Steven Havill: Out of Season

“Did you get ahold of the Boyds on the phone?”

“Gayle said she’d keep trying. No one’s been answering.”

Looking outside, I saw Jim Bergin crossing the tarmac under the harsh light of the sodium vapors. He glanced skyward just as I heard the heavy drone of an airplane.

The radio came alive with the rapid, clipped lingo peculiar to pilots. I’d lived for forty years depending on radio communication and they still left me behind half the time.

“Bonanza niner-seven Gulf Alpha entering downwind zero-niner, Posadas.”

Janice Holman and her sister reacted as if someone had slid a cattle prod under their seats. I guessed that they’d heard three magic words-Bonanza, Gulf, and Alpha. The plane was the right type, and the two letters began and ended with Philip Camp’s registration.

“Oh, God,” Vivian Camp said. She was on her feet and headed for the door, colliding with Jim Bergin as he entered. She lost her balance and he caught her, and for a moment, they did an awkward dance in the doorway.

“That’s the UPS plane,” Bergin said quietly, still holding Mrs. Camp’s arm. “It comes in every day at about this time.”

As if to punctuate his remark, the voice over the radio barked something else about final for zero-niner, and we could see the bright landing lights coming in from the west. Vivian Camp wasn’t willing to accept Jim Bergin’s word. She stood in the doorway, clinging to the doorjamb and to Jim’s arm until the Bonanza idled across the tarmac and slowed to a halt. The brown UPS van pulled up beside the plane even as the prop windmilled, and then stopped.

Vivian Camp turned away from the door, and the sobs came in great, gulping waves. She and her sister sat together, and Estelle knelt in front of them, covering their clasped hands with both of hers.

“Posadas Unicom, Bonanza niner-seven Gulf Alpha departing twenty-seven, straight out to the west.” Bergin leaned across Linda Real and tapped the mike bar.

“No reported traffic, Ricky.”

The radio barked two notes of squelch as the pilot keyed his own mike, and then we could hear the powerful surge of the Bonanza as it started its takeoff run.

“JetRanger Triple Eight November Mike inbound from the south. We’ve got the traffic in sight,” another voice said, and Bergin looked across at me.

“There’s your chopper,” he said.

I breathed a sigh of relief, and as Estelle started to rise, I waved a hand. “Eddie and I will hook a ride out,” I said. “You’ll stay here?”

Estelle nodded. Janice Holman raised an agonized face and tried to say something, swallowed, and tried again.

“We should go along,” she said.

“No, ma’am, you shouldn’t. What would be helpful is to let Detective Reyes-Guzman take you back to the Public Safety Building. That’s our communication center, and anything incoming will go through there.” I tried to smile. “You’ll be more comfortable.”

That was a lie, of course. Neither Janice Holman nor Vivian Camp were going to be comfortable for a very long time.

The downwash from the rotors of the JetRanger tore up half an acre of New Mexico prairie as we settled to earth. A hundred yards ahead of us, caught in the harsh underbelly spotlights, stood Deputy Thomas Pasquale. Around him was the litter of what had once been Phil Camp’s airplane.

A flash of light caught my eye, a set of headlights from a knoll a quarter mile to the west. If it was Bob Torrez, he’d damn near driven faster than the Bell JetRanger flew.

Eddie Mitchell hit the ground like a marine, followed by Donnie Smith, one of the state patrolmen assigned to the Posadas area. But I took my time, gingerly groping for solid footing before I released my grip on the thin door frame of the helicopter. Dr. Francis Guzman waited patiently behind me. Even as we stepped away from the chopper, the state police pilot was spooling the thing down into silence.

Pasquale walked toward us, head down against the wind and the treacherous footing. Mitchell joined him as he approached. “No survivors,” the young deputy said when we were within earshot. “The pilot’s over there, just a few yards from where the engine block ended up.” Pasquale held up a wallet. “If this is his, then he’s Philip Camp, out of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I don’t know who the passenger is. I didn’t want to touch anything there.”

“Philip Camp is Martin Holman’s brother-in-law, Thomas,” I said. “As far as we know, he and the sheriff were the only two on board.”

Pasquale ducked his head. “The sheriff? You mean Martin Holman?”

I nodded and took Pasquale by the arm. “Let’s go see.”

Even as we walked the short distance toward the main chunk of fuselage, I could hear vehicles in the distance. Four sets of headlights appeared around the bottom of the mesa to the west.

“Make sure they park behind the helicopter,” I said to Mitchell, and then Dr. Guzman, Pasquale, and I continued toward the wreckage.

In the thirty years that I’d worked for the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department, I’d visited the scene of three air crashes. That certainly didn’t make me an expert. Within the next twenty-four hours, investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board would arrive and begin their methodical sifting of the scene. Maybe they’d have some answers for us.

I stood on a jumble of rocks, taking care to avoid the cactus. Within the range of my flashlight beam, the pieces of the Beechcraft Bonanza spread out like confetti, making a crescent-shaped scar at least a hundred yards long, maybe more.

Ahead of us, the chunk of the central fuselage was a tangle of metal and tubing roughly the size of a small, imported sedan that had been torn in half lengthwise. Neither wing was attached, nor the tail aft of the rear cabin window. It would take someone far more expert than I was to make sense of the mess that remained. The windshield and its entire framework, including all of the cabin roof, were missing, as was everything from the firewall forward.

“Christ,” I muttered, and stepped closer so I could sweep the flashlight beam over the wreckage. What was left of Martin Holman was belted to the right front seat, and the seat was twisted and bent backward, mangled with the rest of the cabin’s right-side framework.

I felt a hand on my sleeve. “Let me do this, Bill,” Francis Guzman said. I nodded and held the light for him, then turned my head so I didn’t have to watch.

“Thomas,” I said, “did you walk over to the east to find the first point of impact?”

“No, sir,” Pasquale said. His voice was shaking. “You told me to stay right here, and that’s what I did.”

“Good man.” I stood quietly and gazed off to the east. If Philip Camp had been trying to land, the Bonanza would have been traveling in the neighborhood of eighty to a hundred miles an hour when it struck the rugged prairie. If it had hit flat, it would have been badly torn up. But it still would have been recognizable as an airplane.

If the plane had plowed straight in, or at a steep angle, the wreckage would have pulverized itself in a “smoking hole,” as military pilots were wont to say.

As I stood in the dark and listened to Dr. Guzman’s ragged breath behind me, I could imagine only one scenario that would have resulted in this kind of crash scatter: the Bonanza had struck the earth at a glancing angle, perhaps one wing down, at full speed-perhaps upward of two hundred miles an hour, maybe more. If that was the case, there could be a whole handful of explanations that were obvious, even to me. And an experienced pilot could provide far more, I was sure.

I had never met Philip Camp, and certainly had no idea of what kind of pilot he was-careful, careless, a hotdogger, a man who flew by the numbers, or a man who didn’t pay much attention to detail. Martin Holman had mentioned in the previous week that his wife’s sister and brother-in-law were planning a visit, but that had been the extent of our conversation. I didn’t even remember the context of the discussion that had prompted the sheriff to mention the upcoming occasion.