Broken Wings (3 page)

“Yes, you can,” she argued. “I’ve seen it done over and over.”

“Not when
I’m
conducting an investigation, you haven’t.”

She sat rigid, trying to look composed. “Mr. Lowe, whenever there’s a crash that interests the public, the cockpit tapes are splashed all over television. Look at the crash on the Potomac a few years ago…even the space shuttle explosion. Why can you release them to the media and not to someone like me?”

Addison was calm, unperturbed. “Have you heard this tape on the news?”

“No, but…”

“That’s because I don’t work that way.”

She leaned toward him across the table, her face paling with the argument, but her gaze piercing him. “Then let me just hear an excerpt when you get it back. Just the few minutes before the crash.”

“Absolutely not.”

She leaned back in her chair, her golden eyes searching him in frustration. “Why not? In every other case—”

“Not the ones I handle,” he repeated firmly. The matter was non-negotiable. He looked out the window, frowned at the orchestrated order on the runway, and thought for a moment of how much could go wrong out there. The burden of his job was great, and he handled it the best way he could, the most ethical way he knew. He brought his gaze back to her. “Look, you said yourself that you want the truth in this case. You want your friend to be treated fairly. So do I. I don’t happen to subscribe to the idea that the last few moments of a man’s life is any of the public’s business. It’s spectacle, it’s great news, and the media loves to exploit that kind of thing, speculate on what happened, pin blame on somebody. But I won’t allow it. I’m after the truth, and I won’t let some half-baked dramatization bring up the network ratings.”

The wary look she’d worn all morning diminished a degree, and a sparkle of something—surprise? respect?—shone in her eyes. “All right,” she whispered after a moment. “I suppose you’re right about the media. But I was his copilot. I would have been in that airplane if I hadn’t had that car accident. I
need
to know what went wrong.”

Addison leaned back in his chair, wishing she hadn’t used just those words. Hadn’t he used them himself, just four years ago?

I need to know what went wrong.

It won’t change things, Addison. You’ve got to let go of her.

For my peace of mind, man. Don’t you understand? My wife was on that plane!

He raised his eyes to the woman across the table from him, the woman with pain and grief in her eyes, the woman embracing her fear like it was her dead friend. And he understood. “I know what you’re going through,” he said softly. “But I can’t share the tape with anybody until I’ve finished the investigation. I’ve heard a few pieces. There are too many ambiguities, too many places where the wrong conclusion can be drawn. And while I haven’t heard the end of the tape, I feel pretty sure that those last few seconds were not something that can give you peace of mind.”

Tears filled her eyes, and she looked out the window again, unseeing. He knew what she was thinking. She didn’t even have to say it.

I never said good-bye.
He’d thought the same thing himself, so many times. But even worse than that was the recurring thought that had hit him at the most innocent of times those first few weeks.
I should have been there.
Somehow, in sharing those last few moments with Mick through the tape, she thought she could live them with him. But she couldn’t die with him.

“Before we start,” he said quietly, “I feel I should ask you a very personal question. It’s none of my business, I know, but I think it might have some bearing on how I look at Mick Hammon.”

“What?” The question came out flattened with pain.

“Were you in love with him?”

The reaction that passed over her face startled him, for it was quite the opposite from what he expected. It wasn’t defensiveness or guilt or sadness or confession. It was pure, unadulterated fury.

“How dare you?” she hissed. Then, snatching her purse, she got up and stalked out of the restaurant as fast as she could move.

Stunned, Addison glanced around for the waitress, then threw down a twenty and darted after Erin with his clipboard clutched in his hand.

The airport corridors were crowded with people scurrying in various directions. In the confusion it took a moment for him to find her. She was running away from him against the flow of people. He broke into a trot, dodging and bumping people as he went.

At last, he caught up with her. “Erin,” he shouted breathlessly, grabbing her arm and turning her around to face him.

“Let go of me!” She jerked her arm free and backed away. “I’m not going to answer any more of your stupid questions. Subpoena me, sue me, do what you have to do. But I won’t sit there with a man who can’t understand the grief of a friend over a friend without drawing smutty little conclusions.”

Addison felt as if he’d thrown sand in a baby’s eyes. His thick brows arched with apology. “I’m sorry,” he said, dropping his hand helplessly to his side. “It’s just that I don’t know you, and I didn’t know him. I’m trying to get a grasp of this situation, and all I have to draw on are my own impressions. You seem so shaken by his death, I thought—”

“You thought wrong!” Erin glanced around her, at the people shuffling past, oblivious to the scene, then glared back at him. “Mick was a family man, and he loved his wife. She doesn’t deserve that kind of sleazy speculation, and neither did he. And if that’s the kind of fairness you plan to give him in this report of yours, then forgive me if I don’t have a lot of faith in it!”

“I made a mistake,” he admitted loudly. “I’m sorry.”

“Have you ever had a friend, Mr. Lowe? A real friend? One who was there when you had problems, one who gave you advice that you rarely listened to and always discovered was good after it was too late, one who encouraged you and helped you and believed in you? That’s the kind of friend Mick was to me!” She lowered her voice, her lips quivering in pain. “I miss him. But he was not my lover!”

“I believe you,” he said, suddenly jealous that Mick Hammon, whatever kind of man he was, could have had a friend as devoted and as caring as the woman standing before him. He didn’t answer the question she had flung at him, about his ever having had a friend like that. But deep in his empty soul, he knew he hadn’t. “I was out of line,” he whispered, one hand roughing up his hair. “I’m sorry. Really. Can’t you accept that and start over? If for no other reason than just to make sure I don’t come to any more inane conclusions? Just to keep me on track?”

“I’m not sure I can do that, Mr. Lowe.”

He threw up his hands.
“Please
call me Addison. I can’t stand this Mr. Lowe stuff.”

Erin stood still and didn’t call him anything.

“Can we try again? Please?”

She turned away from him for a moment. Sighing deeply, she said, “If you’ll get me out of this airport. Just take me someplace else, and I’ll…I’ll try. I’ve just got to get out of here.”

“All right,” he said, quenching the fierce instinct to comfort her. “This way.” He led her to the nearest exit.

The breeze outside lifted her hair, releasing the feminine fragrance of violets. He swallowed and hoped the feelings she’d stirred weren’t apparent in his voice. “Where would you like to go?” he asked, his heartbeat still pounding in his ears. “Back to your house? Another restaurant? Where?”

She thought for a moment, then looked up at him, a spark of frantic longing in her eyes. “The lake,” she said. “I want to go to the lake.”

Chapter Three

T
he smell of lake water and wind assaulted Erin’s senses. She stood on the bank of Lake Bisteneau, just outside of Shreveport. Her arms engaged in a self-embrace as the wind rippled across the surface of the water. The lake, for heaven’s sake. She hadn’t been here all year, even though she lived less than thirty minutes away. Why had she thought of it today?

The answer was clear. The wind sweeping across the water tasted of freedom. There were no engines rumbling beneath her, no places to fall, no memories from which to hide. The water was as close to the sky as she could be without going there. It was as close to peace as she could find.

The warm wind whipped her rich hair wildly around her face, and she squinted. If only this man weren’t who he was, she thought. If only Addison Lowe were someone who could grab her hand and take her running along the shore, make her forget instead of demanding that she remember. If only she could laugh with him, skip a few stones, take a boat ride…

Addison stood quietly beside her as she breathed in the peace the way an asthmatic breathes in oxygen. He hadn’t uttered a word. It seemed that he was waiting, compassion-ately biding his time until she gave him the go-ahead. Erin turned to him and looked up into eyes more sensitive than she wanted them to be, softer than she would have imagined.

“I love the water,” he said, his gentle tone lightening the mood, comforting her. “I lived about a mile from the beach when I was growing up. I had a little sailboat, and I must have spent hours a day fighting the wind and the waves. All my life I’ve planned to go back, find a little seaside house with big windows that have an Atlantic view. Just never have.”

Erin looked out over the water. A speedboat arched past them, causing the water in its wake to thrash against the shore. “I hardly ever come here. I’m always so busy. But I should come more. It’s peaceful.”

“Is that why you started flying, Erin? For peace?”

Her eyes gravitated toward the sky, and a tentative stillness seeped into their golden depths. “Maybe. The first time I went up it was in a little single engine plane that a boy I was dating had rented. He had just gotten his license, and I had to sneak out to the airport because my mother absolutely forbade me to fly with him.” Erin laughed softly and glanced down at the sand. “When I saw the clouds below me and the ant-sized people and the cars inching along, I remember thinking that that was where I wanted to be. Up above it all, soaring free and fast, like a seagull.”

Addison’s smile was one of genuine pleasure. “How did you talk your mother into letting you take lessons?”

“I didn’t tell her,” she said, a mischievous grin pulling at the corners of her mouth. “My father paid for them and swore me to secrecy. For years, she thought aviation was a science elective in college and that everyone who graduates from LSU has to learn how to fly. She finally figured out that I wasn’t going after a master’s in art when I went to Emery Riddle to train to be a commercial pilot.”

Her lilting laughter joined his on the wind, then quickly died. Erin dropped her gaze, reminding herself why they had come here…reminding herself that it was no time to drop her defenses. “I’m glad she wasn’t alive to hear about the crash. Thinking I was on it would have killed her.” Silence lay between them, heavy, dark. “Go ahead,” she said with false bravado. “Ask me your questions. What do you want to know?”

Addison looked at her for a moment, as if assessing the resolution in her face, or measuring the strength in her features. He didn’t try to change her mood, she realized, and that endeared him somewhat to her. “Let’s sit down,” he suggested.

Obediently, Erin dropped onto the grass with no regard for her clothes. He lowered himself next to her, dropped his clipboard on the grass, and set his wrists on his bent knees. “Erin, when was the last time you saw Mick before the crash?”

The question demanded a direct memory, one she had tried to avoid for two weeks. She forced herself to answer. “The day before, I guess. I took his son to a wrestling match.”

“A
what?
”

His amused tone made her smile again. “A wrestling match. Hulk Hogan, The Undertaker, the works. What’s so funny about that?”

Addison chuckled again. “I’m sorry. I just find it hard to imagine you at a wrestling match. Did you like it?”

“Of course I liked it,” she said. “It’s very entertaining. I’d elaborate, but I don’t really think we came here to talk about wrestling.”

“No.” Addison seemed to regroup his thoughts, and his smile faded. “Okay, so you took his son to this match. Did he come, too?”

“No. He and Maureen stayed home. It was their anniversary. Twenty-seven years.” Erin looked out over the water, remembering the candlelit table and the polished silver and the Cornish game hen Maureen had roasted for the occasion.

“What about when you brought him back? Did you stay?”

“Only a few minutes.”

“You said it was his anniversary. Had he consumed any alcohol that night?” Addison asked, picking up his clipboard and making a notation.

“That was at least twenty hours before the flight.”

Addison began writing furiously, which vexed her further. “Did he or did he not drink that night?”

“Maybe a glass of champagne,” she admitted defensively.

“One glass?”

That smothering feeling closed over her again, and Erin felt her defenses erecting around her. “I don’t know how many glasses. I told you I was only there about ten minutes. He wasn’t normally a drinker…”

Addison propped his wrist on a knee and regarded Erin intently. “Erin, this is very important. Do you think he had had any to drink before you got there? Would he be inclined to drink after you left?”

“I said Mick was not a drinker!” she snapped. “He did not get drunk that night, and if he drank a toast with his wife, it couldn’t possibly have had any bearing on his performance the following night.”

Addison was too busy making notes to argue with her. “His anniversary,” he mumbled absently. “Then he and his wife were probably up pretty late that night.”

“That is none of your business,” she blurted out, astonished. “What difference does that make to your investigation?”

“How much alcohol he consumed and how much sleep he got has a bearing on his fatigue the night of the crash. It’s policy to ask those questions.”

“Then your ‘policy’ stinks. That flight didn’t leave until 7:00 P.M. He could have slept late or taken a nap.”

“Did he?”

“How would I know?” she shouted, rising to her feet. “Didn’t you ask his wife?”

Addison’s silence spoke volumes; his pencil stilled. “I haven’t spoken to her yet. I was hoping to put that off until last.”

Erin studied the man still sitting in the grass, the hard breeze scampering through his black hair. Was it sensitivity that had kept him from Mick’s family, or guilt? Did he want to avoid drilling them or avoid having them drill him? Was it compassion or cowardice? “Is that ‘policy,’ too?” she asked.

“What? Interviewing the family, or putting it off?”

“Either.”

“Unfortunately, it is policy to interview the family,” he admitted. “One that I’m not fond of. I always put it off until I have enough facts so that I don’t have to drill them on everything.” He looked down at his notes again, dismissing the subject.

“Did you speak to him at all the day of the crash?”

Still standing, Erin closed her eyes. The sound of the wind across the water calmed her anger a degree, and she tried to remember, despite a protectiveness that urged her not to. “Yes. He called me that morning about our schedule. He wanted to trip-trade one of our flights the next week— you know, drop one of our flights and replace it for another at a different time—and he wanted to make sure it was okay with me. You see, we always buddy-bid for our flights. That way we could always fly together instead of getting split up. Some pilots fly with a different person each month, but we always stayed together.” That wasn’t the question, she knew, and yet voicing those tame memories aloud seemed to make the more painful ones less forbidding.

“What time was the call?” Addison asked.

“I don’t know. Late morning. Around eleven maybe.”

He paused as he wrote, assembling the facts on a yellow sheet of paper. Finally, he studied her again. “Tell me about your accident,” he said.

Erin shrugged, but a look of pain—or guilt—returned to her eyes. She dropped to her knees, then sat back on her heels. She tore out a blade of grass and folded it into tiny sections. “It was nothing, really. A fender bender on the way to the airport. It was raining that night, and I slammed on the brakes, and my car slid. I hit my head, so they wouldn’t let me fly.”

“Concussion?”

“Just a slight one.” Erin rubbed her head, the spot where the bruise had stopped being tender over a week ago. “I tried to talk them out of grounding me, but Frank insisted. He replaced me.” She pulled a deep breath and looked him directly in the eye. “You know, I was supposed to fly that night. We alternated, Mick and I. I would fly one leg of the trip, he’d fly the next. If I’d been there, I would have been flying instead of him.”

The concerned frown between his brows bespoke genuine concern. “You were lucky to have had that accident,” he said.

Erin regarded him blankly, as though the word
lucky
was beyond comprehension. Had it been luck? Not for a moment since Mick’s death had she felt a sense of relief that it hadn’t been her. Instead, she felt as if she’d left something unfinished. There was a hole someplace where she should have been, and it didn’t feel right not filling it.

“You flew with Hammon for five years,” Addison said, as she looked out over the water with vacant eyes. “In that time, did you ever see his performance under stress? Any emergency situations or problems in the cockpit?”

A hard, protective glaze drained all emotion from her expression. “You have his records. Read them.”

“Everything in his career won’t appear on those records. I’m looking for other things. Things that may not have been reported. Things that maybe only you would know about.”

Erin shook her head balefully, and her barely audible laugh held more anger than mirth. “If you’re expecting me to provide you with smutty details about Mick’s past mistakes, then you’ve got a big surprise ahead of you.”

“I don’t want smutty details. I want facts. If you don’t answer me, you’ll have to answer—”

“I know, I know. A board of your superiors. But you know as well as I do that I’m not going to help anyone—no matter how powerful—nail my friend. If you or your superiors want to know about Mick’s past performance, then read his records.”

“Why are you so defensive about him?”

She looked up at him, her eyes alive again. “Because I know his family. I knew him. And I know how easy it would be for you to take some past foul-up in-flight and his reaction to it, and turn the information into so-called indisputable evidence to support whatever you want it to.”

Addison stared at her for a moment, as if amazed at her suspicious reasoning. Erin felt his eyes probing deeply into her, seeing things she wanted buried. “Then there
were
incidents?” he asked.

“You’re a smart man, Mr. Lowe. You must know that occasionally things go wrong. Weather, instrument failures, communication problems, illnesses on board. Mick handled those things with as much finesse as you could ever imagine. And you won’t get more than that from me.”

“Erin, I’m not trying to ‘nail’ him. I’m simply trying to determine if there’s anything to indicate that he could have functioned in a real emergency. Your information could have a positive effect on the investigation. Why do you assume I’m looking for something negative?”

“It will have whatever effect you want it to,” she said, clipping each word. “The man was an ex-fighter pilot in the Air Force. He flew in Vietnam. He was a colonel when he retired from the service. That fact alone should prove that he could function under stress.”

Addison set his clipboard down and rubbed his forehead. “All right. Here’s an easy one. Tell me about Mick’s temperament. His personality. Will you answer that?”

A soft smile crept across her lips. “Yes, I’ll answer that. He was funny. Always laughing, cracking corny jokes. He said he liked flying with me because I always appreciated the punch line.”

Addison smiled weakly.

Erin stared into the distance. “Mick was the kind of person that you could turn to, you know? With a secret or a dream or just an observation. He never made fun of me. And he loved to fly. More than just about anything.” She looked at Addison, a thought occurring to her for the first time. “Are you a pilot, Mr. Lowe?”

“Yes,” he said. “I flew for an airline for six years before I came to work for the NTSB ten years ago.”

“Then you know what I mean.”

There was awe in the tone of her voice, and he heard the desire just behind the fear. “I know that feeling,” he said. “But I wonder if you still do.”

“Of course I do.” She tore out another blade of grass, vaguely aware that he watched her tear it into pieces.

He lowered his voice cautiously. “Then what was that all about last night in Redlo’s office? You tried to resign. Said you never wanted to fly again.”

Erin felt her lungs constricting again, but common sense told her not to address the subject with total frankness. Addison might not be as understanding as Frank was. And what if Frank was right and she could work through her fear…overcome it somehow? As much as she wanted to escape flying again, she didn’t want to throw away the option. “I was upset,” she said. “I’m having a little trouble getting my confidence back. I keep thinking of the crash.” She dropped the blades of grass and dusted off her hands. “It’s the uncertainty that’s driving me crazy. The not knowing what went wrong. If I just knew. If I could figure it out, I feel like I could get a grip on it.”

Addison looked down at her hands. She was shaking. “Are you going to get help?” His question was asked so quietly that she almost didn’t hear over the sound of the water.