“Anything damaged?” Bree Kelly asked, checking me over.
“Only my pride.”
I stuffed the pain in a compartment deep in my brain and continued on.
“Anybody who thinks global warming is a hoax needs to come up here and have a look,” Wood said as we trudged single file behind him. “Fifty years ago, this whole area was covered with glaciers. They’re all melting, going away. Could be that’s why you saw whatever it was you saw.”
“Assuming you didn’t imagine it,” Bree Walker said.
Wojewodski spotted the debris first. The four of us had spread out line abreast, twenty meters apart, advancing slowly through the trees, when he yelled out, “Hey, I think I got something!”
I could see instantly what he’d found: remnants of a nacelle, the protective, cigar-shaped structure that protects an airplane engine. The shredded, unpainted aluminum, and what was left of the big radial engine it once housed, were wedged against a large pine and partially buried as though driven into the ground by some great force. Gouged in the earth behind the wreckage was a shallow trench twenty meters or so in length and no more than about a foot deep. This was where the nacelle had first struck the ground and been dragged along like the keel board from a sailboat before slamming to a stop against the tree. The thick blanket of pine needles that had fallen onto the trench and the nacelle, all but obscuring both from above, told me that they’d been there a long time, perhaps decades. The depth of the trench told me that the airplane to which the nacelle had once been attached had probably impacted the earth at a relatively shallow angle, as though the pilot had been flying more or less straight and level when he crashed.
Scattered to my left and similarly buried under years of pine needles, I could easily make out twisted pieces of airplane skin and frame: wing spars and ribs and what appeared to have once been an elegantly rounded wingtip.
“Hey, you guys! Hey, over here!”
I turned and saw Wood in a narrow draw, down slope, far to my right. He was waving frantically, motioning for us to come quickly. I ran as fast as my banged-up knee would allow.
There, in the shadow of the ridgeline that towered above us, partially covered over by snow and broken pine branches, was the mostly intact fuselage of a venerable, twin-engine Beechcraft, a Model 18. The empennage, or tail assembly, looked to have been sheared off.
As I approached it from the rear, I could see that the plane had come to rest on its belly, listing slightly to the left, the ground around it strewn with jagged pieces of aluminum and other debris shed upon impact. The fuselage door, aft of where the wings had ripped away when the plane went into the trees, was canted open, dangling by a single hinge. Inside the door was an open wooden crate, approximately three feet by three feet. On the ground directly outside the door was what looked to be one side of the crate. The tail number — NC1569—was evidence that the plane was more than 60 years old. Federal aviation authorities stopped adding the letter “C” to aircraft “N” registrations soon after World War II.
Through the shattered cockpit windows I gazed down at the mummified remains of the pilot, whose body was only partially decomposed thanks to the glacial conditions where his aircraft had come to rest. He was slumped forward, still strapped into the left seat. The right front quadrant of his chalky skull was missing, along with most of his front teeth — injuries that I assumed he had incurred when his face smacked the instrument panel upon impact. He’d been wearing a woolen watch cap and a double-breasted navy peacoat when he died. Both were now moth-chewed and hanging from his body in tatters. He’d also been armed. The butt of what looked like a .45-caliber, semiautomatic Colt Model 1911A protruded from the right pocket of his coat.
None of that, however, gave me as much pause as what I saw next, and left me wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into.
Lying beside the wreckage, just forward of the airplane’s crumpled nose, was the dead body of a young man. His arms and legs were outstretched, like he’d been making a snow angel.
Lifeless green eyes stared up at a cloudless sky. Around the torso was snow dyed black with blood. Goose feathers poked out from three dime-size bullet holes in the front of his down-filled, shiny black parka.
“Anybody recognize him?” Wood asked.
“His name’s Chad,” I said, staring down at the young man’s face. “He worked at the Tahoe airport.”
FIVE
The terrain wasn’t flat or clear enough for the El Dorado County sheriff’s Jetranger to put down, so the helicopter pilots landed in a meadow about a quarter mile to the west. The homicide investigator assigned to the case hiked in the rest of the way.
Wood showed him where he’d found fresh prints of climbing boots that tracked across a crusty patch of snow, away from the crash site, then accompanied him to Chad’s body.
The investigator walked slowly around the corpse, pausing periodically and squatting on his haunches to assess it from different angles, like he was lining up a putt. He was in his mid-thirties, on the stocky side, with sandy, close-cropped hair and a requisite cop moustache that hadn’t quite grown in yet. He wore jump boots, green uniform pants bloused at the calves, a tan uniform shirt, and a green tactical vest under a green sheriff’s parka. A badge was stitched in gold on the chest, just below his name tag: Streeter.
He snapped on a latex glove and tugged gently on the kid’s left hand, which was bent awkwardly inward at the wrist, palm up, fingers outstretched. There was little give in the fingers indicating Chad had probably been dead at least twelve hours — the time it takes humans to reach maximum stiffness after death, depending on their individual physiology and ambient air temperatures. Yet one more thing you learn hunting terrorists.
“Anybody touch anything?” the investigator wanted to know. “Move anything? The body? Inside the plane? Anything?”
All three search and rescuers adamantly shook their heads no.
“Good. Let’s keep it that way. We’ve got patrol units scouring the area for suspects. I’ll get the forensics team up here A-SAP.” Streeter stood, rubbing his chin with the heel of his hand, and peered in through the broken cockpit window at what was left of the pilot. “Whoa. I’d say this dude’s definitely been up here awhile.”
“Since October, 1956,” I said. “I’m guessing the plane was somewhere out of the LA area.”
Streeter turned and gave me a “Who the hell are you?” look.
“This is Mr. Logan,” Wood said. “He was the pilot who spotted the wreck yesterday.”
“Why 1956?” Streeter said.
“There’s a bunch of old newspapers wadded up in the rear of the plane — copies of the Los Angeles Times. All the ones I saw were from October ’56. ‘Cincinnati’s Birdie Tebbetts Named National League Manager of the Year.’ ‘Soviet Troops Invade Hungary.’ ”
Streeter wasn’t happy with me. He asked me my name again. I told him.
“You went inside the plane? You contaminated the crime scene, Mr. Logan.”
“I touched nothing, disturbed nothing. All I did was take a look. I’d suggest you do the same, Deputy. There’s something you really need to see.”
I pointed out the side of the plywood crate, lying on the ground outside the fuselage door, and the nongalvanized box nails jutting from the wood, their tips bent and shiny.
“The nails aren’t rusty,” I said.
“Which means what?”
“Which means they haven’t been outside long enough to get rusty. And the plywood’s not warped. Somebody pried open that crate and tossed out that piece within the last day.”