Reichs, Kathy - Fatal Voyage

At that moment I spotted Larke Tyrell waving at me. He pointed to his watch then made a slicing movement across his throat. I nodded and gave him a thumbs-up.

Telling Ryan that I'd take the briefing, and only the briefing, I zipped the remains into their pouch, made notes in the disaster victim packet, and returned everything to the body tracker. Stripping down to my street clothes, I washed and headed out.

Forty minutes later Ryan and I sat with meat loaf sandwiches in the kitchen of High Ridge House. He'd just voiced his third complaint concerning the absence of beer.

“The drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty,” I replied, pounding on a ketchup bottle.

“Says who?”

“According to Ruby, the Book of Proverbs.”

“I will make it a felony to drink small beer.” The weather had cooled and Ryan was wearing a ski sweater, the cornflower blue a perfect match for his eyes.

“Did Ruby say that?”

“Shakespeare. Henry VI. ”

“Your point being?”

“Like the king, Ruby is being autocratic.”

“Tell me about the investigation.” I took a bite of my sandwich.

“What do you want to know?”

“Have the black boxes been recovered?”

“They're orange. You have ketchup on your chin.”

“Have the flight recorders been found?” I blotted my face, wondering how a man could be so attractive and so annoying at the same time.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“They've been sent to the NTSB lab in Washington, but I've listened to a copy of the cockpit voice recording. Worst twenty-two minutes I've ever spent.”

I waited.

“The FAA has a sterile cockpit rule below ten thousand feet, so for the first eight minutes or so the pilots are all business. After that they're more relaxed, responding to air traffic controllers, chatting about their kids, their lunch, their golf games. Suddenly there's a pop, and everything changes. They're breathing hard and shouting to each other.”

He swallowed.

“In the background you hear beeps then chirps then wails. A member of the recorders group identified each sound as we listened. Autopilot disconnect. Overspeed. Altitude alert. Apparently that meant they'd managed to level off for a while. You hear all this and you picture those guys struggling to save their plane. Shit.”

He swallowed again.

“Then there's this chilling whooping noise. The ground proximity warning. Then a loud crunch. Then nothing.”

Somewhere in the house a door slammed, then water ran through pipes.

“You know how it is when you watch nature films? You've got no doubt that the lion is going to gut that gazelle, but you hang in anyway, then feel awful when it happens. It's like that. You hear these people moving from normalcy into nightmare, knowing they're going to die and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.”

“What about the flight data recorder?”

“That'll take weeks, maybe even months. The fact that the voice recorder worked as long as it did says something about break-up sequence, since power is lost to the recorders once the engines and generator go. But all they're saying now is that input ceased abruptly during a seemingly normal flight. That could indicate a midair disaster.”

“An explosion?”

“Possibly.”

“Bomb or mechanical failure?”

“Yes.”

I gave him a withering look.

“The repair records indicate there were minor problems with the plane over the past two years. Normal parts were reworked, and some sort of switch was replaced twice. But the maintenance records group is saying it looks pretty routine.”

“Any progress on the tipster?”

“The calls were made from a pay phone in Atlanta. Both CNN and the FBI have tapes, and voice analysis is being done.”

Ryan swigged his lemonade, made a face, set it on the table.

“What's the word from the body teams?”

“This is strictly between us, Ryan. Anything official has to come from Tyrell.”

He curled his fingers in a “go on” gesture.

“We're finding penetrations and a lot of lower leg and ankle fractures. That's not typical of ground impact.”

I flashed back to the gouty foot, and again felt puzzled. Ryan must have read my face.

“What now, buttercup?”

“Can I bounce something off you?”

“Shoot.”

“This is going to sound weird.”

“As opposed to your normally conventional views.”

More withering eye action.

“Remember the foot we rescued from the coyotes?”

He nodded.

“It doesn't match any passenger.”

“What doesn't fit?”

“Mainly age, and I feel pretty confident in my estimate. There was no one that old on the plane. Could someone have boarded without being listed?”

“I can look into it. We used to hitch rides in the military, but I suspect that would be pretty tough on a commercial flight. Airline employees sometimes ride free. It's called deadheading. But they'd be listed on the manifest.”

“You were in the military?”

“Crimean War.”

I ignored that.

“Could someone have given a ticket away? Or sold it?”

“You're required to show a picture ID.”

“What if the ticketed passenger checks in, shows ID, then passes the ticket to someone else?”

“I'll ask.”

I finished my pickle.

“Or could someone have been transporting a biological specimen? This foot looks muckier than the stuff I've been processing.”

He looked at me skeptically. “Muckier?”

“The tissue breakdown seems more advanced.”

“Isn't decay rate affected by the environment?”

“Of course it is.”

I dabbed up ketchup and popped the last of my sandwich into my mouth.

“I think biological specimens have to be reported,” Ryan said.

I recalled times I'd flown with bones, boarding with them as carry-ons. In at least one instance I'd transported tissue sealed in Tupperware so I could study saw marks left by a serial killer. I wasn't convinced.

“Maybe the coyotes got the foot someplace else,” I suggested.

“Such as?”

“An old cemetery.”

“Air TransSouth 228 nosed into a cemetery?”

“Not directly into one.” I remembered my encounter with Simon Midkiff and his worry about his dig, and realized how absurd I must sound. Nevertheless, Ryan's skepticism irked me. “You're the expert on canids. Surely you're aware that they drag things around.”

“Maybe the foot took a jolt in life that makes it look older than its actual age.”

I had to admit that was possible.

“And more decomposed.”

“Maybe.”

I gathered napkins and utensils and carried our plates to the sink.

“Look, how 'bout we stroll Coyote Canyon tomorrow, see if anyone's pushing up daisies?”

I turned to look at him.

“Really?”

“Anything to ease your troubled mind, cupcake.”

That's not how it went.

I SPENT THE NEXT MORNING SEPARATING FLESH INTO FOUR INDIviduals. Case number 432 came from a burned segment of fuselage that lay in a valley north of the main crash site. Inside the body bag I found one relatively intact corpse missing the top of the skull and the lower arms. The bag also contained a partial head and a complete right arm with a portion of mandible embedded in the triceps muscle. Everything was congealed into a single charred mass.

I determined that the corpse was that of a black female in her early twenties who stood five feet seven at the time of death. Her X rays showed healed fractures of the right humerus and scapula. I classified number 432 as fragmented human remains, recorded my observations, and sent the body on to odontology.