Hard Fall Part 9

Patrol cars continued to roll in from nearly every L.A. division. CHP had sealed the exit and entrance ramps to the San Diego Freeway. Inglewood cars had already shut down several streets, isolating a huge crime scene into which pa.s.sed only rescue vehicles and other cops. Daggett paid the cab and walked, his badge hanging open from his s.h.i.+rt pocket. Had to be a hundred cops already. Impressive. They had created a press area that had a good view of the wreckage and the rescue efforts; it was already teeming with cameras and bright lights.

"Officer!" one of the reporters called out. But a man in a suit, whom Daggett took for the press relations sergeant, waved this man back, allowing Daggett to proceed.

When such devastation is reduced to the size of a television screen, he thought, all effect is lost in translation. The fire trucks there were dozens of them seemed tiny next to the torn and flaming fuselage. From his window seat on the plane, the disfiguring of the landscape caused by the crash had taken the appearance of an exaggerated teardrop. But on the ground, at eye level, the wreckage seemed to stretch from where Daggett stood clear to the horizon.

It was only upon closer inspection that Daggett realized the clutter was not suitcases and baggage, but cardboard boxes of every shape and size, their contents spread about like litter. Air freight? Not pa.s.sengers? Daggett, carried away by a flood of relief, ran toward the debris. A fireman caught up to him and turned him around, briefly confused as he saw Daggett's FBI s.h.i.+eld.

"Bodies?" Daggett inquired.

"Only two, so far as I've heard. But we haven't been able to get close enough to confirm that." He pointed out a number of twisted fifty-five gallon drums strewn about the burning landscape. From this distance, they looked like crushed aluminum beer cans. "One of our boys got too close to one of those drums. He's on his way to the hospital at the moment. Some kind of chemical in those things. It's all over the place."

"Chemicals?" Daggett couldn't keep the excitement out of his voice. The possible linkage to Der Grund seemed blatantly obvious.

The man looked at him oddly and said, "We're holding everyone back until we know what the h.e.l.l we're dealing with."

In the birthplace of Disneyland and Close Encounters, this must have seemed like a free show. Daggett walked toward a group of men standing near detective cars. These would be the guys in charge. A mud-brown four door Chrysler pulled to a stop at this same moment. The first person out of the car's backseat was Phil Huff. Daggett cringed. Now the fun began.

Huff was Daggett's age but looked a few years older because of a receding hairline and too much time in the sun.

Huff's round face kept his brown eyes wide apart, leaving some hairy acreage above a sharp nose that had seen enough knuckles to carry ring scars, and giving him the calculating look of a meat inspector. He had lost some weight in the last few weeks, taking the clumsiness out of him. He wore a new poplin suit and a brown bow tie embroidered with forest green fleurs-delis He carried a cigarette caught between his fingers that went unlit. When his hands were busy, he stuck the weed away behind his fuzzy-haired right ear. The two men had met on a refresher course at the FBI center in Quantico, Virginia. Huff had been a former homicide cop from Baltimore.

The hardness in Huff's eyes and his erect posture told Daggett it was the same Phil Huff: aggressive, intuitive, with the instincts and timing of a cornered snake. The wind s.h.i.+fted, carrying traces of the billowing smoke. The smell stopped Daggett, for it had the whiff of death in it.

Huff's voice came over his shoulder. "Hey there, Cameron he said, knowing Daggett preferred Cam to Cameron Daggett offered his hand; Huff switched the unlit cigarette to his left and the two men shook. Huff had the handshake of a butcher he needed to prove something. Huff tucked the cigarette away. "No need for them to send some one, Daggett. Especially you." He smiled the practiced smile of an insurance agent about to talk you into additional, unnecessary coverage.

"Guess Pullman sees it a little differently," Daggett fired back. In fact, Pullman hadn't known about this incident until a few minutes earlier.

"You're looking a little gray around the gills. You handled Bernard real well, I hear. Wha'd you do, send flowers to Backman's widow or what?"

"Is this the way it's going to be, Phil? I could be asking you how your guys lost Bernard in the first place." Huff blanched, and didn't have a quick retort. Daggett asked, "Have you heard anything about chemicals being on board?"

Huff shook his head. "Nothing."

"That's what one of the firemen told me. See those cans out there?"

"Haven't heard a thing about it." Huff didn't seem a bit interested.

Understanding the importance of this investigation to his own, Daggett asked, "What about the NTSB? Where do we stand?" The National Transportation Safety Board was responsible for the investigation of all commercial aircraft incidents, and, as such, oversaw the orchestration of the various investigative agencies involved, including the FBI. In nearly any other kind of investigation, the FBI took and maintained control. But not here. Not today. The fact that Huff would act as liaison and representative for the agency seemed dangerous to Daggett. The Bureau's reputation was about to slip a notch. Huff only knew how to be concertmaster; to him, the second chair was a foreign country.

"If we can give them proof of criminal intent, then it's ours," Huff said, returning the unlit cigarette to his lips, where it bobbed as he spoke. "And I suppose that's where you come in, right? A guy wouldn't come all the way out here from Buzzard Point and stick his nose in one of my investigations unless there was d.a.m.n good reason, now would he? Buzzard Point being so busy and so secret and all."

Buzzard Point was busy, but no more so than any other major metropolitan field office.

"How many of us will there be?" Daggett asked. The only crash site he'd been part of had been EuroTours 1023, and then, arriving more than seventy two hours late, and only as a civilian in a foreign country. A complete outsider. He knew the general procedure of such investigations, the hierarchy and basic structure of command, because of his a.s.sociation with and training for service with C-3 at Buzzard Point, but now found himself hungry for details.

"A trailer is being brought on site," Huff explained. "NTSB and Inglewood Police will operate out of it for the next several days. Right now we got every police division represented from West Hollywood to the Sheriff's Department. It's mostly uniforms for crowd control. FAA is sending a team, so is AmAirXpress, a General Electric engine team, a Duhning team, Alcohol Tobacco will send us a bomb sniffing group, Airport Police are loaning us some dogs in the meantime. County coroner, maybe a couple of fire marshals. I'd say we can expect a half-dozen insurance investigators. All told, sixty-some investigators minimum, maybe reach that by late tomorrow. As long as it remains an 'accident,"" he said, drawing the quotes, "then I'm supposed to sit in the back row and suck my thumb "

"Or your cigarette," Daggett said, watching the thing tick in the man's lips as he spoke.

"But if you got something right now tying this to Bernard, or one of his contacts something hard we can hand these guys then we tap their shoulder and do the dance."

Which is exactly what you would love, Daggett thought, but kept from saying.

"Your being here means terrorism is involved. A plane goes down .. . You fall out of the sky at about the same minute .. . You're not here by coincidence, are you?"

"You're lightning fast, Phil. I'll say that."

Huff's lips puckered like the end of a string bag coming closed as he took a drag on the unlit cigarette. "So are we talking suspect, or what? Is that why you're so interested in these chemicals?"

Daggett savored the moment by speaking exceptionally slowly. "What I'm allowed to tell you ... is nothing. Zero." And then he smiled.

The L.A. uniforms did a better job than he had expected of clearing the curious, keeping traffic out, confining the press in their a.s.signed area and giving the firefighters room to work. "It's because of this neighborhood," one of the cops explained to him. "Guys out here are probably the best street cops in the state. Closing off a block, they do two three times a week. We are constantly chasing down a shooter or a dealer. And I mean constantly. Same thing with the crowds and ditto with the traffic. It's a war zone out here.. .. Not this exact neighborhood these are your middle-cla.s.s blacks right around here but only a few blocks away is real trouble. Far as we're concerned, this is just another night in the City of Angels. f.u.c.kin' Pebble Beach this is not."

A plain vanilla car pulled in behind Huff's and something made Daggett look. Huff glanced over his shoulder, "That'll be the FAA."

As Daggett saw the face through the faintly tinted gla.s.s of the rear window, he looked around quickly for a place to hide a foolish reaction, but unavoidable. At the sight of her, he could almost feel the hot sun baking his skin, could smell the distinctive perfume of suntan lotion. When he checked one more time just to make sure she was looking back at him, eyes hopeful and full of excitement. Lynn Greene opened her door and slid her legs out first, holding her skirt and then coming out of the car like an actress curbside at the Oscars.

Huff explained unnecessarily, "That is their explosives expert, if you can believe it."

"I can believe it," Daggett answered.

He is sitting in the sixth row, a couple seats in from the aisle. The man at the podium is in the midst of a lecture on Progress in Plastics, which ends up a history of plastic explosives. A bone-thin man with virtually no hair and an aging voice that's impossible to hear, he quickly loses the attention of those in attendance.

Daggett spots a profile in the third row that he finds much more interesting than the Jecture. She has high cheekbones, a Roman nose, and a funny little smile. She's dark and bashful, blus.h.i.+ng over something the woman in the seat next to her has whispered. And when she glances over her shoulder at him, like a teenager in Algebra II, he understands they are talking about him and he feels a warm flash of embarra.s.sment and l.u.s.t pulse through him. They both quickly look away.

The lecture continues and he wonders how he can introduce himself. This is the last course of the three-day seminar and he can't believe he didn't notice her until now. He experiences a brief flirtation with guilt; he's been with Carrie only six months and here he is plotting a way to meet this total stranger. Mentally undressing her. He convinces himself it's a healthy reaction to a boring lecture, and when they are finally dismissed he sticks to his own aisle and intentionally avoids any chance of contact. He doesn't need that kind of temptation.

Three months later he sees her again, and this time it's on the Maryland sh.o.r.e while out for a walk on one of those hot summer afternoons where you think if you're ever going to die, now's the time, things are so perfect. But they're made more perfect with the sight of her. The sand burns his feet, so he stays on water's edge, chasing a group of feeding sandpipers along in front of him. They scurry furiously to avoid him, then take to flight, landing twenty yards in front, only to run again as he draws closer. An endless chase. He doesn't recognize her at first, perhaps because of the large sungla.s.ses she's wearing, or perhaps because his attention is more fixed to her stretched form and the tight single-piece suit that molds to her like body paint. He walks past, she up the beach toward the small clapboard cottage, he ankle-deep in the foaming reach of the low waves as they come to sh.o.r.e.

It's on his way back, as he's trying hard not to stare, that he hears a clear voice call out with a false German accent, "Zee ahhd-vent of pla.s.steeks brought purr-fek-shun oont power-ta-bill-it-tee." Sitting up, gla.s.ses pulled down that Roman nose, squinting eyes staring over the rim, she smiles coyly, her raised brow asking, "Remember?"

He does remember how could he forget? and he leaves the safety of the cool water and heads toward her, not noticing the hot sand beneath his feet. "Third row," he says.

"That's me," she admits. "And as I remember, you took out of there like it was a house afire."

"I was running late," he said.

"You were running. I was aware of that."

He can't think of how to reply. They introduce themselves. She's Lynn Greene, at the FAA now. Explosives. He's prepared to turn that into a joke, but thinks better of it. He's already flirting. Carrie and Duncan are back at the cottage only a few hundred yards down the beach. He doesn't need this kind of complication, but he can't seem to pull himself away. She's pretty, there's no denying it, but that's not the attraction. It has something to do with her inquisitive expression and the humor that waits behind her eyes.

They make small talk. He remains standing. She s.h.i.+elds her exposed eyes from the sun, but can't stop squinting. Sand clings to the backs of her arms like glitter. Her dark hair is ribbed from a wide-tooth comb that she uses between swims. The comb is spilling out of her overturned straw beach bag, along with a bottle of lotion and several hardcover novels, one with a bookmark. They talk authors. She avoids best sellers. He eats them up. Then they talk movies and jointly come to agreement on the brilliance of Annie Hall and Woody Alien in general. "You talk sh.e.l.lfish?" Daggett asks, quoting from a favorite scene. They laugh, she with her head back, her red lips open wide, the lowered sungla.s.ses pushed back up her creamy nose.

Daggett says good-bye and hurries off.

"Running again?" she calls after him. It stops him and he turns to look back at her. She waits a moment before smiling and lying back down, with a tug on her suit.

He'd like to tug the suit right off her, and she knows it.

It's several more days of long walks before Daggett finds himself pacing the water line outside her cottage. She's in a terry cloth robe, the same ribbed hair, when she appears through the screen door and calls out, "High tide will eventually bring you closer to the steps," and waits for him to approach the cottage. The way she wears the robe it's easy to fantasize that she's not wearing anything underneath it. Her leg jumps out as she's standing, peering inside the ancient refrigerator, calling out the contents to him: iced tea, beer, diet c.o.ke, an orange, an apple. It's a deep brown leg and it tucks itself back inside as she closes the refrigerator and hands him an iced tea in an aluminum can. She takes a beer for herself. He doesn't remember having made any request.

She sits down across from him. The kitchen table is tiny, the recipient of dozens of coats of paint, the latest a marine green. There are clean dishes stacked to the right of the sink, a cantaloupe in the window. The room smells of salt water, and suntan lotion, of violet bath soap and coffee. The door is open to the bathroom. Its fixtures are old, the shelves littered with women's things. A bra hangs from the shower curtain rod. He feels like he's lived here for weeks.

Five minutes stretch into ten, ten into twenty. She drinks another beer. She hands him one and he doesn't refuse. It's easier than any conversation he's ever had. Thoughts swirl around in tangles. Knots. He tells her about Duncan, but leaves out the paralysis. He tells her that he's divorced, and finally explains his relations.h.i.+p with Carrie, that the three of them are in a cottage just down the beach, though as he hears himself tell it, he doesn't quite know the author. Lynn Greene doesn't seem the least bit bothered by any of it. The humor remains, the closeness. She doesn't pull back and start building walls. She doesn't threaten, though she certainly flirts, which after a while strikes him as part of her personality. She's the hot-blooded variety, and she's comfortable with that. The closest she gets to a come-on is "We all need distractions," but it's said in a way that confuses him and leaves the interpretation up to him, and he decides to let it go.

Two hours pa.s.s. It's her beer going flat that tells him how long it has been. He excuses himself. "I'm not running this time," he says. He's trying to tell her something, but he's not sure why. She's amused.

"I enjoyed it," she tells him. To him, her comments sounds as if they've made love. And he realizes they have been making love for two hours. Making love with their clothes on.

When they're out on the porch and he says good-bye for the second time, it's Lynn Greene who spots Carrie first. Carrie is standing down by the receding water of low tide, looking up at them. Misunderstanding. a.s.suming. Burning. Carrie turns abruptly and in stiff-legged strides splashes her way first at a fast walk, then at a run, back down the rose colored beach.

Daggett wants to say something, to apologize, but he's not sure whom to apologize to, or what to apologize for. He's back on the beach, in no particular hurry, well aware that Lynn Greene is not just a pa.s.sing acquaintance, and that Carrie is not far off in her a.s.sumptions.

Standing there in a parking lot filled with the haze of petroleum smoke and the chaos of the firefighters, Lynn Greene smiled at Daggett privately, her eyes sparkling. "Cam Daggett!" she shouted, as only longlost friends shout.

Huff rocked his head in disbelief. Daggett felt his face warm and his stomach turn. She came toward him excitedly, in long strides. He wasn't sure how to receive her. He wanted to swallow her in his arms but not in front of Huff.

A sudden and thunderous explosion caused a hundred people to dive to the ground simultaneously. Daggett and Lynn Greene ended up close to each other. Only a few feet apart, it was not the explosion that stunned Daggett, it was how beautiful she looked, even in fear. Even these many months later.

"It always was fireworks with you, Michigan," she said from the corner of her mouth. "How the h.e.l.l you been?"

She didn't give him time to answer. The explosion threw a piece of the plane's wing onto the horse stables, and as its flaming fuel drained onto the roof, a sheet of fire wrapped itself around the building. The scream of the trapped horses pierced the fading rumble of the explosion. Firemen fled in a hasty retreat coming straight at Daggett and Lynn, who were already back on their feet.

Lynn stopped one of them with a blunt straight-arm. "What about the horses?" she asked, incredulous.

"You f.u.c.kin' kiddin' me?" the fireman replied, a quick glance to Daggett for support. "Dog food, as far as I'm concerned."

"Bulls.h.i.+t," said Lynn Greene.

She took off at a full sprint toward the stables. Without fully understanding his own actions, Daggett found himself only a few steps behind her. "Lynn!" he called out. But she ran on, pretending not to hear.

The inside of the stables, thick with the black, oily smoke, was filled with the deafening panic of the horses as they cried and kicked for freedom. Lynn turned to Daggett she knew he was there and hollered over the cacophony, "You take that side!" She sprang a stall door open and was nearly stampeded by the fleeing horse. Daggett body blocked her off her feet as the horse hooves fell within inches of them.

"Lynn!" he shouted in protest. The roof burned, a ceiling of orange flame. A large section of wall collapsed. Several horses escaped through the resulting hole. She pushed him off.

"You take that side," she repeated, coming to her feet and continuing down the line of stalls. One by one they liberated the Thoroughbreds, who raced out of the building with white eyes and frantic hooves.

He glanced overhead to see a full third of the burning roof about to fall in. Again he shouted to get her attention. He pointed. She looked to the roof but then shook her head in defiance. She freed two more horses. Daggett realized the quickest way the only way to get her out of here was to save every last horse.

Water began to rain down on them the firemen had turned their hoses on this building. Two men in oxygen masks and orange rubber suits, with black boots and thick gloves, appeared out of the billowing smoke. One of them shouted angrily, his voice m.u.f.fled by the mask: "Get the f.u.c.k out of here!"

The piece of the roof caved in, but it was at the other end and it fell into empty stalls. Lynn and Daggett ignored the fireman. They opened the two remaining stall doors simultaneously and the escaping horses knocked the fireman off his feet. With his heavy protective clothing and oxygen tank, he came clumsily to his knees. Lynn offered him her hand but he waved her off furiously.

Daggett and Lynn ran from the smoke into the welcome air, followed only seconds later by both firemen. They turned in time to see the stables fully aflame. Loose horses, their eyes bright with fear, chaotically sprinted for freedom, scattering people in their way.

The remaining section of roof gave way, and seconds later, the walls folded in. The building lay almost flat.

Flames leapt fifty feet into the air chasing a billowing spiral of thick smoke.

"You could have been killed!" he said angrily. It was at that moment he realized the depth of his feelings for her.

"No," she said confidently, shaking her head, eyes tracking the flames. Her face glowed in the orange light. "It isn't my time."

"Your time?" he asked, now more furious than ever. Next thing she'd be reciting horoscopes.

She looked over at him, taking her eyes off the fire. "You know these things, Michigan." Then she took his hands into hers and squeezed. He forgot all about the fire. "Sometimes you just know."

SEVEN.

PERCHED ON THE thin lip of the hotel bathtub, Daggett's feet hung down into the steaming hot bath water. Every so often his feet protested like this, stiffening like boards. A good long soak was the only solution.

"It's not right," he said in a voice that resonated loudly in the small, tiled bathroom. He had a thing about rightness. "We need to keep going on this."

A moment later, over the drone of a television commercial for a bamboo steamer on the ubiquitous CNN, Lynn Greene declared encouragingly, "It's dark. We'll start up again at first light."

"It has nothing to do with darkness it has to do with the report of chemicals being on board the plane. Did you see those people in those s.p.a.ce suits? Jesus, what a sight! That's what cleared everyone out of there. You see how the TV crews ate that up?"

"And for good reason. What if the site is contaminated?"

"All the more reason to suspect sabotage, if you ask me. Chemicals? That's Der Grund's calling card. Not that I can prove it."

"Who?"

"Never mind. The point is "

She interrupted him. "The point is that we got very lucky. The fire neutralized the chemicals. That's the report I got. Without those wellheads burning as they did, we would have had a real disaster on our hands."

"From my end, that's all the more reason to keep up the investigation. Waiting around for guys in s.p.a.ce suits to a.n.a.lyze spoor samples "

"You're disgusting! One night is not going to hurt anything. We'll get a fresh start tomorrow. If there's something there we'll find it." She handed him one of the vodka-and-Rose's she had mixed using the supplies from the mini-bar.

"I need proof of criminal intent. I need some good, solid linkage in order to keep my investigation alive." He took a deep swallow and balanced the gla.s.s on the edge of the tub. Lynn supported the doorjamb with a shoulder. "I've spent nearly two years on this case. I don't come up with something and I'm history. They want my report on this other thing this bombing out at National. Can you believe that? They would pull me from a case like this to have me write a G.o.dd.a.m.ned report on a dead man?" He looked to her for sympathy, but found none.

"We don't call it 'criminal intent," " she said, correcting him. "We call it suspicious causes. But so far there's nothing like that. Nothing at all." She added, "Besides, maybe a new a.s.signment would do you some good. You don't look so good."

He pretended to ignore her last comment. "The NTSB press guy is already talking it up like it was an accident. CNN, all the papers everyone is calling it an accident, for G.o.d's sake. The NTSB is selling a line of bulls.h.i.+t. That news conference was way off."

"It was accurate. We all pride ourselves on accuracy, don't we? It's the NTSB's show. It remains their investigation until evidence allows you guys to take over. Listen, if it were up to me, I'd give you anything you want. But you know that and you don't seem to want." She took a sip of her drink. She wasn't talking investigation. He hid himself in his drink. "And the fact is we've seen nothing on site to indicate suspicious causes. We have the air traffic controller reporting that one of the flight crew called out a c.o.c.kpit fire. The plane went down within seconds. Not one eyewitness has described anything like an explosion. Nothing in the wreckage yet to indicate explosives. The NTSB doesn't have a lot of choice here."

"A Duhning 959-600 at LAX maybe loaded with chemicals? I have a dead body coming out of a 959 simulator set to an LAX runway. I've got a known terrorist building altimeter detonators in his Los Angeles hotel room. Los Angeles, LAX .. . get it? You're going to tell me it's coincidence?" He continued before she could interrupt. She had a penchant for interrupting, for getting her own way. "Don't go soft on me, d.a.m.n it all. Someone has to maintain their objectivity."

"Objectivity? Is that what you're preaching?"