Hard Fall (14 page)

The television is an annoyance in the adjoining room where some of the kids are focused on an animated special involving the Grinch. It's something completely out of place at a Christmas party, he thinks. As the introduction to the redhead is made, as he's watching her lips but suddenly picturing her in bed with him, the news breaks in on the Grinch.

The eggnog is carefully balanced, tightly gripped, for this group tends to gesticulate wildly while reconstructing stories, fabricating stories; he's not about to let his fly. Daggett misses her name. His mind is in a knot of moist lips and this woman—this body with its wild red hair—spread out before him, when he loses her completely. Loses Primrose too. His head jerks toward the door, toward the whining kids whose show has been interrupted, toward the television with the talking head and the flashing graphics announcing a Live News Update.

It's the number that grabs him, that slams into him with such a force, it knocks all the wind from him. He teeters. He's going to go down.

The number.

He wills his knees to support him. Locks them.

“Ten twenty-three,” the talking head says in a dreadful, unemotional monotone. “EuroTours flight ten twenty-three.”

Eggnog sloshes across his fingers. He's spilling his drink. The video that fills the screen is shot at night. Ugly orange flames spread across an entire town. “Frankfurt to Heathrow,” the man says, repeating the number. Daggett knows the itinerary; a photocopy is presently folded in his breast pocket. Flames. Bright orange flames. The remains of the plane scattered in little bonfires for miles.

Miles.

Duncan … His parents.

There's no more sound, like someone turned everything and everyone off. Nothing. A blank hole where he had been standing.

The plastic glass of eggnog slips to the floor, its contents spilled. “All those aboard the commercial jetliner are presently presumed dead,” the anchorman says, almost straining to make reference to Lockerbie. He's comparing numbers as if it's a contest. Daggett hears, “It's not as bad as Lockerbie.”

At the piano, a group of vodka drinkers—unaware of the television, of the children, of Daggett's spilled drink, of the redhead—form a group. A department accountant, a good-looking woman named Suzie, begins to sing along with the stereo in a surprisingly beautiful voice. The sound turns Daggett's head, it seems so incongruous, given the sight on the television. Suzie is looking right at him.

Silent night, holy night
All is calm, all is bright

The scene on the television is anything but silent, anything but holy. The panic in the face of the talking head, the beads of sweat on his forehead as he vamps to keep his station on the air with a live report: anything but calm. And the only brightness is from the leaping orange flames and the pulsing incendiary flashes from the blue lights atop the rescue vehicles.

Daggett slumps and kneels into the puddle of eggnog, his attention fixed on the television. One of the kids hits the remote hoping to lose this guy, but he is replaced by a dozen others, all with the same message, nearly the same words, all apparently reading from the same script.

Primrose calls out to him, “No great loss.” He is referring to the spilled drink, but that's not the way Daggett hears it.

On the darkened, flickering screen the roaming camera surveys the images of the tragedy. Daggett crawls toward the television, Suzie still singing.

There, not six inches from his face, beamed via satellite in living color—dying color—he sees and then thinks he recognizes his very own light gray Samsonite suitcase he had loaned Duncan. It lies there in the field among similar personal belongings and crash debris.

His suitcase.

His only child.

His parents.

Dead? Or crying out somewhere in the flames?

Silent night, holy night
, she begins again.

Twenty-two minutes, four phone calls, and a one-mile taxi ride later, Daggett stood on the outskirts of the wreckage.

A hundred yards off, black, oily smoke rose in towering pillars. The carcass of the disemboweled jet lay broken and twisted. The plane had crashed in the back half of Hollywood Park, home to a horse track and a hotel, an enormous expanse of land, a half-mile square cut out of suburbia. Like so much of Southern California, Hollywood Park had been drilled for oil. Several of the behemoth pumps had been sheared off at ground level by the plane and were now burning out of control. With the fuselage and the half-dozen wellheads all flaring orange plumes into a thick black sky, it looked to Daggett like an image of hell. The rising smoke blocked out the sun.

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 passed only rescue vehicles and other cops. Daggett paid the cab and walked, his badge hanging open from his shirt 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 passengers? 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 shield.

“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 hell 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-de-lis. 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 shifted, 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 someone, 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 damn 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 association 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 assigned 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-class 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. Fuckin' 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 glass 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.