“As investigators we are bound by facts, however regrettable they might be. I have three people searching that area as we speak. It might take a day, or even a week… but we will find her.”
“Find them,” Davis countered. “There are two girls out there. And yes, you might find them. But I’m not convinced by your facts. Not yet. Until I am, I’m going to keep looking elsewhere.”
A long silence ensued at the impasse. Davis turned the iPod in his hand, staring at it as if it were a talisman of some kind.
Marquez rose slowly, and when Davis followed suit, they exchanged resolute stares.
“I’ll help you with this investigation,” Davis said. “But don’t ever question my motives.”
“Very well,” said Marquez. He backed away a step, and asked, “Have you seen the cockpit yet?”
“No.”
“I think it’s time you did. I should warn you, the bodies are still in place.”
“Nothing I haven’t seen before.”
“There you are wrong.” With that, the colonel began walking to the forward edge of the fuselage.
Davis fell in behind him.
As was his custom, Martin Stuyvesant sat in the first row of the bus, and through the front window he saw the sign he’d been waiting for: AKRON, 5 MILES. He sighed a vagabond’s sigh. Would this place be different from all the others?
Of course not.
Stuyvesant was not a happy man. His stomach had been acting up and he was desperately tired. The burn in his gut, he supposed, was an ulcer, but he’d be damned if he was going to see any doctor about it. Ulcers were what you got when you had too many worries, and God knew, Stuyvesant had more than his share. He was effectively homeless, and drank more than he should. He also suspected he might be getting too reliant on the pain medication a friend had given him, but the old knee injury from high school wasn’t letting up, and life on the road was as demanding as ever. Then there were his finances. He was nearly broke again, left with no choice but to tap friends and strangers “for the very last time.” Everyone knew it was a lie. It had been that way as long as he could remember, walking through life with his hand out. Stuyvesant never hesitated when it came to begging for cash — he’d essentially made a career of it — but he needed a fresh angle.
If all that wasn’t bad enough, a new problem was brewing, one he’d only learned about this morning. Somewhere in Colombia, deep in the godforsaken jungle, events were playing out that could land him in a great deal of trouble. Trouble of the criminal variety. There was never a good time for complications of that nature, but the timing couldn’t have been worse. Stuyvesant had made a great many mistakes in his tempestuous life, yet this one he’d thought long dead and buried. One phone call had proved how wrong he was. Like a zombie, the most hideous crisis imaginable had mutated, stirred, and risen from the dead.
Feeling the familiar burn, he reached into a pocket, retrieved his last two antacid tablets, and stuffed them in his mouth. The bus veered onto the first Akron exit, and at the bottom of the off-ramp the brakes hissed as the big machine stopped at a red light. Stuyvesant spotted a man on the curb. Roughly his age — early fifties — he was limping as he ambled along with a cardboard sign that read: WILL WORK FOR FOOD, GOD BLESS.
Stuyvesant watched him sidle along the row of cars in the adjacent lane, pausing for a moment near each window. The man looked like Stuyvesant felt, old and weary, yet his clothes were more tattered, and his hygiene decidedly more repulsive. Stringy hair, yellow teeth, a week’s growth of beard. Here was a man, Stuyvesant thought, who’d lost his self-respect. It was the eyes, however, that really drew his attention. They were cast downward, almost in supplication. That’s where you’ve got it wrong, he thought. You should look them in the eye, show them you’re proud in spite of your circumstances.
The light turned green, and as the bus accelerated Stuyvesant had an epiphany. He saw the driver’s lunch cooler just behind his seat, resting in an open cardboard box.
“Excuse me,” he said, leaning forward to be in the man’s field of vision. “Would you mind if I took the flap from your box?”
The driver glanced at Stuyvesant, then at his lunch. “Uh… sure, help yourself.”
Stuyvesant pulled the box over, removed the plastic cooler, and none too carefully ripped off a good-sized section of cardboard. He then put everything back as it had been, minus one brown corrugated flap. To the woman seated next to him, who was watching most suspiciously, he said, “Do you have a black marker I could borrow?”
She hesitated, but then opened her purse and after some digging pulled out a black Sharpie.
“Perfect! Thank you!”
Stuyvesant put some thought into his message, and after settling on the wording he scrawled it in thick block letters. Pleased with himself, he returned the marker to his bewildered seatmate, and then critiqued his creation at arm’s length.
HOMELESS
NEED MONEY
GOD BLESS
The last line he had waffled on, religion always a touchy issue, but he decided it was safely non-denominational.
Now all he needed was a stage. The right corner from which to make his pitch. Stuyvesant thought he might know exactly where to find it.
He smiled inwardly.
And I’ll look them right in the eye.
EIGHT
The cockpit of a twenty-one seat regional jet is a surprisingly small space. Smaller still after a two-hundred-fifty-knot collision into hardwood forest. That being the case, Davis and Marquez could not inspect the flight deck alongside one another. Access was gained through what had been the cockpit door, until recently a bulletproof Kevlar barrier, now reduced to a splintered six-by-two-foot panel clinging to its bottom hinge.
The aircraft’s nose had come to rest disjointed from the main fuselage and canted at an angle. The cockpit was largely intact, albeit with significant impact damage. Aside from the broken door, Davis noted that a window on the left side had failed inward, and the forward windscreen center-post had buckled severely, a telephone-pole-sized timber winning that battle in microseconds. The flight instrument displays seemed in reasonably good condition, the wide flat-panel screens now dark from lack of power. Whatever chapters the instruments might add to this luckless story would take time to interpret. Microchips had to be recovered, analyzed, and eventually compared to flight data recorder information.
Two overhead panels had accordioned, both sides crumpled, although most of the switches and components were recognizable. The center console, where levers were mounted to manage engine thrust and flap extension, could have come straight from the factory floor. Davis shouldered inside the cockpit to inspect things more closely, and was immediately tripped by one very high mental hurdle. The ARJ-35 was certified as a two-pilot airplane. He was looking at three bodies.
“What the hell?” he blurted.
“My words earlier were in Spanish,” said Marquez, “but much the same.”
Davis leaned in further, snapping the mask back over his face to counter stale air that reeked of death. He saw two men in the left seat, stacked like a pair of burlap grain sacks. Both wore uniforms, the usual dark polyester pants, short-sleeve white shirts with epaulets, and black leather shoes. In the right seat was a man in civilian clothes, this body in the best condition of the three. None of it made sense.
Davis pulled back into the daylight and drew off his mask. “This airplane doesn’t have a jumpseat, does it?”
“No,” said Marquez, confirming that the third cockpit seat, common on larger airliners, was not an option here.