“You understand,” said Marquez, “that seating charts are often misleading.”
“I know,” Davis said.
The colonel’s acumen was again on display. Like Davis, he’d been born a military investigator, yet had acquired a working knowledge of airline operations. Commercial airlines were not as closely moored to precision or regulation, instead taking a more customer friendly, laissez-faire approach. When it came to seating, passengers freely traded places with friends and relatives. They might move to a vacant seat after takeoff to get a window view, or to avoid a captive conversation with a boorish seatmate. Flight attendants often reseated passengers to manage practical matters, such as language barriers in emergency exit rows, or weight and balance issues on small aircraft. Flight attendants also moved customers to suit their own objectives, shunting a drunk to someone else’s serving section, or upgrading an attractive traveler to their own. The bottom line: people changed seats on airplanes like they did in church, and for nearly as many reasons. Which meant airline seating diagrams had to be taken with a grain of salt.
“How many passengers have you positively identified?” Davis asked.
“Of the twenty-one on record, twelve with a high degree of confidence. Four others are reasonably certain, and of course we have the two disappearances — if the seating chart is accurate, one being your daughter.”
“That still leaves three.”
Marquez handed over the diagram.
Davis saw a well-traced outline of the cabin, and depicted inside were seven rows of three seats. The seats were split by an aisle, arranged with two to port and one to starboard along the length of the cabin.
While Davis studied the drawing, Marquez said, “The front row of seats was severely damaged — all of the occupants were thrown clear. We found one body on the floor of the forward cabin, and another near the left wing root — both are in poor condition. We will sort them out in time, but judging by dress and build both are certainly male, which is consistent with the seating assignment for that row.”
Davis nearly argued this assumption. He had once encountered a passenger manifest with one extra female, and a deficit of one on the male side of the ledger. That mystery went all the way to the medical examiner who settled things with one word: transgender. That was the thing about sudden death — it kept a recklessly intimate relationship with truth.
Davis decided to stay his objection. “And the third body from the front row?”
Marquez hesitated. “Seat 2A. This was also a man, however… it would be better to show you where he came to rest.”
“What about the pilots?” Davis asked.
“Both remain in the cockpit. We are taking our time with their recovery — you will better understand when you see the circumstances.”
“All right. And the flight attendant?”
Marquez pointed to an X outside the diagram. “The flight attendant was thrown clear — she does not appear to have been strapped into the forward cabin jumpseat. Positively identified as Mercedes Fuentes, age twenty-six. She’d been working for TAC-Air for twelve months.”
Davis nodded. “A hell of a way to end your probationary period. One more question — when your people removed the bodies from the seats, were all the seat belts cinched tightly?”
Marquez looked at him questioningly. “You seem very concerned with safety belts.”
“Little things can tell you a lot. If all the seat belts were pulled tight, then the crew knew there was a problem. It means the flight attendant was screaming at them in the final minutes to tighten their belts and assume the brace position. The passengers would have done it, every last one. On the other hand, if you found all the seat belts loosened casually… it would suggest the airplane hit without warning.”
“Yes, I see your point. I will ask my team for an answer. Earlier you asked whether the belts on the empty seats were latched. Why?”
“If the belts on that last row of seats were loosely latched,” Davis hesitated for a long moment, “then I’d say those occupants were forcibly ejected in the crash.”
“But they were unlatched. What do you take from that?”
“I don’t know. This was a one-hour flight in an aircraft that had no lavatory. That doesn’t leave many reasons to get up. If those two belts were truly undone, I’d say you’re looking at two empty seats on an airplane whose paperwork shows a full boat.”
“That is extremely speculative,” Marquez said quickly. “The video footage was clear. Every passenger boarded that airplane. I must caution you again, Mr. Davis — if you raise your hopes too high, there is only one place to go.”
“Nobody knows that better than me.”
Marquez stepped down from the Huey, the chopper’s stilled rotor blades sagging in the building heat. Davis followed, noting a lone vulture wheeling overhead on some unseen updraft — an apt marker for what he knew was to come. They came upon a soldier that Davis thought looked vaguely familiar. The man eyed him cautiously.
Davis stopped and said to Marquez, “Please tell him I apologize for my bad behavior last night.”
Marquez provided the translation, and the corporal gave Davis an indifferent sideways nod.
“Tell him I’m going to send his squad a case of rum.”
Marquez did, and the soldier lit a smile and slapped Davis on the shoulder.
That settled, Marquez set off toward the crash site. Davis stayed where he was, and called out, “Give me a couple of minutes. I’d like to take a look at the big picture first.”
“Very well. Take as long as you need, but when you are done please come find me. I would like your opinion on what we’ve found in the cockpit.” Marquez walked away on a freshly worn path through the knee-high grass.
Davis went the other way. He backtracked to the far side of the clearing and found a spot in the shade. He liked to begin every case in this same way, taking a distant viewpoint. He leaned against the trunk of a hardwood tree and pulled out a warm Coke and a bottle of Motrin — the restorative vitamin M — that had been given to him mercifully by the helicopter crew. He used one to wash down a handful of the other.
From that vantage point, in torpid jungle heat at the end of the earth, Davis went to work.
Not by chance, the vast majority of aircraft accidents take place within ten miles of an airport. The simple reason is that most mishaps occur during the business of either takeoff or landing. Such airfield accidents, on balance, present largely intact airframes, unfortunate vessels that have strayed from final approach, landed hard in a crosswind, or skidded off a slick runway during a rejected takeoff. In all these circumstances, the meeting of metal and earth takes place at a relatively low speed, and as Newton so elegantly proved, the force of any impact is a matter of mass multiplied by acceleration. Or in the case of air crashes, deceleration.
Unfortunately, deep in the south-central jungle of Colombia, Davis was looking at the other kind of crash. He was looking at the aftermath of a mid-flight interruption, one in which a reliable and tested airframe, for reasons undetermined, had fallen from normal cruise flight and struck the earth at a random point. It is the rarest kind of accident, and with few exceptions, the most catastrophic. To begin, there are no first responders. In many cases the loss is not even recognized until a flight becomes long overdue. The very location of such disasters can take days, weeks, even years to pinpoint. Some go lost for eternity. That they’d been able to locate this crash within a day put them well ahead of that curve. But as any investigator would tell you, such an accident site is to be approached with profound trepidation. You can end up staring at a hole in a swamp two hundred feet deep, or climbing the side of a mountain glacier. Even diving into the depths of a ten-thousand-foot ocean trench.