Jake shook his head, he was dumbfounded.
Then he noticed McGill marching toward Kaplan, yelling something to him at the same time.
McGill put his face inches from Kaplan’s face and barked, “You have quite a lot of explaining to do now. It looks like you ran two airplanes together. You need to go back over to the tower and we’ll be there in a couple of hours. This ‘accident’ is now a midair.”
Before Kaplan could respond, Annie pointed toward the FAA investigator and said, “Hey, wait a minute. Didn’t that man just say the Skyhawk didn‘t have a transponder?”
“Yeah, so what?” McGill said.
“Well, our primary radar was down yesterday morning, so there is no way Gregg would have seen a non-transponder-equipped aircraft flying along the river.”
McGill looked at Kaplan and then over to Jake. “Is that accurate?”
“Yes, it is. I haven’t been able to brief you on equipment outages,” Jake said.
McGill shook his head and turned hard brown eyes back to Kaplan. “Well. I guess that lowers your culpability. For now.”
McGill turned his glare to Annie, but his order was for Jake: “Get them out of here.”
McGill walked away.
Jake was about to speak to Kaplan when he heard Ben Lewis yell, “Remains.”
Without thinking, Jake, Annie, and Kaplan turned to see Ben hold up a portion of an arm with a hand attached.
Annie’s face turned white. She hunched over and vomited.
Jake felt his stomach tighten. This is getting out of control fast.
CHAPTER 26
The two tractor/trailer flatbeds that delivered the lattice-boom crawler crane, loaned by the Savannah Port Authority, were moved as close to the Challenger’s crash site as possible so the wreckage could be loaded for transport to the Gulfstream hangar. The crane, with its two-hundred-thirty-foot boom length and one-hundred-ton lifting capacity, slowly lowered the Challenger’s main fuselage on the first flatbed. The cockpit and tail section pieces, along with some of the scattered debris were loaded on the second flatbed.
The site would be scoured over the next hours and days to collect any remaining debris, using metal detectors and other equipment deemed necessary to locate anything still buried in the marsh.
Dave Morris pulled away from the site following the two flatbed rigs heading for the hangar. Kowalski walked over to McGill and Jake with a Cheshire cat grin. “The Civil Air Patrol found the wreckage of the Skyhawk.”
McGill asked, “Well, don’t keep me in suspense — how far away is it?”
“As the crow flies, maybe a mile or two, but by road several miles. The Jasper County deputies are en route as we speak. Here are the coordinates the CAP radioed in.”
McGill whistled for Jake and Ben to follow. The four men walked over to McGill’s Suburban where McGill pulled out an area map and laid it across the hood.
“All right, here we are.” He pointed to the spot on Hutchinson Island. “If we follow these coordinates … that puts the Skyhawk right around here.” He tapped his finger on a spot on the map, then circled it with his pen.
Jake watched as McGill ran his finger from the coordinates fix of the Skyhawk location toward the Savannah International Airport.
Looking up at Jake, McGill said, “Almost in a direct line from the end of Runway 27.”
McGill’s argument of a midair had just gained credence. The gaping hole underneath the cockpit could easily be explained away by other causes, even though the outward ripping and rearward curled strips of the metal hull were usually indicative of an outward blast. Even the royal blue paint transfer might have been explained away by a careless aircraft tug operator, but Jake knew there were now too many coincidences.
His earlier assertions of an explosion had damaged his credibility with McGill and shaken his own confidence in his ability to maintain an objective assessment of all the evidence. The evidence was telling him one thing but his instincts were telling him something entirely the opposite. Too many things were happening too fast and they seemed connected somehow. The man in the pub and the man in Dallas.
His thoughts drifted back to the man’s words from the night before in his room. Things aren’t as they seem. The enemy is closer than you think.
He jolted back to the present. He was about to tell McGill about the man in his room, but then had second thoughts. He knew McGill would be furious he hadn’t reported the incident to hotel security, the police and to him. McGill would see it as a potential compromise to the investigation and would likely have Jake dismissed.
McGill said, “Take the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder to Carol. Have her ship them out ASAP to D.C. Then go back out to the TRACON and pull all the maintenance logs for the last three months. I want to know everything about that radar.”
He turned and looked at Ben, “Ben, you and Kowalski are going with me to check out the Skyhawk.”
Jake loaded the two chests in the back of the black Mustang. He was driving toward the Westin when his cell phone rang.
“Jake, it’s Dave.”
“Yeah, Dave, what’s up?”
“Can you get over here right away? I’m at the Gulfstream hangar. I was unloading the fuselage and … well, there’s something here you really need to see.”
“Come on Dave, don’t keep me in suspense. What is it?”
“I think you might have been onto something but I’m not sure. You’ll have to look at it yourself.”
“Okay, Let me drop off the recorders for Carol to ship out and I’m on my way—”
Dave’s line went dead.
He had barely hung up his phone when it rang again. He recognized the number of Donna Greene in Dallas and answered.
“Ms. Greene, what’d you find out?”
“Jake, things have turned into a mess here. The police originally couldn’t find either of the mechanics. Their names were Duane Sanders, he’d been at Longhorn for a couple of years, and of course, Ian McDonald.”
“Were?” Jake asked. “What do you mean were?”
“As I was about to say,” Greene said, “the police entered Sanders’ home and no one was home. It looked like he hadn’t been there in a few days. Eventually they tracked down where his girlfriend lived, but no one answered the door.
“They heard some groaning and knocked down the door only to find an extremely gruesome scene. The girlfriend was tied to the bedposts of the bed, blindfolded, gagged, and naked. Sanders was duct-taped to a chair with a bullet through his left temple. They’d both been hit with Taser darts. When the girl settled down, she told the police that she couldn’t remember much about the last couple of days.”
“The last couple of days? How long had he held them?”
“We don’t know for sure. Never will, probably. Anyway, Sanders had told her about the new mechanic. He came over to her apartment under the guise that he was meeting Sanders there. As soon as she opened the door he met her with the Taser in the chest, then it was lights out. She remembered hearing him talking on the phone and moving around the apartment. She can’t remember anything he said, though. She’s suffering from post-traumatic shock.”
“Did he drug her or something?”
“Apparently so. The medical center is pulling a tox screen to see what he gave her, but the doctor said she was unconscious for most of it. She remembers being raped, though. She said she knew she was being raped but her body wouldn’t move. And he did it more than once, she remembered that much. Not much else. They took semen samples and hope to find a match from the DNA database.”
“He sounds like a monster.”