Crashers

by Dana Haynes

  “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.”

  INTERSTATE 5, VANCOUVER, WASHINGTON

  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.

  PORTLAND INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  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 th
ere,” 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.

  MULTNOMAH COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE, PORTLAND

  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.

  33

  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.

  Another reporter elbowed her way to the front. “Have you ruled out a bomb?”

  Are you deaf? she thought, and smiled serenely. “Too early to tell. We have ruled out nothing whatsoever. Again, we know the Vermeer One Eleven is on the ground. We don’t know why. I can tell you that in the past decade, nearly a third of all U.S. aircraft accidents have resulted from a loss of control, suggesting mechanical failure. About twelve percent have been categorized as ‘controlled flight into terrain,’ suggesting pilot error or an error with the avionics instruments. Naturally, we’re keeping an eye on both possibilities, and an eye on all other possibilities. I don’t know how many of you know this, but we tend to think of Arthur Conan Doyle as the patron saint of the NTSB. We’re guided by his famous dictum: when the impossible has been ruled out, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. So for now, we’re in the ruling-out-the-impossible phase.”

  The next volley of questions, predictably, focused on terrorism: bombs and missiles being the villains du jour. “Why is the FBI interviewing survivors?” someone asked.

  That would be John Roby at the Salem Hospital, Susan realized. “They’re not. The passengers are being interviewed by our team. Next?”

  The questions went on for another twenty minutes. As the press conference was breaking up, the devastatingly handsome anchorman for one of the local network affiliates walked up and flashed Susan his thermodynamic TV smile. “Hi. Quick question?”

  Susan smiled politely.

  “We’re always looking for experts who can appear on our newscast, to lend a little authenticity to the reports.”

  “Yes?”

  He flipped open a notepad. “How do we contact this Arthur Doyle guy?”

  SALEM HOSPITAL

  “I don’t remember much,” said the fourteen-year-old girl in the spinal brace. Her words were slurred by painkillers and the fact that three of her teeth were missing. “I was reading People. There was an article about Rob Pattinson. Then I woke up here.”

  The interrogator asked her three more questions, but gave up as her eyelids fluttered. She was asleep before the man stood.

  He turned.

  Another man, smallish, maybe five-eight, stood in the doorway. He wore khakis and field boots, plus a navy-blue NTSB windbreaker.

  “Cheers. John Roby. We met?”

  The interrogator swore to himself and presented his own ID. “Tom Daystrom. FBI.”

  The newcomer, an Englishman, frowned. “Yeah? To what do we owe the honor?”

  Agent Daystrom held up both hands. “Hey, don’t bust my chops, okay? I know I’m poaching here. But I’ve never worked a major disaster before. You know? I figured it’d be good training. Besides, I thought you guys could use the help.”

  “Decent of you,” the Englishman replied. “You don’t mind if I call this in to the powers that be, do you?”

  Agent Daystrom winced. “You do, and my supervisor will yank me out of here. He’s a real by-the-book type.”

  John Roby paused, then smiled. “Sure, mate. The help’s appreciated, init. I’ll take the other side of the corridor and we’ll compare notes in, say, two hours?”

  “You got it,” Daystrom said and offered his hand.

  As soon as Daystrom was gone, John slipped on his satellite phone headset and called Kiki Duvall, who’d been interviewing victims at hospitals in Portland.

  “Oh God, John,” she said after he identified himself. “This is horrible. Most of these people don’t remember diddly-squat. And those who do are trying to forget it. Until I get into their faces, that is. I hate this.”

  John chose not to remind her that, like himself, she’d volunteered to interview survivors. “Same here. By the by, any sign of the FBI?”

  From the short pause, he knew the answer before she spoke. “Yes. I just ran into an agent who said he was volunteering to help because—”

  “Because he’d never worked a disaster before?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Same here,” John said. “Something’s not right.”

  “You think? FAA’s doing more than they’re legally required to do. Tommy had those firefighters and paramedics working through the n
ight. Maybe the FBI really wants to help.”

  John shrugged, as if she could see him. “Dunno, love. Could be. I never poached on another agency’s investigation without clearing it, though. Stupid. Kind of thing that gets court cases all smudged up. Think I should call Tommy, just to be on the safe—”

  “Hold it,” Kiki cut in. “I’ve got a call coming in. I’ll be right back.”

  A subtle hiss of white noise told John he’d been put on hold. The line clicked. “John? That was Isaiah. The swap-out plane is here. I’m heading out to the airport.”

  “Right. Good luck. And sing out if you bump into any more FBI.”

  Kiki said, “You bet,” and rang off.

  PORTLAND INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

  Isaiah Grey waited for the pilot to open the door of the swap-out Vermeer 111. They’d parked the giant airliner near the Alaska Airlines maintenance hangar, within the airport’s security perimeter and out of sight of the passengers and other civilians in the terminal. Isaiah had ridden a motorized ladder attached to the equivalent of a golf cart out to the site. The wind was brisk and he held on to the steel railing until the door opened.

  “Isaiah?” The swap-out pilot beamed and offered a hand. Isaiah stepped into the jet and pumped the man’s hand, pulling him in until their chests touched.

  “Jesus, they let you in the left-hand seat? Hell in a handbasket.”

  The pilot grinned. “Retiring next year. The steelheads are calling my name. So what are you doing hanging out with these ghoulish crash chasers?”

  Before he could reply, Isaiah noticed a passenger standing up in the first-class section. The man was athletically built and wore a white dress shirt with a black tie. He was turned with his back to the door, and Isaiah saw something he had never before seen on any civilian airplane: the man had a small, matte black automatic pistol clipped to his belt.