Dan was squeezing the remote with one hand. The other was on top of his head, as if to keep it from flying off. "That fucking moron," he said in a voice that was so quiet, it was scary.
"Did you know he worked this trip?"
"I didn't know he was in this kind of shape. No one did."
His hand slipped from the top of his head, brushing my forearm in the process. I almost didn't feel it. The pieces were beginning to fit together, each one falling into place with a dull, brutal thud that felt like a punch to the solar plexus. "Someone knew, Dan. Someone knew." A terrible feeling of panic began to take hold of me. But I had to stay focused. "Let's keep going."
He restarted the tape, and Little Pete continued his grotesque dance, reaching back for the steering wheel to keep from going down. He stayed that way for a few seconds, swaying as if the ground was a storm-tossed sea. And then, God help us, he began loading the aircraft.
My stomach tightened into a hard lump as I watched him lift a dog in its carrier out of the cart, stagger to the aircraft, and slide it through the aft cargo door, stopping to poke his fingers through the cage before pushing the carrier all the way in. I couldn't tell if he was teasing the animal or trying in some sloppy, sentimental, drunken way to give comfort.
In contrast to the passengers' movements, Little Pete's in normal speed were slow and dreary and indifferent, but knowing what had come later that night, every single thing he did was painfully riveting. Pete followed the dog with the bags, stopping occasionally to pull a scrap of paper from his pocket and make a notation.
Dan shook his head. "I can't believe he's actually keeping a load plan."
"It doesn't look to me like he's following any kind of a plan. He's stuffing the load wherever he can make it fit."
"You're right, but he is keeping track. See there." Little Pete pulled out the scrap again and made some adjustment with his pencil. He finished by trying to fit two boxes in the forward compartment. It didn't take long before he gave that up and shoved them in the back with the dog. "He didn't load anything forward," said Dan, "Did you see that? All the weight he put onboard is in the back."
"It was out of balance," I said, feeling the air go out of me as another piece thudded into place. Little Pete had been drunk the night of the fight with Terry McTavish and reversed the load on a jet, which is more or less what he'd done here. "Little Pete loaded it wrong, and the flight crew got blamed."
We watched him close the cargo compartments, almost slipping again at the rear door. He disappeared into the cab of his tug, then popped out with his glow-in-the-dark wands. Appearing remarkably composed, he stood in front of the aircraft, in front of the captain, and guided the airplane out of the frame.
Little Pete walked back into camera range and stowed his wands.
Dan and I stood for a long time staring at the screen after he'd driven away. Neither one of us made a move to turn off the tape, even though there was nothing left to see but rain falling on a bare concrete slab.
Eventually, I felt the insistent aching in the middle of my back and realized I'd been standing stiff enough to crack. Dan had started moving around. He looked as if he was in fast-forward mode himself, pacing around the table and talking to himself. "That son of a bitch. That cocksucking, motherfucking, degenerate scumbag. He was drunk. He fucked up the load. He caused the crash. That's what this has all been about."
I found the light switch and flipped it on, but not having the energy to pace, I leaned back against the closed door as much for support as to ease my sore back. "How did the captain get the plane off the ground?"
"What do you mean?"
"If the load was out of balance enough to bring the plane down, how could he have gotten it off the ground? He would have been tail-heavy."
He answered without ever breaking stride. "It doesn't take that much on a Beechcraft to move the center of gravity. It's a small airplane. A couple hundred pounds in the wrong place would do it. He could have been able to take off but not land. That's possible."
"I can't believe it."
"Why not? They use flaps on landing but not take-off. Plus, the fuel tanks are forward, so if the tanks were full, they could have compensated-"
"No. I'm saying I can't believe anyone would be that negligent, that stupid. How could they let him work like that? Even his father-especially his father."
"C'mon, Shanahan, you know these people. And how stupid are they if they covered it up and got away with it?"
"Yeah, how did they do that?" I dropped down into one of the chairs that ringed the conference table. Spread out in front of me was the stack of papers and documents that had spilled out of Dickie's envelope along with the tape. "The whole thing was caught on a surveillance video, Little Pete is clearly drunk, and yet the true story has never come out. The pilots took the fall for what he did. Obviously, the tape never came out, but still-"
"Lenny had to be part of it," he said. "He was the GM. There's no way this thing gets covered up and he doesn't know about it."
"No doubt. Little Pete Dwyer didn't fool anyone on his own." I traced the edge of the conference table, following the line with my thumb, avoiding eye contact. "And if Lenny was involved, Dan, I think we have to consider that Ellen was, too, at least in the cover-up. There's plenty of motive for murder here all the way around."
His response was instantaneous. "You will never, ever convince me that Ellen Shepard was part of this."
"Maybe she got sucked in. Once you've committed contract fraud, once you've gone that far, if something like this happens, you have to cover it up just to protect yourself. You keep getting in deeper even if you don't want to."
"Buying off a contract is one thing, but twenty-one people died here."
"And if the true cause had ever come out, there would have been no deal. You know that. You would have had investigations and lawsuits all over the place. Nor'easter would have been grounded, maybe even had their certificate yanked. What started out as contract fraud to make the deal happen ended up being a cover-up to make sure it didn't blow up."
He stood across the room from me on the other side of the table with his feet shoulder-width and his arms crossed. The look on his face was as closed as his stance. "Ellen didn't know about this."
He was so confident, so sure that even if he hadn't known everything about Ellen, he had known the important things. He simply refused to believe the worst about his friend. I rested my head against the high back of the chair and stared at the TV screen. The surveillance tape was still running. Neither one of us had made a move to turn it off. I envied Dan his certainty, and I wished so much that I had known Ellen. That I didn't have to draw my conclusions about her from what she hung on her walls, or what was left on her kitchen counter, or the look in her eyes in that dating video when she said she didn't want to be alone anymore. The rain continued to fall on the concrete on March 15, 1995. It was falling harder, and no matter what the facts said about Ellen, I wanted Dan to be right. I didn't want her to have known about this.
"Let's look at it from a different angle. Ellen knew nothing about the crash-the true cause of the crash- until she got to Boston. Dickie sent her this package, she saw the tape and realized that Lenny had used the money they'd stolen-"
He opened his mouth to object again, but I kept going. "Used the money for something besides the contract payoff. She got angry or scared, and that's why she took the evidence. When she figured out what he'd gotten her into, she panicked."
He stared at me for a long time, and I couldn't tell what he was thinking. But he must have been considering the theory, and he must have decided he could live with it. "She got to the evidence first," he said, picking up the thread, "she threatened to go public, and they killed her for it." He tapped his lips with the tip of his index finger. "Now all we have to do is prove it."