He was gazing out the windshield to the northwest, he said. "Our next guest lives in married student housing in that complex off Arapahoe behind Naropa. You know where that is?"
"Yes. I do." I didn't start the engine.
"Well, then, scoot, scoot." He tapped his watch. "WeVe almost made up our lost time. If we make the lights, we'll be back on track."
I still didn't start the engine.
He glared at his watch as though it were lying to him.
Reggie sighed and said. "Okay. Okay. Drive. I'll talk."
I decided to take Twenty-eighth Street over to Arapahoe, which probably was a mistake even this early in rush hour. I missed the first traffic light and listened to Reggie punctuate my braking with a sigh.
He started by saying. "I don't know how much you recall about the Cooper legend. But it was a big deal back in ‘97’. Captivated the country. Divided the country, really. Seemed at the time that half of us wanted him caught and the other half were rooting for him to continue to elude the FBI and make them look like fools. You have to remember those days in the early seventies. This was right after the bombing in Cambodia, during the height of Vietnam, there was a lot of anti-government sentiment going around."
The light changed, and I inched forward, pulling up the on-ramp onto Twenty-eighth Street, we were soon stacked up behind a UPS truck halfway back from the light at College.
In a voice his ex-wife had probably detested. Reggie said. "You should have taken Thirtieth."
"Probably/ I acknowledged.
He was energized as he returned his attention to the Cooper saga. "The crime itself was something special. It was innovative. No one had ever hijacked a commercial jet for ransom in this country before. It was planned meticulously, the man was so ordinary that hardly anyone remembered him well enough to describe him, he left no fingerprints on his ticket or near his seat. His escape was brazen and a work of pure genius, he actually parachuted out the rear stairs of a 727 into the mountain drainage above the Columbia River and disappeared into thick cloud cover.
"Despite the fact that the government combed his drop zone for months they never found a thing. No dead hijacker, no parachute, no ransom, no candy wrapper they could tie to him. Nothing, he disappeared into thin air."
From the backseat. Sawyer asked. "I think Alan and I know all that. But what was so captivating about him for your colleagues at Rocky Flats? Why did all of you get so enthralled?"
"We didn't. Not then, anyway. Back in '7’, when it happened. I don't think we paid any more attention to the hijacking than the rest of the country did, maybe less, the security department was busy then. I mean, we were consumed with our responsibilities, the plant was in constant danger of terrorist intrusion by outsiders, antiwar people, anti-nuclear people, environmental people, we had to keep an eye on all of them and anticipate their incursions, we had a hell of a lot of plutonium to protect, and a ton of secrets to secure, we even had one demonstration where there was a Save the Whales banner." He laughed at the memory.
I cleared the light at College and made it halfway to Arapahoe before traffic again crept to a stop.
"In ‘976, the media made a big deal of the five-year anniversary of the hijacking. You know how they do it, the TV people, on anniversaries. Overkill, they replayed all the old film, they reinterviewed the pilots and the stewardesses— they weren't flight attendants back then— and they did long pieces about all the work the FBI had done, they took crews back to the Columbia drainage and searched for evidence all over again, at the plant, we all got talking about it too, and one day someone in the department suggested that it couldn't have been just any Joe who could do it. It would have to have been someone like one of us to pull off a caper like that.
"The crime was so sophisticated, so clean, so meticulously prepared and researched. It would have taken a cop, or a fed, or a security specialist trained in counterintelligence, well, the idea kind of snowballed and people began to talk and rumors began to spread and.., you know how it goes."
I asked. "Was Corey Rand the one spreading the rumors?"
"Corey wasn't even there in '7’ at the time of the hijacking. But he was on board five years later, he didn't start the whole thing, the Cooper finger-pointing, he never even participated in any of the coffee-machine talk— remember, he was an outsider. Nobody liked him much, even then. But he sure ran with it, he made a personal decision that he was going to figure out the whole damn crime and see what kinds of special skills and special knowledge it would’vetaken for Cooper to pull it off, he used to say that if you could identify what you had to know to do it, pretty soon you would know who could do it. From the list of who could, you could find who did. It became a. I don't know, an obsession with him."
The light cycled once, but we moved forward only a couple of hundred yards. Taxiing behind the UPS truck was like driving behind a brown brick wall.
Sawyer wondered, "Did he? Did Rand ever figure it all out?"
Reggie hesitated and said. "He thought he did." He grew silent.
I urged him to continue. "Go on. Reggie."
"I had become Corey's only friend in the security department. I say 'friend.’ but Corey couldn't really be anybody's friend, he didn't know how, he was a difficult man to get along with, had this set of rules that he lived by that— I don't know— it put people off, he couldn't really relax and be part of the group, after not too long on the job the other guys started calling him 'Adolf.' and.., well, things got worse and worse for him over the years, he was passed over for promotions and he grew more vindictive and things just kept snowballing, at the end ha was totally isolated except for me.
"I tried to protect him for a while. Put him under my wing, so to speak. Tried to get him to recognize the difference between a rule being broken and a rule being bent, but he was more rigid than a concrete slab, and hell, to tell you the awful truth, he was just about as cold."
We finally cleared the light and turned west on Arapahoe, we were getting close to the married student housing complex.
"Then the guys set up that final sting for him. I wasn't in on it; they knew I would’veput the kibosh on it if I'd known what was going on. Years later, one of them admitted to me how he and two of his buddies had set Corey up." He shook his head at the memory. "It was a good dupe they did, worthy of a bunch of security analysts. I'll tell you that, they laid the tracks just right to lure him in, and they cleaned up the tracks just right so you couldn't tell they'd ever been there. By the time I looked around. I couldn't find a trace of their scam. But I remain surprised to this day that Corey fell for it, he was a bright man, certainly brighter than they were."
The light at Folsom was green. Reggie said. "Next left. So, anyway, their plan worked. It turned out that they got rid of Corey just like they had hoped."
Sawyer asked the question that was on the tip of my tongue. "This man who admitted to you what they'd dona to get Corey out of the way? What became of him?"
I glanced over and saw Reggie's eye twitch. "Funny you should ask, he died in a hunting accident in ‘987."
"Let me guess." I interjected. "The shooter was never identified and the killing was ruled accidental."
Reggie started breathing through his mouth. It was the only change I could see in his demeanor, he pointed out the windshield. "This is the parking lot, alan, and it's your turn to help,” he said.
I caught Sawyer's stem face and wide eyes in the rearview mirror before I got out of the car to assist Reggie with the next shut-in. Sawyer tightened her jaw and nodded her head, once up, once down, she raised three fingers and smiled that rueful smile that left her cheeks dimpled.
Reggie refused to elaborate on either D. B. Cooper or Corey Rand during the short drive to our next destination, a tiny frame cottage near Boulder High School. While Sawyer and he were inside. I called the hospital to check on Lauren's progress, according to the nurse, she was asleep and seemed clear cognitively, with the exception of short-term recall for the time before
the poisoning, there was some minor concern about changes in her liver function, she said the doctor would tell me more later in the day after the new labs came back.
She didn't sound too worried about the new liver concerns, so I decided that I wouldn't be, either.
We moved from one of Boulder's most modest neighborhoods to one of its grandest, from the simple frame house near the high school to a mansion on Mapleton Hill. I drove north across town on side streets, well aware that I would miss plenty of lights along the way. I'd already decided to allow Sawyer room to press Reggie for more information.
She picked up the ball deftly. "The 'two buddies' you talked about, Reggie. Whatever happened to them?"
"I know what you're thinking, and I don't... I just don't think it's .., it wouldn't be ..."
"The two buddies? What happened to them?"
He looked away from us, out the side window, before he spoke again. "One of them was a NASCAR fanatic named Ricky Turner. I know what you're thinking, and you're right, he died in a one-car accident in Boulder Canyon after he got blitzed at the Pioneer Inn up in Nederland. Police determined that he was doing over sixty when his car left the pavement. It actually landed on the other side of Boulder Creek from the road."
"Year?"
His tone irritated, he said. "I told you I was willing to talk about Cooper, not about old feuds, anyway, it was an accident, he was drunk as a skunk." Sawyer and I waited Reggie out. "What year? Hell. I was still at the Flats when Turner died. Must have been ‘988, '89: maybe '90."
"You seem to remember all that pretty clearly; Reggie."
"I was his boss. I went to the funeral."
"I think maybe I see a pattern here." I said, as I turned on Pine, which would take Sawyer and me right past our hotel.
Sawyer pressed an obviously reluctant Reggie Loomis. "The other buddy? What about him?"
"I don't think he's in town anymore. I lost track of him before Ricky killed himself in that wreck."
"His name?"
"Don't. You should just let this rest. It's not what you think."
"Come on. Reggie."
"We called him Jacko. His name was Jack O'Connell. I think he moved back to where he grew up. Some place on Long Island. Worked in security at one of the nuclear power plants there."
"Was he at Ricky's funeral?"
"You know, come to think of it. I don't remember seeing him."
No one spoke again until I pulled up in front of the stately mansion on Mapleton Hill. Reggie said. "My next guest is Sylvia Henning. Miss Sylvia, she lives alone here, if you can believe it. Has for over thirty years, she's been one of my guests from the very start."
"I guess it's my turn to help." I said.
"Miss Sylvia doesn't like strangers, help me get the tray together. But I'll take care of her all by myself, and I'll be a few extra minutes with her. Why don't you put together some food for yourselves and eat while I'm inside?"
Sawyer and I prepared trays and carried them over to the elegantly landscaped island that separated the westbound lane of Mapleton from the eastbound lane, she examined the palatial homes and asked. "Old money up here?"
I said. "You bet." I settled onto the smooth face of a decorative granite boulder. "Sawyer, do you think?"
She was sitting across from me. "Yes, I think," she said and dug into her ramekin of eggs. I smelled a fresh burst of tarragon.
"It doesn't make sense, we're chasing a ghost, you know?"
"You mean Rand?"
"His wife told me he was dead. Why would she lie to me?"
"People lie all the time. Some of them don't even need reasons. I spend most of my professional time with people who lie with every third breath just so they can stay in practice."
"I don't know. I'm troubled by it. If Rand's dead, this is all for nothing, we can't finger a dead man for killing our colleagues."
"What else do we have?" she asked.
I ate most of my fruit salad before pausing to use the cell phone to call Sam at home. I asked him to check on the whereabouts and well-being of a Jack O'Connell, ex-Boulder, ex-Rocky Flats security, currently doing security work at a nuclear energy facility on Long Island, he didn't ask why I wanted to know, which meant he figured he already knew why I wanted to know. Sam liked people to think he was ahead of them even when he wasn't.
He said he'd get right on it.
Sawyer said. "Bet he's already dead. This Jacko guy. Want to do a wager on how Corey Rand got to him?"
"Not especially, no."
"There's good news here, too, Alan."
"What's that?"
"It's taken our minds off what happened last night."
She made me laugh. "I called the hospital while you were inside the last house with Reggie, the nurse said there's something screwy with Lauren's liver functions. Is that common after carbon monoxide poisoning?"
She swallowed and tried not to look concerned.
"How screwy?"
"Doctor is going to fill me in later."
She said. "Well, I wouldn't get alarmed." which, for some reason, is one of the most alarming things that physicians can ever say to me. "But there are rare— let me emphasize, rare— cases of elevated liver enzymes after CO poisoning. I'm not sure anyone really understands the pathogenesis. It sounds to me like her doctors are just being prudent."
"Now I'm getting alarmed."
She reached out to touch me before pulling back, she looked down. "The eggs are great. Go ahead, you'll need the protein."
THIRTY-NINE
Once he was back in the car. Reggie wouldn't answer any more questions about Corey Rand. "Corey wasn't part of the deal I made with you two. You want to talk Cooper, we can talk Cooper. If not, we can listen to music. You have any Vivaldi?" he asked before offering directions to an apartment house near Community Hospital.
"No Vivaldi. Did he ever tell you?" I asked, careful not to actually mention Rand's name. "You know, did he ever tell you who it was he suspected of committing the hijacking?"
"He never told me the name, no. But he came to me once and laid out the case in some detail."
"Well, you seem like a good student of these things," Sawyer prompted. "Were you convinced?"
"The presentation," he said, "was compelling."
"But were you convinced?"
"He had identified.., a guy, a guy at the plant, in our department, the guy made sense for a number of reasons. Crucial, of course, he was off-duty over Thanksgiving weekend that year. But that didn't tell ma much. My thinking was, so what? All nonessential personnel at the plant were off over Thanksgiving weekend, then Corey pointed out that this particular guy came back to work a day later than expected, on the Tuesday after the holiday instead of the Monday. Rand said that gave him an extra day to make his way back from the Pacific Northwest, a day Corey said he needed because of some unexpected problem.
"What problem? Well, what first focused Corey's attention on this man, apparently; is that the guy came back to work with a broken ankle. His story at the time was that he was doing some early season cross-country skiing up above Rollinsville and hit a rock on a downhill and broke his ski and his ankle."
Sawyer said. "And Rand thought that was bullshit, that the ankle break was actually evidence of trouble on the parachute drop?"
"Right. But Corey didn't stop there. Once he had this guy in mind, he locked on him like a heat-seeking missile, he went back and looked at the man's military records and found that when he was in the Marines, the man graduated from parachute school, that's important not just for technique reasons, but also because it meant that Cooper knew the safe parameters for a parachute drop from that plane. Cooper gave specific orders to the pilots, he told them to fly the plane unpressurized at ten thousand feet.
That was so he could safely lower the airstairs in flight, he specified that the gear be down, that the flaps be set at fifteen percent, and that the airspeed should at no point exceed one hundred and fifty knots."
I said. "He knew what
he was doing."
"Cooper didn't miss a detail, the crime was a thing of beauty. When he jumped, he waited until the plane was in the clouds so the military jets that were tracking them couldn't see him leave the plane."
I pulled up in front of the apartment house that was our next humanitarian stop, hopped out of the car, and prepared a tray. I was getting efficient at it. Reggie and I were in and out of the apartment and back in the car within the allotted seven minutes. Sawyer picked up the story as though she'd frozen the conversation in time.
"Doesn't sound like Rand had much to go on. Circumstantial, every bit of it."
"Oh, he had more. Corey kept looking at the guy, he found out where he worked before he came to Rocky Flats. Turns out that two jobs back he was employed in security at a company in Reno that did contract maintenance for American Airlines, among others. Corey checked further. One of the planes that the company serviced for American was Boeing 727s."
"Which means he could have had knowledge about the rear airstairs, and how they operated?" I asked.
"Exactly."
I was thinking about old conversations with my wife the assistant district attorney about the components that prosecutors use to assess suspects. Means, opportunity; and motive. M-O-M. "Rand's hypothesis covers means and opportunity; Reggie. What did Rand come up with about motive?"
"I'm not done. This guy that Corey Rand was so sure about. Turns out he grew up in a suburb of Portland; not even seventy-five miles from the drop zone identified by the FBI."
"Still5 as Sawyer pointed out, it's all circumstantial." I said, trying to imagine the words Lauren would use to assess the story. "Where am I heading next? What's our next stop?"
Reggie shrugged. "Rand was convinced, that's what was important to him, the last two stops are up Sunshine Canyon."
I headed west on Mapleton into the canyon. "Back to motive for a minute. How did Rand figure motive?"
"Two motives. One: of course, was money. Remember; Cooper got away clean with two hundred thousand dollars, and the second motive was retribution. Vengeance, if you will."
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