The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  A few pages over and a couple of paragraphs down was the section marked HISTORY OF THE FLIGHT. On the day of the accident, the captain arrived at the airport in Baltimore at 1300 for a 1400 check-in. No one who saw him that afternoon reported anything unusual about his behavior. That day, he and his first officer flew a round trip from Baltimore to Syracuse with a scheduled stopover in Boston each way. They flew two more round trips between Baltimore and Boston that afternoon and evening. Flight 1704 was the last scheduled for the day. They’d never made it home.

  On that final leg, the flight was delayed in Boston due to bad weather, and didn’t take off until 2015, ninety minutes after the scheduled departure time. Weather at the time of departure was heavy rain, low clouds, and poor visibility.

  At 2149, the Baltimore tower cleared NOR 1704 to descend to and maintain 6,000 feet.

  At 2156, NOR 1704 contacted the tower and requested the current Baltimore weather. It was thirty-seven degrees, low broken clouds, winds out of the northwest at ten knots.

  At 2157, NOR 1704 was cleared for landing.

  Ground witnesses who saw the aircraft on the short final approach to the runway said its wings began to rock back and forth. The aircraft went nose up, then into a steep bank and roll. The right wing contacted the ground first. Its forward momentum caused it to cartwheel, breaking into pieces and scattering wreckage over a quarter mile. The accident occurred during the hours of darkness. Part but not all of the fuselage burned. The aircraft was destroyed. No survivors.

  I stared at the page until I thought I heard Dan say something, but when I looked up, he was still sitting exactly as I’d seen him before, with his feet on the table, one hand on the reports and the other on the armrest propping his head up. Behind him on the TV screen, the tape was still running. I found the remote control and turned it off.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” If I’d not said anything at all, I’m not sure he would have noticed. He was talking to me, but completely absorbed in what he was reading.

  One of the appendices in my report was a map of the wreckage, a computer-generated diagram that showed the major pieces, of which there were many, and where they had landed relative to each other and the airport. I turned to the back and looked at it again, studying it more closely this time. I was trying to remember what this crash had looked like. I was searching for the image, that signature shot that is so visceral, so horrible, or so poignant that it gets burned into our collective consciousness and becomes shorthand for this and only this tragedy. Workers in hip waders and diving gear slogging through swamps with gas masks and long poles. A flotilla of boats out on gray seas with grim-faced men dragging parts of people and machinery out of the water. Scorched mountaintops and flaming oceans and fields of snow fouled by oil and soot. Tail sections with logos intact, absurdly colorful amid the twisted, blackened ruins. I tried to remember 1704, but when I closed my eyes, all I could see was that patch of empty concrete. It was so quiet in the room I could almost hear the rain.

  “Holy shit, boss.” Dan’s feet dropped to the floor, jarring me back to the present. “Holy shit.”

  His raised eyebrows and excited smile told me he’d hit pay dirt. “Tell me.”

  “You’re not going to believe what this is. You’ve got the official version there of what happened that night”—he nodded to my report—“but I’ve got the real story.” He held up a ratty pile of dog-eared, handwritten pages he’d been reading. It was stapled in the corner, but just barely. “This is Dickie Flynn’s confession.”

  “Confession?” The word alone, freighted with all that Catholic significance, brought a shudder of anticipation. What sins were we about to hear?

  “Everything that happened that night in order— bing, bing, bing. And see that? Dickie wrote it himself and signed it.” He turned to the last page and held it up just long enough for me to see the scrawled signature of one Richard Walter Flynn. “According to this, Dickie was here that night and right in the middle of everything.”

  I set my report to the side. “How did they do it?”

  “I’ll show you. What did the investigators say was the official cause?”

  “Pilot error. They say the pilot miscalculated the center of gravity, that it could have been as much as eleven inches aft of the aft limit, which significantly screwed up the weight and balance. In other words, he was tail heavy.”

  “Too much weight in the back,” I said. “He lost control when the flaps were lowered for landing.”

  “Fucking Little Pete. Goddamn him.” He was up now and searching for something. I assumed it was the remote and tossed it to him. Almost in one motion he caught it and started the tape rewinding. “Okay, let’s walk through it. The captain is responsible for calculating the center of gravity, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But he’s got to have all the inputs to do the calculation. He needs passenger weight, fuel load, and the load plan for cargo—weights and positions.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, anxious for the punch line. “Standard stuff.”

  Dan raised one finger, signaling for patience, and I got the impression he was walking through it out loud to try to understand it himself. “In Boston, the Operations agent is responsible for collecting all the inputs on a worksheet. On this worksheet he converts gallons of fuel to pounds, applies average weights for passengers and carry-ons. Cargo weights are pretty much a pass-through from the ramper who loaded the plane. He radios the results to the crew and they do their thing. At the end of every day, the worksheets go into the station files.”

  A sharp click signaled the end of the rewind. He started the tape, and Billy Newman reappeared and fueled the Beechcraft again, this time in fast-motion. Dan switched to normal speed as the fueler walked toward the camera. “Here’s Billy coming into Operations to turn in his numbers for the fuel load.”

  The next time he stopped the tape was after the last passenger had boarded. The ticket agent who had worked the flight closed up the airplane and approached the camera just as Billy had. “Here’s the gate agent coming to turn in the passenger count.” Now we were back up to the point where Little Pete came flying into the picture, skidding recklessly up to the aircraft. He let it fast-forward through the loading. Before he stopped it again, I understood. “He never came into Operations.”

  “Bingo. He doesn’t have a radio, and if he’d given them directly to the crew we would have seen.”

  “How do you know he didn’t have a radio?”

  “Dickie said.”

  “Okay, but he updated his own plan,” I said. “We saw him.”

  Dan had his head down, checking the facts in Dickie’s chronology. “Little Pete changed the load, updated his numbers, and never told anyone.”

  I tried to follow how this would have worked. We were supposed to have safeguards in place for this sort of screw-up. “First of all, Kevin Corrigan is a good operations agent. Without the ramp’s input, he would have had a great big hole in his worksheet. He never would have let that happen, and even if he had, the crew couldn’t have calculated the center of gravity without the cargo load. They wouldn’t have even taken off.”

  “I agree with you. Kevin is a good ops man. It’s too bad he wasn’t working that night.”

  “Who was working?”

  “Kevin was back in Ireland at his brother’s wedding. It was Dickie.”

  I sat forward in my chair and concentrated hard. Between the heat and everything else that had gone on tonight, I was feeling addle-brained. “Are you saying that Dickie Flynn, ramp manager Dickie Flynn was working as an operations agent the night of the crash?”

  Dan was nodding. “Yes. He was a manager then, but he started out as an ops agent and he used to cover Kevin’s shift now and then when he couldn’t find anyone else to do it. That’s what he was doing here that night”—he tapped the confession with two fingers—“and that’s why he knew so much. He worked the trip, he and Little Pete.”
/>   “Dickie,” I said, “was in a position to cover for Little Pete.”

  He nodded. “Now you’re getting it.”

  “But Dickie still had to give the captain a number. Did he just make it up?”

  “As near as I can tell, Little Pete called a preliminary load plan to Dickie over the phone before he ever left the ready room to work the trip. They’re not supposed to do that, but sometimes they do because the loads never change on these little airplanes. Little Pete was drunk, which we just saw, and didn’t load the airplane according to the plan. He put all the weight in the tail. He marked the changes on his own load sheet, probably intending to call it in. Then he disappeared.”

  “And no one ever got the updated numbers.”

  “According to Dickie, the storm was getting worse, the captain wanted to go, he couldn’t find Little Pete, so he gave him the numbers he had, figuring Little Pete would have told him if he’d changed anything.”

  “Which meant the pilot’s calculation didn’t match the actual load, and it was enough of a difference to take the plane down. Jesus.” I rested my forehead in the heels of my hands and considered the unusual confluence of events that had taken place that night. It’s always that way with a plane crash. There are so many backups to the backups to the fail-safe systems and procedures that it always takes not just one but an unusual chain of strange events to bring one down. I looked up at Dan, who was sitting back in his chair as if it was a recliner. We were through with show-and-tell. Once again, the image left on the screen was that bare apron in the rain. “Why wouldn’t the investigators figure this out?”

  “No black boxes, for one thing. An aircraft either has to have been registered after October 1991, I think it is, or have more than twenty seats to require boxes. This one didn’t qualify.”

  “I saw that in the NTSB report. No boxes and no surveillance tape because Dickie took it. The crew was dead. That means the only people left who knew what really happened were Dickie and Little Pete.”

  “They weren’t the only ones who knew. When Dickie heard that the plane had gone down, he figured out what happened. He got scared and wanted to change the worksheet to cover his own ass. To make it look like the captain’s mistake, he needed to know what the real load was. But nobody could find Little Pete or his plan. This is where our buddy Angie comes in.”

  “Angelo?”

  “Big Pete called him at home that night after the accident and got him out to look for Little Pete. Angelo found him up in a bar in Chelsea and, get this, the knucklehead still had this right where he’d left the damn thing—in his pocket.” He’d pulled a piece of paper from his stack and held it up. “This is Little Pete’s load plan, that thing he kept pulling out of his pocket.”

  “Let me see that.” It was a wrinkled, computergenerated load plan with one corner tom off, and it was a mess. Almost every position had been marked through or overwritten. “You’ve got to hand it to Dickie, he kept a thorough record.”

  Dan took the plan back. “Angelo stashed the kid somewhere and ran this copy back over to the airport. Dickie dummied up a second worksheet, gave a copy to Big Pete, who got it to Little Pete. Twelve hours later, the kid had sobered up, everyone was telling the same story to the investigators, and it looked like the fight crew made the mistake. Case closed.”

  “Until,” I added, “Dickie decided he didn’t want to go to his grave with the souls of twenty-one people on his conscience. No wonder he spent the rest of his life getting drunk. Does he talk about Lenny in there?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He smiled a killer smile. “Lenny was right there from the beginning. He came out that night, and according to Dickie, he and Angelo went on the Crescent Security payroll—at least for one big payday.”

  “That’s what the pay stub in Ellen’s file was all about. The ten grand, that was Dickie’s portion of the hush money. Ten thousand bucks out of a total seven hundred thousand-dollar payoff. Not a very high price to sell your soul.”

  “Dickie always did get the short end of the stick.”

  We sat for a moment in silence with the papers and documents scattered all around us. All the pieces had come together in the worst possible way, and I felt the weight of all we had found out in that room. I felt crushed by the enormity of the thing—of all that had happened and all that was going to happen.

  Finally, Dan roused himself to stand up and go over to the television. He was going to pop out the cassette, but I stopped him. “I want to watch it one more time.”

  He turned to look at me. “Why? Are you looking for something?”

  “The passengers’ faces.” I needed to see them again, to see them as individuals—as men and women, children, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives. I didn’t want them to be fused together into an entity that I knew only as “the twenty-one people killed in the crash of flight 1704.”

  Without a word, Dan qued through the tape and found the beginning of the boarding process. This time as we watched in normal speed, I made sure to look at each one as they passed by in the rain and climbed the boarding stairs.

  Seeing their images on tape reminded me of Ellen’s video, of how I had felt when I’d heard her voice, when I’d seen her smile, saw doubt on her face and frustration and determination—all the things that make us who we are. Seeing her that way had made real to me someone I’d never met. It had created a void in my life for someone I’d never even known.

  As I stared at the screen, I thought about the surviving family and friends of these victims, what it was going to do to them to see the people they had loved, still loved, in their final moments, and the silent black-and-white image started to blur again.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Dan stared at my computer monitor. “Who’s H. Jergensen?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” I was trying to wrangle the papers on the floor in my office into one pile so that Molly wouldn’t have a heart attack when she arrived for work on Monday. The heat had finally stopped pouring in, and our offices were now merely sweltering as opposed to life-threatening. “Why?”

  “Because you’ve got an e-mail message from him and it’s urgent.”

  “What’s in the subject line?”

  “Matt Levesque.”

  Matt … H. Jergensen … H … Hazel. “Hazel. Is it Hazel Jergensen?” I raced over and almost lifted him bodily out of the way so that I could sit at the keyboard. “Move, move, move.”

  “All right. Jesus Christ. What is it?”

  “It’s the invoices to Crescent, finally. Or at least a reasonable facsimile.” I sat down and clicked into the Majestic electronic mailroom to find the message. “Hazel Jergensen worked for Ellen on the task force and, according to Finance Guy, kept records of everything. He thought she might have a record of who signed the invoices to Crescent. Dammit.” I was talking as fast as I could, typing as fast as I could, and missing keys. “We’re going to find out once and for all if Ellen was in on this, at least the embezzlement part.” After multiple tries I found the message, double-clicked, and waited for it to come up.

  Dan hadn’t responded, and when I turned to find him, he was as far away from the computer as he could be and still be in the office. “Don’t you want to know?”

  “To be honest,” he said, “I’ve already found out more than I ever wanted to know.”

  “What if it wasn’t her? We don’t know for sure, Dan. This will tell us.”

  The CPU seemed to labor endlessly, whirring and clicking as I watched the blinking cursor on the screen. The wool fabric on my chair was making the hollows at the backs of my knees sweat right through my jeans. When the message finally appeared, it was in pieces. “Here it comes.”

  Half a note from Hazel appeared first, saying simply that Matt had asked her to … the rest of the message came up … forward the information. I punched up the attachment. The first section included titles and column headings—vendors, amounts paid, check numbers, and in the far right-hand column “Approved by:” I tried to stay ca
lm, but it was tough. If it was all here, Hazel had sent us exactly what we needed.

  “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Dan coaxed. I hadn’t even noticed, but he was now leaning over my chair, breathing over my shoulder as the report began to appear.

  The screen changed hues as the last of the data popped up. The spreadsheet was so big, we could see only the first few columns.

  I scrolled down through the A’s. There were lots of B’s. Lawyers, accountants, auditors, consultants—advisers of every stripe. At one point I got frustrated and went too fast, and we ended up in the H’s. Finally I found it. My heart did a little tap dance from just seeing it there. Crescent Consulting—big as life.

  I took a deep breath and heard Dan do the same. “Are you ready?” I asked him.

  “As I’ll ever be. Go ahead.”

  I shifted the view so that we could see the whole spreadsheet. When we saw the signature, we both sat back at the same time, me in my chair and Dan against the desk. I thought I heard him deflating back there. Or maybe that was me. I scrolled down until we’d seen all of the Crescent entries.

  Ellen had signed every one.

  I felt sad. That was the best way to say it. Disappointed and sad. Dan had drifted away again. “Dan, I’m sorry. But isn’t it better to know than not to know?”

  He turned around, started to say something, and his beeper went off. Before he could respond, mine went off and they beeped together, making for an eerie, syncopated stereo alarm.

  “Operations,” I said, silencing the tone on mine.

  “Both of us,” he said quietly. “It must be something big.”

  “Yeah, Kevin … uh-huh … in my office…” Dan held the phone to his ear. “No, I’ve had the phones rolled over … What? When?” He hesitated, glancing at me. “I’ll get in touch with her. Okay, I’ll be right down.”

  “We haven’t dispatched an aircraft in over an hour,” he said after he’d hung up. “We’ve got one on every gate, at least two on the ground trying to get in, more on the way, and visibility is for shit. Kevin says everything just stopped.”