Flight ik-8

by Jan Burke

He tried to study the building. He thought of what the various rescue personnel had told him. The east stairwell, the one nearest Kerr’s office, had collapsed completely. The top two floors of the west stairwell had also sustained severe damage, but where the old and new courthouse buildings were attached to each other on the lower five floors, there had been less destruction. From that point downward, the west stairwell was, in fact, two adjoining stairwells, with connecting doors between each flight of the old and new. Each had collapsed in a different way. Portions of the stairways for the second, third, fourth, and fifth floors were inaccessible, but they were not reduced to dust.

  The bomb squad suspected that additional charges had been placed near the stairwells to close off escape routes to survivors. Or at least, Frank thought bitterly, to survivors on the seventh floor. The more damaged east stairwell had been the one they thought Judge Kerr would have most likely used.

  Another five minutes and he would have been inside. Once inside, it would have been hard to stop him from — from what? he asked himself. From dying in the blast? From being buried in the rubble? If Irene and Seth were trapped in there, what help could he offer, even now?

  Word came to him that the bomb squad had cleared the building. The technical rescue operation went into full swing — core teams of four to six members with highly specialized training, each supported by eight to twelve others. Using jacks and lifts and other equipment, they would shore up the collapsed structure, level by level — all the while trying to locate trapped victims, knowing every minute might be one a victim spent bleeding or crushed, suffocating or in pain, the likelihood of survival decreasing.

  He should just get the hell out of the way, he told himself. But he couldn’t make himself leave. Not when they were so close. Irene was a survivor. She had proven it again and again. Frank had to wait. He had to be sure.

  He thought of how much she hated enclosed spaces. Of all that Seth had already been through. Please, God, don’t let them be terrified. Don’t let them be hurt. Don’t let them be suffering. Don’t let them be…

  No, he wouldn’t even think it.

  After a time, he wasn’t waiting alone. He wasn’t entirely sure when it had come about, but Reed and Pete found him. Hale, too. Vince was still keeping an eye on the airport, they said, and would have been here if he didn’t want to capture Haycroft so badly. Frank didn’t want to capture him. He wanted to kill him. He would have gladly killed him for what he had seen in the last twenty minutes alone.

  Somehow Hale had made it possible for them to remain within this highly restricted area. They did not try to cheer Frank up with talk of miracles or try to buoy him up with false hope. For that, he was grateful. The waiting changed — his tension eased slightly in their presence, although they said little.

  Utter helplessness should not be discussed, he thought, even among friends.

  No, he told himself. There is something you can do. What?

  He closed his eyes and forced himself to think of the scene here an hour or so ago. In a second call to Irene’s boss, he had learned that she had had an appointment to meet with Kerr just before the ceremonies. Kerr was going to show off the new office for a few minutes, then walk down to the dais with them. She would have been there when the first small blast had taken out the telephones, though she might not have heard it, up on the seventh floor. She would have heard the second one — the one that had taken out the elevators.

  He was picturing the big window, Seth and Irene looking down at the plaza, seeing everyone seated in anticipation of the ceremony — but no, that’s not what she would have seen. She would have seen people being evacuated.

  “Frank?”

  He gave a start, then turned to see Reed Collins. Next to Reed, seeking support on his arm, was a weeping woman in her fifties. She was wearing business attire. There was something in Reed’s manner, in his reddened eyes, that made Frank want to stop time. He wanted Reed to stop walking forward with this woman.

  He knew what this primly dressed woman was. She was a harbinger.

  And he knew what was weighing Reed down. Sympathy.

  “No,” he said aloud, but he didn’t move.

  “This is Maggie…”

  “Maggie Koopman,” she supplied.

  “Kerr’s clerk,” Reed said.

  “I’m so sorry,” Maggie said. “It’s all my fault!”

  Frank looked at Reed.

  “She says Irene and Seth were with the judge when the phones got knocked out. She said she told them that they should stay—” Reed stopped, then rephrased it. “She offered to go downstairs to check on the problem, which she was convinced was a new-building glitch.”

  “A glitch,” Frank repeated dully, looking at the ruins.

  “There was no way of knowing it was anything else,” Reed said. “So she left.”

  “And the others stayed.” All these words were turning him to stone. He could feel it happening, from the inside out.

  “Yes. She’s sure of it. As it was, she went down to the first floor and then, of course, she wasn’t allowed to remain in the building.”

  “I told them!” she said miserably. “I told them, ‘I have to go back! Judge Kerr and a reporter and a little boy are still inside!’”

  Frank felt Reed’s hand tighten on his shoulder, and he realized he had swayed on his feet. He tried to steady himself, but found he couldn’t, and reached out for Reed’s shoulder with his own hand, bracing himself.

  “I told them, ‘You’ve got to let me go back and get them!’” Maggie Koopman was saying. “They told me officers were going through the building floor by floor, evacuating it, and that they’d make sure the judge and the others were brought out safely. But they didn’t!”

  “The guy they sent up to get them was on the east stairwell when the next blast hit,” Reed said.

  Frank looked at the ruins of the stairwell.

  “No,” he said. “No.”

  Pete stayed next to him. Talkative Pete, not saying a word. Reed took Maggie Koopman, mourning a man she had worked with for twenty years — whose death she was convinced she had caused — to where her daughter waited to take her home. Pete still hadn’t said a word by the time Reed came back.

  “We’ve left a message on your home phone for Elena,” Reed said. “Unless she’s been near a radio or TV, she probably doesn’t even know this has happened.”

  Was it a good thing or a bad thing, not to know? he wondered.

  Too damn bad, he told himself. You know. So think!

  He closed his eyes and thought of Irene looking down on the plaza, seeing the evacuation. He felt sure that she had done so. She looked out windows, and not only because she was claustrophobic. She was an astute observer. They both worked in professions where one survived by observing others.

  So Irene looks out on the plaza and sees the evacuation. A clerk tells her to stay where she is. And Irene — Irene stays put?

  “She didn’t stay in that office,” he said aloud.

  Reed and Pete exchanged a look.

  I know Irene, he thought. What did she do next?

  His thoughts were interrupted by the barking of a dog — a German shepherd wearing an orange vest bounded over to greet him.

  “Hello, Bingle,” he said. “Am I ever glad to see you.”

  “He’s glad to see you, too,” Ben Sheridan said as he caught up with his dog. He was wearing orange coveralls with “SAR” printed on the back. “Bingle wouldn’t forgive me if I didn’t let him say hello before we got started.”

  “Anna here, too?” Frank asked. Ben’s girlfriend was also a dog handler.

  “Our whole search-and-rescue dog team is here.” He paused, then said, “They’ve just briefed us.”

  Frank looked up but didn’t see the look of sympathy that Pete and Reed wore now. Did Ben know?

  “Yes, I know,” Ben said. “Actually, this little greeting ceremony has another purpose.” He smiled. “I told the team that you and Bingle are old friends. I stre
tched the truth a bit and said that you had already worked with Bingle on a search and that I wanted you to search with us again.”

  Frank felt a rush of gratitude so overwhelming, he couldn’t speak for a moment. He finally managed, “Thanks, Ben.”

  “Before you thank me, make sure you want to do it. Aside from the fact that it’s dangerous to be crawling around in a structurally damaged building, this work can be grim — even for a homicide detective. We aren’t expecting many victims, thanks to the evacuation. But many is not zero, and we may not make any live finds. And a person found alive may not make it — it takes time to get them out and the injuries tend to be severe.”

  Frank nodded.

  “Allow me to be ruthless, Frank. Whether the people they find are dead, alive, crushed, or mutilated, these dogs do this work because it’s a game to them — so I’ll have to respond to Bingle’s finds in a positive way, praising him, playing with him — and you have to get the hell away from him if you think you might start to give him any other kind of response. I don’t want you to deck me if I’m playing Frisbee with my dog a few feet away from your wife’s body. That’s one reason we don’t usually bring relatives along for these searches — it’s asking a lot of you.”

  “I understand.”

  “Then understand this, too — you can’t just focus on three people. That might be the hardest part.”

  “Let me help. Let me do something besides… imagining.”

  “All right. We’ll have to hurry — we’re expecting the bomb squad to let us get to work any time now. I’ve brought equipment for you — hard hat, goggles, radio set, work gloves, that kind of thing. Let me see if I can get you a set of coveralls. Nothing we can do about the shoes, I’m afraid.”

  “I’ll go barefoot, if that’s what it takes,” Frank said.

  Anna, Ben’s girlfriend, was an easygoing, athletic blonde. Still, for all her affability, she had a mind of her own, and Frank wondered if she would be angry when he showed up posing as a SAR dog handler. Like all of the handlers in Ben’s group, she took her work with the dogs seriously. But when he approached the group, she completely backed up Ben’s story. At one point she glanced at him, looking worried, and he realized that he had not factored in her fondness for Irene.

  Bingle knew his job so well, Frank had little doubt that his biggest task would be staying out of the dog’s way. Not so long ago, Ben and Bingle had lived with Frank and Irene — in the first months after Ben’s leg was amputated, he had stayed with them. Even after he moved out, they had seen Ben and Bingle often, so Frank’s familiarity with the dog now allowed him to fake his way along to some extent. The dog responded to commands in Spanish, a language Frank spoke fluently. Still, he was glad Ben would be nearby to “read” the dog — to pick up on all the subtleties of the dog’s behavior that were part and parcel of dog and handler communication.

  Some members of the SAR team were going through the remains of the new wing of the courthouse, but Ben and Anna and Frank were focusing on the stairwell between the old and new courthouses. Each person had been assigned a specific area to search. Other means of locating the missing would be used as well — but the dogs on this team had a high rate of success, so Frank felt the burden of doing his best to help Bingle.

  When Ben told him where they would be working, he had not been able to hide his own anticipation.

  “Yes,” Ben said. “If she was up on the seventh floor and is alive now, she’s on that stairway. But remember—”

  “There’s a big range covered in ‘alive,’” Frank said, thinking of some of the victims he had already seen.

  “Right.”

  They entered the darkened older courthouse through a doorway near an undamaged stairwell. This stairwell was some distance from the one they would be searching. They parted from Anna at the first floor. “You and Ben will start on the second floor,” she explained. “I’ll radio you if I need a confirmation.”

  Ben explained to him that if a dog alerted — indicated a find — another dog and handler would be brought in to confirm the alert before the next expert team of rescuers was called in. “It’s dangerous and difficult to do the excavation work,” Ben said. “So we want to be fairly sure we’ve got a real find before they start all the work that goes into trying to move slabs of concrete.”

  Ben reminded Frank of the basic commands and hand signals and of Bingle’s alerts. “He’ll bark on a live find. Otherwise he’ll howl.”

  Frank remembered to speak to Bingle in excited tones, to ask him in Spanish, “¿Estás listo?” — “Are you ready?” The dog looked at him and cocked his head to the side, as if not quite convinced Frank knew what he was doing. Frank remembered the proverb that it is impossible to lie to a dog. But after a moment Bingle seemed to accept that commands were going to come from Frank.

  During most of their walk through the empty building, they didn’t need to use flashlights or the lights on their safety helmets and could rely on the light coming in through the windows at the ends of the halls. There was no obvious damage in this part of the older courthouse, but the building would be thoroughly inspected before anyone was allowed to return to offices, chambers, and courtrooms. As they entered the corridor leading to the west stairwell, they were in darkness and turned their flashlights on.

  The air here had an odd musty smell to it, and Ben explained that when older buildings suffered damage, this was not unusual. “I’ve heard it’s caused by all the accumulated dust up in ceilings and on pipes and on any other surface that hasn’t been mopped or vacuumed for fifty years.”

  Bingle did not seem to be bothered by the dust or the darkness, but they hadn’t gone far down the corridor before Frank sensed a change in the dog. Bingle’s ears were up and pitched forward, he carried his tail erect and walked high on his toes. He seemed to be both focused on something and excited.

  Suddenly he looked intently at first Frank, then Ben. Rascal, the dog Ben was handling — one of Anna’s Labradors — was reacting to something, too.

  “He’s alerting, isn’t he?” Frank said. “¡Búscalos! Find ’em, Bingle!”

  Bingle strained on the lead, now in the spirit of things. They reached the edge of a pile of rubble, and Bingle pushed his nose into a crevice between two pieces of concrete, then lifted his head back.

  “Frank,” Ben said suddenly, but he was too late.

  Bingle began to howl.

  53

  Friday, July 14, 1:31 P.M.

  Courthouse Stairwell

  It could be anyone, he told himself.

  He braced himself as he took a closer look, while Ben called Bingle aside and praised the dog lavishly. He was grateful to Ben for taking over that responsibility for him.

  Impossible to lie to a dog.

  In among the jagged pieces of gray concrete that spilled down the older portion of the stairs, he saw a woman’s black dress shoe. He closed his eyes for a moment, then forced himself to keep looking, letting the light seek the owner of the shoe. It suddenly illuminated a length of dark hair, which he then saw was attached to a loose piece of scalp, which was lying a few inches from a crushed skull and a remarkably pale but unscathed hand.

  He fought a wave of nausea. He heard a screaming inside his head and wondered for a brief moment if he had screamed aloud.

  Ben was playing with Bingle but watching Frank. Frank heard Ben’s voice catch, even as he kept telling the dog he was handsome and smart. The shepherd paraded past Frank with a floppy toss-toy, then came back and nudged him with it.

  “He’s just… he’s only trying to engage you in his game.”

  Engage. Frank looked up at Ben suddenly and then forced himself to look again into the crevice. He saw that the hand was a well-manicured left hand with no rings on it. Irene had short nails and was never without her wedding and engagement rings.

  “It’s not her,” he choked out. “It’s not Irene.”

  They radioed in what little description of the dead woman they could pro
vide and set a marker. Removing the dead was, necessarily, a lower priority than looking for survivors. Anna hadn’t found anyone on the first floor and had already moved up to the third. Once Ben was satisfied there were no other victims on this level, they retraced their way to the intact stairwell and were almost up to the fourth floor when Anna radioed that she needed a confirmation. She could see one male victim, but she was not sure if there was a second — in another area, she was getting a vague alert from Devil, the dog she was handling.

  When they arrived, she said, “Shouldn’t be hard to ID the one male. He’s wearing an eye patch.”

  “Whitey Dane,” Frank said even before he managed to get a look at him. Dane’s chest had been crushed by a section of wall that had fallen in on him. “What the hell was he doing here?” He looked up at Anna. “Myles Volmer or one of his other bodyguards can’t be too far away.”

  Frank saw that on this floor, unlike the one below, the connecting door to the newer stairwell was open, although several chunks of concrete lying across it now made it half its normal size. Bingle seemed interested in this space. So while Ben and Anna worked with Devil and Rascal, Frank cautiously crawled into the remaining opening and flashed his light around. He was relieved not to find a long drop on the other side. He was looking at the landing of the newer stairwell now and saw that it had less debris on it than its counterpart in the older building. It formed a cavern of sorts — the stairs above and below appeared to be impassable, but this space was relatively open, making it the largest “void space” he had seen along the stairwell.

  He moved through the opening to the landing on the other side of the door, then helped Bingle scramble through. Bingle was no sooner on the landing than he cocked his head back and forth, as if listening to something. He immediately tried to make it up the stairs, whining when he could not get through, then barking sharply. It echoed loudly in the enclosed space.

  “Bingle — ¡Quieto!”

  The dog looked back at him, then up at the stairs, whining.

  Ben’s face appeared at the opening. “What’s going on?”