In NTSB terms, the back door was – fittingly – pipelines. For three months and fourteen days, he had been investigating pipeline leaks and fires across the continental United States. Pete hated like hell to lose him from planes, but jumping the gun on probable cause was a cardinal sin at the NTSB – and jumping it on live TV while bad-mouthing a dead millionaire to his grieving widow was always going to mean more than a slap on the wrist for Tom Patrick.
The Learjet was only his most high-profile foot-in-mouth incident. Just from Pete’s personal memory – and at fifty-nine his memory was not even that great – he could recall Tom being quoted variously saying that passengers in a stricken 727 were now ‘in little tiny chunks all over the Gulf of Mexico’; that the pilot of a wounded DC10 had saved the lives of all those on board through ‘brute force and ignorance’; and that a frozen-solid teenaged stowaway who’d dropped out with the landing gear over Casper, Wyoming, had killed a couple in their Ford Taurus ‘like a big meat popsicle’.
Pete LaBello was ten months from his gold watch. He and Ann were going to spend their declining years in Vermont and fully expected to live out their retirement in the same unspectacular way they had hitherto achieved in their respective careers. His time at the NTSB and hers teaching high-school physics were unspoiled by drama or particular distinction, and that was the way they liked it.
Pete liked Tom Patrick – he really did. But Tom didn’t make even that easy, and the closer to the watch he got, the more wary he was about putting Tom back on planes. At the same time, he knew he couldn’t continue indefinitely to waste him on pipelines when they so badly needed his expertise elsewhere. Which was why, when the report came in from LAX shortly after the Jetstream went down, Pete figured sending Tom Patrick north across LA instead of east to Nevada would make the fewest possible waves.
Pete LaBello was wrong.
*
Tom stood on the apron outside Hangar Six and looked around in awe. He’d been with the NTSB for eleven years, but the scale of plane accidents still left him humbled. And this one hadn’t even fallen out of the sky or ploughed through a city. This was minor. And yet there was barely a piece of flesh or metal left in the wake of the number-two engine that hadn’t been wrecked, ruined or wrapped around another piece of flesh or metal somewhere else.
The plane had been wheeled out of the hangar for an engine run, and had been turned at forty-five degrees to it so the turbulence wouldn’t blast the hangar clear into the Pacific Ocean.
He became aware of the huddle of men behind him, waiting for him to say or do something. The airport manager, Duncan Hancock, cleared his throat very slightly. Off to his left, the paramedics who hadn’t taken the injured to hospital were waiting to take the dead to the morgue. He recognized the looks on their faces: even though he’d shown his ID and it had been checked with DC by a doubtful assistant, they still thought it unlikely that someone who looked the way he did was about to undertake an official investigation into a vending-machine malfunction, let alone this.
He knew he should have gone home first and got what the manual called ‘appropriate clothing’ – but what the hell? Lenny Munro and the rest of the team would be here in an hour or two and things would be taken away from him again. Every minute was precious to him, so he was wearing the same tattered jeans and Hollywood Park Casino T-shirt he’d played poker in for the past thirteen hours. He had his ‘appropriate’ NTSB cap, and that would have to satisfy their sartorial suspicions.
Tom bent down and unzipped the flyaway bag that investigators were required to keep with them at all times. It was packed with everything from paperwork, through a department-issue laptop, to his gym kit. Not that he went to the gym – or had ever been to the gym – but the track pants and T-shirt were good for watching TV in any motel in the south-western United States.
He took the digital video camera from its hard case and began to record the scene.
As always, once he’d started, the rest of the world melted away around him, and he felt the low-level adrenalin drip that made this job not unlike an afternoon at the Bicycle Club.
Tom panned across the scene once, then panned back with the camera pointed up at the destroyed hangar. Then he turned a slow circle, taking in the entire scope of the scene. Glancing at the LCD screen to ensure he was getting everything, he started to move and talk, giving time, date, location and brief circumstances of the incident so far.
‘Six injured men have been removed from the scene to LA County Hospital. Two critical with amputations, two stable with open fractures, two with minor wounds and shock.’
He walked past the nose of the plane and into the hangar. The automatic aperture took a second to adjust to the gloomier interior.
‘This is body number one – estimated to be twenty yards off the starboard side approximately in line with the …’ he looked up ‘… main accessory hatch aft of the nose-gear.’
Still shooting, Tom placed a bright orange flag on a small weight beside the body. It was face-down on the cement. He zoomed in. ‘Few visible injuries. Minimal blood from the nose and minor cuts.’
He stepped over the man’s body, glanced up briefly to see where he was heading next, and stepped into the cool darkness of Hangar Six.
‘Body number two.’
Tom raised the camera to show the tattered remains hanging six feet up the wall on a hook made of twisted corrugated-iron sheeting.
When Tom was a kid the garbage men in his neighbourhood used to tie dolls and teddy bears they found in the trash to the front of their truck. Now he had to force that image out of his mind.
‘Body is caught up on metal sheeting presumably torn loose by the incident. It is approximately eight yards from the tip of the starboard wing and approximately six feet from the floor.’
He placed a second flag in the puddle of blood under the dangling black work boots and stared up at the body.
‘Cursory inspection shows multiple open wounds and massive loss of blood. Also …’ He stopped and squinted into the evening sunlight that streamed through the torn metal, then used the camera zoom to help him out. ‘Also a substantial piece of metal embedded in the lower abdomen, possibly a fan blade.’
He turned away and looked for body three. As he crossed the floor, he bent down and looked at something small and white. The stub of a cigarette. He marked it and moved on.
Nearby, the lower half of what used to be a man was sprawled on the floor beside a large metal tool cabinet.
‘Body three.’ Tom placed a flag beside a blue-coveralled knee. ‘Part one.’ He looked around him and found part two – the upper half of a man, his left arm severed mid-forearm, the right crooked across his chest, his eyes half closed and a spray of his own blood under his chin. Tom frowned as he noticed the man’s right hand – frozen with its two forefingers extended like a V for Victory.
He became aware of someone standing beside him, and turned to see a wiry black man in blood-spattered coveralls and a blanket. He was also looking down at the dead man’s hand.
‘Sir, you need to get back behind the tape.’
But the man seemed not to have heard him.
‘Scissors,’ he murmured. Then – never taking his eyes from the body – he held up his own flattened ‘paper’ hand to explain to Tom. ‘He woulda won.’
2
IT WAS DARK by the time Lenny Munro led the Go Team through the small throng of reporters and out to Hangar Six.
Tom had already arranged eternal daylight, courtesy of high-beam magnesium arc-lights. That was the thing about working in LA – the town was never short of lighting equipment. One team of paramedics had departed with bodies one and two, and the pair who’d lost the toss were now picking up the disparate pieces of body three and placing them gingerly in the black bags.
‘Tom?’
Tom looked up from his notebook.
Lenny Munro was a heavy-set man of forty-nine, with a ridiculous buzz-cut that he fondly imagined made him look like a retired astronaut, but actually made him look like the hopeless dad in a 1950s sitcom.
‘Pete told me he’d sent you.’ It was a statement of fact, but Tom could tell Lenny was pissed. What the hell? Let him be pissed. Tom wanted back in on planes, and if he was prepared to swallow his pride and be first-on-scene for a dick like Lenny Munro, then that was Lenny’s good fortune.
Tom rose off his haunches and shook his hand briefly. Lenny was flanked by two investigators in appropriate clothing – Jan Ryland, a slim, bookish woman in her early thirties, and Jim Crane, a tall, greying man with a salt-and-pepper beard.
‘Hey, Jan, Jim.’
They nodded – embarrassed to see him. Lenny Munro got down to business.
‘What are we looking at?’
‘Secured area. Most of the injured were removed beforehand. Maintenance crew was ten-strong. Three dead inside, six in hospital, all hanging on.’
‘What about the tenth man?’
‘He’s over there.’ Tom pointed to Halo, who was now behind the tape.
‘What’s he doing here?’
‘The paramedics have checked him out but he refused to go to hospital until his friend was accounted for.’
‘Where’s his friend?’
‘Right there.’ Tom pointed to the shapeless black body-bag being rolled into the nearest ambulance. ‘And there.’ Two paramedics carried a second bag between them.
