Move to Strike

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  “But she took something out of a box she got in the swimming pool,” Ginger said. “The neighbor—what’s her name . . .?”

  “Louise Garibaldi,” Sandy said.

  “Louise testified that she saw her take it! How do you get around that?”

  “Claim that Louise is an incompetent witness, so her testimony should be stricken,” Nina said. “We’re going to strike out half the prelim evidence if we can.”

  “Incompetent? How?” said Wish.

  Nina said, “I’m waiting to hear from Ginger on that, Wish.” Paul had finally consented to fill her in on his experience without going into too much detail. “Let’s just say that Louise is amazingly cheerful for this hard world we live in.” She smiled and ignored the puzzlement of Sandy and Wish.

  “If all that was stricken, nothing would place Nikki at the scene,” Paul said. “Wait! What about the blood on the wall outside the study? And what about her statement to the cops?”

  Nina nodded. “Can’t do much about that at this hearing, Paul. I can’t get the whole case dismissed because of that remaining evidence. That’s why I’m just trying to knock out the felony allegation at this stage.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Paul said.

  “No plan comes without a glitch,” Nina said. “Here’s the glitch. I am sitting on what may be some very valuable opals that I know were taken from Sykes’s house that night. I may have to give them to Henry.”

  “But then—then it’ll be clear that she did take valuable items, even if she took them from outside, so it’s a felony, right?” Wish asked.

  “Except for one thing. You can’t steal your own property,” Nina said. “I’ve done some research on this and I’m going to run with that idea. If I can manage to show they came from Nikki’s family’s claim . . . maybe we can find a way to put on Tim Seisz to testify that he found black fire opals on the Logan claim . . .”

  “Your secret plan behind your secret plan,” Paul said. He reached over and patted her knee. “That’s my girl.” His eyebrows drew together as he felt her draw back from him.

  Wish pulled on his long chin, saying, “Whoa.” Everybody else looked dubious.

  “And how do we prove that?” Sandy asked from behind her notepad.

  “Are you sure she’s telling the truth? Has she told you what she took?” Ginger asked.

  Nina nodded. “She took a bag of opals given to Dr. Sykes in late March by Dennis Rankin, who thought Sykes owned the property where he found them. Well, Sykes didn’t own the property. The property was owned jointly by Daria Zack and Beth Sykes. So Sykes had no right to take the opals, but he took them anyway. And within days he had persuaded Daria to sell him her share.” She filled in some details of Nikki’s story for them.

  When Nina was finished, Ginger ran her hand over her scalp and said, “I have a question.”

  “Fire away,” Nina said. She had been thinking about the move to strike for one solid week now, always with trepidation that she might have a blind spot somewhere or was missing something. The whole structure was so convoluted. She tensed, waiting for Ginger to blow it all away.

  “Sykes’s wife—Beth—she owned half the opals. So what about community property? Didn’t that make Sykes a part owner too?”

  “Good question,” Nina said, relieved. “The answer is that the opals weren’t community property. Under California law, property that is inherited is separate property until the heir expressly or by implication decides to change its character, by using it to buy a joint asset, for instance.

  “I talked to Beth again last night. She said that she’ll testify that there was never any intent on her part to convert the claim to community property. She’ll also testify that she has no problem with Nikki retrieving the opals.”

  “Well, well, well,” Ginger said. “That’s quite an edifice of legal thought you’ve built. I’m so glad I went into science so I don’t have to build these skyscrapers out of air.”

  “It’s like high-school geometry,” Nina said. “You start out knowing what you want to prove, then you work backwards until you find the steps that add up to the answer you already want.”

  “What are the chances Tim’s going to find opals on that claim, though?” Paul said. “They shouldn’t be there.”

  “But they are.”

  “What’s that?” Paul said. “Did Tim call?”

  “Twenty minutes ago,” Nina said, sitting back, preparing to enjoy the reaction she was about to get. “You should have heard him, Paul. He says it’s the biggest black fire opal strike since 1972, when an immense gemstone was found in the Virgin Valley. He found the wall where Rankin had been working almost immediately, before dark last night. There were signs of a recent landslide that must have exposed the vein. He took samples back to UN this morning, and he says it’s big.”

  In spite of her confusion about him, she found herself offering up a big smile. Paul was grinning too. “Vindication,” he said. “Go on.”

  “Okay, where was I? Right. Let’s say the judge lets me run rampant in this hearing. Flaherty has his moments. We’ll see. If he allows it, Tim will testify, then Rankin can confirm where he got the opals and testify that he gave them to Dr. Sykes. Then I’ll put on Daria and Beth and public records to confirm that Sykes had no ownership interest in the Logan claim at the time Rankin gave him the opals. Eh voilà! Like magic! Out goes the burglary charge on a lack of probable cause. What’s left?”

  “All that work and it’s still a homicide,” Sandy said. “But you have a lot more room.”

  “And we have a much more sympathetic-looking kid in trouble,” Ginger said. “I wish you luck. I really do.”

  “Ginger, I know you are still working with the DNA findings. Dig deeper. We need you to prepare the attack on the blood testimony. And the sooner I get that chemical analysis on the Louise Garibaldi issue the better. We don’t have much time.”

  “There’s a guy in Sacramento I work with now and then. He’s been busy busting inmates out of state prisons based on DNA evidence with Barry Scheck’s group, but he’s back in town now. He’s good. I’ll consult with him.”

  “Great. Paul, you and Wish have to be sure that Rankin shows up for the hearing. He won’t want to be involved, but he’s been subpoenaed.”

  “I served him yesterday and put the proof of service in the file,” Nina said in an aside to Sandy, who made a note.

  “She served him all right,” Paul said.

  “And Paul, we need the Nevada records of ownership of the property. Also, the registration of the claim.”

  “Check. I’ll get on that tomorrow. I’m looking at plane parts this afternoon.”

  “I’ll prepare Daria and Beth to testify,” Nina said. “And figure out how to make this thing work.”

  “What date do you want to set the hearing for?” Sandy said.

  “We have to give twenty-one days’ notice. Plus three days to pull the motion to strike together. So . . .” Sandy already had her calendar out.

  “Earliest is July sixteenth,” she announced.

  “July sixteenth it is.”

  The door was open to the NTSB digs. Paul entered without knocking and found Chuck Davis inside, editing paperwork, a red pen slashing across a section as he read. The place was piled with files and papers. He tucked the pen into a ceramic cup, gave his notebook a flick to shut it, and offered Paul a chair. “We’ve concluded our field investigation,” he said. “The Go Team is heading back to Washington tomorrow.”

  “Any change from your initial conclusions? You still thinking pilot error?”

  “We’re thorough,” he said, not answering. He took his notebook and filed it carefully in a drawer of his desk. “Let me walk you through this process a little better than I did the first time we spoke. When a plane goes down, even if there’s a fatality, there is not automatically an investigation by the NTSB.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Everything costs, and not all accidents are suspicious. Most
causes are relatively straightforward. In this case, our investigation is being paid for by the plane manufacturer’s insurance company.”

  “Not the government?”

  “That’s right. But believe me, despite what you may infer from that,” here he beamed a light ray out of his black beady eyes toward Paul, “we are disinterested observers, not insurance company shills. We are looking for the truth, that’s all.”

  “The insurance company has a stake, though.”

  Davis smiled. “They don’t want to have to pay out on a faulty airplane, obviously, if the machine’s not faulty.”

  “Obviously,” said Paul.

  “And they are satisfied that there is evidence for a conclusion of pilot error in this case.”

  “So you’re not going to try to put the plane back together?”

  “No. The parts will be stored for now at the Reno airport.” Paul was catching Davis’s drift. Davis wasn’t necessarily equally satisfied.

  Having hinted at his misgivings, Davis moved back to the investigation. “We have pretty thoroughly picked over the Beechcraft’s engines, hydraulic and avionic systems. We looked for something in the melt-down which was all that was left of the cockpit gauges. We reviewed the FAA radar images and interviewed the examiner who last tested Skip Bailey. The plane was a model 18, built in the sixties, but completely rebuilt. The engine was only a couple of years old. All the other parts had been completely refurbished or replaced within the past few years. And,” he said, forestalling a question he apparently saw Paul formulating, “the work that’s been done was done well. We checked that wreck down to the rivets.” He pulled out and opened a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. “Will you pardon me? I missed my lunch.”

  “So, you found nothing new.”

  “I’ll take you through some of our thinking on this.” Davis seemed determined to parade the entire length and breadth of the investigation before releasing his captive audience back into the wild. He leaned back into his chair, as if settling in for a cozy fireside chat. Paul followed his lead, stretching his recuperating leg out on a second chair.

  “Our exam of the engines and fuel-system components, what was left of them anyway”—he was nibbling at his sandwich—“indicated no preimpact failure.”

  “This is what the final report will say?”

  Davis said, “Over the next year all this information will be very carefully reviewed. I can only give you some preliminary information. Data from the last radar return recorded showed the airplane was holding steady at about six thousand feet—much too low in an area where eight-thousand–foot peaks are common. No distress calls or communications to ATC were received. We conclude that the pilot continued VFR flight into instrument meteorological conditions. His failure to maintain sufficient altitude and/or clearance from the mountainous terrain, which may or may not have been precipitated by one of the illusory events I described to you earlier, caused the crash.”

  Paul tapped his foot restlessly. “What about what the witnesses said?”

  “. . . and a possible engine stall, cause unknown.”

  “So, the original mistakes Bailey supposedly made are compounded in your report. In spite of all his experience, you’ve decided he, one, had some kind of muddled reaction to wind, and two, didn’t pay close enough attention to atmospheric conditions,” Paul said. “I find it harder than you to ignore the engine crapping out on them.”

  “We didn’t ignore the reported stall. When you gas up a plane, a good pilot checks the fuel for contamination. Sometimes it’s mixed with a little water.”

  “It’s delivered that way?”

  “Not normally, but it occurs. Now what happened up there, the stall you mentioned that was reported by witnesses, made us wonder if the fuel was compromised, because what you get when you have a certain amount of water in a tank is you get a sputter, and maybe, if you’re unlucky and there’s a quantity of water, you get a stall. The engine quits. You don’t want your plane to stall, so you check your fuel whenever you fuel up.”

  “How much water would it take, say if you wanted to make sure the engine would stall?”

  “You mean, if you were trying to cause the engine to fail?”

  “Right.”

  Davis scrutinized his face. “Do you have anything that suggests that’s the case here?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Well, I’d say a cup would cause major problems for certain.”

  “Did the pilot check his fuel?”

  “His mechanic swore both he and the pilot checked it. Because we’re suspicious devils, we checked with two other customers that bought fuel from the same supplier that day. The fuel was good. There was no water.”

  “What did you find in looking at the fuel tank?”

  “You’ll recall there was a fire.”

  “So there’s no evidence of water.”

  “That’s right. But if, and I’m just giving you an if because you seem skeptical in the face of all the evidence we have compiled. If someone wanted that plane to go down, the suicidal pilot, his greedy wife, his childhood enemy, someone . . . if that evil person wanted the plane to stall and crash, water in the fuel tank would cause the symptoms noted by witnesses before that plane crashed.”

  Paul tried not to let his surprise show on his face. So Davis had taken his doubts seriously and had looked for evidence to repudiate them. He wasn’t as hard-ass about his conclusions as Paul had originally thought. “Was there any fuel left in the tank?” Paul asked.

  “The tank’s mangled and cracked open, plus it caught fire. Even if we had some fuel left, there’s not much point in doing chemical testing unless you suspect contamination.” He folded his arms. “As I said, our investigation indicates that the fuel was pure.”

  “All right,” Paul said. “I can see the team has done a thorough job. I don’t have any problem with your work. But I came here to look at the plane parts, so I may as well finish my job, too.”

  “I’ll drive you there.” Balling his sandwich paper up, he threw it toward a can and stood. They walked outside together into bright sun and quadraphonic traffic.

  Half an hour later they were in Reno at the beginning of the rush-hour traffic. An old building adjacent to the Reno Air hangars leaned precariously to the right, but inside it was dry and scrupulously clean, down to its concrete floor. Skip Bailey’s pride and joy lay disemboweled in a thousand labeled, mutilated pieces on a table covered with pristine white paper on the far left of the room. Larger pieces, such as the charred wings, sat on paper on the floor in the center of the shed. They walked along, hands in pockets, until Paul got to the fuel tank, or what was left of it.

  “You can see it’s in bad shape,” Davis remarked.

  “What’s this?” Paul held up a twisted piece.

  “The fuel screen.”

  “That would be responsible for keeping out . . .”

  “Bits and pieces of things that shouldn’t make it into the fuel line.”

  “Huh,” said Paul, setting it carefully back in its place. “And this over here?” He motioned toward another piece.

  Davis had much to say about this second object, which had some arcane purpose in steering, so he stayed engaged and happy while Paul palmed the fuel screen.

  After a long look at all the pieces, and lectures as long-winded and forbidding as a few he had had to endure back at Northeastern, Paul was ready to leave. As they walked out, he noticed an object lying by itself near one of the seats, remarkably undamaged. “What’s this?” He could see what it was at a glance. He turned the object around. White, about the size and heft of a Ping-Pong ball, it appeared to be solid Styrofoam. Familiar. He had seen something like it recently . . .

  Davis lifted an eyebrow, then a bell must have donged in his head. Things fell back into place on his face. “It’s nothing. We found it under the seat Christopher Sykes was sitting in.”

  “Didn’t burn up in the fire?”

  “The fire was concentrated elsewhere.
That part stayed cool enough so this item survived.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “It serves no useful purpose in flying, that I can tell you.”

  “So why did they have it on the plane?”

  “A little game of catch?” Davis shrugged, clearly bugged. He didn’t like the stall, cause unknown, and he didn’t like Paul finding the one thing that didn’t fit into his reenactment. “The interior of the plane had been thoroughly cleaned preflight. The only other loose things clearly belonged to Christopher Sykes—his bag, cell phone, sunglasses, baseball cap. We never did figure out what the ball was doing there under his passenger seat. You find out, you give me a call.”

  So, Davis rated among the truth seekers after all.

  “Thanks,” Paul said. “I’ve seen enough.”

  As he pulled back into the parking lot in Carson City, Davis turned to Paul. “When you actually see the pieces, you realize two people died,” he said. “When you see how it all turned out, you keep thinking you have to do something to prevent it from happening again. And then you go back to Washington and go back on rotation, and in a few weeks you get another midnight call. I’m not here to snow anybody. You and your experts find something we didn’t, I want you to call me immediately.” He gave Paul his card and shook his hand.

  A pay phone back in Carson City took his calling card number. It suited his current financial purposes to go easy on running up charges on his cell phone. “Ginger? It’s Paul van Wagoner.”

  “Hey, Paul. I just walked into the lab back here in Sac.”

  “I’m sending you some items Air Express. Two items. One’s metal. It’s a filtering screen for an airplane fuel line. Do every chemical test known to woman on this sucker. I’m looking for contamination.”

  “What kind of contamination?”

  “No idea.”

  “You have to give me a hint. A direction. Otherwise I have too many miles to go before I sleep.”

  “I can’t help much . . . except maybe you should look for some evidence of water.”

  “Water? You’ll be stopping by in five minutes then?”