He turned and looked off to the southeast, where a small party of federal investigators and two Posadas County sheriff’s deputies were working. “At least we know something,” he said. “We’ve got the exact initial-impact spot, and the markings on the prop tell us that the engine was putting out power at the time of impact.” He hitched up his collar. “If they can find the missing propeller blade tip, we’ll know a little more.”
“You’ll tear down the engine?” I shouted over the wind.
Buscema nodded. “That’s going to take some time.” He thrust his hands in his pockets. “Compared to a jumbo jet or something like that, a Bonanza is a pretty simple airplane, Sheriff. It’s usually not hard to pinpoint a problem if mechanical failure was to blame. What we’re going to do”-he pivoted at the waist to look back into the wind and the sun-“is make as thorough a survey of this site as we can before we move anything. Establish the angle of impact, probable direction of flight, all those simple things.”
He grinned at the expression on my face. The jumble of junk in front of me didn’t look “simple,” even if the wind stopped shifting it around, but I was willing to take Buscema’s word for it.
“And then we take a look for the obvious things.” He held up an index finger. “Number-one cause of all crashes is pilot error, Sheriff. That’s number one. It’s a good bet that Philip…what was his name?”
“Camp. Philip Camp.”
“It’s a good bet that Mr. Camp made a mistake. That’s what the statistics tell us. If the weather had been really bad, with low ceiling, crap like that, I’d be willing to bet next month’s wages on pilot error. But this is a bit more complicated. It was clear and windy-not perfect flying weather, but still, not so bad. What we know for sure is one big, fat, humongous fact.” He paused and I raised an eyebrow to prompt him.
“He was flying too goddam low. The airplane hit the ground at a shallow angle. Not enough to skip like a rock across water, but pretty shallow nevertheless.” He shrugged and tucked a hand in his pocket. “If he’d been cruising along at ten thousand feet above the ground, this kind of violent scatter crash wouldn’t have happened.” He made a corkscrew motion with his other hand. “Let’s say something really bizarre happened. Let’s say he was trying to show his brother-in-law how he could do a barrel roll. He gets all crossed up, and the end result is that the plane sheds a wing. Or a serious chunk of empennage. What comes down is a ball of junk. Not smithereens like this.”
Buscema turned his back to the wind and pulled his cap down tight on his head. “I’ll be willing to bet that they were flying fast and low. You know why?”
“Because the sheriff wanted to look at something. That’s the only reason I can think of that explains why they’d be over here. Philip Camp had no reason to be curious. The sheriff might have.”
“That’s right. You know Martin Holman and his work better than anyone, Mr. Gastner. You told me that he didn’t like to fly. He didn’t like to spend county money. So he could have driven out here, couldn’t he?”
I nodded. “He could have,” I said, “but my guess is that time was a factor. He saw an opportunity and decided to con a free ride out of his brother-in-law. They could do in a few minutes what would take most of the day by ground vehicle.”
“And what the hell was there to see, anyway? Dust, open prairie, and an occasional herd of cattle. Hell of a thing to die for.” Buscema paused. “And you said he had a camera with him?”
“Yes. It’s been recovered. One of our deputies is processing the film.”
“Well,” Buscema said in dismissal, “don’t hold your breath.” He wrenched the bill of his cap down again. “Now, a lot of people will fly low to get out of mountain chop. You get down a little closer to the ground, right over the tops of the trees, and there’s better visual reference.” He grinned. “It’s more like riding in an old freight wagon on a bouncy road. But you’ve got stuff in your visual horizon and you’re less apt to get airsick. Way up high, you get to feeling sort of detached when you’re bouncing around. See what I mean? And it still doesn’t tell us why they were over here, or what they were doing.”
He took a couple of steps to his left and knelt down to look at a tangle of instrumentation and engine controls. “What we need to do is stick with what we do know. The remains of the cockpit controls make a few things pretty clear.”
He pointed first at one twisted piece and then at another.
“There were no flaps dialed in. She was flying clean. Trim was where we’d expect it to be for level cruise flight. Cruise throttle setting, too. Not maximum, not pulled back for descent. Just cruise, running right at sixty-five percent or a little better. Nothing unusual about manifold pressure settings, at least judging by the position of the controls. Prop in cruise pitch. Gear up and locked. Plenty of fuel, and fuel selector in the expected place. In fact, why he didn’t make a fireball after impact is only God’s guess.”
“Everything normal,” I said. “You don’t think that maybe the plane could have shed the tip of the propeller while in flight?”
“No, I don’t. I might be wrong, but the odds of that are a long shot. If that’s what happened, he would have slammed in some engine-control changes to take care of the vibration. And let me tell you, that would be enough to shake the engine right off its mounts in nothing flat. So, if he had half a brain and that’s what happened, we’d expect to see the throttle pulled out to stop, and if he had the time, maybe the prop pitch messed with one way or another. But that’s not what we’ve got.”
He touched a toggle switch. “At least not at first glance. The autopilot was disengaged, so the pilot was doing the flying.” He looked off to the east again. “Where does the woman live who first reported the problem?”
“Charlotte Finnegan.” I pointed toward a rugged knoll a mile distant. “Her ranch is another four miles or so beyond that, right on the county road.”
“And she told you that she saw an aircraft in trouble?”
“That’s what she told the dispatcher. And last month, she told the dispatcher that she’d heard two tractor-trailer trucks collide head-on just down the road from their ranch, too. What she really heard was a piece of tin blow off one of the shed roofs and hit the kitchen wall.”
“Ah…I see. One of that kind. But this time she didn’t explain what ‘trouble’ meant concerning the airplane?”
“No.”
“Have you talked with her since?”
“No. I haven’t had a chance.”
“Then we’ll want to do that. In fact, how about if we do that right now? Milliman will keep after this. I’ve got a hunch that the airplane isn’t going to let us in on any secrets. Maybe the medical examiner will.” He glanced at his watch. “Is your man pretty prompt?”
“My man?”
“The coroner. Is he going to make us wait, or is he on top of things?”
Doctors Alan Perrone and Francis Guzman were handling the initial examination for us, and it was clear that Vincent Buscema didn’t know either one of them.
“We’ll know the results as soon as they’re in,” I said.
“Then let’s go chat with this Finnegan lady.” He gestured at the hill. “It’s just a few minutes over there. This is a good time.”
I grinned. “There’re no ‘few minutes’ about anything around here, Vincent. And if we’re going to talk with Charlotte Finnegan, I’d like to take my chief of detectives with me.”
“Where’s he at?”
“She. And she’s at the medical center, where the autopsy’s in progress. We can pick her up there and head on out. It means some backtracking, but if we want to talk with Mrs. Finnegan, we’ll want Detective Reyes-Guzman along, believe me.”