“Wonderful,” he muttered. To his left, a piece of torn aluminum began a slow, easy roll toward the east. “Secure that, son,” he said, and Tom Pasquale jumped like he’d been shot. Buscema looked at me out of squinting eyes. “This is going to be holy hell,” he said. Wind tore at his jacket, snapping the nylon around his waist and flattening the large NTSB letters across his back…I could see the curve of his shoulder blades and spine through the fabric.
He turned and looked off to the southeast, where a small party of federal investigators and two Posadas County sheriff’s deputies were working. “At least we know something,” he said. “We’ve got the exact initial-impact spot, and the markings on the prop tell us that the engine was putting out power at the time of impact.” He hitched up his collar. “If they can find the missing propeller blade tip, we’ll know a little more.”
“You’ll tear down the engine?” I shouted over the wind.
Buscema nodded. “That’s going to take some time.” He thrust his hands in his pockets. “Compared to a jumbo jet or something like that, a Bonanza is a pretty simple airplane, Sheriff. It’s usually not hard to pinpoint a problem if mechanical failure was to blame. What we’re going to do”—he pivoted at the waist to look back into the wind and the sun—“is make as thorough a survey of this site as we can before we move anything. Establish the angle of impact, probable direction of flight, all those simple things.”
He grinned at the expression on my face. The jumble of junk in front of me didn’t look “simple,” even if the wind stopped shifting it around, but I was willing to take Buscema’s word for it.
“And then we take a look for the obvious things.” He held up an index finger. “Number-one cause of all crashes is pilot error, Sheriff. That’s number one. It’s a good bet that Philip…what was his name?”
“Camp. Philip Camp.”
“It’s a good bet that Mr. Camp made a mistake. That’s what the statistics tell us. If the weather had been really bad, with low ceiling, crap like that, I’d be willing to bet next month’s wages on pilot error. But this is a bit more complicated. It was clear and windy—not perfect flying weather, but still, not so bad. What we know for sure is one big, fat, humongous fact.” He paused and I raised an eyebrow to prompt him.
“He was flying too goddam low. The airplane hit the ground at a shallow angle. Not enough to skip like a rock across water, but pretty shallow nevertheless.” He shrugged and tucked a hand in his pocket. “If he’d been cruising along at ten thousand feet above the ground, this kind of violent scatter crash wouldn’t have happened.” He made a corkscrew motion with his other hand. “Let’s say something really bizarre happened. Let’s say he was trying to show his brother-in-law how he could do a barrel roll. He gets all crossed up, and the end result is that the plane sheds a wing. Or a serious chunk of empennage. What comes down is a ball of junk. Not smithereens like this.”
Buscema turned his back to the wind and pulled his cap down tight on his head. “I’ll be willing to bet that they were flying fast and low. You know why?”
“Because the sheriff wanted to look at something. That’s the only reason I can think of that explains why they’d be over here. Philip Camp had no reason to be curious. The sheriff might have.”
“That’s right. You know Martin Holman and his work better than anyone, Mr. Gastner. You told me that he didn’t like to fly. He didn’t like to spend county money. So he could have driven out here, couldn’t he?”
I nodded. “He could have,” I said, “but my guess is that time was a factor. He saw an opportunity and decided to con a free ride out of his brother-in-law. They could do in a few minutes what would take most of the day by ground vehicle.”
“And what the hell was there to see, anyway? Dust, open prairie, and an occasional herd of cattle. Hell of a thing to die for.” Buscema paused. “And you said he had a camera with him?”
“Yes. It’s been recovered. One of our deputies is processing the film.”
“Well,” Buscema said in dismissal, “don’t hold your breath.” He wrenched the bill of his cap down again. “Now, a lot of people will fly low to get out of mountain chop. You get down a little closer to the ground, right over the tops of the trees, and there’s better visual reference.” He grinned. “It’s more like riding in an old freight wagon on a bouncy road. But you’ve got stuff in your visual horizon and you’re less apt to get airsick. Way up high, you get to feeling sort of detached when you’re bouncing around. See what I mean? And it still doesn’t tell us why they were over here, or what they were doing.”
He took a couple of steps to his left and knelt down to look at a tangle of instrumentation and engine controls. “What we need to do is stick with what we do know. The remains of the cockpit controls make a few things pretty clear.”
He pointed first at one twisted piece and then at another.
“There were no flaps dialed in. She was flying clean. Trim was where we’d expect it to be for level cruise flight. Cruise throttle setting, too. Not maximum, not pulled back for descent. Just cruise, running right at sixty-five percent or a little better. Nothing unusual about manifold pressure settings, at least judging by the position of the controls. Prop in cruise pitch. Gear up and locked. Plenty of fuel, and fuel selector in the expected place. In fact, why he didn’t make a fireball after impact is only God’s guess.”
“Everything normal,” I said. “You don’t think that maybe the plane could have shed the tip of the propeller while in flight?”
“No, I don’t. I might be wrong, but the odds of that are a long shot. If that’s what happened, he would have slammed in some engine-control changes to take care of the vibration. And let me tell you, that would be enough to shake the engine right off its mounts in nothing flat. So, if he had half a brain and that’s what happened, we’d expect to see the throttle pulled out to stop, and if he had the time, maybe the prop pitch messed with one way or another. But that’s not what we’ve got.”
He touched a toggle switch. “At least not at first glance. The autopilot was disengaged, so the pilot was doing the flying.” He looked off to the east again. “Where does the woman live who first reported the problem?”
“Charlotte Finnegan.” I pointed toward a rugged knoll a mile distant. “Her ranch is another four miles or so beyond that, right on the county road.”
“And she told you that she saw an aircraft in trouble?”
“That’s what she told the dispatcher. And last month, she told the dispatcher that she’d heard two tractor-trailer trucks collide head-on just down the road from their ranch, too. What she really heard was a piece of tin blow off one of the shed roofs and hit the kitchen wall.”
“Ah…I see. One of that kind. But this time she didn’t explain what ‘trouble’ meant concerning the airplane?”
“No.”
“Have you talked with her since?”
“No. I haven’t had a chance.”
“Then we’ll want to do that. In fact, how about if we do that right now? Milliman will keep after this. I’ve got a hunch that the airplane isn’t going to let us in on any secrets. Maybe the medical examiner will.” He glanced at his watch. “Is your man pretty prompt?”
“My man?”
“The coroner. Is he going to make us wait, or is he on top of things?”
Doctors Alan Perrone and Francis Guzman were handling the initial examination for us, and it was clear that Vincent Buscema didn’t know either one of them.
“We’ll know the results as soon as they’re in,” I said.
“Then let’s go chat with this Finnegan lady.” He gestured at the hill. “It’s just a few minutes over there. This is a good time.”
I grinned. “There’re no ‘few minutes’ about anything around here, Vincent. And if we’re going to talk with Charlotte Finnegan, I’d like to take my chief of detectives with me.”
“Where’s he at?”
“She. And she’s at the medical center, where the autopsy’s in pro
gress. We can pick her up there and head on out. It means some backtracking, but if we want to talk with Mrs. Finnegan, we’ll want Detective Reyes-Guzman along, believe me.”
“What, she’s a Mexican woman?”
“Mrs. Finnegan? No. She’s just not the sort of person you’ll want to deal with by yourself. You’ll need the backup.”
Buscema looked puzzled, but let it go at that.
CHAPTER TEN
In the previous twelve hours, there had been enough vehicular traffic to wear a well-marked road across Johnny Boyd’s property. I could follow the route in my sleep, and just then, that didn’t sound like such a bad idea.
I drove south along the fence line to a gate in the barbed wire that Boyd had cut for us and waited while the federal investigator struggled with the wire closure and then walked the gate to one side to let me drive through.
He grunted back into the Bronco and slammed the door. “Does this wind ever stop out here?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’ll get so still that the windmills won’t turn for an hour at a time.”
“That’s something I’d like to see,” he said and peered out the side window as we skirted the first series of stock tanks, the water brimming over the rims as the eight-foot Aermotor blades spun in a steady blur. The area around each tank was pockmarked by the hooves of the cattle into a thick, rich goo about the color of chocolate pudding.
“Gets hot out here in the summer, I bet,” Buscema said.
“Beyond hot,” I told him.
For another ten minutes, we thumped along an east-west fence, dodged to the south again to cross a rugged arroyo, and then followed the base of a small mesa until we reached an established dirt road that shot due north from the Boyds’ home to another windmill.
By the time we had driven a quarter mile on their ranch road, the fine dust had sifted into the vehicle, pungent and cloying in the back of the throat.
The road led straight to the Boyds’ ranch house, and we kept the speed down while driving through their yard. Just behind the barn, we thumped across a cattle guard and pulled up onto the graveled surface of County Road 9010. This was barely a track and a half wide, but in comparison to jouncing across the open mesa, it was a boulevard.
We drove due east and before long, reached the intersection with County Road 43, the paved arterial that would take us to Posadas.
I paused at the stop sign and pointed to the left, toward the north. “The Finnegans live up that way about a mile. Remember the last cattle guard?” Buscema nodded. “All the land on this side of that fence line belongs to Richard Finnegan. On the west side, it’s Johnny and Edwin Boyd’s.”
“Big spreads,” Buscema said.
“With not much on them,” I replied and pulled the Bronco out onto the county road. Buscema hefted his briefcase onto his lap and snapped it open. For the next several minutes, he was engrossed in his paperwork.
We were still three miles north of Posadas, humming along on blessedly smooth pavement, when the mobile phone beside me chirped.
“Hi-tech stuff,” Buscema said as he watched me fumble the thing to my ear. With my other hand, I turned on the radio.
“Gastner.”
“Sir, this is Linda.”
For a moment, my mind went blank, but experience had taught me not to bother fighting it. “Linda who?” I asked.
“Linda Real, sir. Gayle has been trying to raise you on the radio and I’ve been working the phone.”
“We’ve been out of range on both counts,” I said. I didn’t bother to add that the radio hadn’t been turned on until that moment. “What’s up?”
“Estelle said it’s important that you swing by the hospital at your first opportunity, sir.”
“She’s got some news for us?”
“I don’t know, sir. That’s all she said. She did say that if we weren’t able to reach you by”—she paused—“seventeen hundred hours, we should send a deputy up to the site for you.”
I glanced at the clock on the dash. We’d saved a deputy a long, rough ride by six minutes. “We’re just coming down the hill past the mine. ETA about six minutes.”
“I’ll inform her, sir.”
“Thanks.” I dropped the phone on the seat and glanced at Buscema. “Something from the hospital. I don’t know what.”
Less than a mile from town, another department vehicle passed us northbound. It was Sergeant Mitchell, flying low. As he passed us, the radio squelched twice, and even before I had time to wonder where he was bound, I saw his four-by-four slow abruptly, turn around and charge after us.
“Three-ten, three-oh-seven.”
I picked up the mike. “Three-ten.”
“Three-ten, did you copy the message from three-oh-six?”
“Ten-four. We’re heading to the med center now.”
Buscema glanced at his watch. “Are your boys usually this eager?” he asked.
“They better be,” I said.
“Are most of the deputies locals? Homegrown?”
“Some are. Some not. Sergeant Mitchell, the hot-rod in our rearview mirror, spent about five years in Baltimore.”
“Now that’s a little cultural shock,” Buscema said. “What keeps him here?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I grinned at him. “The peace and quiet, maybe.” We entered the village and turned southwest on Pershing. I knew the hospital’s layout intimately after hundreds of visits over the last decade since the facility’s construction, and knew exactly how to save time and steps. I parked in an “Ambulance Only” slot near the emergency-room door. Mitchell pulled in beside me.
Estelle Reyes-Guzman was waiting for us. I introduced her to Buscema, and the federal agent’s eyebrows shot up for just a second before he nodded brusquely and recovered his composure.
“Francis is waiting in X-ray,” Estelle said, and we followed her down the polished, antiseptic hallway, made a shortcut through the kitchen and then took the back door to X-ray, avoiding the waiting room out front. I trailed Estelle and Buscema and noticed that the federal agent kept close watch on Estelle’s every move.
Dr. Francis Guzman was on the telephone when we entered his domain, and he glanced over at the four of us, holding up an index finger while he finished his conversation. “Sure,” he said and then hung up.
“This is Vincent Buscema from the National Transportation Safety Board,” I said. They shook hands and then Francis looked across at me. He was handsome in a rugged, bearded sort of way, and his dark eyes shared the same deep inscrutability as his wife’s.
“Dr. Perrone is still working, but I wanted you folks to see this prelim,” he said and stepped over to a polished counter. He picked up a small plastic bag and handed it to me. I took it and rearranged my bifocals so I could see the specimen, or at least pretend that I could. It appeared to be a chunk of brass, no more than an eighth of an inch on a side, roughly rhomboid-shaped.
“What is it?” Buscema asked.
“If I had to guess,” Francis said, “I’d say that it was part of the jacket from a rifle bullet.”
The silence that followed was so intense that I could count the gentle pulses of the air-conditioned breeze out of the ceiling vents.
“No shit,” Buscema said finally.
“Look here,” Francis said, and with one hand on my elbow, he pulled me toward the long clipboarded viewing wall. Several X-rays were fastened in place—vague, shadowed portraits of mysterious inner-body parts.
“There’s more,” Francis said, and he touched the first X-ray with the tip of his silver ballpoint pen. “As nearly as we can determine so far, the path of the bullet—or whatever it was—was at a steep angle upward. The piece you’re holding”—he turned and nodded at the plastic envelope—“is one of two pieces that ended up right here. The other fragment is actually quite a bit smaller.”
“And where’s that?”
“The track looks like it came up and unzipped the descending aorta, right below the heart. There’s a tear there that
’s nearly four centimeters long.”
I frowned and leaned closer, trying to make sense of the shadows and highlights. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Who was shot?”
“Mr. Camp.”
I looked at Francis in astonishment. “You’re trying to tell me that Philip Camp was shot? He was shot in his own airplane?”
Francis nodded. “It appears that way, sir.”
“By who?” Buscema asked, and immediately grimaced, realizing it was a stupid question. He waved his hand and then tapped the X-ray. “You’re saying that you found bullet fragments? Is there any way you could be mistaken?” He reached over and took the plastic bag from me, peering closely at the specimen. “It sure as hell is.”
“And even if it’s not from a bullet as such,” Estelle said, “it’s a piece of a projectile that was traveling fast enough to penetrate a considerable distance as it was fragmenting.”
“Did you look at any of those pieces under a stereoscope?” I asked, and when Estelle nodded, I added, “And what did you find?”
“I’m sure the fragments are from a bullet. One of them has what look like rifling marks. Really pretty clear. Eddie agrees.” I glanced at Mitchell, and he nodded soberly.
“Where are the rest?”
“Deputy Abeyta is with Dr. Perrone now, down in Autopsy. He and Eddie were cataloging each fragment as it was found. When I was sure of what we had, I sent Eddie up after you.”
I leaned against one of the polished stainless-steel tables. “So you’re saying that Philip Camp was shot,” I said. If I said it enough times, maybe I’d believe it. “What about Martin Holman?”
Francis shook his head. “Nothing yet. Nothing has shown up in X-ray. Nothing at all.”
“So,” I said, “from the ground?” I stood up and advanced on the X-ray once again. “Nothing else makes sense.”
“It looks like one bullet. It struck Mr. Camp low in the back, just above the pelvis. My guess is that’s where some of the shattering took place. At least two pieces continued on for some distance, stopping where you see them in the X-ray.”
Out of Season Page 6
