“How reliable is she, do you think? You just sounded like her version of events might not be the most accurate.”
“If she’s not actually mentally ill, Charlotte Finnegan is a hairsbreadth from it. I’m not sure how much of what she actually sees is real or what she imagines.”
“Husband? Other members of the family?”
“Only her husband, and he wasn’t home at the time.”
“Huh.” Costace rubbed a hand through his close-cropped hair. “And Buscema says that…” He let his voice trail off as the door opened. A short, stumpy man in jeans, knit golf shirt, and a light blue jacket stepped into the room. He didn’t bother to knock, and he pushed the door shut behind him. He carried a slender black-leather folder.
“Bill, this is Special Agent Walter Hocker. Walt, Undersheriff Bill Gastner. And this is Detective Estelle Reyes-Guzman.” Hands were pumped, and Hocker regarded Estelle with interest.
“Isn’t your husband one of the docs over at the hospital?” His voice was quiet and husky, right on the edge of being hard to hear.
“My husband is a physician, yes,” Estelle said.
“He’s doing the autopsies?”
“Yes. He’s working the autopsies with Dr. Alan Perrone, one of the assistant state medical examiners.”
“Ah,” Hocker said. He stood with his hands on his hips, feet planted. He transferred his attention to the top of my desk, but it was clear that he was preoccupied with his own thoughts rather than actually interested in my housekeeping.
While he gathered his thoughts, I walked around behind the desk and sat down. “So,” I said, and folded my hands on the blotter. Hocker jerked out of his trance, squared his shoulders, and sat down on the edge of the desk, dropping his leather folder beside him.
“Buckmaster…no, what’s his name?”
“Vincent Buscema,” Costace prompted.
“Buscema.” Hocker looked up at the ceiling and closed his eyes for a couple of seconds, as if he were playing private memory tricks. “Buscema. Right.” He nodded and looked down at me. “He says that you have film from the sheriff’s camera, as well as a fragment of the projectile. Is that right?”
“Correct.”
“All right. We need to get those to the lab,” Hocker said. “Just as quickly as we can.”
“The film is being processed into prints right now,” I said. “And two of the deputies are working on the bullet fragments.”
“What, you didn’t send the film off somewhere, did you?”
I didn’t bother to dignify the question with an answer, and Estelle must have seen the flush on my cheeks. “One of our staff is processing the film downstairs,” she said.
“And the fragment analysis…they’re doing the work here as well?”
“Yes,” I said. Somehow, Hocker had made the word
here
sound as if it referred to the end of the earth, and that irritated the hell out of me—even more than the implication that we’d entrust evidence to MinutePhoto down at the mall, if we had a mall.
“I’ll be glad to share with you what we have so far.” Hocker frowned and I added, “What, we’re going to have one of those ridiculous turf wars now? Where we all waste time arguing about whose case it is?”
Hocker twisted his head and looked sharply at me. I returned his gaze without further comment. After ten seconds or so, I saw the crow’s-feet at the corner of his eyes deepen just a bit.
“No, we’re not going to do that, Sheriff. The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board asked for our assistance. I wish that they’d made that request through your office initially, and I apologize that they didn’t. You have to admit that it’s a case that will draw considerable attention—a Canadian plane, a Canadian citizen at the controls, shot out of the sky not a stone’s throw from the U.S.-Mexican border, killing both the pilot and a passenger, who just happens to be the county sheriff.” He paused. “That’s the story as it was passed on to me. Am I about right?”
“You’re about right. Except that the incident has nothing to do with either the Canadian citizenship of the pilot, the Canadian registry of the aircraft, or with the proximity of the incident to the Mexican border.”
Hocker raised an eyebrow. “You’re sure?”
“No.”
He relaxed and this time, the smile lit up his face. “Well, we can all hope that it doesn’t.” He stood up. “What about the bullet fragment?”
“We have one piece, about the size of—” I glanced around for something to make a comparison. I pointed at the little rectangular amber light on the front of my computer—“a little bigger than that light. There may be others.”
“That’s going to be a tough one,” Hocker said.
I nodded. “I’ve assigned two deputies to work that up. When they exhaust their resources, and I imagine that will be fairly quickly, then we’ll send the fragment to whatever lab is most appropriate. We may develop specific questions to ask that will help in the analysis.”
“Do you know what kind of work the deputies are planning to do on the piece?”
“I would imagine that they’ll take basic measurements, weigh it, that sort of thing. If the fragment includes marks from the rifling in the barrel, that may be useful. With a fragment that small, it’s going to be hard to establish the caliber with any certainty. Establishing the make or model of weapon is going to be even more difficult. And photos will be taken, of course. If by some stroke of luck we should come up with a suspect’s firearm, we might be able to make a comparison—if there are enough marks to go on.” I smiled. “The deputies won’t ruin the evidence, Agent Hocker.”
Hocker shook his head quickly. “I didn’t mean to imply that,” he said. “I just want to make sure that the initial avenues of investigation are opened quickly.”
“That’s what we do around here,” I said and leaned back. “We open avenues.” I glanced at Estelle, who had remained silent and stood near the door. She regarded Hocker, her face expressionless. I couldn’t tell what was going on behind those black eyes, and maybe that was just as well.
“And the photos?” Hocker asked.
“As the detective said, one of our personnel is in the darkroom right now. The film has been developed and she’s working on a series of enlargements.”
Hocker nodded. “Outstanding.” He squared his shoulders and tucked in his shirt. “Did you get a preliminary look?”
“Yes. Detective Reyes-Guzman has several of the initial blowups, if you’d like to see them.”
Hocker did, and after Estelle spread the photos out on my desk, he spent several minutes looking at each in turn, with Costace at his elbow.
“This windmill apparently interested the sheriff,” I said, tapping the photo of the block-house site. “There are two ranchers whose land covers the crash site, the Boyds and the Finnegans. This is on the Finnegans’ property, about a mile from the site.”
“Bizarre,” Hocker mused. He lined up the edges of two prints. “And this little building here is just off to the side, a few yards from the windmill?”
“Right.”
“Prairie, fence, more prairie. A few head of cattle,” Neil Costace said.
“Actually, they’re antelope,” Estelle said. She managed to make it sound like simply an interesting fact rather than a correction.
Hocker didn’t look up. “And what would the sheriff care about antelope?” he asked. “They’re all over the southwest.”
“We don’t know,” I said.
He stood up and shook his head. “Huh.” He shrugged and added, “Well, all this is interesting, but it doesn’t tell us much. We agree on that?” He slid the photos back into the packet and handed them to Estelle, then picked up his leather folder. “The fact that one of the crash victims was the county sheriff is what interests me,” he said. “If the shot wasn’t just a random one, if it was intentional, then it’s a case of an altogether greater dimension.”
I nodded and said nothing. We had been down that road before, without any answers popping out of the sand.
“I’ve made some inquiries through the regular federal channels,” he said. “In fact, I just got off the phone. We have only four names so far that are connected with this thing, and it made sense to me to run each one through the federal centers and see what we got.”
“Holman, Camp, Boyd, and Finnegan,” I said. “I would guess it’s going to be slim pickings.”
Hocker shrugged. “The day is yet young,” he said and grinned. “But first I’d like to take a look at the aircraft and see what that tells us.”
I couldn’t imagine seeing much more than a neat hole through a piece of crumpled aluminum, but sifting through the remains of the Bonanza would give us all something to do. Maybe the others didn’t, but I needed that. I was growing impatient, waiting for the slow wheels of forensic science to tell me something I couldn’t already guess with equipment no more fancy than a good pair of bifocals.
As we arrived at Posadas Municipal Airport, Robert Torrez, Tom Pasquale, Vincent Buscema, and another FAA official whom I hadn’t met were in the process of lifting a large portion of the right wing off a small flatbed truck.
The shield on the truck’s door read “Posadas Electric,” and I wondered briefly which of Torrez’s relatives had donated the use of his vehicle. The sergeant was related to half the town and knew the other half.
I watched as Deputy Pasquale operated the forklift and for once, he drove the machine as if he had a Ming vase on the forks.
Inside the cavernous and cool hangar, I surveyed the litter. In the hours since dawn that Sunday, Vincent Buscema had been able to work miracles. The hangar floor looked as if someone were arranging a display of landfill art. As the wing settled to the cradle of two-by-fours that Buscema kicked under it, I walked around the back of the forklift, staying well clear when Pasquale threw the thing into reverse.
With no load, he spun the lift around in its own length and charged back outside to the apron, operating once more at his normal pace.
Buscema approached and shook hands with the two FBI agents. “We’re making progress,” he said.
“I would never have guessed that a small aircraft could make so many pieces,” I said.
He nodded. “What we’re going to do as we bring more and more down is to arrange everything we’ve got so it makes sense, nose to tail, wingtip to wingtip. That helps us understand what we’ve got.”
I stepped over to the engine block. The propeller hub was still in place, but even my unpracticed eye could see the bend in the crankshaft and imagine the tremendous forces slammed against the hub and shaft as the prop hit the ground. “I’ve seen pictures where the plane was basically reassembled,” I said, “actually put back together, patched together. They did it with that airliner that blew up back East didn’t they?”
“Sure,” Buscema said. “But we won’t have to do that here. We’re ninety-nine percent sure of what happened. I mean, that engine you’re looking at tells most of the story. It was turning at least cruise RPM when the blades hit the ground. Two of the blades were sheared off, and we’ve got the tips. The third blade looks like a pretzel.” He nudged the engine with his toe. “There was nothing wrong with that engine when the plane hit the ground. You can bet on that.” He put his hands on his hips and turned, surveying the collection.
“We could spend days and days trying to decide if there was a mechanical control failure of some kind, but I think that’s going to be a waste of time, too. What you want,” he said as Hocker bent down and examined a chunk of white-painted aluminum roughly the size of a large grocery bag, “is to find a small hole that doesn’t belong.”
“Or holes,” Hocker said.
“Or holes, yes,” Buscema pointed off to the left. “We’re putting the fuselage right in here.”
“So show me the seats,” I said. “If the fragment hit the pilot low in the back, it had to go through the seat first.”
“Exactly, and the hole is exactly where we thought it might be. Look.” I grimaced as he stepped over and beckoned me to one of the brightly upholstered seats, now twisted and looking so out of place amid the scraps on the floor.
Hocker and Costace were quicker than I was, kneeling beside one of the seats as Buscema turned it slightly. A small piece of red survey flagging had been tied to part of the seat’s framework.
“It’s such a small cut that at first glance, it doesn’t show,” Buscema said. He slid his hand under the seat cover from the bottom and spread the fabric. “Entry,” he said. “Of course that little cut in the fabric could have been caused at almost any time by somebody careless with a ski pole, fishing rod”—he shrugged—“even with the latch of a briefcase, I suppose.” He slid his hand out of the seat.
“But higher up on the front side, we’ve got a companion tear, a little bit larger.”
“A really steep angle,” Estelle murmured.
“For sure,” Buscema said. “The angle fits. There’s blood on the seat, but that’s consistent with the crash trauma.”
“The wound from a small, high-velocity fragment isn’t going to cause much bleeding,” Bob Torrez said, and Hocker glanced at him.
“All right,” Hocker said. “We’ve got holes in the pilot. We’ve got holes in the seat. Then it shouldn’t be hard to find where the bullet pierced the belly of the plane, ripped up through the flooring, whatever that’s made of, zipped through the carpet, then through the seat and into the pilot.”
“That’s what we plan to do,” Buscema said. “The next truck down will have the majority of the fuselage’s remaining pieces, including the major cabin structure.” He glanced at his watch. “I expect that within the hour. Sheriff, I really think that you’ll have something solid to go on in just a short while.”
I nodded. “What we need to do,” I said, “is to start the process of matching the fragment with other fragments. What are the odds that when you take that seat apart, you’ll find more of the bullet?”
“Maybe,” Hocker said. “And maybe inside the cabin floor structure too, if the bullet hit a frame member and shattered.” He turned to Estelle. “There were no exit wounds on the body?”
“No, sir.”
“Any calculated guesses on the bullet caliber?”
“That’s going to be a tough call,” I said. “Maybe when we see the first entry hole that it made in the plane, we can make a guess.”