Coffee, Tea, or Murder? (25 page)

Gina Molnari called the flight deck, and Jed informed her of the situation. “Keep everybody calm back there,” he instructed.

“Shall do, Captain,” she responded crisply.

The runway was clearly visible, and we could see emergency vehicles racing down the runway, creating a kaleidoscopic, flashing light show.

“All set?” Jed asked us.

“Yes, sir,” George said.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Then let’s do it!”

Jed drained off altitude and airspeed as we approached the runway’s threshold. Soon, we were over it, and the moment of truth had arrived. Would the gear hold up? Or would we end up on the 767’s belly, sliding crazily down the runway until inertia brought us to a natural stop, hopefully without serious injury to the plane and passengers? That many of the emergency vehicles standing at the ready were fire engines reminded everyone that fire was the most serious of possible outcomes.

The wheels touched, came back up off the runway, touched again, and this time stayed down, solid and sure. The faint sound of applause from the passenger cabin drifted through the flight deck door.

I breathed a deep, prolonged sigh of relief. I looked back at George, who gave me a warm smile and a sharp nod of his head. “Well done, Captain,” he said as Jed taxied the jet to its assigned spot on the airport. Because we’d landed in emergency status, we weren’t allowed to park at the terminal. Instead, we were directed to a relatively secluded area and were told that a set of mobile stairs would be brought for deplaning. Buses would transport everyone to the terminal.

Once inside, we were herded into a large room and instructed by uniformed officers that we’d have to stay there until further notice. We weren’t the usual group of arriving passengers. Ours was not a scheduled flight; customs clearances had to be arranged outside normal channels. Also, our captain had been shot by the first officer and required swift medical attention. An ambulance had whisked him off to an area hospital, and Seth reported that he was confident Captain Caine would survive. His assailant, First Officer Carl Scherer, was taken to a holding cell at the airport and would remain there until the complex questions of jurisdiction were sorted out.

“Quite a ride,” George said to me when he returned from a meeting with local and state law enforcement authorities.

“Thank goodness Jed was along. What would we have done without him?”

“I have the feeling you could have landed us safely, Jessica.”

I laughed. “Your faith is grossly misplaced, George. But thanks for the vote of confidence.”

I thought of those motion pictures in which an untrained pilot is forced to fly a commercial jetliner after a catastrophe has felled the regular pilots. Usually, those screen heroines were flight attendants. The notion that I might have been forced to sit in the 767’s left-hand seat and get us safely on the ground in Boston was ludicrous. But I would have tried if called upon. I shuddered at the thought.

“Well, George,” I said, “you got your man.”

“Through no effort on my part.”

I looked out over the assembled passengers and spotted the three flight attendants, Gina, Betsy, and John, standing apart from the rest.

“I wonder—”

George turned. “Wonder what, Jessica?”

“I wonder whether the plane had a cockpit voice recorder.”

“Ask our pilot over there,” George said, pointing to Jed Richardson, who was surrounded by passengers thanking him for having saved us.

I went to Jed and waited for a break in the congratulations being heaped upon him. “Jed,” I said, “I assume the plane has a cockpit voice recorder.”

“Sure it does,” he said. “Federal regulations. One of two black boxes on every flight.”

“Was it turned on?”

“You bet it was, from the minute the engines were started at Stansted. It can’t be turned off by the crew. That would defeat the whole purpose of it.”

“When can we hear it?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Carl Scherer and his wife spent considerable time together alone on the flight deck. I’d like to know what they talked about.”

“I doubt if the authorities would release the tape to you, Jess. Cockpit conversations are confidential unless they’re used in an accident investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.”

“Even in a murder investigation?”

“Hmmm. Let me ask the right people.”

George returned from his latest meeting as Jed left in search of an aviation authority.

“We’re still squabbling over what to do with Mr. Scherer,” George said. “The FBI was called in, so we have your city and airport police, the FBI, and of course, Scotland Yard represented by yours truly.”

I told him what I’d asked Jed to do regarding the cockpit voice recorder.

“Interesting idea, Jessica. That tape will undoubtedly prove useful to the prosecution during Scherer’s trial.”

“Or the defense,” I said.

“How so?”

“I’m not sure, George. I just know I’d like to hear what they said to each other.”

A few minutes later, Jed came back. “They’ll do it, Jess,” he said, “provided the request comes from an official law enforcement source.” He smiled. “I asked them if Scotland Yard qualifies. They said they thought so. Come with me, Inspector. They want to talk to you. In the meantime, they’re removing the black boxes from the aircraft. NTSB has a lab unit here at Logan. They can run the tape for us in there.”

By this time, the rest of the passengers were on edge, and that’s being kind. Some had become downright surly at being detained, and no matter how many times officers assigned to keep us in a group explained the necessity of it, tempers weren’t salved. Churlson Vicks and Sal Casale were especially vocal. “We own this bloody airline,” Vicks commanded in a loud voice. “I demand that we be allowed to go.”

Christine Silverton made similar protestations but in a more subdued manner. Her stepson, Jason, sat brooding on a folding chair in a corner of the room. A few members of the press threatened an exposé if they weren’t allowed to leave immediately. The look on the officers’ faces said plainly that they’d heard it all before and didn’t care one iota about exposes.

It took a half hour for the tape from the flight deck to be removed from the black box, which was actually red, and to have it ready to roll on NTSB playback equipment. I joined George and a contingent of other law enforcement officers in the small room, and we took chairs arranged in a semicircle around the table on which the playback unit sat.

“Ready?” a technician asked.

“Let her roll,” an FBI agent said.

“I’ve fast-forwarded to the section you said you were interested in,” said the tech. “It begins with, ‘Betsy, I need you.’ ”

“Good.”

The speakers erupted with sound, and the technician adjusted the volume to a more reasonable level.
“Betsy, I need you,”
was heard, along with muffled voices recorded from a distance, obviously belonging to us as we stood outside the cockpit and pleaded with Scherer to put down his weapon.

The sound of the flight deck door closing was unmistakable.

“Carl, what are you doing?”
It was Betsy’s voice.

“I’m going to take us down,”
Carl said.

“Are you crazy?”
she said, panic in her voice.
“Why did you shoot Bill?”

“About Wayne. He accused me of taking his knife from his case and—”
His next words were garbled.

“Carl, we can get through this. Bill’s not dead. Tell everybody it was a mistake, an accident; they’ll let you fly the plane to Boston. After that, we can—”
We couldn’t make out the rest of what she said.

She was heard crying.

“Please don’t kill us all,”
she pleaded.

A long period transpired during which no words were spoken. There were the sounds of Betsy’s sobbing, and at one point we heard her say,
“I love you.”

Eventually, the tape reached the point when Scherer agreed to allow me to come to the flight deck, and I replaced Betsy.

“You can turn it off now,” I said. “We know the rest.”

T
he mood was somber during the trip from Boston to Cabot Cove. The events of the past few days had settled in on all of us, and the realization that we came close to meeting a cold, violent death in the Atlantic Ocean wasn’t far from anyone’s thoughts.

I’d convinced George to spend a few days in Cabot Cove, and he’d received permission from his superiors in London to do just that.

“It was heartbreaking to see that lovely young flight attendant led away in handcuffs,” Susan Shevlin said as our stretch limo brought us closer to home.

“Husband and wife hauled off that way,” Seth added, sadly. “They sold their souls to the devil, who in this case turned out to be Wayne Silverton.”

“They’ll both spend the majority of their lives behind bars,” said Mort, “her for murdering Wayne, him for—all sorts of charges will be leveled at him.”

“Captain Caine was almost another victim,” I said.

“I checked with the hospital just before we left,” Seth said. “He’ll pull through fine.”

“Thanks to you, Doc,” Mort said.

“Thanks to Jessica, we
all
pulled through,” Maureen Metzger said, her voice breaking.

“Let’s not forget Jed,” Jim Shevlin said.

“Amen!”

Jed and Barbara Richardson had flown to Boston in one of his two-seater Cessna 172s, and had left Logan Airport in it for the return trip to Cabot Cove. Jed’s final words to us were, “If we don’t make it, it’s because we’re overweight from all the stuff Barbara bought.”

“How did you know that it was the first officer’s wife who’d stabbed Wayne Silverton,” George asked, “and not him?”

“I didn’t know,” I said. “I just had this gut feeling. If he’d wanted to kill Wayne, he would have used the handgun he carried with him, not stolen Caine’s knife for the task. Besides, it was Betsy who’d been directly on the receiving end of his advances. If it weren’t for the cockpit voice recorder, we’d never have known. I’m sure Mr. Scherer would have maintained that he’d killed Wayne in order to save her.”

“At least there was some honor to the whole sordid mess,” was Seth’s comment.

Talk naturally turned to Christine Silverton. “What do you think will happen with her?” Maureen asked.

“That’s up to the lawyers and the courts,” I said. I managed a laugh. “As we were leaving, I heard Mr. Casale say to Mr. Vicks that he was selling his share of SilverAir to the first sucker that came along. That’s exactly the way he put it. But I think that if whoever ends up owning it can get past this rocky start, it has a good chance of succeeding. All the drama aside, it was a good flight. Wayne was right. People will be willing to pay a little extra for some comfort and decent service.”

“Sounds like you’re getting ready to apply to SilverAir for a job as a stewardess, Jessica,” Seth quipped.

“The last thing I’d want to do,” I said. “I’m too old. And they’re not called stewardesses anymore, not with so many men holding those jobs.”

“There’s no age restriction on being a flight attendant anymore,” Jim Shevlin said.

“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “Besides, I’m not about to be asking, ‘Coffee, tea, or me?’ of anyone.” I turned and looked at George, who’d said little during the long drive. He smiled and patted my knee.

George stayed in one of Seth’s spare rooms, and we all met for breakfast at Mara’s the following morning. Everyone looked rested and moods were considerably lighter than the night before. Other people in the dockside eatery knew of our adventure through television reports from Boston. Naturally, there were many questions, including a flurry of them by two reporters from Cabot Cove’s daily newspaper who’d tracked us down that morning. We decided to elect one spokesman to speak for us all, and that person was Mayor Jim Shevlin, who promised the reporters he’d meet with them later that morning.

“What’s on your agenda today?” Maureen Metzger asked after we’d consumed stacks of Mara’s famed blueberry pancakes, and plenty of her strong coffee.

“I thought I’d go flying for an hour.”

“How could you possibly even think of doing that after what we went through yesterday?” Maureen asked.

“It’s the most relaxing thing I can think of,” I said.

“Mind a passenger?” George asked.

“I’d love one.”

 

“You’re brave to fly with me,” I said to George, who sat in the right-hand seat of the Cessna 172 aircraft I’d rented for an hour from Jed Richardson’s flight service. “I don’t have much experience.”

“Knowing how capable and responsible you are with everything else you tackle, Jessica, I’m sure flying isn’t an exception.”

We took a leisurely flight over the area surrounding the town, and I pointed out landmarks that I’d become familiar with during my flight training with Jed. I ended up flying over Cabot Cove itself so he could see it from the air.

“As lovely as from the ground,” he commented after I announced it was time to return the plane. I made a slow turn in the direction of the airport.

“Well, Jessica, you seem to be supremely relaxed up here in control of your airplane.”