Crashers (23 page)

The men smiled ruefully at her. Phil turned to Lucas. “Since it got all peaceful and shit in Ireland, we let our Rolodexes get a little rusty. What say we call Dublin and Belfast, call in old markers. Make some new friends. See what's shaking.”

Lucas stopped scowling at the phone. “Now you're talking.”

 

Lucas Bell spent the rest of that Wednesday morning on the phone or clattering away with e-mail, contacting the Ireland watchers at the CIA, British Military Intelligence, Interpol, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (or
whatever the hell they were calling themselves these days) in Belfast, and the Gardai headquarters in Dublin. He asked each of these agencies if they knew of any Irish nationals with ties to the IRA or the Ulster leagues who were flying into the United States in the foreseeable future. He asked if they knew of any American supporters of the Catholic or Protestant sides who were currently making waves.

The agencies agreed to keep their eyes open and to get back to him.

British Military Intelligence was the first agency to get back to Lucas. And they had news, although the relevance was questionable. It seemed the next stage in the Ireland/Northern Ireland peace talks was set to begin in two days. In the States.

THE MARION COUNTY MEDICAL examiner waved a hand to the girl standing in front of Tommy. She wore a black T-shirt with an illustrator's rendition of Neil Gaiman's comic-book character Death emblazoned across her narrow chest. Accompanying that was a long, black lace skirt and a black shawl, plus black Doc Martens. Her hair was as black as fresh tarmac. Her eyeliner, black, looped and swirled across her temples. Her lipstick was matte black.

The ME said, “May I introduce my daughter, Arachnia.”

Arachnia popped a gum bubble. Tommy offered his hand and said, “Arachnia?”

She blushed and Tommy thought a good Goth should learn not to blush. Her cuteness got in the way of her cool. “Laura. Arachnia is my tag.”

Tommy said. “You're a Goth.”

Her eyes lit up. “You know about Gothic?”

“Yeah, but in Texas, our Goths are even blacker.”

She took a beat, then snorted an unladylike laugh, getting the joke, deciding she liked this disheveled Texan with the unruly hank of hair hanging over his left eye.

“Nice to meet you, Laura. Your daddy says you're good with computers.”

She shrugged. “Pretty good.”

“Know what a GIS is?”

She said, “Geographic information system. Used in cartography.”

Tommy relaxed. She looked all of sixteen but she seemed to know her stuff. “Right. We're pulling shrapnel out of these bodies and out of the survivors. Now, it's really important that we map the trajectories of the shrapnel.”

Arachnia, or Laura, wrinkled her nose.

Tommy said, “I know. It's pretty gross. But it's vital. We asked for a computer technician to join us, but the guy we were expecting is about to become a father.”

The girl didn't look too sure. “I don't know. . . .”

Tommy's heart sank. “I understand. If you know of anyone else who—”

“Dad,” she cut in, and popped another bubble. “Do you have the Microsoft suite installed here?”

The ME nodded.

“If you've got the Microsoft Access software, maybe we could do it. If I could slave that to the map-making GIS stuff, we could run it all off my MacBook Air. I added some serious RAM to it.”

Tommy had a MacBook Air laptop. He could barely compose a letter using Word. “You can do that?”

She shrugged. “You're not supposed to be able to, but . . .” And again with the shrug.

Tommy grinned and held up a fist. “Give us a bump, Arachnia.”

She touched her knuckles to his and grinned. Again, her studied coolness was shot to hell by her innate cuteness.

Laura excused herself to go get the needed hardware.

Tommy turned to the medical examiner. “Goth?”

He shrugged. “That, plus International Baccalaureate. She's a high school senior and already has seventy credits at Portland Community College.” He shrugged again. “Daddy cuts up cadavers for a living.”

Monstrously huge flatbed trucks barreled south on I-5. There were three in all, each preceded and followed by wide-load-warning cars. State police also rode shotgun. The trucks were so big, they took up two lanes. Behind the entourage came three smaller flatbeds, these carrying massive cranes. The ground rumbled as they passed. Washington State Police were getting
ready to shut down the Interstate 205 bridge that leads into Portland. When the dinosaurlike trucks arrived, they'd be the only vehicles allowed on the bridge at a time.

The entire entourage was on loan to the NTSB and was making good speed, heading toward the field of grass.

There are lockers at the airport that flight crews can rent. Both pilots of the doomed Vermeer had taken advantage of them.

Isaiah Grey met Angela Abdalla of the PDX incident-investigation team, along with a lawyer who represented ALPA, the Air Line Pilots Association, in the crew lounge. Together, they followed an airport official with a bulging, jangling tumbleweed of keys on a thick ring. He unlocked the locker rented by Russ Kazmanski.

Isaiah had brought a sturdy banker's box with a removable lid, the kind used by police and prosecutors to keep evidence. With the lawyer and Angela Abdalla watching like hawks, Isaiah removed a raincoat from the locker. The pockets contained Kleenex, a lip balm, and thirty-five cents in change: a quarter and two nickels. He folded the coat and stuffed it into the box. Next came a gym bag containing gym shorts, two T-shirts with the CascadeAir logo on the breast, clean gym socks, clean underwear, and well-worn Adidas cross-trainers. There also was a toiletry bag with shampoo, deodorant, toothbrush and toothpaste, and a comb. A half-empty box of Airborne, which some people think can stop a head cold from happening, though Isaiah doubted it.

Isaiah stuffed the bag into his evidence box and returned to the locker. He found two issues of
Scientific American
magazine and a paperback copy of
The Brothers K,
which looked like it hadn't been read yet. He riffled through the magazines and the book, found nothing of interest. At the back of the locker shelf was a box of Good 'n Plenty, unopened.

Isaiah threw it all into his box. Satisfied the locker was empty, Isaiah sealed the box with masking tape, then he and the lawyer signed the tape with a Sharpie.

“I fall from the sky,” the union lawyer said, “I hope I leave behind something more interesting than
Scientific American
and Good 'n Plenty.”

Isaiah gave him the bent eye. “Shit like this? Interesting is bad. Dull is good.”

The attorney blanched, then nodded his understanding.

Isaiah, the lawyer, and the PDX representative headed next to Meghan Danvers's locker, bringing along a second evidence box. They opened the locker and took out an umbrella with a collapsible handle.

“What are you doing?”

They turned. A man stood at the entrance to the lounge. African American, maybe thirty-five, he held an infant less than a year old. Beside him was a woman, five years younger, also black.

“What are you doing?” the man repeated. His eyes were puffy and red, and his voice was scratchy from fatigue and from sobbing. Isaiah's heart dropped. “That's Meghan's locker. That's her umbrella. What are you doing?”

“Mr. Danvers?” Isaiah stepped forward.

“Yes. What is this? Who are you?”

Isaiah had an exceptionally bad feeling about this. “I'm Isaiah Grey, sir. I'm with the National Transportation Safety Board. We're—”

“Oh my God.” Mr. Danvers was trembling, and Isaiah feared for the infant in his arms. It was a little boy in OshKosh B'Gosh overalls and tiny Nikes. He was starting to grow fussy, absorbing the emotions from the man holding him. “You think Meg did this. You think she's to blame.”

“No,” Isaiah said simply. “No, man. We don't—”

“Don't
man
me! You're riffling her locker! You're looking at pilot error! Aren't you?”

The baby started crying, a panicky, high-pitched wail.

The woman next to him was red-eyed, too, but quiet, staring.

Isaiah said, “We really don't—”

“Meg wouldn't just crash. She was a pro.” His voice broke. Angela Abdalla and the union lawyer looked like they hoped to untack the carpet and crawl beneath it. The baby shook his little, wrinkled fists and howled.

“How could you think that? Jesus. That's insane. Meg was a responsible pilot. She was conscientious.”

“Sir, I—”

He was crying now, the baby picking up his sorrow and squealing louder.

Isaiah took another step forward. “Look. We don't know what happened. We've ruled out nothing. We're focusing on everything. That's our job. That's what we have to do.”

The woman next to Danvers scooped the baby from his arms. The two of them had the same build, the same cheeks: Isaiah was sure they were siblings. She bounced the baby, patted his back, spoke over his howling.

“I understand,” she said, turning to her brother, whose his face was crinkled in grief, his hands balled, his lips pulled back to reveal his gums. He made a keening noise, almost exactly two octaves below the baby's wail.

“James?” The sister rubbed the baby's back, then rubbed her brother's shoulder. “Hey, James? Shh. It's procedure. They're checking everything.”

James Danvers all but collapsed against her. The child shrieked and kicked his legs. The sister turned James around and led him to the door.

He exited, sobbing. She turned back to Isaiah, Angela Abdalla, and the union lawyer. “Meg's my sister-in-law.” She had to speak loudly over the baby's shrieks. “You'll find out what happened?”

“Yes,” Isaiah promised. “We will.”

“Meg was a good flyer. She . . . this is what she was, flying. She loved my brother and she loved her baby, but flying . . . it's . . . this is what she was.”

Isaiah approached the woman, cupped the baby's head in the palm of his too-big hand. He could hear James Danvers crying in the corridor.

“Hey there,” Isaiah said to the sobbing infant. “Hey, little man.”

The sister-in-law jiggled the baby, tried to get him to squeeze her little finger in his fist. She made eye contact with Isaiah.

“I heard . . .” he started, feeling his own eyes mist up. “There's a tape. A cockpit tape. She fought hard to save her ship, save her passengers. She fought
hard
!”

The woman leaned in, kissed Isaiah on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said, and followed her brother out of the locker room.

The deputy medical examiner from Yamhill County had come into Portland to hear Tommy's speech on Monday. He'd volunteered to stay on in Portland and help with the crush of autopsies.

It was going on 10:00
A.M.
Wednesday and the man had cut more Y incisions in the past twenty-four hours than he had in the previous year. He stood up straight, felt his shoulder muscles protest, and held up a metal mechanism the size and shape of a car's spark plug, wet with viscera. “What the hell is this?”

Tommy Tomzak was two tables over, working on another passenger. He glanced up. “Damned if I know.”

“Then why am I charting its path through this poor dumb schmuck?” This was the umpteenth piece of unfamiliar metal or glass or plastic that the young assistant ME had taken from a body that morning.

Tommy straightened his spine and swung his shoulders, hearing his neck pop. “That widget? It went somewhere. It was part of an engine, or a wing, or it came from the cockpit, or from the coffeemaker or the toilet. It came from somewhere. And it ended up in Mr. Seven-C, there.” They had taken to referring to the dead by their seat designations. “If we know where that thing started, and where it ended up, it'll tell the engineering geeks something about the crash. Something major, something minor; hell, I don't know what. But it'll tell 'em something.”

He went back to his autopsy. “We tell 'em enough of the little things, maybe they'll figure out the big thing.”

“Which is?”

“What got fucked up.”

 

Once the metal mechanism the size of a spark plug was washed clean, it was put in a self-sealing plastic bag, which was designated 7C-14: the fourteenth foreign object taken out of that particular dead body. The bag was taken out of the autopsy room and into the office of the Multnomah County medical examiner, where it was given to Laura, the ME's Goth daughter, along with a crude drawing of a human body. Arrows showed the direction of impact and an X showed where the mechanism had been lodged, just under the left lung.

Laura had lashed together an interface between the map-making software of the geological information system with the report-making capability of the Microsoft suite. Using the amalgam, she made a three-dimensional representation of the victim from seat 7-C.

SO YOU'RE NOT RULING out pilot error?”

Susan Tanaka made a herculean effort to keep the smile on her face. The noon press conference was only ten minutes along and it was already clear that the press was unimpressed by her answers. It was always this way. The uninitiated expected answers right away. Some understood that the process was time consuming. Some looked for a cover-up. Others assumed incompetence. She was dressed to the nines in a black-and-white-patterned Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress.

“We have ruled out nothing,” she replied. “An investigation of this magnitude can take a year. Can take two years. CascadeAir Flight Eight One Eight crashed on Monday. This is Wednesday.”

The room was hot and crowded. The Keizer Chamber of Commerce had offered the NTSB the use of this space for the morning debriefings, and apologized that it wasn't larger. But the smallness of the room played in Susan's favor by limiting the number of reporters and how long they were willing to hang out in the muggy confines.