Flight ik-8

by Jan Burke

  He moved closer to the plane. Some of the covering vines had been cut away and a portion of a window cleaned. Mayumi assured him that they had both videotaped and photographed the scene before disturbing it. Frank cautiously approached the window and peered in.

  He saw the body, or what remained of it, immediately. Directly in front of him, it sat at the controls. A seat belt was strapped across the headless form. One side of a bright blue nylon jacket was stained with large brownish-black patches of dried blood. Here and there, the jagged edges of broken ribs pierced the jacket, corresponding roughly to the impact from the right. The radius and ulna of one arm protruded from a sleeve; dark dried sinew still covered them. He did not see hand bones or a skull.

  Once they knew remains were present, Mayumi was saying, they had called the coroner. Her voice seemed separated from what lay before him, as if she were the narrator of a documentary film.

  With the help of Wilson and one of the other deputies, Frank pried the cockpit door open. A dry, musty smell greeted him. Ben stepped forward and shone a flashlight over the interior. Spiderwebs were everywhere. The material of Lefebvre’s pants had not fared as well as the jacket; mummified leg bones stuck out of a pair of boots.

  “Luckily, it seems to have stayed fairly dry in here,” Ben said. “And I don’t see many signs of scavenger activity. No entry point large enough for most of them. Insects, spiders, mice… maybe a wood rat… that seems to be about it. We may want to look for a wood rat’s nest. Wish I had Bingle up here with me.”

  “Bingle?” Wilson asked.

  “Ben is also a cadaver dog handler,” Frank said. “Bingle is one of his dogs. He might be able to find bones carried off by other animals.”

  “There has been disarticulation as the ligaments have decomposed, of course,” Ben said, absorbed in his study of the remains.

  Wilson peered in, stepped back with a little shudder. “What I can’t figure out is, what tore his head off?”

  “He wasn’t decapitated,” Ben said absently. “Nothing’s at the right level to act as a guillotine.” He slowly moved the flashlight beam across the floor. He paused as it lit a mandible — the horseshoe of lower teeth jutting up into space — then moved on. “There.”

  A skull stared back at them. Gauzy webs filled the eye sockets, giving the appearance of pale eyelids. A long-legged brown spider, annoyed by the light, scurried out of the nasal passage.

  “The skull wasn’t taken off,” Ben said. “It fell off after the neck muscles decomposed. Skulls only stay on upright skeletons on television.”

  Ben kept moving the light, and they saw a dust-covered nylon bag stowed toward the back of the cabin. The spiders had been at work there, too. The bag was draped in cobwebs.

  “Think anyone has been in here since the crash?” Wilson asked.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Frank said.

  “So, you can see that we didn’t open this up before you got here, right?” Wilson asked.

  “What do you mean?” Frank asked, looking at him sharply.

  Wilson turned red again. “I mean, you can see all the dust and everything — you can tell we didn’t go inside, right?”

  “What are you getting at?” Frank asked.

  “I’m just wondering — you know — about the money.”

  “What money?”

  “The money Lefebvre was paid for killing that witness. You know, the kid.”

  2

  Saturday, July 8, 4:46 P.M.

  San Bernardino Mountains

  Wilson’s remark led to questions, and then Frank remembered long-ago talk of the case, but not from Las Piernas. The story of a cop who had taken a bribe to kill a witness — and then supposedly disappeared — had briefly made headlines and television news in Bakersfield. But Frank had been a patrolman then, pulling long shifts in a department that was dealing with its own problems. In those days, he had thought of Las Piernas as nothing more than an extension of L.A., a place where any weird-assed thing could happen, and so he had paid little attention to the stories about Lefebvre.

  No one at the scene was able — or willing — to tell him much. Mayumi didn’t have the complete NTSB file yet, but promised to send a copy to Frank as soon as she got back to her office in Gardena. Even Cliff Garrett claimed to only vaguely remember the case — which had taken place “downhill” ten years ago. “Bad news for the Las Piernas Police Department,” Cliff said, “but not our case. I had my own cases to worry about then, just as I do now.” Frank had said as much to himself when he remembered mention of the case, but he sensed that Cliff knew more and was simply dodging involvement.

  Over the next few hours, Frank never heard more than a half-told tale that made little sense to him. Lefebvre, they said, had been a homicide detective in Las Piernas. He was supposedly paid a large sum (recollections varied on this point, the amounts ranging from ten thousand to two million dollars) to steal evidence and kill a witness — a teenager. He had killed the witness while the kid was in his hospital bed, supposedly under the watchful eye of the Las Piernas police. “Guess the wrong officer was watching him,” Cliff said. Lefebvre fled Las Piernas in his Cessna that night and hadn’t been heard from since. Until today, everyone thought he was drinking piña coladas on some distant beach, laughing at Las Piernas’s failure to catch him.

  No large sums of money were found hidden in the wreckage of Lefebvre’s plane, and nothing that resembled stolen evidence was discovered. Carefully working their way through the wreckage — all the while taking photographs, making notes — Frank and the other investigators found little to go on. Among Lefebvre’s effects were his pilot’s logbooks, a wallet, a small notebook, a cheap ballpoint pen, a set of keys, and a badge holder with his police ID. Most of these items were in a zippered side pocket in the jacket. In an inside pocket, near where the heart had been, Frank found a business card–size piece of paper, too blackened by bloodstains to be read. He bagged it and marked it for the lab’s documents examiner.

  No duffel bags full of cash. No luggage. Not even so much as a change of clothes or a toothbrush. The nylon bag held nothing but a set of rusting tools.

  Mayumi confirmed that the last entry in the flight log was dated June 22, the night Lefebvre made his escape from Las Piernas ten years ago. There were no remarks of note, except that it showed that Lefebvre had filled the tanks before taking off.

  “So it seems unlikely that he ran out of fuel,” she said.

  “Any ideas on what caused the crash?”

  She smiled. “Far too early to say.”

  He looked through the wallet. It held a driver’s license, two charge cards, and forty-three dollars. There were also two credit card receipts. One was dated June 21 — the day before Lefebvre had left Las Piernas — from a restaurant called the Prop Room. The total bill was high enough to make Frank wonder if the restaurant was pricey or if Lefebvre had met with someone else the night before he disappeared.

  The other receipt was dated June 22, from Las Piernas Aviation Services, for fuel for the plane.

  He showed the fuel receipt to Mayumi.

  “Hmm. That matches what he wrote in the log. Unless he developed a fuel leak, he had more than enough to make it over these mountains.”

  Frank studied the photos on the license and the ID. Lefebvre stared back at the camera with dark eyes, his expression solemn and intense. His hair was dark and cut short. His cheekbones were high, the face slender. The nose was slightly crooked. A hard face, Frank thought. According to the driver’s license, ten years ago Lefebvre would have been forty-two. It showed his height as 6’1", his weight 170. Frank knew that weight and stature figures on licenses were notoriously incorrect — men made themselves taller, women, lighter — and that Ben would need time to measure and examine the bones to determine the dead man’s probable age and stature. He glanced between the photos and the skull, tried to match the skull with the face in the photos. He couldn’t. He handed them to Ben.

  “Too bad he didn’t s
mile in the photos,” Ben said. “The skull has a chipped front tooth.”

  “Maybe that happened when it fell off his neck and rolled across the floor.”

  “No, the chip looks antemortem. Filed smooth by a dentist at one time.” He pointed to a crack on the right side of the cranium. “But this fracture is perimortem, I think — it shows no healing and was probably a result of the impact of the crash.”

  With gloved hands, Frank gently turned to the last few pages of the notebook. The pages were a little moldy, but intact and legible. They were filled with neatly penned notes, apparently regarding several cases. There were phone numbers, dates, and other numbers that appeared to be house or apartment numbers. Nothing that looked like the combination to a safe with two million bucks in it, Frank thought, but you never knew. He went through the wallet more carefully, found nothing.

  The air inside the plane was hot and close. Frank moved outside the wreckage, found a large, flat rock in the shade, and sat thinking while Mayumi continued examining the crash site and Ben and the coroner’s assistant finished inventorying and removing the remains. He tried using his cell phone to call Carlson, but couldn’t get a signal in the ravine.

  When they were on their way back, he tried again. The call was routed to the Wheeze — Louise Oswald, division secretary. Frank suppressed a sigh of impatience when her voice came on the line. The Wheeze never had to search hard for a sense of her own importance.

  She told him that the lieutenant was in a meeting, but would speak to him when he returned. “He asked me to tell you,” she said, lowering her voice, “not to discuss this case with anyone — repeat, anyone — until then.”

  “In that case…” he said, and disconnected. He knew she would undoubtedly make him pay for that later, but it gave him some small satisfaction on a day that was damned short of it.

  By the time he took Ben home and drove to headquarters, it was after nine that evening. Frank looked up at the building that housed the Las Piernas Police Department, sought a particular window, and found it. The light was on in Carlson’s office.

  “That better be you and not the cleaning lady, you asshole,” he muttered, and pulled into the parking garage.

  He first stopped by the property room to turn in the box of Lefebvre’s effects he had signed for at the scene and completed a set of chain of custody forms.

  Then he went upstairs to Homicide. The Homicide Division was an open room with a dozen battered desks pushed up close to one another. Computers competed for space with aging office equipment. The walls were beige, or what had once been beige. Paint was low on the city budget priorities. A wide hallway led to interrogation rooms. Four enclosed offices stood along the wall opposite the hallway door. The lights were on in one of the offices.

  Frank nodded a greeting to a couple of detectives who were talking to a crying middle-aged woman. Her face was heavily swollen on one side. He did not pause near them, but went straight to Carlson’s office. He entered without knocking, shutting the door behind him.

  Carlson, startled, pushed away from his desk. His chair rolled back with the sudden movement — so far back, he was more than an arm’s length from the desk. He had to use his feet to scoot the chair back into place.

  “Sit down, Frank,” he said, red-faced.

  “No thanks,” Frank said quietly.

  Carlson was uneasy. He had once seen Frank Harriman knock a man out cold — without ever raising his voice before throwing the punch. And there were other reasons he sometimes questioned Frank’s stability.

  “Sit down, Detective Harriman — please,” Carlson said.

  Frank knew that Carlson wasn’t one of those people who found it hard to say “please” — he just found it hard to mean it. Frank let him sweat it for a moment before he took a chair. “I don’t like being set up,” he said.

  “You weren’t—”

  “I don’t like being set up under any circumstances, but walking into that situation less informed than San Bernardino and the NTSB — hell, less informed than a reserve officer—”

  “Yes, well, I’m sorry, that couldn’t be helped.”

  Frank didn’t bother to hide his disbelief. “There was no reason to keep me in the dark. And Ben Sheridan should have been informed—”

  “Never mind Sheridan. Here…” He opened a desk drawer, pulled out a thick stack of files, and held it out. Frank didn’t move. Carlson set the stack down on the desk. “You’ll have to take them eventually. I’m assigning Lefebvre’s case to you.”

  “That looks like more than one case file to me.”

  “As I told you earlier today, you have the Randolph cases, too. We believe they are all related.”

  Frank still didn’t move to take them. “Before today, Lefebvre’s name was nearly meaningless to me. I vaguely recalled hearing a news story about him years ago. Don’t you think it would have been better to let me know that this was not only high profile, but also that someone as notorious as Whitey Dane had a connection to the case?”

  Carlson shrugged. “So the killer is a man we’ve been after for a long time. If Lefebvre hadn’t murdered Seth Randolph and stolen the evidence against Dane, you might not have remembered Dane’s name either. He would have been locked away years ago. As a matter of fact—”

  “As a matter of fact, you decided to send me to that scene without breathing a word about any of this. For God’s sake, why not send someone who knew the background on the case? I know you saved a little mileage on a pool car, but—”

  “I didn’t decide to send you just because you were nearest the scene!”

  Frank watched as Carlson struggled to control his temper. After a moment, Carlson said, “Even if you had been in Las Piernas, you’re the one I would have sent up to the mountains precisely because you are one of the only detectives in Homicide who has been with this department less than ten years. I needed at least one person who would be able to approach that wreckage without a lot of preconceived notions about the pilot of that plane.”

  “This is ridiculous. The other detectives in this department can be trusted to be professional.”

  “Where Lefebvre is concerned, no. Not anyone who was around here then. Lefebvre’s name is universally despised in this department — and the sooner you understand that, the sooner you’ll see why you must be the one to take the case. None of the others could have viewed the scene objectively — including Pete Baird.”

  “With or without Pete, I deserved to know what I was walking into.”

  Carlson shifted in his chair, making sure he had a firm grip on the desk before doing so. “Yes,” he said, “in retrospect, I concede that’s true. At the time — perhaps I allowed my own dislike of Lefebvre to influence my response to the situation.” He sighed. “To tell you the truth, I would have been happy if Lefebvre stayed missing. Now this will all be raked up again.” A sudden suspicion came to him. “You haven’t discussed this with your damned wife, have you?”

  Frank leaned forward just slightly. Carlson leaned back. He kept his grip on the desk.

  “I don’t think I could have possibly heard you correctly.”

  Carlson looked down at his desk again. “I want to reiterate that this is not to be discussed with the press.”

  “Who around here has ever leaked anything to the press?”

  Carlson colored. Not so long ago, he had received a formal reprimand for discussing a sensitive investigation with the Express. He had evidently counted on the fact that Frank’s marriage to a reporter would always make him the first person the department suspected of leaking stories to the paper. Fortunately for Frank, Carlson’s efforts to divert suspicion for the leak had backfired.

  Carlson cleared his throat. “I’m only saying that I dread what this department will inevitably be put through as a result of reopening old wounds. I gather you understand my concerns?”

  “I’ve got a few of my own. Once everybody up there realized I didn’t know jack shit about my own case, they didn’t have much
to say. What little I heard from them doesn’t make sense, and now—”

  “The basics are simple. We believe Lefebvre stole evidence and killed a teenager who was a witness in a capital case. Word on the street was that he was paid handsomely to ruin the case — half a million dollars.”

  “Half a million, huh? Nice to have an official figure.”

  “You found it?” Carlson said eagerly.

  “Only if he spent all but forty-three bucks of it gassing up the plane.”

  Carlson looked ludicrously crestfallen. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean either Lefebvre stashed it somewhere, had a confederate, or never had it in the first place. From what I saw today, I’d say he never had it.”

  “Perhaps it was stolen from the plane—”

  “Doesn’t seem likely.” Frank described the scene.

  Carlson sat brooding. He began making a low, tuneless humming noise, a sound he made whenever he was inwardly debating something. He was unaware that his coworkers referred to this as “Carlson’s thinking noise.” The office joke was that it would have driven everyone crazy if he’d made it more often.

  “Cliff Garrett said that Lefebvre was a department hotshot,” Frank said by way of interrupting the humming.

  “He was a fine detective,” Carlson agreed. “One of the best.”

  “A friend of yours?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I was in uniform then. Not very likely I’d be fraternizing with a detective.” He shifted in his chair — undoubtedly he had suddenly recalled that Frank often socialized with uniformed officers.

  Harriman was silent, studying him. Carlson had never spent much time on the street, and Frank suspected he hadn’t been very useful during the time he was in uniform. Hell, he wasn’t very useful now. “So you didn’t know him at all?”