned at least three hundred out of my regulars, made 'em look like chumps, really laughed at 'em. People come in here to relax, you know? They don't want to be made fun of or nothing.”

Ray said, “Sure. Any idea where we can find these guys?”

“I don't know what they do for a living but they been hanging out in this neighborhood for about a week now. They buy groceries down at the corner and they eat at Mario's, across the street.” He pointed out the front window. “They're like cockroaches. Big, mick cockroaches. They're everywhere.”

He paused, his eyes narrowing. “No offense. You're not Irish, are you?”

Ray said, “Well, I'm not . . .” and nodded toward Lucas.

While the bartender pondered that, Ray slid the first photo back into his pocket, then handed the bartender his business card. “If you see these guys, call this number, please. And don't tell them we're looking for them.”

The bartender said, “You got it. Ship 'em back to fucking Ireland, I say.”

The FBI agents started to turn away. Ray turned back. “Out of curiosity, which guy won the three hundred bucks off your regulars?”

“That big blond guy.”

“Yeah? Can I ask how?”

It was a good question. It was the kind of detail about a suspect that could lead to an arrest.

“Damnedest thing.” The bartender shook his head. “This guy bets us that the top story on TV would be a disaster. Some kind of crash, he said. Lots of deaths. I'll be damned if they didn't break in to the news with a . . . what do you call it? A breaking story. Seems some airplane crash up in Oregon or Washington or some such.”

He smiled and shrugged. His smile wilted when he realized that the two FBI agents were staring at him, their mouths open.

The bartender said, “What?”

Ray turned to Lucas and said, “Christ almighty.”

THE AFTERNOON-SHIFT GROUND CREW at the airport wore bright orange jumpsuits with
THE SULTANS OF SWING
stenciled on the back. As they arrived for that day's work, they were greeted by a shift leader, officials from the airport, and representatives of their union. Angela Abdalla, of the Port of Portland's incident-investigation team, was there with a black guy who was going a little gray and wearing the windbreaker and ball cap of the National Transportation Safety Board. The black guy thumbed through a stack of papers the crew recognized as the Vermeer's transit check: the routine maintenance reports, consisting of not much more than walkarounds and topping the fluid levels, which occur every seven days or thirty-five flight hours.

“People,” Angela Abdalla said, getting the ball rolling. Those who knew her, or who just had seen her around the airport, thought she appeared exhausted and rumpled, rather than her usual, sleek executive look. “This is Isaiah Grey. He's with the NTSB. We need to figure out what happened with the Vermeer yesterday, and he's going to need your help.”