‘Talk to him yet?’
Tom looked at him soberly. ‘Lenny, he’s in two pieces.’
‘You know who I mean.’
Tom shrugged. ‘Hey, I’m just first-on-scene. You know I can’t start an investigation without you.’
‘Just asking. I’m not saying you’d do anything you shouldn’t, Tom, you know that.’
‘I know that, Lenny.’
They both knew they were being lied to.
*
Twenty-seven minutes before Lenny Munro made it to Hangar Six, Tom had finally finished initial documenting of the scene. He hadn’t skimped and he hadn’t hurried; he’d made sure that everything he did was done with the utmost efficiency. He’d asked the manager to inform him when the Go Team’s scheduled Delta flight touched down from DC. Every time one of Hancock’s staff came close to him he held his breath, but he managed to finish before word of the arrival. He’d done his job.
Everything he could glean now was a personal bonus.
Tom packed his flyaway bag, then ducked under the yellow tape to where Halo Jackson stood, holding his blanket tight around his throat. ‘How you doing, Mr Jackson?’
‘Fine.’
‘You been to the hospital?’
‘I’m fine.’
Tom glanced at the young woman paramedic who hovered near by. She rolled her eyes, and her silence said, ‘Can’t force him to go.’
Tom shrugged. If Halo Jackson wanted to live in denial, that was up to him. All it did was save Tom a drive to LA County and that sick, miserable feeling he always got in hospitals. A doctor taking his blood pressure once told him he suffered from ‘white-coat hypertension’. Tom had been offended at the time, but once his ego had settled down he’d known the guy was right. Just being around doctors made him clammy.
‘Mr Jackson, the—’
‘Halo.’
Tom hesitated. ‘The investigators will be here soon—’
‘You’re not the investigator?’
Tom handed him his card: ‘I’m just first-on-scene – faster somebody gets here the better – while the Go Team gets together. They’ll run the whole thing.’
Halo nodded.
‘So,’ said Tom, ‘what can you tell me?’
Halo didn’t say anything at first, and that alone endeared him to Tom. Everyone had an opinion and most people couldn’t wait to share; he liked a man who thought about what he was going to say.
Then Halo Jackson shook his head slowly and looked straight into Tom’s eyes. ‘I have no idea.’
Some fucking bonus.
*
Munro and his team worked through the night, treading carefully around the worst of the drying blood as they started to number a thousand pieces of scattered metal. In the sunshine of the next morning they would go outside and log more. They would find a six-foot peel of engine casing creating havoc with commuter traffic on Sepulveda Boulevard, and a fan blade through the cab of an airport baggage-handling cart. The handler, Carson Holt, had been spared skewering by taking an illicit cigarette break. Later he would lose a day’s pay because of it, and wouldn’t even go to his union rep. Carson figured a hundred and twelve dollars was a small price to pay for escaping being pinned to his seat by flying debris, and lived his life better for a short time after that.
But for now the Go Team was there under the fake Hollywood daylight, starting the process of reassembling the plane so they could see what had gone wrong and where. It was a two-million-dollar jigsaw, with the pieces scattered in a half-mile radius.
But one piece interested Lenny Munro from the start: the quarter-inch piece of cigarette Tom Patrick had marked. Smoking was not banned in the airport for health reasons alone. More important – way more important to anyone who knew anything about flying – was FOD. Foreign Object Damage. It was a fancy term for litter. In most places litter was an eyesore; in airports it could be death. A knotted condom, a workman’s dropped glove, a McFlurry cup: any of these could get sucked into an engine and bring down a plane, and airports around the world employed teams of cleaners – preferably with OCD – to avoid just such an outcome from a bout of minor litter-bugging.
So, Tom Patrick finding a cigarette in the hangar behind the Pride of Maine was a big deal to Lenny Munro. A very big deal. A cigarette alone was not enough. But cigarettes came in packs.
And when he presented his Air Accident Report four weeks later, Lenny Munro – quite understandably – placed the blame for the loss of the Pride of Maine, the deaths of three engineers and the injuries to six more squarely on the shoulders of maintenance engineer Christopher Stern.
Husband of Vee, father of Katy.
And best friend of Halo Jackson.
3
TOM COULD FEEL the heat still rising from the floor of Storage Tank Nine, Amoco farm, Santa Ana. All around him, charred and twisted metal smoked like a dung heap. Although pipelines were not his thing, he knew instinctively what had happened.
Storage Tank Nine had been emptied of gasoline at 06:30 hours. At 15:45 hours, some careless asshole had pumped diesel into it. At 15:59 a stray spark – probably caused by poor electrical bonding during the doomed transfer – had set the latent gas fumes off like a little bomb, and the brand-new diesel had fuelled the resulting conflagration.
Simple.
And yet it would take him a week of collating forensic details and interviews before he could present evidence of what was already as plain as the nose on his face. Tom sighed. There was no fun in pipelines, only grunt work. Now, take that storage tank, fill it with fuel, electrical circuitry, four thousand moving parts and three hundred passengers, then set it on fire as it hurtled across the sky at 500 m.p.h., and he’d be in business …
He squinted at the sun, thought of the casino he’d seen on the way into Santa Ana, and wished he were flicking up the corners of his cards to check his hand. A tiny shiver of excitement ran through him – the same way just thinking of pickles made his mouth tingle.
