Murder in Foggy Bottom (4 page)

He slept fitfully.

He realized as he approached Washington that he’d been so immersed in his thoughts about Doris and his sons that he’d forgotten there had been a commercial aviation accident in New York. He turned on the plane’s AM radio and tuned to a Washington all-news station in search of a quick update before having to negotiate air traffic control. He sat through a movie review and a story about a murder-suicide in Rockville, and was about to turn off the radio to avoid its distractions when a newscaster came on:

“We reported earlier that a commuter airliner has crashed in Westchester County, New York. The downed flight, we’re told, was bound for Washington and carried a full passenger load, including area residents. Stay tuned for further developments in this breaking story.”

“Damn!” Pauling muttered as he clicked off the AM radio and focused in on his approach instructions. Traffic was heavy and he had to hold for fifteen minutes, but eventually landed and taxied to the side of the airport reserved for private and corporate aircraft. It cost him what he considered a small fortune to tie down there, but he never toyed with going to a less expensive, private facility out in the country. He liked being around a major airport, enjoyed conversations with professional pilots and serious amateurs like himself.

He walked into the flight planning room to close out his IFR flight plan and was in the process of doing the paperwork when another private pilot he knew came up to the desk.

“Coming or going, Max?”

“Just flew in. I was in Pittsburgh visiting my ex-wife and kids. You?”

“Going up to Maine to do some bass fishing. Weatherby’s Lodge. Know it?”

“No. I haven’t been fishing in years. I caught the news about the accident. You have anything new on it?”

“The
accident
? Make that two.”

Pauling slowly turned and looked quizzically at his friend. “Two?”

“Boise, Idaho. Just heard it five minutes ago.”

“Two in one day? What was the equipment in Boise?”

“A Dash 8, I think. Commuter flight out of a regional there.”

Pauling drew a deep, distressed breath, signed his completed flight close-out form, slid it across the counter to the duty officer, and picked up his overnight bag. To his aviator friend, he said, “Safe flight.”

“Maybe I ought to check how the planets are aligned today, along with the weather.”

“Not a bad idea. Two in one day. Take care.”

Pauling drove to his apartment complex in Crystal City, Virginia. The fifteen-minute drive was nothing more than a blur, as though it hadn’t happened. All he’d thought about, the only vision he had, was of a twisted, burning, crushed aircraft strewn over countryside, or suburb or city, body parts sprawled everywhere, acrid smoke searing the throat and nose, and, if lucky, a painful cry from someone who’d survived. He’d once been at an aircraft crash site, and the scene was forever etched in his memory.

His phone was ringing when he walked through the door, and the digital readout on his answering machine indicated eight messages had been left. He picked up the phone.

“Max, it’s Colonel Barton.”

His boss at State was military through and through, always referring to himself by rank, never Walter or Walt, which annoyed Pauling, like a doctor who insists on being called Doctor but uses his patients’ first names. It wasn’t the military thing that bothered Max. He’d liked his tour of duty with the Corps even though it meant Vietnam, and he respected the need for a clear chain of command, all the rules and regulations, the need to forbid fraternization between officers and enlisted men—and women. It had to be that way if you were going to win wars. Pauling always felt a sense of silent pride whenever he saw young men and women in uniform riding the Metro to and from the Pentagon, no rings in the nose, ear, or lip, no scraggly beards, but clean-cut and erect and proud. Or ready to be proud once they’d proved themselves.

So it wasn’t Barton’s military bearing and mind-set that bothered Pauling. It was the man behind the uniform, more politician than officer. Lots of them in Washington.

“Hello, Colonel. What’s up?”

“I’ve been trying your cell phone.”

“Batteries must have run down.” Truth was, Pauling had turned it off when he left for the weekend.

“I need you here right away.”

“I’m on leave . . . Colonel.”

“You
were
on leave, Max. Can you be here in a half hour?”

“Yeah, I suppose so, but what’s so important?”

“A half hour.”

Pauling held the dead phone away from his ear and said something decidedly not official—and certainly not military.

4

That Same Day
New York

First to reach the Dash 8 that had crashed less than three minutes after taking off were two New York State troopers, who arrived in separate marked cruisers. At first, they weren’t sure where the plane had gone down. They could see smoke when they’d first gotten the call while patrolling 684 and headed in that general direction, but it wasn’t until a homeowner a mile from the crash scene called 911 to report “some sort of accident” that they were able to home in, converging in front of the caller’s house and setting off on foot down a hiking trail leading to the shoreline of Kensico Reservoir.

When they reached the downed aircraft, they were stunned by the carnage spread out before them. The fuselage of the Dash 8 must have exploded upon impact, sending passengers, and parts of passengers, flying in all directions. The troopers started toward what appeared to be the largest intact portion of the plane, but one of them suddenly stopped and recoiled. A few feet in front of him was a man’s torso, the lower portion of his body missing.

“God Almighty,” the younger of the two troopers said, squeezing his eyes closed. He’d seen fatal auto accidents up close on the state’s highways, but this was beyond anything he’d ever imagined.

“Nobody survived this,” his colleague said quietly. They stood side by side, not moving, saying only those things that tend to be said when there is nothing meaningful to say, hearts pounding, smoldering wreckage and brush ignited by the flames hissing in the background.

The senior trooper pulled his radio from his belt and spoke into it: “Troopers Mencken and Robertson at scene of airliner crash. A couple hundred yards up from the reservoir, the Kensico. It’s a . . . it’s a mess. No apparent survivors.”

The voice in his ear said, “I read. Secure scene. Nobody near it until you’re relieved.”

They looked at each other before splitting up, one staying where they’d been, the other slowly, carefully circumventing the apparent perimeter of the crash site to take up a position on the opposite side.

FBI Special Agent Frank Lazzara had been appointed agent in charge of the White Plains field office only a month earlier after serving three years with the Bureau’s organized crime unit in Manhattan. At first, he resisted the reassignment because he considered it a demotion. Working organized crime in New York City was where the action and visibility were. White Plains? In suburban Westchester County?

But when his boss and mentor explained over dinner one night that the mob was in the process of shifting many of its more lucrative operations out of the five boroughs and into smaller but still sizable cities in New York and Connecticut—they’d already established a stranglehold on the carting industry in Westchester—and that the Bureau considered White Plains and adjacent cities and towns to be future hotbeds of mob activities, Lazzara changed his view of the new posting. He had started the reverse commute from Brooklyn, where he and his wife and their one-year-old child lived, and spent much of his first month in the new office being brought up to speed on pending cases and getting to know other special agents who’d be working under him.

He was poring over a thick file that had been compiled on mob-connected carting companies in the county when another agent entered the office.

“Frank, there’s been a commercial airline accident.”

Lazzara looked up, wondering why he was being told.

“It’s local,” the agent said. “A commuter plane out of Westchester airport. A Washington flight.”

Lazzara sat back and frowned. He’d flown from Washington into Westchester the previous day after a round of meetings at the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

“Any survivors?” he asked.

A shrug.

“Where did it come down?”

“Out near one of the reservoirs. Joe is monitoring it.”

Lazzara left the office and went to where Special Agent Joe Pasquale sat in the midst of communications equipment.

“The accident?” Lazzara said. “Where? What reservoir?”

“Near the Kensico Reservoir. Plane crashed on takeoff. There’s been another.”

“Another what?”

“Another aircraft accident. In Idaho.”

“Not a good day for the airline industry. Or for a lot of people. Any details on that one?”

“Only a few. Just happened. About the same time. Commuter, too.”

“Frank, Washington on the line,” Lazzara’s secretary said.

He returned to his office and picked up the phone: “Lazzara.”

His supervisor said, “Send everybody you’ve got out to the scene of this airline accident near you.”

“Everybody? Okay. Special instructions?”

“Yes. Put a clamp on everybody there. No statements to the press. No statements to anyone.”

“Yes, sir. I just heard another commuter plane went down in Idaho.”

“You heard right, but no comments on that, either.”

“Criminal acts involved?” Lazzara asked, trying to determine whether his agency would be in charge of the investigation.

“Let’s assume there are until we know otherwise.”

Lazzara called the four special agents who were on duty that morning into his office.

“What’s up?” Pasquale asked.

“The plane accident. Get a fix from the locals where it went down.”

“State police just called in, Frank,” his secretary said. She handed him a piece of paper on which she’d written information on the downed plane’s location.

“Let’s go,” Lazzara said.

Notification of the downed Dash 8 in Westchester County had come through earlier via the communications center at the National Transportation Safety Board’s headquarters at L’Enfant Plaza. It was forwarded to their Office of Aviation Safety, where that day’s standby instant-response team, known as a “go team,” which included experts on airframe and power-plant analyses, human performance, radar data, fires and explosions, and witness statements, was alerted to make ready to fly to Westchester County airport. Other calls were made simultaneously to NTSB’s Northeast regional office in Parsippany, New Jersey; the de Havilland Corporation in Ontario, Canada, the Dash 8’s manufacturer; the airline; the Federal Aviation Administration; and to FBI headquarters. The NTSB public affairs duty officer was brought into the loop to be ready to handle media and public queries. The initial team that would rush to the accident scene would soon be augmented by designated parties not directly affiliated with NTSB, but who could give the lean-and-mean agency needed expertise. With only four hundred employees, the chairman of NTSB had proudly testified at a recent congressional budget hearing, his agency was “one of the best buys in government.” They investigated more than two thousand aviation accidents each year, as well as five hundred other transportation mishaps, and had issued more than ten thousand safety recommendations since NTSB’s inception in 1967, “at an annual cost of fifteen cents per American citizen.”

The team flying to Westchester would be led by Peter Mullin, one of eight NTSB vice chairmen and a thirty-year veteran of aircraft accident investigations, a commercially rated pilot with thousands of hours in the cockpit, and whose reputation for running a tight ship at accident scenes was well known. His team assembled at Hangar Six at Reagan National, where NTSB maintained its own fleet of aircraft. Mullin, a tall, angular, balding man who walked slightly hunched to accommodate a bad back, grimaced as he took the right seat in the Learjet 45 twin-engine jet aircraft with NTSB markings. A full-time bureau pilot slipped into the left seat. Seated behind them were six members of the initial instant-response team. The engines had just come to life when Mullin was called on a radio channel linking the aircraft to NTSB headquarters.

“Peter, there’s been a second accident.”

“Where? Commercial? A jumbo?”

“Boise. Another commuter flight.”

Mullin set his jaw, turned, and told the others of the news, then got back on the radio: “What’s the status in Boise?”

“Vague. Denver’s got a team ready to go.”

“Good. Keep me posted.” To the pilot he said, “Let’s move!”

They were given priority takeoff clearance ahead of a string of commercial jets and were airborne within minutes. They’d reached their cruise altitude when Mullin was again contacted on the NTSB reserved radio channel. “Peter, you’re not going to believe this but there’s been a third accident involving a commuter plane.”

“You’re right, I don’t believe it. Where?”

“San Jose. A Saab 34.”

“Status?”

“Unknown. The Gardena office is on it.”

“Three,” Mullin grumbled.

“What?”

“I said
three,
goddamn it!”

“Peter, there’s an eyewitness to the San Jose incident who’s come forward.”

“Oh?”

Mullin listened silently to what his assistant at headquarters said.

“Tell Gardena to stash him away. We don’t need unsubstantiated stories like that getting out.”

“It’s a woman.”

“What the hell difference does that make? Stash
her
away.”

“Okay, Peter.”

“What’s up?” a team member seated behind Mullin asked after he’d ended the radio transmission.

“Another commuter plane down, a Saab, San Jose.”

There was silence in the aircraft. Someone broke it by saying, “Three? Can’t be a coincidence.”

“No, it can’t be, especially if an eyewitness in California has twenty-twenty eyesight and isn’t too whacked out.”

He used the same cleared frequency to reconnect with headquarters. “This is Mullin. I’m on my way to New York to investigate the downed plane there. Give me Poe.”

Poe took the call and listened intently to what Mullin had to say. “Thank you, Peter,” he said, ending the conversation with his thumb on the cradle’s plunger, then dialed another number.

“Federal Bureau of Investigation. How may I help you?”

“This is NTSB Vice Chairman Poe. Put me through to the director’s office. It’s an emergency.”