Crashers

by Dana Haynes

  Kiki said, “Didn’t see it. We were the top domestic story on NPR, though.”

  The peel-away lid of the cream cheese container wouldn’t budge and working on it was only aggravating Tommy’s hand. Kiki took it from him, both of them noting the quick spark as their fingers touched. She peeled the lid back easily, put the packet in Tommy’s palm.

  Tommy stared glumly at the little packet. “Screw it,” he said, and tossed it into a nearby garbage can. The untouched bagel followed. “We gotta roll.”

  Kiki grabbed his hand, kept him from rising. Her green eyes were flecked with gold from the window light.

  “Tommy, yesterday was outstanding. The team is doing great.”

  “Let’s celebrate when we solve this thing.” His voice sounded tense, even to himself.

  “This isn’t Kentucky,” Kiki said.

  Tommy stood. “You don’t know that.”

  He moved off to a coffee carafe, refilled his cup. As he did, Kiki reached for Tommy’s notebook, turned it around to check the notes.

  It took her about ten seconds to realize that they were notes on the Kentucky crash, not the Oregon crash. She thought about yelling at Tommy to get his head in the game. She thought about telling Susan Tanaka. But as Tommy winced and flexed his cramped right hand again, she simply turned the notepad back around.

  Tommy and Kiki compared their thoughts for a few minutes, then Kiki ran upstairs to shower. Tommy moved toward the exit, where he found Isaiah Grey drinking decaf and pecking away at a MacBook Pro. He wore a deep navy V-neck sweater over cargo pants and hiking boots. Plus the reading glasses. He waved Tommy over.

  Tommy said, “Research?”

  Isaiah finished typing and hit Enter. “E-mailing my wife. She teaches ninth-grade civics. I agreed to blog for her class, next major crash I caught. You know, a few years ago I would have sneered at that word. Blog.”

  Tommy frowned. “What are you telling them?”

  Isaiah looked up, took a second, removed his reading glasses. “Well, I’m going with the theory that the pilot was a mule for a Columbian drug cartel, and they killed her for stiffing them on their cut.”

  It took a two-beat, but Tommy sat and shook his head, tossing out a shy, lopsided smile. “Okay, had that one coming. Sorry. You know your protocol.”

  “Nah. It’s cool.”

  Tommy looked at the screen of the laptop, noticed the photo of a handsome black woman that served as his screen wallpaper. “She’s pretty.”

  Isaiah smiled. “Yeah.”

  “You married out of your league.”

  Isaiah ratcheted up the smile a bit. “And a big fuck you, too, Lone Star.” He glanced back to where Tommy and Kiki had been sitting. “Trouble in paradise?”

  “No,” Tommy replied too quickly. “We better get rolling. Today’s likely to be as psychotic as yesterday. Are you off to PDX?”

  Isaiah nodded.

  “Mind dropping me off at the Multnomah County ME’s office? I know where it is, now.”

  “You insult my marriage and you want me to do selected scenes from Driving Miss Daisy?”

  Tommy sipped his coffee. “Play nice, and I’ll try not to kick your ass on the golf course, first day off we get.”

  Isaiah stowed the laptop in its carrying case, deciding then and there that he and the Texan were going to get along. “You’re on.”

  Peter Kim was up at dawn. He called his wife in Florida and got an update on their son’s sixth-grade Invention Convention experiment. He did twenty minutes of calisthenics, then showered and changed into a crisp blue shirt with a dark blue tie and darker blue suit. He took another rental car and headed north to the Portland suburb of Gresham, to oversee the strip-down of the Patterson-Pate engines.

  Walter Mulroney got up and read a passage from the Bible to himself, his morning tradition for the past thirty years. Today it was a passage from the Book of Luke. He showered, dressed and ate a bowl of hot cereal with a glass of orange juice from room service. Fortified in body and spirit, Walter felt ready to begin the task of picking up the pieces of the Vermeer.

  His spirits fell when he opened the curtain and saw the wall of storm clouds marching over the mountains to the west.

  John Roby’s job was to determine whether there had been a bomb on board the $79 million wide-body jet. He felt he’d accomplished that well enough for his own purposes. That done, John could have headed back to his sublet in New York and waited four or five days until the NTSB chemists were done testing the plane and its content for explosive residue. Then he could have typed up his report and e-mailed it to Del Wildman’s office in Washington.

  But instead, John opted to stay. Before joining the agency, he’d been a cop, a deputy chief inspector for the Yard. As such, he was an experienced hand at debriefing witnesses and victims.

  He downed a cup of coffee—he couldn’t abide the toxic waste Americans called tea—and took a rental car south to Salem Hospital, where a third of the surviving wounded were being treated. It was time to find out what people other than Bernard Weintraub, Mr. 10-B, had seen and heard and felt before the crash.

  Susan Tanaka tossed aside The Oregonian. It landed atop the Salem Statesman Journal and USA Today, which she’d already scanned.

  The news was worse than she feared.

  The Oregonian led with the crash and, on the front of the Metro section, ran a story headlined: INFIGHTING PLAGUES INVESTIGATION. Someone at the NTSB had leaked the story of Walter’s attempted insurrection and bid to be Investigator In Charge. The Statesman Journal had missed that little byplay but led with the story of Bud Wheeler’s arrest and the destruction of the Wheelers’ lawn, fence, and hedges by heavy-handed investigators for the NTSB. “Bastard,” she muttered; Peter admitted that he’d pissed off some farmer while retrieving the starboard wing but he hadn’t bothered to tell her he’d taken the almost unprecedented step of having a civilian arrested. The old man, Bud Wheeler, hadn’t been shy when giving his quotes to the reporter. Worse, there was a three-column photo of tractors in the backyard of the house, the destruction in their wake evident to all.

  “Oh God,” Susan moaned. She thumbed through the rest of the pages absently, not reading more than the headlines. That’s when she saw the second, worse bit of news.

  “Dammit!” she said, and scrambled across the room, yanking open the curtains of her window. There it was, just as the paper predicted. A dark gray mass of clouds forming over the Coast Range. A storm was moving in.

  31

  EVERYONE ON THE AIRY, glass-walled sixth floor of Gamelan Industries, Inc., hovered around Dennis Silverman’s low-walled cubicle. Everyone, from his fellow engineers to the secretaries to the well-dressed preppies from marketing, who normally wouldn’t be caught dead near the Dilbert cartoons and Star Wars models and unruly piles of computer components and Nerf hoops that decorated the engineering unit.

  Everyone wanted to know: what had it been like? Were their dead bodies everywhere?

  “Yeah.” Dennis had parked his butt on his desk, feet up on his ergonomically correct chair; he was the star around which the sixth floor orbited. At least, that morning. “They’d begun clearing away the bodies before they let us at the plane, but they weren’t half done. And the blood? Oh, man . . .”

  He shook his head in mock sorrow. His cohorts lapped it up.

  How about the interface? He shrugged. “Fried. I had to almost climb into the nose of the plane to hardwire the Gamelan.”

  Was it an L-19 unit? He winked at them. “D-Forty,” he said, and the crowd made oooh noises. The L-19 was an older, less reliable Gamelan diagnostic computer, which monitored fewer servos. The D-40 was the Cadillac model.

  How was the data stream? Dennis removed his tortoise-shell glasses, rubbed his eyes, gave them the I’ve-been-slaving-all-night look. “We’ll see.”

  It went on and on. Everyone had questions, even the receptionist with the long blond hair and the great legs and the killer rack had hand-carried a while-you-were-out no
te to his desk. Hand-carried it. She hadn’t stuffed it into his pigeonhole without so much as glancing in his direction, the way she had for the past two years.

  Even she wanted in on the story.

  OVER ROSEBURG, OREGON

  Ray Calabrese was sitting in first class, nursing the mother of all headaches. But at least it was first class—tons of legroom, seats big enough that he didn’t feel like he was sitting in a bear trap. There was a small movie screen built into the seat back before him, along with a credit-card-driven telephone. And there was no problem with elbow room either. Nobody sat to his left. Nobody sat to his right. Nobody sat anywhere at all in first class, in business class, or in coach. The nearest humans were the two pilots; the three of them were the only people on board the Vermeer 111.

  It felt weird, being the sole passenger on the plane. The pilot had told him to sit wherever he wanted and to make himself at home. “There’s no food, but I put on some coffee,” he said before disappearing onto the flight deck. “Have at it.”

  Ray wandered around the plane a little. He didn’t have any idea why it was empty and, frankly, he didn’t care. It was getting him to Portland. That’s all that mattered.

  He checked his watch. Going on 8 A.M. Wednesday. He went back to the seat he’d picked at random and grabbed the telephone out of the seat back, swiping his Visa card through the slot. He punched in a number he’d memorized.

  “Bell.”

  “Lucas? It’s Ray.” The connection was static-ridden. “Can you hear me?”

  Lucas said, “Yeah. Where are you?”

  “In a jet. We’re about halfway there. I’ll be in Portland inside an hour. Have you found O’Meara?”

  Lucas had to shout to be heard as the static suddenly got worse, then got better. “No. But we’ve got the city sewn up tight. We don’t think he got out of L.A.”

  “Any word from Daria?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  Ray squeezed his eyes shut. “Shit. Lucas, you’ve got to get her away from that psycho bastard.”

  “I know, Ray.”

  “I’m serious, man. O’Meara is a short-circuit wearing skin. Daria’s an adrenaline freak. That is a bad combination. She’s probably trying to help, but she’s a civilian.”

  Lucas said, “Ray—”

  “I know. A civilian with a spook’s training, but a civilian all the same. And she’s supposed to be living under our protection. Under my protection.”

  Lucas said, “I know, Ray. We—”

  “I think I see what she’s playing at. Trying to run with O’Meara gives us an in. But she could go from mole to hostage in a heartbeat. If that happens—”

  Lucas shouted, “Raymond!”

  Ray blinked, surprised. “What?”

  “Inhale!”

  It took Ray a moment to get the point. He forced his shoulders to settle, tried to drain a little of the tension out of his spine. “Um, yeah. Okay. Sorry.”

  “Good. Now listen. The Gibron woman isn’t at home and she isn’t in the morgue. We’ve got taps on your home phone, your office phone, and your cell phone. We’ve got live surveillance at her apartment, your apartment, and this office. We’ve informed our people and the cops that she’s a civilian cooperating with us on an investigation. Protecting her is everyone’s job number one. Okay?”

  Ray sank into the plush seat. “I hear you. I’m sorry. You know what you’re doing.”

  Lucas said, “Gee, thanks. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I can’t believe they’re sending me to Oregon. O’Meara is in Los Angeles. Daria is in Los Angeles. The fucking case is in Los Angeles.”

  “Yeah, but the plane crashed in Oregon.”

  Ray thought about that awhile, watching a low layer of overcast float by beneath the empty jetliner. “You know these assholes better than I do. Do you think O’Meara’s responsible for this?”

  “Could be. We just don’t know enough.”

  The Vermeer’s shadow rode a vapor roller coaster outside Ray’s window. The more he thought about it, the more Lucas sounded right.

  “Okay. I’ll check in from the Portland field office. We’ll go over the jet’s roster, see if any names set off alarms. Buzz me if Daria surfaces, will you?”

  Lucas said, “You got it. And, Ray?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We’re taking this seriously. Serious as shit.”

  FIELD OF STRAWBERRIES

  The air was heavy with the threat of rain. Clouds the color of bruises hung in the air, low and dark, packed tight enough to make complex, structured cloudscapes on their underbellies. And although no one had felt the first drop of rain yet, all the searchers in Peter Kim’s crew wore heavy raincoats and hats and rubber boots.

  The crew carried metal detectors. They were one farm over from the Wheelers’ and walking gingerly through a strawberry field, looking for pieces of the missing engine number three, sweeping the ground with their oval sensors. They had picked up scads of old tin cans, coins, and assorted screws and bolts. One of Peter’s team pulled up a steering wheel that looked for all the world to have come off a Model T. But so far, nothing that looked like it had fallen off a Patterson-Pate aircraft engine.

  Forty minutes into their search, they began to find the fuel Captain Danvers had dumped just before impact.

  SALEM HOSPITAL

  A seventy-year-old grandmother, Mrs. Nora Washington had been thrown from the rear of the jetliner—she’d been in the next-to-the-last row of seats—and had shattered her pelvis. Yet, somehow, she was awake and coherent at eight o’clock Wednesday morning, and the pain medication didn’t seem to make her loopy. Detective Chief Inspector John Roby decided to start his interviews with her.

  “Once a bloody cop . . .” the retired DCI muttered to himself.

  After getting her permission to enter the semiprivate hospital room, John pulled a chair over and began the interview. He had a notepad and a pen but he didn’t write anything down; that was for later. For now, his style was calm and conversational. He didn’t try to play down the bizarre events, didn’t try to lead her anywhere. There’d be time enough for that.

  For now, he just wanted to get her talking.

  “I was reading,” she said, her brow creasing but the large, square bandage on her forehead remaining flat. “I don’t know what happened first. I think I heard the explosion.”

  “My God.” John shook his head and made tsk noises. This interview would take more than an hour, but he’d go at her rate. That was the best way to get the whole story.

  FBI, LOS ANGELES FIELD OFFICE

  Lucas Bell hung up the phone and glared at it. He didn’t know why he glared at it, but it felt good. His office partner was tossing a plastic basketball straight up in the air, catching it, and tossing it again. It was how he concentrated.

  The dayside deputy assistant director—the commander of that Wednesday’s active investigations—rapped on the door frame and poked her head into their perfectly tidy office. “Any good news?”

  Lucas said, “No. No sign of the Red Fist of Ulster. No sign of the Gibron woman. Nada.”

  The assistant director shrugged it off. “It’s a big city, Bell. Be patient. Did Calabrese call in?”

  “Yeah. He’s in the air, almost to Portland. Do we have any link between the Irish and the CascadeAir crash?”

  “The Portland field office has gone over the roster. They say no. But it’s early days. They’re still looking.”

  “Good, good.” Lucas continued glaring at the telephone.

  Phil stopped tossing his basketball. “Here’s a question: why that plane?”

  The day chief shrugged. “What say we find out?”

  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.

  32

  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.