Hard Fall Part 10

"Am I preaching?" he asked, reaching for the drink and draining a fair amount of it.

"Yes, you are."

He looked at her distorted image through the irregularity of the gla.s.s. She stretched as he spun it. "You're the air accident investigator," he said. "The explosives expert. You're leading the FAA's investigation on this thing."

"d.a.m.n right," she agreed, tilting her drink up in a way that stretched her long neck. "And don't get so personal. You're not making this any easier."

"It is personal. You should be helping me on this."

"I'm trying."

"Are you?"

"Yes."

He watched her in profile as her throat tightened as she swallowed, and he found it provocative. It had probably been a bad idea to invite her up here.

"These go down too easy," she said, studying the small gla.s.s, "but why don't I make us another?"

He finished his and handed it to her.

"How are they doing?" she asked, nodding toward his feet.

"I'll tell you after the second drink."

She left him alone to his thoughts. Like his voice, they tended to bounce around in the small room. As she seemed to be taking too long, he called to her, "It has got to be the work of the same guy. There are far too many overlaps. Doesn't that count for anything?"

"No," she said, joining him again. "Not to Lynn Greene the investigator. I shouldn't even be aware of that side of your investigation. I'm paid for my objectivity something I lost the minute I saw you on site." She sat on the closed toilet. They were close to each other. She lifted her gla.s.s; the rims chimed. "Here's to working together," she said. "At last."

"I need your support on this."

"Even though I'd rather be playing, than working."

"Please help me."

"One step at a time. There's a system in place here. Give it a chance to work."

"I can't. What if Bernard made more than one trigger?"

"Who's Bernard?"

He didn't answer. He tried the drink. It was stronger and he wondered: by design? She was right, they did go down easy. His feet looked bigger because of the magnifying powers of the water. Big, pale, wrinkled feet with crooked toes. Very romantic.

She said, "I'm supposed to be objective. Don't worry: no one is going to whitewash this. I won't allow that. What would be the point? Between the lot of us, we'll be looking at every conceivable explanation for that crash. Believe it."

"I can't wait six months," he said. "These things always take six months."

"I understand that." She adjusted herself and it brought her closer to him. She ran her fingers through his hair and he felt it down to his toes. "I'll do what I can. Promise." She was at his back where he couldn't see her and he found it disarming.

"Lynn," he said so deliberately, it was like a referee blowing a whistle. He heard her ice rattle, and then the gentle pump of her swallowing.

"Okay," she said without any hurt in her voice. "But unless you fill that thing with ice water and dunk me in it, I had better be going. I have other ideas about how this night should be spent." She kissed him on his neck below his ear. It ran a few thousand volts down his left side. His body hair stood at attention.

"How's Duncan doing?" she asked. That cooled him down. When he failed to answer she added, "That phone call you just made sounded more like a business call than a man calling his son."

"Sometimes that's how it is between us."

"It shouldn't be."

"I know that."

"You're mad."

"Yes."

"At me?"

"No. At myself. The truth hurts."

"He has a sitter?" she inquired. "Or is it her?"

"A sitter tonight. Old enough to be his grandmother. She's become sort of part of the family."

"The sitter or Carrie?" Lynn asked. "Strike that from the record," she added. "I'm not a very good loser."

"Who says you've lost?" he asked as she handed him her empty drink. At the moment he knew everything there was to know about emptiness.

"You're with her, aren't you? I had hoped my dazzling personality and bathing suit silhouette might change that arrangement. Some things you learn to accept. Some things you don't," she warned.

More tempted than ever to stop her, he ran an arm out and she dragged her fingers along it until their hands swept over one another and the very tips of their fingers kissed.

She found her purse, stopped in the narrow pa.s.sageway to look in on him. She smiled at him long enough to convey a message. She wanted to stay; she wanted him to ask her. He smiled back. She nodded and shrugged. The door closed behind her, and a second later Daggett was' standing where she had been standing, his wet feet on the carpet, hand gripping the doork.n.o.b. But he didn't turn it.

The next morning the phone rang him awake in the middle of a room service breakfast. His morning run had been hampered by his vodka of the night before.

The voice of Phil Huff said, "We're in the clear here, so I'm going to keep it brief. There's something going down that you'll want to be part of. I'll pick you up outside the lobby in about ten, twelve minutes." He paused. "Any problems with that?"

"I'll be there," Daggett said.

Huff wore the same poplin suit, his shoulders square with arrogance. Daggett caught himself staring at the scars on the man's nose, wondering if women were attracted to scars. Huff had plenty of both. He drove the same mud: brown Chrysler Daggett had seen him in at the crash site. The front seat had a ratty slipcover, and Huff's heel had worn a hole in the floor mat in front of the accelerator pedal. The radio was crusted with dust and spilled coffee. The vinyl of the sun visor was split open from the years, like a piece of fruit left too long on the windowsill. Huff steered them into traffic, slipped the police light onto the dash, turned it on, and, as traffic parted slowly, said, "Our boys got a call from the LAPD substation out here at the airport, telling us about a call one of their downtown squads got. A mechanic for AmAirXpress claims he was jumped and drugged yesterday by a man and woman at his home. Says his airport ID and overalls were stolen. They rolled a detective on it a minute ago. We hurry, we may catch most of the show."

Daggett considered all of this briefly. "If it holds, this could give us authority over the crash investigation," he said anxiously.

"Something better than that," Huff said, teasing Daggett with the long pause that followed. "You're gonna f.u.c.kin' love this."

Daggett wouldn't beg. He waited him out.

"The chemicals on board this airplane?" he stated as a question, forcing Daggett to reply, "Yeah?" "Made by a company called ChemTronics with refineries or whatever the f.u.c.k you call them in twenty-some states." Huff left another long pause, pretending to be busy with the car, though the car seemed to be driving itself on a road completely straight. "ChemTronics, come to find out, is a defense contractor wink, wink; nudge, nudge and is in bed with none other than EisherWorks Chemicals."

Daggett's pulse doubled and he tried not to give Huff the pleasure of seeing or hearing his enthusiasm, which required a substantial effort. "In bed?" he asked.

"EisherWorks owns controlling interest in ChemTronics. It amounts to an American subsidiary."

"So this could be Der Grund."

"I thought you'd like it."

Daggett mulled over the possibilities. Would a financial connection between the two be enough to convince Pullman or his superior, Richard Mumford, of Der Grund's suspected involvement? He doubted it. It wasn't hard enough evidence. And even if they had received a threat, ChemTronics was unlikely to share it with the FBI. Ignoring terrorist threats angered stockholders and drew unfavorable publicity; both affected share price. Major corporations received threats all the time, and for the most part, they used their own security departments to handle them. But even without a "hard" connection, it boosted Daggett's confidence that he was still on the trail of Bernard's detonators. And where the h.e.l.l did it lead from here? What was next?

Phil Huff said, "Thermos at your feet is black with sugar. You look like you could use a cup."

They drove for nearly twenty minutes, at which point he had lost track of where they were. The curbs, sidewalks, planting, even the houses, all looked the same. "I'm a real estate bigot," he said. "To me this all looks the same. Where the h.e.l.l are we?"

"Dougherty's place is right up here," Huff said, obviously amused.

Daggett spotted the detective's unmarked car. Four-door, black-walls. "Stop!" he demanded, and the driver responded immediately by hitting the brakes. They both rocked forward toward the dash and settled back.

"What?" Huff asked angrily, eyes searching. "Christ, the way you said that, I thought I was about to hit something."

"You were," Daggett said, indicating the street in front of them. "Take a look." Pointing.

"Yeah?" Huff asked, not seeing.

"The tire tracks," Daggett explained. "The mud ... the tire tracks there by the curb, see? But none behind the wheels of the unmarked." He glanced over his shoulder and sipped the coffee. "Fresh ditches. Sewer work, right? But what about the mud?"

Huff looked too. "Kids musta had the hydrant on yesterday."

"Yeah. Exactly. A lot of tracks down the middle of the street, but only this pair over here by the curb."

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," Huff said excitedly. He backed up the car to stay out of the tracks. He parked it. "I'll get the d.i.c.k's keys. I got a Polaroid under the seat." He reached down and located it, and handed it to Daggett. "You leave it in the trunk and the film bakes."

"Measuring tape?" Daggett asked.

"Should be in the kit in the trunk." He handed Daggett the keys. He said, "This d.i.c.k wasn't thinking about the crime scene."

"No, he wasn't. So why don't you ask him politely to cool his heels a minute." He made it a statement. "Talk to him. See if we can have this guy to ourselves for a while. There's nothing in this for LAPD. Nothing but paperwork for this badge. Tell him we'll take it off his hands."

"He won't like it," Huff cautioned. "Just us being here means there's something to it."

"That's why we do this alone. Right, Phil?" Daggett said. "We don't need any tongues wagging."

"No s.h.i.+t."

"And while you're in there call your lab boys. Tell them to bring stuff to cast these ditches .. . vacuums for inside the house .. . the whole nine yards." He added, "We treat it like a major crime scene."

"The lab? I can't do that. We don't even know for sure your guy was here," Huff protested. "Right? Let's not get ahead of ourselves."

"A mechanic's ID stolen the afternoon of a crash?" Daggett asked, incredulous. "Make the call, Phil. I'll take my chances on this one."

By the time Daggett and Huff returned from the nearly three-hour interrogation of Kevin Dougherty, the crash site at Hollywood Park looked completely different than the night before. The strewn packages and overnight mail envelopes of various colors, shapes, and sizes were gone, carted off to a nearby high school gym for inspection by FBI and FAA explosives experts. With the fares now extinguished, the ominous, other planet quality of the previous night gave way to the feeling of a battlefield on the morning after: every object spread over five acres was either carbon black or mud brown. The disemboweled tail section of the fallen aircraft stuck out of the ground like a piece of modern sculpture. It was near this tail section that Daggett spotted a small group of investigators that included Lynn Greene. There were forty to fifty investigators roaming the debris, stooped like sh.e.l.l seekers on a Florida beach, many carrying clipboards, cameras, or clear plastic bags containing grotesquely unrecognizable items. One crew, near the detached nose, was running debris and mud over a sifter; others searched the screen like archaeologists after pieces of history.

The entire effort seemed somehow removed, as if acted out on a stage so large he couldn't see the edges. Again, he thought of the doomed flight 1023 and found himself thankful he had been several days late to that site. To add hundreds of dead bodies to this horror was unthinkable. He marveled at how efficiently, how effortlessly, the several dozen investigators managed to work side by side, each performing a specific function, many of which no doubt overlapped. If only law enforcement ran so smoothly.

Huff emerged from the command center trailer a few minutes later. "For what it's worth," he said, "this investigation may soon be ours."

"How soon?" Daggett questioned.

"It can't be turned over to us without suspicious causes."

"What about Dougherty? What about his ID tag being ripped off? Doesn't that give us suspicious causes?"

"Us maybe, but not the NTSB. They need some hard evidence. Crash site evidence." Huff added optimistically, "At the noon meeting the team leader will announce that all the search teams should give evidence of criminal intent top priority. We've canceled the noon press conference. We can get a better handle on all of this by the evening meeting. We're moving some of the teams so that all of us will be staying over at the Marriott. NTSB cut a deal for the main conference room, and two of the smaller ones. All in all, it's going well."

"Going well? What kind of hard evidence do they need, Phil?"

"More than tire tracks and the testimony of a mechanic. I don't like it either, but we're not going to change it. They work inclusive to the crash site. They can't allow off-site threats or security violations, or even supporting theories, to influence or bias their objectivity at the site itself."

"Objectivity?"

"Listen, they understand our position, okay? The way they laid it out is that they'll jump on the slightest bit of evidence, and that they're more than willing to give any and all of our requests top priority. We're not b.u.t.ting heads here." He glanced out toward the team at the tail of the aircraft. "Cross your fingers those guys can put Humpty Dumpty back together again."

"Meaning?"

"The voice-recorder tape is a mess. I'm told they're dealing with half a mile of spaghetti."

"But we need that."

"We need a lot of things."

"What about the data recorder? The DFDR," Daggett asked.

"They say it looks fine. It's being flown back to Was.h.i.+ngton on their private plane later this afternoon. Once they untangle the tape from the CVR, it'll be flown back so they can be synced up."

"I'd like to listen in on that."

"It may be a week or two, from what I hear."

"Even so."

"I'll mention it. Listen," he added somewhat tentatively, "my SAC has directed my squad chief to make this crash investigation my ticket. They don't understand your being here. Told them I invited you to help out. So, technically, we're both following up the Bernard ticket. That didn't exactly cut it for them, but there's not much they can do about it. You're my guest. That means we've got to give you access to the investigation."

Was this the same Phil Huff? "I appreciate it."

"It didn't help much. They won't let me give you any people."

"I'm on my own?"

"LAFO has three counterterrorism squads all told. As of ten minutes ago, all three are a.s.signed to this case. That gives me about thirty guys. You run any requests through me, I'll make sure they're handled. Plenty of guys to go around. Maybe I can swing something."