James Carol - The Quiet Man

‘Can I ask why?’

‘You can ask.’

‘But you’re not going to tell.’

Anderton smiled briefly. ‘We’re trying to find a way to draw the killer out. The last thing we want is to drive him any deeper underground.’

Byrne opened her mouth to speak. She hesitated as something occurred to her. There was a tiny smear of red on one of her front teeth.

‘Do you know who the killer is?’ she asked carefully.

‘No, we don’t,’ Winter said.

She turned her head to the right and met his eye. ‘You’re close to identifying him, though.’

‘We have a possible lead, that’s all. There’s still a lot of work to be done.’

‘That wasn’t a no.’

‘Rebecca,’ Anderton said, and the journalist’s eyes snapped back to her. ‘Stop digging. As soon as we have anything worth sharing, we’ll share.’

‘If you could get something to me before today’s deadline that would be really helpful.’

‘Stop digging.’

Byrne smiled. ‘Shall we?’

They followed the same route as the day before. The newsroom door was closed, but Winter could still hear the bustle and the raised voices. He could sense the chaotic energy that was being generated back there. Byrne stopped outside the door of the archive room. She pushed it open then stepped aside.

‘I’ll be expecting your call, Laura.’

‘You can count on it.’

They went inside and walked over to the shelves. April was in the first of 1991’s three volumes. He pulled the book down and carried it across to the table. Nathaniel Wood had died on April 21, so the logical place to start looking was April 22.

‘A car crash would cause internal injuries,’ Anderton said.

‘Another possibility is that he committed suicide by jumping from a skyscraper.’

‘Or maybe he was a parachutist and his lines got tangled.’

‘So we know the sort of thing we’re looking for?’

‘We do.’

Anderton crowded in closer. She was smelling fresh, like she’d managed to get a shower this morning. Winter was suddenly conscious of the fact that he hadn’t had one since yesterday. He flipped the book open and started turning the pages. Days and weeks flashed by, random headlines jumping out. Melodrama in a large bold typeface.

The lead story for April 22 centred on a nursing shortage at Vancouver General. Other than there being a delay in getting treatment, Winter couldn’t see how this might be linked to Nathaniel Wood dying from internal injuries. That was a stretch, though, a real clutch for a straw. All hospitals operated a triage system. It didn’t matter if you were on the frontline of a war zone, or in a small country hospital, or a large urban facility like Vancouver General, that was the way it worked. If someone was brought in presenting life-threatening injuries they’d get bumped to the top of the list. Staff would be found to deal with the emergency.

The story continued on page three and took up most of the space above the fold. The rest of the page was taken up with a political story, so that was a bust. Page two was a bust as well. Winter turned to the next page. The second he saw the headline his mind lit up with a whole host of possibilities. Anderton inhaled a sharp breath and exhaled a whistle. She glanced at him, looking for confirmation that her eyes weren’t playing tricks. He was looking at her, searching for the same thing. The left-hand quarter of page five had been given over to the story. The headline read: MOTHER AND SON IN MIRACLE ESCAPE FROM PLANE CRASH.

Winter scanned the story. The crash had happened on April 21, a Sunday. The plane was a small single-prop Cessna. It had been flying for forty minutes when it developed engine trouble. The pilot had sent out a Mayday then tried to perform an emergency landing on a highway. Witnesses told how the plane had come in steep and hard and tipped over. The pilot had died instantly. The mother and son had been airlifted to Vancouver General. At the time of the newspaper’s deadline no names had been released.

The crash had happened in the late afternoon, which was reflected in the way the story was presented. It felt as though it had been thrown together from sketchy information, like whoever wrote it was pushing a hard-and-fast deadline. This was backed up by the fact that it was buried away on page five. Newspapers operated a triage system too. If a big story came in just before the deadline then that edition would be rearranged accordingly. A plane crash was always going to trump a story about a nursing shortage. It had drama and excitement and a strong human interest angle. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite big enough for the presses to be halted. For that to happen they would have needed more deaths. If the plane had ploughed into a crowded building or taken out a coachload of tourists, that would have done it. But that hadn’t happened.

‘What do you think?’ Winter asked.

‘I think that an air crash would cause internal injuries.’

‘Me, too.’

He flipped through the pages and stopped when he got to April 23. The story had made it to the front page, which supported the theory that the deadline had been too tight the day before. There was a new angle, too. The headline read: AIR CRASH MOTHER IN COMA. There was a photograph of the wrecked Cessna lying on the edge of a long, lonely, straight stretch of highway. The wings had sheared clean off and the plane had come to rest lying on its side.

‘We’ve got names,’ said Anderton.

She was pointing to the first paragraph. Winter followed her finger. Nathaniel Wood had been named as the pilot and Gemma had been named as the mom. She’d suffered serious head injuries in the crash and been placed in a medically induced coma. William was named in the second paragraph. He’d been in the back seat of the plane when it went down. His right wrist had been fractured and he had some scrapes and bruises, but those were his only injuries. The reporter had called it a lucky escape. Winter wasn’t buying. William had gotten off lightly because the grownups had taken the best seats, while he’d been relegated to the back. This combined with the fact that his bones were softer and more flexible had led to him being able to walk away from the crash when his parents hadn’t. Luck had nothing to do with it.

Winter sped through the rest of the article, picking out the salient details. According to eyewitness reports, Nathaniel Wood had almost pulled off the emergency landing. Unfortunately, ‘almost’ wasn’t good enough. He’d hit the highway hard and, at first, seemed to be in control. The impact must have weakened the left wheel strut because a couple of seconds later it gave way and the plane rolled. He fetched the next volume from the shelves and went straight to August 5. Nothing there, so he went to August 6. Gemma Wood’s death merited two paragraphs buried on page nine.

Anderton pushed back from the table. She was beaming. Moments like this were rare. You needed to appreciate and savour every single second. It would be a crime not to. Winter had been chasing this guy for a couple of days and he was feeling pretty damn pleased with himself. Anderton had been chasing him for three years, so you could take that feeling and multiply it by a hundred.

‘William Wood’s our guy, isn’t he?’ she said.

‘He’s got to be. The fact that his mother died on August 5 can’t be a coincidence. The way I see it, with Cody and Myra, he was reliving the whole thing. I’m figuring that he somehow blames himself for his mother’s death. That’s why he had Cody trigger the bomb.’

‘It sounds as though you’re talking about survivor’s guilt.’

‘That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Guilt can be one hell of a motivator.’

Anderton let out a long sigh. She was still smiling, though. ‘I can’t believe I’ve finally found him.’