“No, hey, let me finish my little spiel here before you say anything. First of all, it was absolutely horrible of me not to call as soon as I heard you were in the hospital. Things were going fits around here, but that’s not any excuse. I feel terrible about it, and I’m deeply sorry. I’m also devastated to hear you’re not going to be covering aviation anymore. I want to hear every last detail of what happened. First of all, how are you?”
Pace deliberately hesitated for a second. “Uh, oh, me? You want me to talk now?”
“Yes, smarty, it’s your turn.”
He smiled. “I’m fine. All the cuts are healing, and the bruises are in that final, ugly yellow stage. Most of the damage left isn’t visible to the naked eye.”
“Is there a lot of that kind of damage?”
“Some. It will go away, too. In time.”
“Can you tell me everything that happened?”
“I don’t think you want to hear it all.”
“I do. Oh, maybe not all the lurid details of the beating, but everything else. Especially why those boneheads you work for took you off the beat.”
Pace told her most of it, concentrating on his conviction that a conspiracy was in play that cost the lives of Mark Antravanian and Mike McGill, and maybe now Justin Smith. He assured her he never suspected that her company had any role in the plot.
“So that’s why I’m not on the beat anymore,” he concluded. “I kept running around accusing people of murder and assorted cover-ups without evidence, just hunches. That’s frowned on in the civilized world, and in the newspaper business, too.”
“Lord, what an awful period for you,” Warner replied. “I don’t know how you managed to keep your sanity.”
“There are those who think I didn’t.”
“Oh, you did. You sound like you’re doing fine sanity-wise. You know there’s something that, well… oh, never mind.”
“What?” Pace chuckled. Warner was not one to be at a loss for words.
“This is almost too weird.”
“Whitney, you and I have never had secrets.”
“Sure we have,” she said, her tone lightening. “But they were so secret you never knew about them.”
“I’ll phrase it another way. Is something on your mind?”
“Yes, maybe. It’s something that didn’t mean anything to me. I mean, it meant more to Dave Terrell than it did to me. I only cared because David did. I didn’t think it was very important, to be honest. Oh, I don’t think he thought it was important, either. It just bothered him.”
“What the hell are you babbling about?”
“Wait, let me get out my calendar here. I don’t want to be wrong about dates.”
Pace waited. He heard the sound of papers shuffling and pages turning. The Sexton vice-president was searching her ever-cluttered desk for something.
“Here it is,” she said finally. “Okay, here it is. It isn’t much, I don’t think, but in context with your suspicions, it’s damned scary.”
“What, Whit? Will you get on with it!”
“The crash happened April 17th just before 11:00 A.M., local time, right?”
“Right.”
“That’s 8:00 A.M. here.”
“Yeah, right. Where are you going with this?”
“Bear with me, Steve. I’ve got to take this a step at a time because I’m thinking on my feet here. So it’s 8:00 A.M. here. We hurry, hurry, hurry and put our own team together to get to the crash site. We need Dave Terrell because he was one of the chief engineers on the 811 project. Ah, you know him, don’t you?”
“Sure. We met when I did the stories on the 811, before it went on the line. And I talked to Dave at Dulles once or twice after the accident. He didn’t have much to say.”
“I don’t think he knew anything,” Warner said. “Anyhow, at the time of the crash, thank God, Dave and some of the other key engineers were already in Washington for a congressional hearing so they shot right out to Dulles. I think they were credentialed and on the field by 3:00 P.M.”
“That sounds reasonable.”
“Well, there wasn’t much they could do in those first hours,” Warner explained. “I mean, they watched the fire and rescue people do their thing, and chatted up some of the NTSB and FAA people on the scene, letting everybody know they were there and eager to help. But there wasn’t any real investigative work to do. So when the starboard engine and what was left of the starboard wing were secured, Dave walked out to have a look at them and to do what he could to help identify bits and pieces lying around.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“Well, there was a lot going on. Dave didn’t know exactly what he was looking for and everything was burned, so it could have been hard to spot. He might have missed it.”
“Missed what?” Warner didn’t usually circle tough subjects; she’d home in and attack head-on. So Pace found her hesitation maddening.
“Feathers, blood, some sign of a bird strike.”
All of a sudden, Pace felt a hollow sensation in his chest, the sort of reaction one gets when the heart goes on holiday in the throat without warning.
“I’m not sure I’m following your implications, Whit,” he said, trying to keep the astonishment out of his voice.
“Well, talking about it afterward, Dave was more embarrassed than anything else. He said he thought he must be getting old. I figured it was the confusion, but now I think maybe it was something else. Steve, Dave said he didn’t see any signs of a bird strike. No blood, no gore, no bones, no feathers, no nothing. The question is, if it wasn’t there on Thursday afternoon, how come it was there on Friday morning?”
35
“Steve, this is the Chronicle switchboard,” a woman’s voice said. “I have a call for you from a gentleman who identified himself as Emil Jackson. Do you want me to patch him through?”
Pace, who was walking out his front door when the phone rang, felt his heart leap. “Yes!” he said emphatically. “By all means.”
There was a click. “Mr. Pace?”
“This is Steven Pace, yes.”
“Doctor Jackson, medical examiner’s office.”
“Yes, sir?”
“I’m sorry to bother you so early,” the doctor said. “I called you at the office, but they said you weren’t in yet, and I’m headed into a long series of meetings. They wouldn’t give me your home phone number.”
“That’s company policy,” Pace said. “You’re not bothering me at all.”
“I would have called back yesterday, but I wanted to run some tests on Mr. Smith’s remains, and the results didn’t reach my desk until this morning. I’m afraid the findings don’t fit your suspicions. We scanned for a good number of poisons, and all the tests came up negative.”
“Then what killed him?”
“It’s hard to say. There were no obvious abnormalities of the brain, no obstructions of coronary arteries. Mr. Smith was in fine physical condition as far as we could determine. The best bet is an arrhythmia resulting in a heart attack, in layman’s terms.”
“Why can’t you be certain?”
“These things are not always easy. There was nothing about the condition of his heart that would lead one to expect an episode of arrhythmia. Yet these things do sometimes happen. We will be signing this off as natural causes.”
“I still don’t buy that, Doctor, especially in light of Justin’s condition,” Pace said. “What if something other than poison was used?”
“I can’t test for every known substance in the world,” Jackson said defensively.
“Even if you suspect murder?”
“I don’t suspect murder. You do.”