by Boston Teran
"If I failed," he said. "I'm sorry. I, tried—"
"Talk to me," said Paul. "Why aren't you answering?"
Dane looked down at the transceiver. He thought he had been.
"Talk to me."
Dane moved the beam toward the sound of those propellers. "I'm still here," he said.
"I hear you now. You can't pass out, understand? You've got to get to the plane. So talk to me."
Dane tried to hold himself and that beam straight as a needle. "Speech is silver," he said, "but silence is golden."
The Cessna dropped down into that cloud cover.
The bow deck was growing hot from the fire. "I am a slow walker, but I never walk back."
Paul could see the water just beneath him. A cold and wrinkling black. He was current judging quick as he could. "Keep talking."
"Strike harder and twist the links—"
The strobe and the flames intensified. Details pieced together out of that dissolving mist. Caruso saw the wreckage all engulfed in smoke. He saw the strobe all engulfed in smoke. "Keep talking!"
"Where others' skills have failed. He can still invent—"
The Cessna was coming out of the gray, Dane saw it. Those fluted bottoms touched the water. The plane skimmed along kicking out great fumaroles of white froth. It was rushing to him against time.
The engine was pulling back, the nose rose slightly. A wave of air and spray blew over the wreckage driving back the smoke and fire. One of the floats shouldered the bow of that sinking day cruiser. The Cessna lifted then hit back down on the water just yards from the burning houseboat.
Paul pulled off the headset and screamed out, leaning toward the cabin door, "Come on!"
Dane leapt into the water. The cold burst up through his body. Everything went black, then he was mouth-grabbing for air. The floats were just feet away. He paddled with one arm and his legs. Paul was watching the fire to make sure it didn't get to the wing. He couldn't see Dane but he could see the strobe's light clipping its way toward him.
The float rose with the current and Dane managed one lunge with his good arm but missed. As it dropped with the current he lunged again, but missed. As it rose Dane tried again and this time when the float lifted so did he.
It rolled back down and Dane pulled himself onto the float's flat top. He wormed around enough as it rose again to get hold of a strut. His head bent back. The cabin door was swinging loosely open a grasp away.
Then just as Paul screamed, "Come on!" the other inboard on that day cruiser blew.
* * *
THE EXPLOSION was the last thing Essie and Sancho Maria heard over the scanner. And no amount of body English Maria could work on those dials was going to get it back.
* * *
IT WAS 12:13 when the Coast Guard cruiser saw an explosion of sparks ray out through the mist. In that few seconds of pure burn they spotted the Cessna taking off.
It was moving, rising quickly. Above the fire, above the smoke. A hundred feet, two hundred feet. It was banking. It hit the cloud cover and then all they could see was a match tip of light. A strobe tracer to mark its climb.
There was another explosion. Two hundred gallons' worth of gasoline in an aluminum and fiberglass houseboat of a drum. They could feel the shock on the Coast Guard cruiser and pieces of houseboat were flung across the bay as if propelled by lightning.
Everything lit, everything burned, everything went black. Then they saw that match tip of light. It was falling, turning and tumbling down out of the blackness and into the sea. Until it was no more.
Chapter Seventy-Four
There is no pain you are receding
A distant ship, smoke on the horizon
Charles sat in the same studio, with the same music and the same clock on the wall as he had hours earlier. But now—
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying
There had been numerous messages on his answering machine from Essie, each one repeating the same awful mantra.
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
They had destroyed you once, they have destroyed you again.
This child is gone
The dream is gone
ROY'S DEPARTMENTAL chief and her assistant arrived at the courthouse building by 1:00 A. M. Word of the disaster at Grizzly Bay had begun to filter out. A KRLK news truck was setting up on the shore road along Suisun Slough for the first on-site report. A KCAL news chopper was flying in from Oakland.
Flesh was in Roy's office manning the phones, trying to keep herself together. Any and all attempts to relieve her were met with angry and tearful outbursts of resistance.
She called their contact at Justice, as the diamonds in her possession were cut. The IRS and DEA were contacted, as there were possible issues of tax evasion. An attorney with whom Roy first worked and who'd joined the INS to become part of an HIDA team that handled domestic and international money laundering cases was celebrating his tenth wedding anniversary when the call came.
Within hours of this tragedy doors around it would open. Some would lead to answers. But others—
* * *
FIGHTING BACK her panic Ivy finally got hold of Charles; by the time she got off the phone her panic had become an abject and horrified numbness. She peeked through the blinds from a darkened room and watched her neighbors. The man and his college-age son were on their front lawn talking to a collection of other neighbors and pointing toward the garage where Ivy's car still sat in the driveway with its torn-off door just lying there.
The man and his son were reliving the fight with hand gestures and Ivy could hear them in her mind saying, "The girl was screaming, 'You're a murderer… and a money launderer… and the police will be coming.'"
Ivy closed the blinds, then went and collected every pill in the house. She put them in an ashtray. She ran a bath and set the ashtray down on the tub ledge. She took a decanter from the top of the wine rack and smashed it in the kitchen sink. She picked through the breakings for the right piece to slit her wrists.
* * *
A BLACK-AND-WHITE sent from Tracy raced past the golf course along Airport Road. Essie and Sancho Maria had picked up the first Coast Guard reports of wreckage and bodies in Grizzly Bay and a small unidentified plane that had managed a takeoff from the site just before the final explosion.
Sancho Maria tried over and over to contact Paul by radio but something must have been damaged as it wasn't operative. She tried to get his frequency back on the scanner, but that was a frustrating failure. After all the hope she'd handed over earlier that night she needed a godly palmful of it right now for a safe return.
Essie saw the black-and-white coming up through the tie-downs. The officers had been sent by Sergeant Farr to begin the questioning of what Essie knew and if there were other evidence she may have in her possession.
They quickly discovered that the "unidentified plane in question" belonged to Paul Caruso. While they were passing this along to the Coast Guard a single prop began its approach toward the runway from over Liberty Island Road. It was 1:10 A. M.
As the Cessna landed they could see one wing was badly scarred from fire. After landing the women raced toward the plane as it rolled out. One of the officers held them back. The plane was now evidence in what was being viewed as a kidnapping and conspiracy murder case.
The second officer waited by the wing. His tie blew across his shoulder until the propeller spun itself still. One cabin door opened and Paul Caruso half climbed, half stumbled to the tarmac. It was left to the officer to keep him upright.
Sancho Maria tried to reach her husband but the first officer held her back. She explained to him in no uncertain terms her rights and his and when the other cabin door did not open Essie shouted, "Where's Dane?"
Caruso tried to get to his wife and Essie, to talk to them first, but the officer wouldn't allow it. "Did you pick someone up off one of the bo
ats?"
"I did. Yes," he said.
"Where is he?"
Again he tried to get to the women, again he was prevented. Sancho Maria launched into a fiercer tirade about what she knew to be his rights.
"Where is he?" the officer repeated.
Paul looked at Maria, at Essie. He was trying to talk to them past the officer with his eyes, to explain with fragments of expression. "His arm was broken. We had to take off. I was trying to pull him into the plane… there was another explosion as we climbed."
He paused. The long, long night was overwhelming him, but he tried with the barest nod and breath to speak to Essie as he said, "He slipped through my hands… and fell."
Chapter Seventy-Five
AS THE MORNING sun in all its cathedraled beauty touched the slips and berths along the channel at Benecia an idle pair of eyes saw drifting on the current what looked to be an arm taken from its rightful owner.
* * *
CLAUDIA WAS watching the news from her ocean-front suite in Coronado, California. The first thumbnail sequences glued together with video footage of the search and recovery operation in Grizzly Bay portrayed a vision of money laundering and recriminations. Of possible kidnapping and conspiracy. Of destruction and tragedy etched in sordid half-fact and surmise.
Claudia saw her husband being brought in for questioning and when the girls, who were in a connected suite, heard their father's name they came rushing in.
Claudia had turned off the television. One asked, "Was that Daddy they were talking about?"
"No," said Claudia.
* * *
AFTER ONE hour of nonresponse investigators entered Ivy's town house under probable cause. They saw her purse and car keys on the dining room table. They called her name, but got no answer. They found the broken decanter in the sink.
They began a search of that five-bedroom two-story showplace. In the master bath they came upon a tub filled with water, long since gone cold. An ashtray worth of pills waited on the ledge along with an untouched glass of wine.
It was not much longer before Ivy was discovered in a guest bedroom closet. She had been curled up there under a knot of clothes through so much of the night she had urinated on herself.
* * *
INVESTIGATORS CORDONED off the Fenns' house in The Meadows. The same had been done with Nathan's house and his offices at Discovery Bay. The house at Plymouth Cove, the one that allegedly belonged to Merrit Merton, was about to fall to the same fate.
Essie's garage drew a crowd of onlookers at the end of the block and from the apartments above and across the alley where neighbors drank their morning coffee and watched in shocked bewilderment as boxes were tagged and loaded into a police van.
* * *
WHEN FLESH reached the Rio Vista Airport investigators were working the Fenns' hangar. Representatives of the FBI were part of a small contingent in The Burrow coffee shop interrogating Paul Caruso who was, at this point, the only known survivor or witness to the previous night's tragedy.
Flesh had worked through the night and all that morning. She had not showered. A coworker had stopped at her house and returned with a change of clothes. Her hair was pulled back in a plain knot, she wore no makeup. Her eyes were red and swollen from bouts of crying.
Everyone who knew her or Roy stopped and offered a few words of condolence, or a supportive embrace. To their astonishment this neophyte prosecutor nicknamed Flesh, this sometimes ridiculed prosecutor because of her special treatment by Roy Pinter, was holding it together with a painful and professional maturity.
Paul Caruso sat in a booth and answered one exhausting question after another while Sancho Maria stood beside him with a hand resting on his shoulder that from time to time he reached up and held.
When Flesh entered the coffee shop Caruso was explaining how Dane had told him he was going back onto the houseboat to see if Roy Pinter was alive and could be rescued.
Flesh stood just off from this circle of questioners listening and occasionally an investigator who knew of Roy and her relationship would steal a glance, but when her eyes met theirs they would look away absently.
Flesh took Sergeant Farr by the arm, eased him back from that cadre of questioners and told him quietly that she needed to talk with him.
Near the front door she put her briefcase and extensive file down on the counter. "There's something I need to go over with you," she said.
"All right."
She opened her file. Sergeant Farr noticed faxed pages dense with notes and Post-its.
"The Coast Guard report says they reached the site at 12:13. Rudd fell from the plane maybe, what… a minute or two later."
"That has to be pretty close to right."
"Caruso landed here at 1:10 A. M."
"Give or take a few minutes."
"From Grizzly Bay to here, I am told, even at the slowest cruising speeds would take all of fifteen minutes."
"All right."
"So Caruso was up in the air for almost forty-five minutes after Rudd fell from the plane."
"Okay."
"There's a few questions my office would appreciate you asking Mr. Caruso."
* * *
PAUL." CARUSO turned to Sergeant Farr. "I want to review something with you, if I may." Paul nodded. "You said that Cessna radio was inoperable."
The cat Caruso had taken from the wall of his hangar and which had been on the booth seat beside him decided to leap on the table and have a few licks from Paul's coffee cup. Caruso told the investigators around him, "The little shit is a caffeine freak."
"Paul?"
Caruso watched the cat, stroked the cat as he spoke to Sergeant Farr. "It was damaged in one of the explosions."
Caruso lifted the cat away from the cup.
"But your hand held transceiver was working?"
He stared at the cat, felt the warmth of the sun on his hands in flooded bits of memory as Dane walked into the hangar that dusk.
"Paul?"
"It was working. Yes."
He was a man's voice and a boy's face and those sunglasses to protect the eyes.
"You were over the bay almost forty-five minutes… searching?"
"All right, Dane Rudd," Paul had said. "Let's you and I go up and chase that sunset." If he could only have that moment back, he thought, if he could only relive—
"Yes," said Caruso.
"How come you didn't use the transceiver to at least try and call in a Mayday?"
Paul Caruso held the cat against his chest and began to cry. His crying sounded like rainworn water over stones. Sancho Maria leaned down and whispered something unheard by those around them.
"I thought it wasn't working," Paul's voice shuddered. "I just screwed up, I guess. Maybe I panicked."
It was a moment pursued no further by anyone, at least not at the moment. Flesh walked past the table carrying her briefcase and file. She did not believe Mr. Caruso.
Paul wiped his eyes. Sancho Maria understood her husband was not crying because of what had been said. He was crying because he might have lost the son he could never have.
* * *
FLESH PASSED through the empty bar. Stopping, she glanced at all those cracked and stained portraits of mythology as The Burrow was one of the Delta's more well known eccentricities.
The television above the bar was on, but the sound had been muted. The station was turned to the news where divers slipped down into the shallows of Grizzly Bay looking for remains.
She felt a clammy dizziness come over her. The inside of her mouth turned to paste. She set her briefcase and file down on the bartop and held on for time to collect herself.
Sergeant Farr had followed her in. He put a hand on her back. "Would a drink help? I know I shouldn't be suggesting it, but—"
She shook her head refusing his offer. She turned away from the television and collected herself. "Paul Caruso," she said with quiet explicitness, "landed a plane on water, at night, in a mist, alongside two boats going
up in flames. Does that sound like a man who'd 'screw up' or 'panic'? He did nine years in the Men's Colony, for Christ sake. He is one very-tough-fuck."
Sergeant Farr thought a moment, he glanced through the archway that led to the coffee shop where Paul Caruso continued to wipe his eyes.
"I believe he might have thought that since the radio wasn't working, the transceiver wasn't working. He might have. So much was happening so fast."
Flesh took her briefcase and file. On the wall beside the door she noticed a faded print where a father and son flew out of a stony prison on wings made from wax.
"What are you trying to get at?" Sergeant Farr asked.
"I don't believe," said Flesh, "Dane Rudd fell from that plane anymore than you or I."
Chapter Seventy-Six
WHEN FLESH ARRIVED at Disappointment Slough there was a news chopper circling overhead all dark blue and black against the sky. The landing and dock site to the island had been cordoned off by a police barricade and Flesh had to ID herself to get through.
Just beyond the barricade people had pulled off the road and were stretched out along the berm in singles or small gaping clusters. Some had binoculars, some Instamatics. Others relied on their eyes.
As she was escorted to the island Flesh saw one civilian on a small day cruiser about fifty yards downstream. The man was videotaping her boat while he was being ordered back and Flesh regarded him with raw disgust, staring, hoping that he would zoom in on her up close so he could see her praying silently and viciously that some day it would be one of his lying dead in full view of a carrion curiosity.
* * *
THE INSIDE of the house was a hive of investigators. Flesh approached a lieutenant who was in charge of itemizing the forty to fifty other boxes that Essie had filled over time. These were to be brought from the island with everything else as possible evidence.
Flesh introduced herself then asked for Essie, as she had been told Essie was here to guide them in these issues. The lieutenant led Flesh to the kitchen and pointed through the open back door. "You'll see her up the hill. We gave her a little break."