Cape Disappointment (20 page)

“Russian sniper rifle. It had been modified but was in perfect working order and had a noise suppressor. He had a couple of boxes of ammunition with Russian writing on them. I took a picture of it and had somebody translate when I got home. It said the ammunition was for sniper use only and it wasn't supposed to leave the Soviet bloc under any circumstances.”

“You ask him about the rifle?”

“You don't admit you've been snooping through my brother's closet.”

“Are you saying your brother was some sort of government hit man?”

“I don't know what he was.”

“What else do you know about South America?”

“He was drunk when he told me this as well, and so was I, so I don't remember as well as I might. He said there were gangs of street kids in Rio de Janeiro. Death squads were taking them out. These death squads were mostly made up of police. In the middle of the night they'd round up a group of kids, drive them somewhere, shoot them, and leave them for the buzzards. Other times they'd just shoot them in the makeshift shelters where they slept. Drive by in a Suburban and riddle their shacks with gunfire. Homeless kids posed quite a problem down there. Stealing. Begging. Prostituting. The goon squad retaliations began after a German tourist was apparently killed by a gang of kids. The cops wore masks, but there was no doubt among the local populace that they were cops. Same guns as the cops. Same boots.

They even used some of the same commands. But this is the worst part: They weren't observers, this CIA— or whatever— group Bert was sent down there with. I don't know how or why, but they were involved in the killings. And not just in Brazil.”

“Killing kids? Are you kidding me?”

“I ever tell you he once had a dog chain around his neck and was actually swinging from a doorway when a neighbor walked by a window and pulled him down? It was about that time he burned his passport and quit the feds. Except they set him up for the drug thing, and before he knew it, he was doing time.”

“The CIA set him up?”

“So he said. I'm not sure why. I'm sure it's complicated.”

“He working for the CIA now?”

“I don't think so.”

“Where's he staying?”

“With our grandmother on some undeveloped property out past Kent. It's acreage full of blackberries with a couple of trailers on it. Grandma lives in one of the trailers. Out in the back near the old barns, Bert has his own broken-down trailer. Grandma has a restraining order against him to stay off the property, but he still hangs there. She just ignores him unless he pisses her off, and then she calls the cops. That's how that SWAT team incident started.”

“How many times has he been in prison?”

“Just the once. But he's been in and out of the county jail more times than he was in and out of Aunt Arianna. Of course, you know all about his recent history. Kathy was defending him on most of it.”

Snake went back to the living room and turned the movie back on while I returned to the news clippings. I was back in tune with my instincts, or so I thought. I laid out the crash clippings and perused them in chronological sequence. The more I read, the more unanswered questions I had.

It wasn't until I began looking through the stack of unread newspapers I'd been collecting myself that I began to see an emerging pattern, though it didn't concern the crash, just the way the public relations for the investigation was being conducted. Glancing back through the papers, it seemed as if a new theory was proposed each day. One anomaly that struck me was that Timothy Hoagland, chief investigator for
the NTSB, stated early on that finding the cockpit voice recorder was their number one priority. He made the statement in at least three separate interviews over the first two days, but then an unnamed spokesperson for the NTSB announced that they were not looking for the cockpit voice recorder because there hadn't been one on the plane. Hoagland did not retract his previous statements. The head investigator should have known whether the plane had a cockpit voice recorder.

On the third day of the investigation, Hoagland announced, “We're looking into all possibilities. Pilot error, icing problems, mechanical failure, freak weather abnormalities, electrical irregularities, and the possibility that another aircraft collided with the Beechcraft King Air.”
Was
he looking at all the possibilities? Conspicuously missing from his list were several that had been on my mind. He hadn't mentioned sabotage. Nor had he mentioned terrorism, as alleged by at least one of the elderly witnesses in an interview with Portland television station KGW. I happened to believe she was mistaken, because I hadn't seen the missile trail she claimed she saw, nor had anybody else. So while they asserted they were looking into all possibilities, they had eliminated at least two at the outset. It was possible a mechanic had done something to the plane prior to takeoff. It was possible one of the passengers had gone berserk and jumped into the cockpit with a box cutter or a nail file or even a bottle of water, any of the contraband the homeland security people were worried about at airports. There were a lot of pos sibilities not being addressed, at least not publicly, but when I mentioned as much to Snake, he said, “They don't want to start a panic.”

“Like we're all going to run into the streets and get killed in traffic?” Snake ignored my sarcasm. He'd long contended the government was withholding information about UFOs to stave off a panic. In fact a good portion of his pet theories revolved around the idea of staving off public panic.

I didn't know whether Bert's warning a week prior to the crash was the source of my paranoia or if I was just bent on uncovering some sort of crime. I knew this: I needed somebody besides myself to blame for Kathy's death. All week I'd been thinking I should have been working on the Sheffield campaign and not Maddox's, thinking (quite illogi-cally) that had I been by Kathy's side for all those weeks I would have
seen the crash coming. I should have insisted Kathy keep her promise to me and remain at the ocean instead of rejoining Sheffield. I should have heeded Bert Slezak's warning. I should have asked more questions the day he stopped at my car. I cursed myself for things left undone, words left unspoken.

Scrutinizing eight days' worth of the
Post-Intelligencer
and
The Seattle Times,
I couldn't help but uncover a pattern: First, there would be a specific theory posited in print, usually offered by someone from the FAA, FBI, or the NTSB investigating committee, touted as the direction the investigation was now headed. Always with a big headline; always on the front page. Then a couple of days later, buried in a tiny article in the depths of the paper, that theory would be discounted. After a barrage of loud theories and nearly mute retractions the air was filled with various possibilities for why the plane had gone down. It was almost as if somebody was purposely muddying the waters.

The first such accusation and subsequent retraction was that the pilot might have been inebriated or hungover. This was attributed to “an unnamed NTSB investigator” who credited an anonymous tipster from Portland.
Unnamed
and
anonymous
came up a lot. I noticed they talked about
the
pilot, singular, as if there was only one. There had been two. It occurred to me that it was easier to believe the tragedy had been precipitated by pilot error if you were laboring under the notion there had been only one pilot. Two pilots made the case for pilot error or drunkenness less likely. The next day Hoagland said, “We're closing in on the possibility that it was a weather disturbance.” Two days later at the back of the second section next to the obituaries and in front of the comics,
The Seattle Times
printed this: “Early reports saying the pilots of the King Air Beechcraft carrying Senator Sheffield and party were drinking the night before the flight have now been discredited. Today witnesses who spent the evening with the pilots in Portland denied either pilot drank any alcohol the evening prior to the flight.”

Big accusation; small retraction. It was a staple of political manipulation and had been for years. The Maddox campaign had done it several times this fall. The accusation tends to stick in the collective mind. The retraction gets overlooked.

Also not mentioned in most of the articles was the information that the Sheffield plane had two separate deicing systems. Now, eight days
after the crash, they'd recovered most of the plane, and yet another early theory— that one or both of the engines had cut out— was being discarded. The damage that both props sustained on impact indicated they'd both been turning. One investigator said there was no evidence of a midair collision, yet the next day Timothy Hoagland proposed it as a possibility. One day he said they had pretty much ruled out pilot error. The next day they were looking into it again. It seemed almost as if the investigators wanted people thinking it was a near miracle the plane had been in the air in the first place.

“Snake?”

“Yeah.” The sound on the movie went down.

“Where was your brother the day of the crash?”

“Maryland, I think. Looking for a job. And seeing old friends.”

“The day of the crash he called Kathy. He wanted to meet her in Seattle. I don't think he was in Maryland. Not then, not now. He got arrested at the Cape. When was your last contact with him?”

“I talked to him on the phone.”

“When he asked you to come and check on me?”

“Right.”

“Cellphone?”

“Yeah.”

“And you're supposed to report back about me?”

“He wanted me to call him sometime tonight.”

“Why don't you call him now?” Snake froze the movie, pushed a couple of buttons on his cellphone, put it to his ear, and waited.

“He's not answering.”

“He called us when we were on the way to the landing strip.”

“He likes to make phone calls, don't he?” The possibility that Bert had something to do with the crash had been nagging me all week. How else would he have known in advance?

I drank two tall glasses of water at the sink and went into the bathroom, where I showered, toweled off, pulled on a pair of jeans, my Montrail trail running shoes, a T-shirt, and a fleece jacket. I picked up a camera, a pair of binoculars, and my car keys.

“Let's go,” I said.

“Where to?”

“I need to ask some questions.”

“You want a babysitter?”

“More like a witness.”

“I'm watching a movie here.”

“With your boots on Kathy's coffee table. Besides, the movie's on disc. You can start where you left off. One of the joys of the modern age. None of us ever have to miss anything trivial.”

Snake grew even more disgruntled when I asked him to move his vehicle so I could drive the Taurus. He holstered his two largest revolvers, concealed a third semiautomatic handgun in his coat, and followed me out the back door. In all the years I'd known and worked with him, I had only once seen him pull one of those weapons, and it had been to shoot out a stoplight that was getting on his nerves.

On N.E. Forty-fifth I pulled into a gas station. As I pumped gas under the fluorescent lights of the service station, I felt as if I were Rip van Winkle waking from a twenty-year snooze, looking around at anything and everything as if encountering it for the first time. A man and a woman walked down the sidewalk, and just seeing the normalcy of their lives, she carrying a packsack full of books, he a single bicycle wheel with a bent rim, made me realize how my cocoon of grief had insulated me from the world. A man and a woman in a minivan with three small children in car seats pulled up next to the pumps. One child's blue eyes twinkled with delight when I waved. He was almost as cute as the children Kathy would have borne.

“Who are you going to see?” Snake asked when I got back into the car. He'd been dozing, straw cowboy hat tilted rakishly over his face.

“I want to find out what caused the crash.”

“You got the NTSB on it. You got the FBI out there. You got—”

“You trust the FBI?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Between your brother's prognostication and the news stories, I'm beginning to get suspicious.”

“What's a prognostication?”

“A really big word.”

“Suspicious of what?”

“That maybe the NTSB has its own agenda, and maybe it doesn't include telling us what really brought that plane down.”

“I wouldn't read too much into newspaper articles. You and I both
know they never get all the facts straight. What you're doing here is hoping there's some nefarious conspiracy under way and that you're the man to uncover it.”

“A guy who knows the word
nefarious
should know
prognostication.”

“You're hoping to be the hero. Thomas, don't go down the conspiracy rabbit hole. People go down, and they never come back up. I'm serious. That kind of thinking is what drove my brother nuts. Don't get your dander up. I'm just telling you what I think.”

“You want me to drop you off back at the house?”

“I'm going with you. In your frame of mind, you're going to need some backup.”

“Stay awake, then.”

“Just resting my eyes.”