Crashers

by Dana Haynes

  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.

  WHEELER RESIDENCE

  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.

  FIELD OF GRASS

  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.

  18

  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.”

  FIELD OF GRASS

  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 ha
nd, 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.”

  MULTNOMAH COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE, PORTLAND

  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.

  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.

  19<
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  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.”