Hard Fall

by Ridley Pearson

  Her face hardened, and she briefly looked like a different woman altogether. Then her features relaxed. “My crash site was on La Cienega. A VW bug and an ambulance, Michigan. I was driving the bug, unfortunately. I didn’t hear the ambulance siren. We’re still in court over that, and it’s been six years. It ran the light and struck me here,” she said, rubbing her right side as if she could still feel the pain. “Now why don’t you chase us down a couple cups of coffee—mine’s black. We’re gonna need it.”

  Daggett brought two more cups of coffee over the next two hours and then two plates of fried chicken and mashed potatoes from the cafeteria. Fragile, as she insisted on being called, had transformed a nondescript oval sitting atop a woman’s body into a grainy but recognizable digital portrait on a high-resolution computer screen. With each progressive electronic enlargement, the computer redrew the face, compensating for the lack of definition. She then shaded and filled with a wand she referred to as the airbrush. Many enlargements later, the face of Maryanne Lyttle stared back at them. To Daggett, this was nothing short of a miracle.

  Fragile saved her efforts to disk and printed out a hard copy onto paper. While she began searching the airport terminal security tapes, a sketch artist named Willard used the airbrush and the better part of an hour to erase the woman’s sunglasses and, using the width of the bridge of the woman’s nose as a reference, drew in a pair of eyes, complete with eyebrows and hairline. “It’s as close as we’ll get,” Willard said proudly as he stiffly rose out of his chair.

  “No it’s not,” contradicted Fragile Ramirez. “She took off her glasses inside the terminal.”

  Daggett looked over at the screen, his heart jumping from the combined effects of excitement and boiled coffee. Fragile had a white box framed around a small head in a random sea of air travelers. It was much more defined than the earlier image. As Daggett watched, the frame grew increasingly larger, driving the other images off the screen. With each enlargement the computer redrew the face. Fragile waved the wand, making up for where the computer missed. Again the face grew more visible. Again, Daggett’s heart jumped. So close now!

  Willard grabbed the hard copy of his efforts and held it side by side with the new face on the screen.

  “What do you think of that?” he asked loudly, a full-tooth grin opening his face.

  The two images were identical.

  Daggett came out of his seat and shook the man’s hand. He bent down and kissed Fragile on the cheek. “You’re magicians, both of you.”

  “It was the earrings,” said an excited Fragile. “That other shot didn’t give us any clothes, didn’t give us any signature to follow her with.” Daggett hadn’t noticed the earrings until that moment. They were big black ovals. Easily identified, if you thought to look. Fragile had thought to look. She was blushing from the kiss. She continued, “We’ll be able to follow her now, Michigan, one camera to the next. Guaranteed. If she boarded a plane, you’ll know where she was headed. If she left the terminal, you’ll know by which exit. Those earrings were her downfall. She should have thought twice before wearing those earrings.”

  “Yes, she should have,” said Daggett, realizing suddenly that was just the point: A professional wouldn’t make such a mistake. Was he dealing with an amateur?

  Willard left the small office. Fragile said, “You look a little white, Michigan. You all right?”

  Daggett, staring at the face on the screen, nodded slightly. Doubt had wormed its way into his head. An amateur. Was it possible?

  Or, after all this, did he have the wrong woman?

  Daggett attended the nine o’clock meeting at the Marriott, amazed both by the smoothness with which it ran and by the huge number of people taking part in the AmAirXpress investigation. Well over a hundred were in attendance, covering both sexes and as wide a variety of races as there were specialties. It reminded him of a political convention, the way delegates group together. Over there was the crew of investigators for General Electric; and there, a team representing the airline pilots’ union. With each comment from the dais another series of heads would fall as eyes were cast to the accompanying reports; small inter-group discussions would supersede the present report, and then another group of experts would lower their heads and begin a similar routine. On the dais, Huff sat third from center, next to Lynn Greene. During his report, Huff reemphasized the criminal intent angle, keeping details vague, and once again encouraged everyone to dig for hard evidence.

  When the meeting ended, after nearly ninety minutes, Daggett felt well briefed on the progress at the crash site but depressed and discouraged with the results.

  The flight recorder data—the DFDR—had been sent to the FAA lab in Washington for analysis. The damaged voice recorder—the CVR—was still being worked on here. Parts of the broken aircraft were already being tagged and transported to a hangar at LAX, where an attempt at reconstruction would be made if any suspicious causes surfaced. To date, none had, and this weighed heavily on Daggett. His only hope to continue his investigation lay in the debris of the crash; both, at the moment, were in pieces.

  He had to maintain his optimism, had to maintain a broad base to the investigation to give it every possibility. As tempting a suspect as Maryanne Lyttle seemed, Daggett couldn’t allow himself to be obsessed with her. He still believed a male operative, using Dougherty’s identity card, had gained access to AmAirXpress 64 while on the ground. Maryanne Lyttle, at best, was this man’s accomplice. A driver? A scout?

  Daggett telephoned his WMFO voice-mail mailbox, where an impersonal woman’s voice told him he had six messages. He stepped through the process of retrieving them. Only the last had to do with this case: “We have a blood type and we have a thumb print.” The voice belonged to a man who introduced himself as Barge Kolowski, a fingerprint expert at the Washington State Forensic Science Laboratory. “Blood type came off that tooth. The print was developed off the bar of soap. It’s a beauty, by the by. He was smart enough to throw away the bar of soap—a shower is somewhere you don’t often wear gloves—but we found his trash because of that tooth, and that’s something he didn’t plan on. We’ve forwarded the print to your people here, and I assume they’ll pass it on to Washington. More of those same cigarettes, as well. We think they’re a Russian brand called Sobranie, for what it’s worth. If you have any questions, give me a call during office hours or at home.” The man left his home number.

  Daggett, alone in his hotel room, drink in hand, hung up and shouted, “Yes!” into the empty room. Evidence had a way of doing that to him.

  The phone rang. He set the drink down and checked the clock: 11:30. Late. He answered it brightly.

  “Washington, D.C.,” the tired, frail voice stated.

  “Fragile, is that you?” he asked.

  “The gate. Your mystery woman, Maryanne Lyttle? I just watched her on videotape as she boarded a flight for Washington, D.C. The gate’s destination sign is as clear as day.”

  “Washington?” His voice cracked. An operative still at large. Kort? An unaccounted-for detonator. Washington, D.C., WMFO’s territory. His ticket. He was both excited and afraid.

  He breathed into the receiver, saying nothing, stunned by the thought of a second target somewhere in his hometown. He stared at the small ice cubes on the carpet as his glass rolled under the end table and disappeared. The phone had knocked the drink off the end table.

  “Michigan?” she asked. “Did you get that?”

  It made sense. Bernard had built the detonators in Los Angeles. Flight 64 had been bombed in Los Angeles. Bernard had then turned up in Washington …

  His stockinged toes searched beneath the end table and located the spilled glass, rolling it back out.

  “I got it,” he said into the phone.

  Carrie watched as the plane from Los Angeles slowed to a stop out on the airfield and the boxlike shuttle vehicle used at Dulles International drew alongside to board the passengers and deliver them to the terminal. She hoped for hi
s sake that the vehicle was air-conditioned. She had lived through some unbearably hot, humid summers while growing up outside New Haven, but nothing to compare with this. This heat made her impatient and irritable. She was mad at him before she even got a chance to say hello. This heat was his fault.

  She lifted a finger toward her mouth, prepared to nibble at her nail, and then thought better of it. More than anything, she wanted a cigarette.

  On the way to the car, she attempted several times to engage him in conversation, but he didn’t respond. Nothing new there. He carried his briefcase—he never went anywhere without that thing; she carried his hanging bag.

  “You’re mad about something? Is that it?” he asked, sounding bored with the subject before it began. This infuriated her.

  “First, the three of us were supposed to go to the shore last weekend. Then you promised Duncan it would be this weekend. It’s Labor Day weekend. It’s a holiday. I know you couldn’t have gone to either Seattle or L.A. without wanting to, without pulling some strings. So you’re making choices, and those choices are pretty clear.”

  He took a long time before saying, “Rather unusual circumstances, Carrie. I explained that before I left. Duncan understood.” The implication was that she didn’t.

  She spoke softly. “I need to be more than a pair of legs and a you-know-what.” Cam gave her one of those looks. She could feel him pull away. “We’re losing each other.”

  “We haven’t lost anything, Carrie. Misplaced maybe. Not lost.” They walked along in silence.

  “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?”

  He glanced at her.

  “I hang my heart out on my sleeve and your sole contribution to this discussion is to correct my syntax?”

  “Carrie—”

  “What the hell is going on here?” She felt like an idiot. But as he blushed, she understood. She stopped cold and set the hanging bag down. “You saw her, didn’t you?” Lynn Greene lay at the core of all her fears. To Carrie, this stranger represented her biggest threat. Cam fantasized about her—imagined her better for him; she knew he did, without their ever having discussed it. She wanted security from this relationship. Love? yes. A mate? certainly. But more than anything, she wanted to belong to someone, to have them belong to her. She and Duncan and Cam had quickly formed a team, and the safety she felt as a result of this had become everything to her. On a beach one afternoon, over a year ago now, Lynn Greene had changed all that. Now she lived in the darkened shadows of fear, afraid to look out, afraid to be seen. The hope of permanent companionship grew weaker with every argument.

  “She just showed up. Sixty-four—the crash—is her assignment. It was nothing.”

  “Did you sleep with her?” Tears threatened. She felt foolish. She took a deliberate step away from him, arms crossed tightly. People were watching now. A stream of dispassionate humanity parted and poured around them like water around a rock.

  Who was this jealous woman? It sounded like her voice, but she didn’t create scenes; she didn’t explode in jealous fits, especially not in the middle of Dulles International.

  “I’m not going to give that the dignity of a response.” He took up his hanging bag. His expression said Are you coming? His expression said even more.

  “You thought about it,” she said in a defeated, completely sober voice. He didn’t deny it. It seemed as if several minutes passed. She reached down deeply within herself and spoke just as he was about to walk away from her. “No crime in that, is there?”

  He turned and viewed her cautiously. What did he want from her? A surrogate mother for his son? Someone to wash the dishes and take out the trash? Someone to lie down for him? What had happened to the months of laughter? What had happened to the inquisitive questions and hours of talk? Gone. What had happened to the surprise flowers and the dinners out and the hours of petting before a single button was loosened? Gone.

  She said bravely, “Hell, if fantasy is a crime, we’re all indictable.” She didn’t fantasize about anyone except him, but she wasn’t about to admit it. The thing now was to give him a way out.

  “I asked you to pick me up because I missed you,” he said.

  She forced a wide smile onto her face; he didn’t seem to know when she forced it. “I thought it was to save cab fare.”

  “That, too.”

  She walked over and buried her face in his collar where it smelled so much like him, she almost wept. He dropped the hanging bag and wrapped a tentative arm around her—he wasn’t big on showing his emotions in public. A moment later they joined the mainstream.

  “Hell of a welcome back, eh, Cam?”

  “I can handle it.”

  “You can, can’t you?”

  “That bothers you?”

  “I think it does.” She added, “Threatens, maybe.”

  “Inside, Carrie, I don’t handle it very well.”

  “So when are you going to let me in? I was in there once.”

  Daggett said nothing. His puzzled expression and the sudden distancing she felt again told her he didn’t have an answer, and that it bothered him.

  But it bothered her more. And she was keeping score.

  8

  * * *

  Anthony Kort stepped off the train and onto the platform at Washington’s Union Station. The air around him weighed a few hundred pounds and was so hot, he broke into an immediate sweat. It smelled of steam and darkness down here. He liked it.

  He traveled by train, not only because of his fear of flying but because there was no security screening whatsoever. You could board a train with any kind of weapon or bomb, any drug, any disguise. If absolutely pressed, you could even jump from a train.

  Trains had their drawbacks as well. They were tediously slow, and in America, poorly serviced and uncomfortable. Disenchanted black people waited on you with complete contempt. The sleepers were inadequately small and poorly ventilated. The food tasted like warmed-up wet cardboard.

  Kort had spent three days on the train, an opportunity to plan and rest. Despite this down time, or perhaps because of it, he had grown progressively more tense as the days had dragged on, a runner before the marathon.

  Kort rode a taxi several miles from Washington’s Union Station train terminal and then disembarked near, but not at, a Metro subway entrance. He reached the Metro, rode it two stops, changed to the other side and rode one stop back, alert all the while for surveillance of any sort. He took a room in a former colonial mansion, now a bed-and-breakfast, a room that had been reserved in the name of Kevin Anthony. David Anthony was a thing of the past. His room offered an unobstructed view of the two streets on the building’s perimeter, and three avenues of escape. The proprietor’s wife, who ran the desk, was a handsome woman in her fifties, graying hair, glasses, and a rigid posture. She explained the rules in a sweet but businesslike voice: breakfast served from seven to nine; alcohol was available in the evening hours, five to ten o’clock, at an extra charge; no unregistered overnight guests; two keys, one for the front door, one for the room. Lost keys cost twenty-five dollars. No music after ten; room phones would not allow direct-dial long-distance calls, but phone company credit card calls were possible through the telephone company operator; towels were changed daily, sheets every other day unless otherwise requested; all the rooms had window air conditioners and guests were requested to switch them to the Energy Efficient mode during the daytime hours when the room was not occupied. “Let’s see,” she said, checking her red leather-bound book with its tabular columns, “we received a wire transfer for the deposit. Thank you,” she added, looking up. “And the balance will be paid by … credit card?”

  “Cash,” replied Mr. Kevin Anthony, producing a series of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. One of the beauties of automatic tellers and international cash systems was that a single plastic card gave one instant access to funds. His red Cirrus card—a dedicated ATM card—allowed him to withdraw up to one thousand dollars in cash a day, six days a week. His
remaining three Visa cards each had twenty-thousand-dollar credit limits. Now in phase three of his operation, the David Anthony card would be retired. Michael had seen to the accounts—thankfully before his arrest. Money was the least of Kort’s problems.

  He spent the holiday weekend familiarizing himself with the empty city and its impressive Metro subway system. Tuesday at noon, wearing his own face and his own short hair, he stood on the corner of K and 21st, awaiting her. Perhaps it was his fatigue that made him remember, perhaps the sound of the police siren as it passed, perhaps the nagging realization that it could happen again—he could be arrested anywhere, at any time. Such was the nature of his life. It bred paranoia and suspicion in him. Whatever its cause, he found his memories as unavoidable as the truth; glimpses of his own history, they were bound to repeat themselves. He had relived this a hundred times in the last five years, like the recurring nightmare it was.

  It is five years earlier, his wife and child barely cold in the ground.

  He returns to his home—his sanctuary—in a state of numbness, not bothering to switch on the lights. He imagines blood on his hands, though there is none. He thinks of Lady Macbeth. His movements seem slowed and dreamlike—a castaway’s vision of love. He passes a table that holds a photograph of his wife taken only weeks before the birth, while she was still in the glow of pregnancy.

  He carries his deed as a beast of burden carries his load: painful but resigned to his calling. The police will come for him any minute. He is as certain of this as he is that he murdered the man. He holds no remorse. The space within him that remorse might occupy is instead filled with both a keen sense of justice and the hollow ache of loneliness. Being all alone in the world is the real hell. He is neither proud nor ashamed of the murder. He is satisfied. Pouring the vodka into the glass, he briefly perceives himself as the hooded executioner, the man who learns to accept his actions.