Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

Pace whistled softly. “Why didn’t you find this during the original autopsy?” he asked, more curious than accusatory.

“It’s not among the things we normally test for,” Jackson said. “I wouldn’t have spotted the needle mark. At least I wouldn’t have had second thoughts about it, if you hadn’t asked me to watch for anything suspicious. And I wouldn’t have tested for insulin if you hadn’t goaded me.”

So there it was, all laid out in a nicely corroborated package. Justin Smith becomes suspicious of the bird-strike theory. He takes his suspicions to Vernon Lund. And the same night he winds up dead of an overdose of insulin, administered to make death look natural.

Grimly, Pace told Sachs and Padgett of the medical examiner’s findings.

“What are these people hiding?” a stunned Ken Sachs demanded. “Who are they?”

“Well, Justin did come out here that day to see Vernon Lund,” Pace said.

“No,” Padgett responded. “With all due respect, Ken, Vernon Lund isn’t capable of ordering dinner without help, let alone somebody’s murder. And he wasn’t the only one who knew Justin was here and what he wanted.”

“Oh?”

“Sometime after Justin left, Vernon called me in to discuss the Times’ allegations. Elliott Parkhall was there, too.”

“Parkhall’s the one who strikes me as a little wimp,” Sachs said.

“The whole time we’re talking to Mr. Lund, Elliott is sweating and getting real jumpy,” Padgett said. “Then he starts raving about the press sticking its nose in where it doesn’t belong. He was quite agitated. Near as I can recall, he said something like ‘They’re all trash, and we ought to wipe ’em out every time we catch ’em at it.’”

“Jesus,” Sachs said. “You don’t suppose he took himself literally?”

“I wouldn’t bet against it,” Pace said.

Padgett was eager to get involved, so Sachs explained their theory about the amount of bird in the engine.

“That’s the most unbelievable thing I ever heard,” the IIC responded. “The power-plants team would have noticed.”

“Not necessarily,” Sachs said. “Not if they accepted at face value what was given to them. There’s bird all over the engine, therefore there must have been a bird strike. How much bird there is becomes irrelevant. It’s there. You accept that as a given and go on.”

Padgett nodded. “So what are you looking for in this pile of blades?”

“More blood,” Sachs said. “As my able colleague pointed out, if there was a bird strike, somewhere in here are the blades the bird actually hit. They should have blood on them. They should be as splattered with blood as those still attached to the fan.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Padgett acknowledged.

And so the three of them looked. They looked carefully, at everything. A few times they thought they’d found something, but the smears turned out to be caked mud or dried muddy water. At the end of an hour, they’d been through the entire pile, and there wasn’t a trace of blood anywhere in it.

Padgett got up from his couch. “I don’t even want to begin to believe this,” he said.

Sachs stood up beside him. “Neither do I. But I don’t think I have any choice. I think it’s likely that whoever sprayed the bird gore in the engine missed these blades because they were still scattered all to hell-and-gone around the airport property. Our conspirators couldn’t find them.”

Padgett and Pace both nodded.

“Jim, I want these blades moved downtown to the lab right away in a locked and guarded vehicle,” Sachs ordered. “I want every surface, every edge, gone over by every scientific means at our disposal. I don’t want there to be even a single, remote, one-in-a-million chance that some evidence of the hawk is overlooked. And you don’t have to explain to anyone why we’re looking. Tell them I authorized the examination and if anybody has any questions, they can call me. When you get the blades out, I want this hangar sealed until further notice. Armed guards around the perimeter. Nobody gets in or out without your authorization and mine. They have to have both, okay?”

Padgett nodded.

Sachs watched the IIC depart and folded his arms as though he felt a chill. “Well, the investigation was never closed, so I guess it wouldn’t be right to say it’s been reopened,” he said. “But it’s certainly gone off on a new tangent.”

“Not to be parochial about this, Ken, but when can I write the story? Once word gets out that Justin Smith was murdered, everybody’s going to be turning over rocks.”

Sachs gave him a rueful smile. “You can be parochial all you want. That’s your job. You can write the story as soon as the lab finishes examination of the blades. I’ll call you personally, and I promise you at least a full twenty-four hours alone with the story. If the lab doesn’t find any more than we found, it will be conclusive in my eyes that we’ve got a problem here. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough, if it doesn’t leak before you call me.”

“It won’t leak. You, Jim, and I are the only ones who know, and Jim and I aren’t going to talk to anybody. It won’t leak from the lab because nobody at the lab will know why they’re checking the blades. You’re safe.”

“Sounds like it,” Pace agreed.

“I wish I could say the same for the traveling public.”

“What do you mean?”

Sachs looked positively grim. “In addition to having a conspiracy on our hands, we’re back to square one in this hangar. If there was no bird strike, we don’t know what caused this crash, and we don’t know it won’t happen again.”

The floor of the United States Senate chamber was placid. Clerks and pages stood in place because the Senate was in session, though only in an official sense. The junior senator from Florida sat in the presiding officer’s chair, a duty he assumed because it was a trivial job at this hour, and when the job was trivial, those lowest in seniority were expected to assume it. Presiding over the Senate during the period called Morning Business involved recognizing members who wished to have the floor and helping rule on questions of parliamentary procedure. The questions of parliamentary procedure arising during Morning Business were never of any consequence. A high-school student-body president could have handled it.

In the rear corners of the chamber and at the doors to the cloakrooms, Senate aides with the heady prerogative to be on the Senate floor clustered to bask in the reflected glow of each other’s power and privilege. They might have been discussing matters as important as appropriations bills, but more likely it was one of the three S subjects: sports, scandals, or sex. Sharp eyes could pick out seven senators, each awaiting his or her turn to read into the official Senate record a speech carefully crafted to stroke the sensibilities of the folks back home. Since no specific issue was before the Senate at the moment, there were no constraints on the subject matter the senators chose to address. A visitor could come away with the impression the Senate heard nothing but occasional lectures on the value of farm subsidies, or the dangers of nuclear space garbage, or the progress of trans-Arctic dogsled treks, or the virtues of Billy Bob Keckaman, who had been selling electric widgets from exactly the same electric widget stand in Thumbsucker, Alabama, for sixty-four years without a dissatisfied customer.

If there was any substance at all, a speech might draw a reporter from a home-state newspaper. If the home-state newspapers didn’t have Washington correspondents, the duty to chronicle the oratory fell to a junior wire-service reporter, as the job of presiding over these speeches fell to a junior senator.