“Sorry to hear that, but I’m off duty.”
“I know, but I need you on this.”
“Are you authorizing overtime?”
‘Come on, Mulligan. You know I can’t do that.”
“Then find somebody else.”
A year ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated. I used to put in a lot of hours that I never got paid for. Back then, I was working for people who cared about the news more than they cared about money, so I did, too. It was different now.
“Look, do this for me and you can take tomorrow off.”
“Tomorrow and the day after,” I said.
“No way.”
“Okay, then,” I said, and clicked off. As I pulled away from the curb, Chuck called back.
“Yeah?”
“Okay, you win. Two days off. But make it tomorrow and Monday. I can’t spare you two days in a row.”
“Done. What’s the address?”
I finished up with him and called Fiona.
“I need a rain check. Gotta go play reporter.”
“That’s a real shame.” She sounded vaguely drunk. “Did I tell you that my announcement was major? Oh, and foolproof? Don’t forget foolproof.”
“I remember. But somebody tried to park a plane on a side street near the airport, so I gotta go take some pictures.”
The plane had gone down on Brunswick Drive, less than a half mile south of the airport, in a neighborhood of modest brick and wood-frame houses in the Providence suburb of Warwick. I crept south on Post Road, turned left on Main Avenue, and ran into a police roadblock.
“The plane hit a house, and jet fuel is leaking into the basement,” a uniformed officer told me. “We’ve got the whole neighborhood cordoned off, and we’re evacuating everybody who lives within two thousand feet of the scene. It’s a dangerous situation, bud. You need to get the hell out of here. And, hey, you got a busted headlight. Better get that fixed before you get a ticket.”
I thanked him, turned around, worked my way down to West Shore Road, and parked the Bronco on a side street. Then I grabbed my camera and jogged a half mile to the scene, easily slipping by the police checkpoints in the fog.
The fuselage of a small plane was wedged in the wreckage of a red-brick two-story colonial. The aircraft’s tail had snapped off and crushed the roof of a Ford Expedition parked in the driveway. The site looked chaotic with police cruisers, ambulances, and fire trucks parked at odd angles all over front lawns on both sides of the street. Some bore the insignias of the Warwick PD and FD. Others were Green Airport security and rescue vehicles.
So far, nothing was on fire, but the damp air reeked of kerosene and, oddly, of french fries. That puzzled me until I remembered reading that jet fuel is sometimes manufactured by mixing distilled petroleum with recycled cooking grease from fast food joints. The street was strewn with what looked like tufts of cotton candy. I bent down, picked up a piece, and discovered that it was the house’s fiberglass insulation.
As near as I could tell, I was the only journalist on the scene. With TV helicopters grounded by the weather, nobody else would have pictures by morning. The crash site was a news photographer’s dream. Fog swirled around cops and firemen clawing through a tangle of shattered bricks and twisted metal. Everything was in silhouette, backlit by fire department spotlights. I wished my friend Gloria Costa, the great one-eyed photographer, could be here; but like the rest of The Dispatch’s photo staff, she’d been let go. Last time we talked, she was still looking for work. My photography skills were rudimentary, but I popped the lens cap and started shooting.
It was nearly a half hour before anybody noticed me. Then Oscar Hernandez, the Warwick police chief, emerged from the wreckage carrying a blood-streaked black leather briefcase.
“Mulligan? Who the hell let you in here?”
“Nice to see you, too, Oscar. Whatcha got there?”
“Nothing that concerns you. We’re dealing with a perilous situation here. I need you to leave right now.”
“I’ve been in perilous situations before.”
“Come on, get moving. One spark and this thing could blow.”
“So you’re saying I shouldn’t smoke?”
“I don’t have time for your jokes.”
“If I refuse to leave, are you going to arrest me?”
He shook his head and sighed.
“If you insist on staying, I can’t guarantee your safety.”
“Nobody ever has. Can you spare a minute to fill me in on what happened here?”
“Walk with me.”
We strode together down the street to his command car, where he placed the briefcase on the hood.
“The plane is a Beechcraft Premier I, a small twin-engine jet. According to the tower at Green, it took off from Atlantic City shortly after eight P.M. The flight plan had it coming straight up Narragansett Bay. The pilot had already begun to descend when the fog rolled in. He was attempting a routine instrument landing, and there was no sign of trouble until the tower lost contact seconds before he was supposed to touch down.”
“How many on board?”
“The pilot and one passenger.”
“Dead?”
“Very.”
“The bodies still in the wreckage?”
“Yeah. Gotta wet everything down to reduce the fire risk before we can cut them out.”
“Anybody home when it hit?”
“A married couple and their three-year-old daughter.”
“And?”
“The adults were watching TV in the family room on the other side of the house. They managed to climb out a window. Their daughter was in a back bedroom on the second floor. The father got a ladder from the garage, climbed up, broke a window, and found her cowering in her closet. Poor little thing was scared to death. He carried her down before the first responders got here.”
“Any of them injured?”
“They’re pretty shaken up, but they’re all okay.”
“What are their names?”
He gave me a stony look.
“Hey, I can always look it up in the city directory.”
“Philip and Julia Correia.”
“Philip with one l or two?”
“No idea.”
“And the daughter?”
“Lucy.”
“Where are they now? I’d like to talk to them.”
“Some friends took them in, and no, you can’t have the address. After what they’ve been through, they deserve a little peace tonight.”
I nodded. They’d had a hell of a scare, and their house was so badly damaged that it would have to be torn down and rebuilt. I hoped their insurance was paid up.
“Have you ID’d the pilot and passenger?” I asked.
“Tentatively.”
“And?”
“You know I can’t give you that until next of kin are identified.”
“How about off the record?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Look,” I said, “I just want to Google them, see if I can find some background so I’ll be ready when you release the names.”
“Can I trust you on this?”
“Come on, Oscar. After what we went through together on the Kwame Diggs case? How can you even ask?”
“Okay, Mulligan. The pilot was Christopher Cox, age twenty-eight. He worked for Egg Harbor Aviation, a small outfit that flies high rollers in and out of Atlantic City.”
“And the other victim?”
“Lucan Alfano, forty-four, of Ocean City, New Jersey, according to the passenger manifest.”
“Anything more on him?”
“Not yet.”
“The briefcase was his?”
“I managed to pry it from what was left of his lap, so I’m thinking yeah.”
“What’s in it?” I asked.
“Probably business papers, but maybe there’s something in here to confirm the ID.”
Hernandez slid a pocketknife from his pants pocket, used the blade to jimmy the lock, and raised the lid. Then he muttered, “Oh, shit,” and slammed it shut.
“Did you see that?” he asked.
“I did.”
“I should never have let you get a look at it.”