“And if the aorta was opened up, death would have been instantaneous,” Buscema said flatly.
“Just about. Seconds at most.” Francis held his thumb and index finger two inches apart. “You’ve got a tear that long. He wouldn’t have had time to do more than take a couple of breaths. That little piece of brass is like a fragment of a razor blade. Just unzips the artery.”
“He collapses forward, and down the plane goes,” Buscema said. “It fits. Before the passenger has time to realize what’s happening or to lunge for the controls. Bam!”
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered. “Eddie, I want you and Abeyta to put this thing together. Be goddam sure nothing gets misplaced. You get all the fragments and make a composite. I want to know what this goddam thing was. If it was a bullet, I want the caliber, manufacture, grain weight, everything. Rifling twist, everything.”
“Yes, sir,” Mitchell said, and Buscema handed him the plastic bag.
“It had to come from the ground,” I said. “Do you see any other way?”
Buscema shook his head. “There’s no other way that makes sense,” he said. “We need to know where the plane was struck. If a high-velocity rifle bullet punched through the aluminum skin, it wouldn’t be deformed or deflected much. But if it hit frame members, or cables, or the frame of the pilot’s seat, it very easily could be.”
“The entrance hole in the victim’s back was extremely small,” Francis said. “It wasn’t the sort of wound I’d associate with being struck full-on by a high-velocity bullet.”
“So it was a fragment to begin with,” Buscema said, and Francis nodded.
“Then we’ve got three big jobs, Mr. Gastner,” the federal agent said. “One, we need to put that airplane back together and find out just what the hell happened. Reconstruct where and how that bullet hit the airframe. It’s a comparatively small plane, but that’s still going to take time. Does the county have a vacant hangar we can use?”
“We’ll find one.”
“The second thing is to determine what kind of bullet it was. The Bureau has resources that you don’t, so I wouldn’t waste any time before calling them in on this.”
“I’ve already done that,” Estelle Reyes-Guzman said.
“Good,” Buscema nodded. “You got the bullet, and we find out where and how it hit the airplane. That leaves just the big one.”
“Who fired it,” I said.
“And why,” Estelle added.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Saying what we had to do was a hell of a lot easier than doing it. What Vincent Buscema wanted first was a telephone, and while he barked orders to whoever was on the other end, I sent Eddie Mitchell down to the airport to secure a hangar.
The vacant hangar was the easy part. The Posadas Municipal Airport had enjoyed a spurt of growth and activity back in the early 1970’s, when Consolidated Mining still believed that ore-rich deposits were available under the rugged slopes of Cat Mesa. Those glory days lasted for about a decade.
Three hangars now stood empty, and Jim Bergin handed over the keys to what he called CMCO-2. The sixty-by-hundred-foot hangar had once housed Consolidated’s Gulf-stream Jet, a couple of executive cars, and the hulks of half a dozen odd pieces of mining equipment that hadn’t made their way to the Consolidated boneyard up on the hill.
The machinery still remained, but there was plenty of floor space, blow-sand streaked, to lay out the torn pieces and chunks of Phil Camp’s Bonanza.
As soon as Buscema was off the telephone, he beckoned Estelle and me and we followed him into one of the doctors’ conference rooms. “First things first,” he said and closed the door. “That crash site has to be secured for the night.”
“We’ll have deputies up there,” I said, “and, I assume, some of your people as well. Everyone will stay on-site.”
He nodded. “Weather looks all right, so that’s a help. You got us a hangar?” I nodded. “Good. Now, here’s the problem. We can’t just pitch stuff into the back of pickup trucks and haul it down to the hangar like loads of trash.”
“I can appreciate that,” I said.
“I’ve got a detailed, low-level aerial photo being processed of the crash site,” Buscema said. “It’s actually a composite.” He framed a long, rectangular space in the air with his hands. “Over the top of that, we lay a clear plastic grid. Each square on the plastic grid gives us a square meter. That way, we can mark where each piece is found on the crash site. Where it comes from.”
“And then it’s tagged, and then it’s moved,” I said.
Buscema nodded. “Exactly. It’s a pisser of a process, but in a case like this, it’s the only way we’re going to make sense of what might have happened. Toss a homicide into an air-crash equation and all kinds of rules change.”
He took a deep breath and stood for a moment with his hands on his hips, regarding the tile floor. “Fortunately,” and he said finally, “this isn’t three hundred tons of shattered Boeing 747 that we’re handling. In comparison, it’s a little pipsqueak of an airplane that won’t take us long to move or to tag. And we’re starting off with a known fact, which helps just a whole hell of a lot. We know, with as much certainty as we know anything in this crazy world, that a bullet from the ground—or maybe from some other, unseen aircraft—took out the pilot. And then the plane scattered over two hundred yards of prairie.”
It was the first time I’d heard anyone mention the possibility of a second aircraft, and I looked at Buscema with surprise. “You really think there might be a second plane?” I asked.
“No, I don’t. Not a remote chance in hell.”
Estelle let out a long sigh. “It could be anything from a youngster firing a wild shot with a hunting rifle to…” She hesitated, searching for the extreme.
“Terrorists shoot down airplanes,” Buscema said. “Or try to.” He shrugged. “But not in the countryside outside of Posadas, New Mexico, I wouldn’t think. Not unless your Philip Camp or Martin Holman were very interesting to someone as targets.”
Holman would have been pleased, I thought, to have someone even briefly entertain the idea that he was something other than a former used-car salesman who had enjoyed a reasonably successful run as sheriff. International conspiracies had a nice ring of intrigue that would have puffed him up with pride.
I shook my head. “The odds of hitting a low-flying aircraft with an intentional rifle shot are pretty slim,” I said. “I’m not saying it’s impossible, but damn near. If someone wanted to kill either of the two men, there’d be easier ways to go about it. And who the hell would know where they were flying, in any case?”
Buscema nodded. “I agree. The books are full of all kinds of weird incidents that support this being an accident. Some hunter lets fly at a treed raccoon; the bullet misses the ’coon and connects with the Bonanza a thousand yards distant. Stranger things have happened.”
“There aren’t many raccoons up on that mesa,” I said, and as I spoke, both department pagers chirped. Estelle glanced at the display.
“I’ll get it,” she said and stepped across to the corner table to use the telephone.
“But there’s a witness to the plane in trouble, and we need to talk with her,” I said as Estelle made her call.
“You think we can be out there before dark?” Buscema asked, and I nodded at Estelle.
“Just as soon as she gets off the line.”
When Estelle hung up the telephone, she turned to me and said, “Bob Torrez said that they found one of the department cameras at the crash site. The sheriff had the camera with him.”
I frowned. “What was the other camera they said they found, then? One was sent down earlier with Tom Mears.”
“It belonged to the Camps. And there were no exposures on it.”
“And this one? Any film used?”
“Bob said the counter is on seventeen. And unless someone didn’t follow procedure, there’s always a fresh roll of film in the camera, ready to go. That means they took sixteen shots b
efore the crash.”
“Lots of if’s,” I said, remembering Martin Holman’s tendency to let procedure slide. “The camera and film are on their way down?”
Estelle nodded. “They should have it processed in an hour. Then we’ll see.”
I started toward the door. “While we’re waiting, let’s use the time to pay a call on Charlotte Finnegan,” I said, beckoning Estelle.
Vincent Buscema jabbered on either the radio or the cellular phone most of the way north on County Road 43, organizing the logistics of the operation that would transfer the remains of the Bonanza to CMCO-2.
We supplied night quarters in the form of the departmental RV for the officers who would sit the wreckage overnight, one of the benefits from a drug bust the year before. The thirty-two foot motor home, ironically nicknamed “Holman’s Hilton,” would make for a far more comfortable second night for Tom Pasquale and the others who elected to remain at the site.
County Road 43 wound its way up past the village landfill, the remains of Consolidated Mining’s boneyard and headquarters, and then through a long stretch of bleak ranch land before turning eastward to link up, well outside of Posadas County, with the state highway to Glenwood and Reserve.
By the time we passed the intersection with the ranch road that cut west toward the Boyds’ place, the sun had set behind the bulk of Cat Mesa. I gestured off to the west. “All this land, up to the back side of Cat Mesa, belongs to Richard Finnegan. Either that or he leases it.”
“Bleak,” Buscema said. The road started its long curve to the east.
“The entrance to Finnegan’s ranch is just ahead,” I said. “There’s a cattle guard on the left.” Estelle slowed the car.
“What the hell is there for cattle to eat out here?” Buscema asked, and I laughed.
“Not much. I doubt they can support more than one steer on two hundred acres.”
The patrol car thumped over the cattle guard and we saw the small iron sign, pocked here and there with bullet dents, with the name “Finnegan” cut out with a torch.
“She says she saw the aircraft from somewhere around here?” Buscema twisted in the seat, looking south to the back side of Cat Mesa.
“Apparently. It wouldn’t take long to cover that distance in a plane.”
“A hundred eighty miles an hour gives you a mile every twenty seconds,” Buscema mused, then added, “No telling.”
The Finnegans’ ranch house was a well-worn mobile home, its paint baked to faded dust by the unrelenting sun. The roof was dotted with discarded tires, black donuts that kept the flimsy metal from peeling off when the wind started to howl.
The location was picturesque in a way that Dante might have appreciated. The mobile home was butted up against a rock slide from the small mesa behind it. It looked like it might be rattlesnake heaven, a great place for kids to play.
A single elm, still alive because its roots were probably wrapped around the septic system, grew scraggly by the front door, its thin, lacy limbs just starting to show some buds.
Other than that, the nearest vegetation was creosote bush and a few token specimens of bunchgrass. The predominant crop was sand, and even that was too coarse to be of any commercial use.
Scattered here and there around the homestead were outbuildings of various sizes, shapes, and stages of repair. Three enormous rolls of black-plastic pipe rested against an old Dodge four-wheel-drive pickup. The truck didn’t look as if it had moved in a decade, but the piping was new, no doubt part of the never-ending projects meant to move water across the bleak landscape to a spot where it might do some good.
One lean-to housed a late-model Ford Taurus. The slot next to it was empty. Estelle pulled the car to a stop behind the Taurus.
“This place in August must be something else,” Buscema muttered.
“Delightful,” I said. “It gets hot as a blast furnace, but at least”—I paused to turn to Buscema and grin—“it’s a dry heat.”
“That’s nice to know,” he said. We got out of the car, and only when the last of the three car doors had slammed did the blue heeler pup by the front stoop push itself to its feet and saunter out to greet us. As if to demonstrate that it really didn’t care who we were or what we wanted, it walked right past us to the right front tire of the car.
While I knocked on the door, Vincent Buscema stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the horizon. He stretched out an arm and pointed to the southwest. “So it’s about ten miles or so, as the crow flies, to the south rim of Cat Mesa.”
“That’s close,” I said.
“Huh,” Buscema said, and thrust his hands in his pockets.
I rapped on the door again, but heard no movements inside.
“This might be them,” Estelle said. I looked past her and saw a pickup truck. The light was too poor to distinguish the make and model, but its ubiquitous shape was silhouetted against the dust cloud it left behind as it followed in our tracks from the highway.
The dog pried itself away from our car tires and greeted its family as they got out of the truck, its tail practically slapping the sides of its face. I recognized Richard and Charlotte Finnegan by shape, if nothing else. He was squat, broad, and flat-faced, his ruddy skin cooked to blotches and scabs in places where the sun could sneak a peek around the shade of his Resistol.
Charlotte reminded me of the long-suffering schoolmarms in those old black-and-white photos taken on schoolhouse steps around the turn of the century. She had probably been pretty as a girl, but time had flattened and angulated her.
Richard Finnegan let his hand drift along the top of the Ford pickup’s front fender, as if he were fearful that he might stray too far from its company in the presence of strangers.
“Howdy,” he said.
Charlotte Finnegan beamed a radiant smile that thirty years before would have been a stunner. “Well, hi now,” she said and waved. She walked over to Estelle as if she were half an hour late for an appointment, extending both hands to the detective.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, her voice dropping. “Just so sorry.”
Estelle nodded and held both of Charlotte Finnegan’s hands in hers. “We appreciated you calling us, Mrs. Finnegan,” I said. “This is Vincent Buscema, from the National Transportation Safety Board. He’ll be investigating the crash.” Charlotte reached out one hand and took Buscema’s, but she still held on to Estelle’s left hand.
“So what the hell happened?” Richard Finnegan asked. He shook hands with me, and his grip was enough to make me flinch. His skin was hard and rough. He dug a cigarette out of his shirt pocket, and the mannerism was a perfect replica of Johnny Boyd’s habit.
“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Buscema said. He disengaged his hand from Charlotte’s. She and Estelle stood side by side, hand in hand, like two old friends. “Ma’am, when did you first see the aircraft?”
“Let me show you,” Charlotte said, and she started off around the end of the trailer, dropping Estelle’s hand only when they reached the deep shadows near the hitch.
“You ain’t going to be able to see anything from there, Charlotte,” Richard said. But his wife ignored him. Standing at the end of the trailer, Charlotte indicated what was apparently a small flower bed, tucked between the aluminum of their home and the limestone of the rocks behind.
“It’ll be cool enough here during the summer,” she said with considerable delight. “I’ve never been able to have a nice garden, but I really think this will work. Don’t you?”
I realized she was talking to me, and so I replied, “I’m sure it will. Is this where you were when you first saw the plane yesterday?”
“No,” she said. “I was standing out by the car.”
“Maybe you’d show us,” Buscema said.
We walked back around to the front of the trailer, and Charlotte turned and started for the front door. “How about some coffee?” she asked, with the satisfaction of the habitual coffee drinker who knows that the time is perfect.
<
br /> “Sure,” I said. Vincent Buscema stopped in his tracks and looked back at me. He held up a hand as if to say, “Well?”
“Charlotte,” Richard Finnegan said gently, “they want to know about the plane yesterday.”
“Oh,” Charlotte said. She reached out a hand to Estelle again, and the detective wrapped an arm around the woman’s shoulders.
“Do you remember how high up it was when you first saw it?” Estelle asked quietly, and Charlotte frowned.
Estelle turned her around so that they were facing southwest. “When you first saw it, was it up like so?” Estelle lifted her free hand and held it at a steep angle, pointing at an imaginary aircraft well above the horizon, then dropped her arm down so she was indicating a level just above the distant trees on the back side of Cat Mesa. “Or down low?”
“It came along from that way,” Charlotte said, sweeping her hand from the west. “And right over there”—she pointed to a spot in the sky as if we would be able to return to that particular bit of air space at will—“it turned right up this way, then went back to the west.” She frowned and ducked her head. “And you know, it did that four or five times. Just great big circles like that.”
“When you called the sheriff’s office, Charlotte, you said something about the plane having trouble. Do you remember that?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Now Richard tells me that it was the sheriff who was in that airplane.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, that’s horrible,” she said, and I agreed.
“Could you tell that the plane was in trouble?” Buscema asked.
“It just reminded me of the county fair,” Charlotte said and nodded firmly, diving her hand down and then up sharply.
“That’s what the airplane did?”
“That’s what it did. Just like one of those rides at the fair. Swoop. And almost over on its back. Swoop. And that’s when I went in and called town.”
“The pilot was doing stunts, like?” I asked.
“And then he swooped right down behind that little mesa there.” She pointed almost due west.
“She told me that it was backfirin’ pretty bad,” Richard Finnegan said. “You tell ’em about that, Char.”
Out of Season Page 7
