The other stories involved the plane crash that Carrie had come across yesterday. At the time, she hadn’t thought there could be any relevancy to her grandparents’ deaths, but now that it had come up again in the same vicinity as the other murders, she began to think about it. It seemed odd that such a flurry of murders would have taken place in such a small and sparsely populated area, especially when all of them had occurred within eighteen months after the crash.
Curious, she expanded her search to include any stories involving Hungry Horse for a four-year period prior to the crash. About a dozen articles came up, but as she read them, she found that none of them involved mysterious deaths or murders.
Suddenly, she wanted to know more details of the events surrounding that plane crash and what might have been on it.
The first story she read indicated that the final results of the NTSB’s investigation into the exact cause of the crash had been inconclusive. There had originally been several theories as to the cause of the accident, including wind shear and mechanical failure, but the NTSB had been unable to conclusively pinpoint any one event as the exact cause for the crash. The NTSB’s investigator-in-charge, Jack Kleister, noted that the investigation had been hampered by the fact that the plane’s black box had never been recovered, and because the plane had gone down in a remote and heavily wooded area of Flathead National Park, the recovery operation and accurate reconstruction of its condition at the time of the crash had been “very difficult.”
Carrie made a note of the investigator’s name, printed out the story, and then began reading the earlier article.
Just under eighteen months ago on October 3rd, a corporate jet had gone down in Flathead National Forest during an ice storm. Flight records indicated the plane, which was owned by the multinational conglomerate NorCorp, had been in route from Baltimore to Seattle when it disappeared from radar approximately forty miles east of Kalispell. Search-and-rescue efforts that had been coordinated by the Montana Aeronautics Division, Flathead County Sheriff’s Department, and the US Forest Service had been hampered by darkness and a blizzard, with winds up to seventy miles an hour accompanied by lightning and freezing rain that had turned to snow during the night.
Three days later, rescue workers located the wreckage in a rugged, remote area near the summit of Shadow Mountain, approximately fifteen miles east of the Spotted Bear Ranger Station, which, Carrie noted, placed it within the thirty-mile radius of the other incidents. Despite the fact that portions of the fuselage were relatively intact, there were no survivors.
The three men killed in the crash were: the pilot, James Laidlaw, age forty-eight; the copilot, Derrick Hughes, age twenty-six; and the passenger, Dr. Phillip Sandefur, age fifty-four. The article noted that the official coroner’s report would be held pending positive identification of the three men by the state crime lab in Missoula.
Carrie left the paper’s archive system, pulled up the Web browser, typed www.ntsb.gov and hit enter. She knew the NTSB’s report would give a much more detailed account of the crash and the investigative findings than were included in the paper. The screen filled with the home page of the NTSB’s website, which included postings of all its final reports of investigations into accidents involving virtually any mode of mass transit in the United States.
The site had its own search engine, which allowed her to search for all crashes within a certain date range by state and if there were any fatalities, which made it easy to find the one she was looking for. The final report was nine pages long, so instead of reading it from the screen, she printed it out and began reading as soon as the pages were spat out.
On October 3rd, a Gulfstream V-SP, number N9712E, had taken off from Baltimore International Airport in route to Seattle. At 23:18 MDT, the aircraft was contacted by the Salt Lake City Air Traffic Control Center and instructed to climb from ten thousand feet to twelve thousand feet to allow for the terrain as it crossed Montana. At approximately 23:32, the Salt Lake ARTCC lost radar contact with the plane.
According to the report, the accident occurred at 47 degrees 54.75 minutes north and 113 degrees 10.33 minutes west, which, Carrie knew from the earlier article, was on Shadow Mountain, approximately thirty miles from her grandparents’ cabin.
She scanned down to the section detailing the personnel information. There had been three people killed in the crash. Two were the pilot and copilot, and the third was an employee of NorCorp. Both the pilot and copilot had originally received their training during service in the US Air Force. The pilot had flown for Delta Airlines for seventeen years before he had retired to fly on a part-time basis as a private pilot for NorCorp. The copilot had just left the air force two months prior, and this was his first commercial flight. There was an extensive investigation into the background of both men, including interviews with family and coworkers as well as the most recent medical records. The conclusion of the report was that there was no evidence to indicate that the crash had been caused by pilot negligence or error.
Of the single passenger, nothing more was mentioned aside from the fact that he was an employee of NorCorp. While this wasn’t necessarily anything suspicious, it did leave Carrie to wonder about who he was and why he was being flown to Seattle on the company’s private jet.
The report also contained a section detailing specific information on the plane, a Gulfstream V-SP, including its empty and maximum weight capacity, last annual inspection, and maintenance records, but again, it wasn’t much help with any information that Carrie thought might be relevant, such as a description of any cargo the plane might have been carrying in addition to its mysterious passenger.
Switching tactics, she tried to go another way, namely through the website of the company that owned the plane. The NorCorp website itself was impressive, with an overview of the numerous companies that made up the giant conglomerate and products ranging from cosmetics to pharmaceuticals to medical equipment and specialty plastics.
Carrie spent over a half an hour navigating the site, scrolling through company overview after company overview and countless pages of mission statements and corporate financials. Not surprisingly, she was unable to find a single mention of the plane crash.
Undeterred, her next approach was to call up the Baltimore Sun’s website, where she did a search through the obituary pages for the three days following the plane crash. Then on second thought, because it had taken three days to find the wreckage, she expanded her search to six days. After she printed out the results, she began reading through them, looking for any that mentioned the plane crash. The first one she found was for Derick Hughes, the copilot. As she continued through the list, she was disappointed to find that there were no other obituaries related to the crash. Next, she repeated the process with the Washington Post’s and Seattle Post Intelligencer’s online obits for the same date range, but again, she came up empty-handed. Because NorCorp’s headquarters was located in Atlanta, she tried the Atlanta Constitution site as well, where she found the obituary for James Laidlaw, the pilot, but still nothing on the passenger, Dr. Sandefur.
Frustrated to the point of giving up, Carrie decided to call in someone who was better in the ways of electronic information retrieval than she could ever hope to be.
She took her cell phone from her purse and punched in the two-digit speed-dial number for her office in Denver.
“Hi, Sandy,” she said to the receptionist. “Is Charlie in?”
CHAPTER 43
The day was clear and bright. The sun shone in a brilliant blue sky, the dazzling white of the snow-covered landscape almost blinding him in spite of the mirrored sunglasses he wore as he drove from Flathead Lake and the Lakeshore RV Park back to Kalispell. But Kyle was in no mood to enjoy the day. He was becoming accustomed to living in a world that was eternally cold and gray.
He rode in silence. There were no Jimmy Buffet CDs in the rental, and even if there had been, he wouldn’t have played them. His taste for the music had soured. Instead of remindi
ng him of good times, it now served as a painful reminder of yet another of his many failures.
He had just left the Lattimers after he had returned their camera. They had anxiously asked if there had been any more news about Danny and Tammy, and Kyle had told them no. He hadn’t even bothered to take off his shades. He had been too ashamed to look them in the eyes.
His cell phone rang. He frowned when he saw the caller ID. It was Janet again.
He wasn’t in the mood for her, but he had been putting her off for days. Better to get it over with now while I have some privacy, he thought.
“Agent Andrews,” he said just to see if she would say anything.
“Kyle, it’s your mother.”
“Hello, Janet.”
“Have you told them yet?” she asked.
“No, I haven’t. I’m in the middle of a case. I can’t just quit in the middle of it.”
“Why not? I’m sure they can find someone to take your place.” Normally, Kyle would have been irritated by her constant trivialization of his chosen career, but as she spoke, her voice quivered as if she were about to cry, which was something that was completely out of character for her.
“I need you here with me,” she added shakily.
“Why?” Kyle asked suspiciously. He could tell something was wrong.
“I’m supposed to start chemo next week,” she said and began to cry. “The cancer’s spread to my lymph nodes.”
CHAPTER 44
“Hey, Carrie,” Charlie Weisman said as he came on the line.
It was comforting to hear a familiar voice. “Hey, Wise Man.”
“I wasn’t expecting to hear from you for at least another week or so,” he said. “Is everything okay?”
“I’ve been better,” she admitted. “How’s it going there?”
“We’re gettin’ by,” he said, and then, whispering where no one else could hear him, he added, “Just between you and me, Allan’s freaking out. He’s afraid you’re not going to come back.”
“Are you kidding me?” she said. It felt good to know that she was missed.
“You know how he is.”
“Yeah, I know. But listen, the reason I called is I wanted to see if you can dig up some information for me.”
“Sure, what do you got?”
Carrie looked out the door to make sure no one—meaning Wallace Hipple—was eavesdropping on her conversation. She closed the door. “A year and a half ago on October 3rd, a plane crashed in the mountains near my grandparents’ cabin. The only thing I’ve been able to find out about it is that it was owned by a huge multinational conglomerate called NorCorp. I found some information on the NTSB’s site but not what I was looking for, so I went to the company’s website. Of course, there wasn’t even a mention of it there. I wanted to see if maybe you could dig up something on it.”
“Sure. Anything in particular you want me to look for?” Charlie asked.
“I don’t know,” Carrie replied. “You know how I am. I’m probably just overreacting, but something just doesn’t seem right about all this. There was a passenger on the plane. The NTSB’s report hardly mentions him. It didn’t even give his name. I searched the obituaries in all the papers—Baltimore, Washington, Seattle, even Atlanta, where NorCorp’s headquarters is located—and came up with nothing. I want to know why he was being flown across the country to Seattle on the corporate jet but wasn’t important enough to be mentioned anywhere after the fact. And see if you can find out if the plane was carrying anything. There’s no mention of any cargo in the report, but it doesn’t specifically say there wasn’t any either. Just see what you can find out about any of it. I’m going to call the NTSB myself and see if I can come up with something more that way. If you come across anything that jumps out at you, let me know.”
“You got it,” Charlie said. In the background, she could already hear the furious clicking of his keyboard. That was one thing Carrie loved about Charlie. He was always eager to do anything she asked without ever questioning why. Aside from Allan, Charlie was a big reason why she had never considered leaving the paper. She knew she wouldn’t be half as good a reporter without him.
“You got your laptop with you?” Charlie asked.
“No,” Carrie replied. “Just my phone. I didn’t plan on doing any work while I was here. I’ve been using the local paper’s computer.”
“No problem. I’ll call you if I find anything. Give me the name and address of your motel, and I’ll FedEx your laptop to you. I wouldn’t recommend using the paper’s computer anymore if you want to scoop them. They might be watching what you’re doing.”
Carrie hadn’t thought of that, but it was exactly the sort of cheap ploy she would expect from Wallace Hipple.
“That would be great. Thanks, Wise Man. I owe you big time,” she said. “And I don’t mean just a burger and shake. This one’s worth dinner at Morton’s at least.”
“Nah, don’t worry about it,” Charlie replied. “I’d have to get dressed up for that. Just make it a steak burger from CityGrille, and I’ll be happy.”
Carrie smiled. “Deal! But you’re selling yourself short there, Wise Man.”
CHAPTER 45
Carrie’s next stop was downtown, only this time her destination was across the street from the justice center at the old yellow county courthouse.
Inside, she checked the building directory and then proceeded downstairs. She followed the directions on a sign posted on the wall and made her way down the drab corridor to the door with “County Clerk” stenciled on the glass in gold letters.
She opened the door and entered into a small reception area. Across from her, an old oak counter ran across the width of the room, its surface worn smooth from years of paperwork being shuffled back and forth. An elderly lady at one of the desks behind the counter looked up at Carrie through thick, silver-framed glasses. The nameplate on her desk read Marjorie Mays.
“Can I help you, dear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Carrie replied. “I need to get a copy of the death certificates for several men who were killed in a plane crash on October 3rd of the year before last.”
“Are you related to one of them?” the old lady asked as she stood up and shuffled over.
“No, I’m researching their deaths for a newspaper article,” Carrie replied.
Marjorie looked at Carrie over the top of her glasses and frowned as if trying to decide whether or not to help her.
“You have their names?”
“Yes,” Carrie said, pulling out a sheet of paper with the information.
Marjorie pulled three 5x8 index cards from a stack on the counter and slid them in front of Carrie. “I need you to fill out one of these for each of the copies you are requesting, including your name and address, employer, and a phone number. There’s a three-dollar charge for each copy.”
Carrie filled out the information, paid for the copies, and then waited impatiently while Marjorie printed out the certificates. Using a small silver tool, she imprinted the county seal on each of the certificates before she returned to the counter.
Outside in the hallway, Carrie shuffled through the documents, anxious to review the new information. The first was the copilot, which she skipped. The second one was the one she was looking for, the mysterious passenger. The death certificate showed his name as Dr. Phillip Keith Sandefur. He had been fifty-eight at the time of the crash. His “occupation” on the form was listed simply as “technician,” and under “business or industry” was printed “medical.”
Carrie frowned and blew a strand of hair from her face. She had hoped the death certificate would give her more information than that. Was he a medical doctor, or did he just have a PhD? If he was a medical doctor, would his occupation have been listed simply as “technician?” And if that’s all he had been, what could be so important that the company would fly a technician across the country? Some special surgical equipment that had broken down and required immediate repair? That seemed unlikely. It was
frustrating that his listed occupation and industry were so generic. There wasn’t really enough information for her to even speculate as to what he did. But it hadn’t been a complete waste of effort. She thought she had found the thread she was looking for. Now it was just a matter of following it.
She made her way upstairs and hurried back out to the Hummer. In spite of the clear, bright day, it was cold, with patches of fresh snow still on the ground. She started the truck to get the heater going and then called Charlie to give him the passenger’s name and occupation and, perhaps more importantly, his social security number.
After she hung up with Charlie, Carrie glanced at her watch. As so often happened when she was researching a story, she had lost all track of time. It was after two o’clock now, and she hadn’t eaten lunch. She remembered seeing a combination KFC/A&W a few blocks north on Main Street, so she drove through and picked up a cheeseburger and large fries.
Back in her room, she flipped through her notes while she ate, heedless of the greasy prints she left on the pages. When she found what she was looking for, she picked up the phone and began to dial.
After three rings, a stern-sounding receptionist answered, “National Transportation and Safety Board, how may I direct your call?”
“Jack Kleister please,” Carrie replied.
“May I ask who’s calling?”
“Yes, Carrie Daniels. I’m a reporter with the Denver Inquirer. I have a few questions regarding an accident investigation Mr. Kleister was in charge of.”
“Just a moment please,” the receptionist said as she sent the call through.
“Kleister here,” came the sudden response. He sounded older and his voice was deep and nasally, as if he might have spent a good portion of his life smoking.
“Hello, Mr. Kleister, my name is Carrie Daniels. I’m a reporter with the Denver Inquirer, and if I could, I would like to ask you a few questions regarding a plane crash you were the lead investigator on about eighteen months ago.”
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