Cape Disappointment (23 page)

THE ROOM WAS A COMMERCIAL HANGAR,
complete with high ceilings, workbenches, and oil stains on the concrete floor. Up front was a microphone and a meeting table where eight or ten suits were pushing their chairs out from the table. Two of them were preparing to speak to the journalists. Oversized electric heaters were mounted on brackets hung from the ceiling, each throwing off a dry heat that several damp reporters made a point to stand near. There were fifty or sixty folding chairs, half already filled by reporters, cameramen, and others. Just as the news conference started, Snake left his seat and squeezed into a chair beside Ruth Ponzi.

Timothy Hoagland, the man heading the NTSB investigation, was a tall, ponderous-looking man whose face was mostly forehead, his thinning, light brown hair cropped so close he may as well have been bald. He was overweight but carried it in a way guaranteed to have a lot of people telling him he wore it well. The line of his chin went straight down into his collar as if he'd been stuffed into the shirt and tie. He wore stylish black-rimmed glasses and an expensive dark suit. His arms floated out to the sides as if they were too muscular to remain flat against his torso. For some minutes he talked about the plane, about how many pieces they'd brought up— more than a hundred and twenty—about the four remaining bodies they had yet to recover— one
of them was Kathy's—about finding the second pilot's corpse yesterday, and about the reduced odds of recovering more.

“Accident investigations are a painstaking process,” Hoagland concluded. “Every item has to be sifted and examined individually and put together with the other pieces. It's the largest jigsaw puzzle you'll ever see. I know people are anxious for a speedy resolution here, but with an airplane crash, especially one that goes down over a body of water, things don't happen quickly. I'm asking you to be patient.”

As he spoke, I found it hard to think of anything but the fact that Kathy's body was still in the ocean, possibly being gnawed on by crabs or sharks. At the memorial service we'd had for her two days ago there had been no coffin. It was hard for me not to think about what might be happening to her body. Was she trapped under wreckage eight hundred feet down? Or, having washed out to sea, was she headed for Asia? Had she been cast up on some local beach waiting to be found by clam diggers? When I was finally able to focus on the events around me, I heard Hoagland say, “Finally, in one of those ironies that sometimes happens when you're delving into an accident scene, we were told just this morning that the Maddox people had recently planned to use the same plane the Sheffield party flew, but canceled.”

“Are you saying it might have been Maddox and his people who went down instead of Sheffield?” asked Ruth Ponzi, jumping to her feet while continuing to scrawl frantically on her notepad. “That it was a matter of happenstance we lost one candidate instead of the other?”

“You could look at it that way,” said Hoagland.

Hoagland was a confident speaker, at ease with his position and the public trust, much more at ease than I would have been in front of a group. He glanced at a subordinate who had been biding his time during his spiel and said, “I believe that's all I have in terms of prepared remarks. If you have questions …”

A flurry of hands shot up, and several people in the front blurted questions without raising their hands. A television reporter asked, “Did the Maddox people cancel their lease of the plane because they received a warning about the plane or the pilot?”

“No one received any kind of warning that I know of,” Hoagland said.

“Will the investigation be completed before the election, and if so, will you issue your conclusions before the election?”

“We can't be certain when the investigation or the report will be finished. If we've concluded our work and come to a satisfactory determination by the election, I can assure you we will not hold back our report. But we're not running this on a timetable.”

At the initiation of the Q and A, a young man in jeans and a wrinkled Windbreaker had walked toward the front of the room, waiting for his turn. After several more routine questions and replies, the young man in the aisle found his opening and spoke loudly. “My name is Joey Hilditch.” It took a few seconds, but the background buzz died down until we could all hear the fan, in the heater, high on the wall. The young man was tall, thin, and in need of a haircut. “I'm wondering when you're going to clear my father's name.”

“Pardon?” It was the first time I'd seen anything close to discomfort on Hoagland's face.

“The papers have made references to the pilots being drunk the night before the flight. They get their information from you. The letters section of both local papers are full of comments wondering why the pilots were even allowed to fly. It's like you're deliberately trying to discredit my father and Mr. Mitz.” He stopped to gather his resources, thinking through what he had planned to say. “If you've taken back any of those statements about the pilots drinking the night before the flight, I haven't seen it in any of the local papers. I'm asking you to present evidence my father was drinking, otherwise stop implying it. My father was an awesome pilot. So was Mr. Mitz. In twenty years my father never even had a close call.”

“I beg your pardon,” Hoagland said. “It remains to be seen exactly how and why the plane went down. If you'd been listening, you would have heard me say our investigation would involve a long and painstaking process.”

“Meanwhile you're spreading rumors about my father and Freddy Mitz. Look at your own quotes from the news two days ago.”

Hoagland looked around and then made one of those astonishing and provocative statements officials sometimes deliver, which are then overlooked by his audience. “I thought nobody was supposed to be here without press credentials.”

“Just answer the question,” I said, rising to my feet. “What purpose does it serve to malign the pilots when there is no evidence?
The Ore-gonian
has done a series of personal interviews with the people who were with Mitz and Hilditch the night before, and they all swear the pilots had not been drinking. Why hasn't this information been circulated to the major media?”

Hoagland spent almost half a minute shuffling through some notes he took out of a briefcase, then conferred with an aide. When he finally replied, he looked at just about everyone in the room except me and Joey Hilditch. “As far as we know at this time, neither of the men in the cockpit had been drinking prior to the accident.”

“What do the toxicology reports say?” I asked.

“I'm not …” Hoagland looked around for help. “I don't have that information at my fingertips, and if I did I'm not sure I would be at liberty to disclose it. Now, for the rest of today we'll be assembling plane parts, talking with the technical team, and conducting background interviews. There is still an ongoing retrieval process out at the Cape. Parts will be trucked here from the Cape as they are found. That is all.”

As people began to disperse, I edged through the crowd and caught Joey Hilditch's eye as he was being braced by a couple of print reporters, one from
The Stranger,
an alternative weekly newspaper in Seattle that catered to hip young adults and the gay crowd. I waited, watching the crowd getting shooed out of the garage by NTSB personnel and employees of Northwest Apple. It seemed strange that the NTSB was conducting a good part of their investigation on the Apple premises. It smacked of something, though I couldn't put my finger on what.

When Joey Hilditch was finally alone, I said, “I'm sorry about your father. I was at the landing strip right before they took off.”

“Did you see him?” Joey seemed younger and more disingenuous than he had from a distance.

“Your father was already in the plane. I spoke to the other pilot, Mitz. He seemed squared away.”

“They both were. That's why all this makes me so angry.”

A man in a brown Northwest Apple shirt came over and said, “Joey?” They shook hands while I stood aside. “Jase Larson,” he said, introducing himself. “I'm sorry about your father. It's got us all pretty broken up
around here. Your father and Freddy were among our mainstays. And your father was such a gentle guy. We're all going to miss him.”

“Thanks,” said Joey.

“We got your email. I'll try to hit your points one by one.” Larson looked at me and, when I didn't say anything, turned back to Hilditch. “Would you like to go somewhere or … ?”

“Here's fine.” Despite the NTSB's attempts to clear the building, clusters of people were still standing around, including Hoagland, who was conferring with two of his co-workers in coveralls.

“The plane had major servicing right before the flight to the East Coast. They flew just over seven thousand miles without incident.”

“Is it possible the plane was tampered with?” Joey asked.

“Your father and Freddy did a thorough preflight check.”

“What if a skilled mechanic had done something?” I asked.

Joey said, “This is …”

“Thomas Black,” I said.

“Sure. Sure,” said Jase. “A competent mechanic? I suppose that could have happened. But if it did, these people will find it.”

“The way I understand it,” I said, “they flew into Portland the night before without any problems. Is it possible something happened in Portland and it didn't take effect until they had a full load and were out over the water?”

“The FBI has been all over that airport, and they say no,” said Hoagland, approaching us.

“Is anybody entertaining the possibility a missile was fired from the ground or from a boat?”

“If that was the case, we'd have found evidence of it in the wreckage by now,” Hoagland said.

As we talked, we were joined by Ruth Ponzi, Snake, and two other NTSB officials in coveralls, or at least I assumed they were NTSB. Led by Jase Larson, the Apple employee, the eight of us slowly gravitated to a side door and filed outside into a light drizzle. A flatbed truck with its load carefully concealed under a tarpaulin sat on the tarmac, the driver presumably waiting for the hangar to empty and the big doors to be raised. I glimpsed a piece of an airplane under the tarp.

No sooner were we clear of the building than Hoagland looked at Snake and said, “Don't I know you, sir?”

“My brother. I have a twin brother.”

“Ah, yes.”

“We read you guys arrested him,” I said.

“Slezak?”

“That's him.”

“We held him and questioned him for interfering with our investigation. He was saying some pretty crazy things. I hope you're not here to cause trouble, too.” Hoagland looked Snake up and down. “Just why are you here? You with the press?”

“No,” Snake answered and pointed to me. “I'm with him.”

Hoagland turned my way. “I don't believe I've had the pleasure.”

“Thomas Black. I work for James Maddox.” It was clear from the look he gave one of his subordinates they'd heard my name before. Last night Kalpesh had offered to pass my name ahead, but I'd declined the gesture. Apparently, he'd gone ahead anyway, paving my way or warning them, one or the other. Or maybe they just recognized my name because it was on their witness list. “What's the likelihood of finding the rest of the bodies?”

“I'm told by the experts we've consulted that if we don't find the rest in the next day or two, it's not likely we'll find them at all.”

“You been doing this long?” I asked.

“My résumé is public record. As far as my team goes, I've got some of the same people who worked the crash down in Florida last year with the ballplayers. They did tremendous work on that.”

Ponzi spoke up. “Is there any possibility one of the pilots was trying to commit suicide?”

“Of course there isn't!” said Joey Hilditch.

“I heard one of the national reporters talking about it over coffee this morning,” Ponzi said, “and I was thinking we should quell rumors before they get started. I'm trying to help you out here, kid. I'm on your side.”

“We'll know more when we begin reassembling the plane,” Hoagland said. “As far as we can tell, the plane was flying normally and didn't perform any heroic avoidance maneuvers. A handful of senior citizens saw it from the Cape Disappointment lighthouse, but they haven't been much help. There were no radio communications during the crash and certainly no warning that they were in trouble. No voice cockpit recorders. They simply dropped off the radar.”

Hoagland didn't ask me any questions about what I saw that day, so apparently he wasn't aware that I'd witnessed the crash. In spite of that, I couldn't help thinking Hoagland had a handle on the investigation and knew what he was doing. He looked and spoke with the confidence of a man who was skilled at what he did. He wasn't the most personable guy in the world, but it was clear he wanted you to like him and that when it came to investigations, he was all business.

I handed him the disc with the photographs on it. “I took a couple of photos while the plane was going down. My name and phone number are on the disc.”

“You saw the plane go down?”

“I'm on your list.”

“Thank you. We'll look into it, and we'll be in touch with you,” he said, handling the disc as if it were of little consequence. He would feel differently once he saw the photos.