Hard Landing (29 page)

"Let's look at it from a different angle. Ellen knew nothing about the crash-the true cause of the crash- until she got to Boston. Dickie sent her this package, she saw the tape and realized that Lenny had used the money they'd stolen-"

He opened his mouth to object again, but I kept going. "Used the money for something besides the contract payoff. She got angry or scared, and that's why she took the evidence. When she figured out what he'd gotten her into, she panicked."

He stared at me for a long time, and I couldn't tell what he was thinking. But he must have been considering the theory, and he must have decided he could live with it. "She got to the evidence first," he said, picking up the thread, "she threatened to go public, and they killed her for it." He tapped his lips with the tip of his index finger. "Now all we have to do is prove it."

"That's not our job."

He turned away in frustration, then circled back and motioned to the TV screen. "Aren't you even curious about how they did this? That pisshead Dwyer kid took that Beechcraft down and is still out working the ramp loading airplanes. He's working tomorrow. What if, God forbid, something happened and we knew about this and didn't do anything?"

"We can take him out of service. Or assign him to the stock room."

"Boss, I don't want this guy anywhere near one of my airplanes."

Having seen what I'd just seen, it was hard to argue with that sentiment. With both palms flat on the surface, he leaned across the table. "Shanahan," he said, looking me directly in the eye, "I need to finish this tonight."

His tie had disappeared long ago, his shirttail was out, and I noticed for the first time how thin he'd become, too thin for his suit pants. His face was drawn, his forehead lined with every sleepless night he'd spent thinking about why Ellen had died and, more painful than that, what his role in her death might have been. I had a feeling that watching that videotape had taken more out of him than he could have admitted, and it occurred to me that he might have been leaning on that table because he was too worn out to stand up. No matter what I had promised Bill, there was no way Dan was going home tonight. With the answer right there in front of us on the table, he didn't have enough left to wait it out until tomorrow. It had to be finished tonight.

I checked my watch. Tom Gutekunst from Corporate Security would be in at six o'clock in the morning. We had almost eight hours. I reached out for a stack of papers.

"Sit down before you fall down," I said, handing him half, "and start with these."

Every once in a while I'd look up to see Dan's lips moving as he read through the papers in his lap.

I was still plowing through the first document I'd picked up. It was officially known as the National Transportation Safety Board Aircraft Accident Report for Nor'easter Airlines, Inc., Flight 1704, Beech Aircraft Corporation 1900C, Baltimore, Maryland, March 15, 1995. It looked like aircraft accident reports look- standard formats, factual, statistical-and I was having a hard time with it. I had just seen the people who had boarded that flight, human beings that were here reduced to tables and charts and codes. The loss of their lives and the loss of equipment were treated not dissimilarly with everything measured, weighed, counted, and set down on a page in black-and-white.

I flipped back to the beginning and started again, reading the same words I'd read twice already, looking for the highlights this time and trying to retain at least some of the information.

On March 15, 1995, a Beech 1900C which was operating as NOR 1704 crashed on final approach to Baltimore. Seventeen passengers, the captain, and the first officer were all killed. The dog being transported in the kennel in the aft cargo compartment had survived.

In the section marked personnel information, I found out that the captain had been forty-one years old. He'd flown with Nor'easter for seven years and worked as an instructor/check pilot for this type of aircraft. Fellow crew members described him as "diligent, well trained, and precise." The first officer was thirty-six. His position with Nor'easter was his first regional airline job, but he'd been flying for eight years. It was an experienced crew.

A few pages over and a couple of paragraphs down was the section marked history of the flight. On the day of the accident, the captain arrived at the airport in Baltimore at 1300 for a 1400 check-in. No one who saw him that afternoon reported anything unusual about his behavior. That day he and his first officer flew a round trip from Baltimore to Syracuse with a scheduled stopover in Boston each way. They flew two more round trips between Baltimore and Boston that afternoon and evening. Flight 1704 was the last scheduled for the day. They'd never made it home.

On that final leg, the flight was delayed in Boston due to bad weather, and didn't take off until 2015, ninety minutes after the scheduled departure time. Weather at the time of departure was heavy rain, low clouds, and poor visibility.

At 2149, the Baltimore tower cleared NOR 1704 to descend to and maintain 6,000 feet.

At 2156, NOR 1704 contacted the tower and requested the current Baltimore weather. It was thirty-seven degrees, low broken clouds, winds out of the northwest at ten knots.

At 2157, NOR 1704 was cleared for landing.

Ground witnesses who saw the aircraft on the short final approach to the runway said its wings began to rock back and forth. The aircraft went nose up, then into a steep bank and roll. The right wing contacted the ground first. Its forward momentum caused it to cartwheel, breaking into pieces and scattering wreckage over a quarter mile. The accident occurred during the hours of darkness. Part but not all of the fuselage burned. The aircraft was destroyed. No survivors.

I stared at the page until I thought I heard Dan say something, but when I looked up, he was still sitting exactly as I'd seen him before, with his feet on the table, one hand on the reports and the other on the armrest propping his head up. Behind him on the TV screen, the tape was still running. I found the remote control and turned it off.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

"Nothing." If I'd not said anything at all, I'm not sure he would have noticed. He was talking to me, but completely absorbed in what he was reading.

One of the appendices in my report was a map of the wreckage, a computer-generated diagram that showed the major pieces, of which there were many, and where they had landed relative to each other and the airport. I turned to the back and looked at it again, studying it more closely this time. I was trying to remember what this crash had looked like. I was searching for the image, that signature shot that is so visceral, so horrible, or so poignant that it gets burned into our collective consciousness and becomes shorthand for this and only this tragedy. Workers in hip waders and diving gear slogging through swamps with gas masks and long poles. A flotilla of boats out on gray seas with grim-faced men dragging parts of people and machinery out of the water. Scorched mountaintops and flaming oceans and fields of snow fouled by oil and soot. Tail sections with logos intact, absurdly colorful amid the twisted, blackened ruins. I tried to remember 1704, but when I closed my eyes, all I could see was that patch of empty concrete. It was so quiet in the room I could almost hear the rain.

"Holy shit, boss." Dan's feet dropped to the floor, jarring me back to the present. "Holy
shit."

His raised eyebrows and excited smile told me he'd hit pay dirt. "Tell me."

"You're not going to believe what this is. You've got the official version there of what happened that night"-he nodded to my report-"but I've got the real story." He held up a ratty pile of dog-eared, handwritten pages he'd been reading. It was stapled in the corner, but just barely. "This is Dickie Flynn's confession."

"Confession?" The word alone, freighted with all that Catholic significance, brought a shudder of anticipation. What sins were we about to hear?

"Everything that happened that night in order- bing, bing, bing. And see that? Dickie wrote it himself and signed it." He turned to the last page and held it up just long enough for me to see the scrawled signature of one Richard Walter Flynn. "According to this, Dickie was here that night and right in the middle of everything."

I set my report to the side. "How did they do it?"

"I'll show you. What did the investigators say was the official cause?"

"Pilot error. They say the pilot miscalculated the center of gravity, that it could have been as much as eleven inches aft of the aft limit, which significantly screwed up the weight and balance."

"In other words, he was tail heavy."

"Too much weight in the back," I said. "He lost control when the flaps were lowered for landing."

"Fucking Little Pete. Goddamn him." He was up now and searching for something. I assumed it was the remote and tossed it to him. Almost in one motion he caught it and started the tape rewinding. "Okay, let's walk through it. The captain is responsible for calculating the center of gravity, right?"

"Right."

"But he's got to have all the inputs to do the calculation. He needs passenger weight, fuel load, and the load plan for cargo-weights and positions."

"Yeah, yeah," I said, anxious for the punch line. "Standard stuff."

Dan raised one finger, signaling for patience, and I got the impression he was walking through it out loud to try to understand it himself. "In Boston, the Operations agent is responsible for collecting all the inputs on a worksheet. On this worksheet he converts gallons of fuel to pounds, applies average weights for passengers and carry-ons. Cargo weights are pretty much a pass-through from the ramper who loaded the plane. He radios the results to the crew and they do their thing. At the end of every day, the worksheets go into the station files."

A sharp click signaled the end of the rewind. He started the tape, and Billy Newman reappeared and fueled the Beechcraft again, this time in fast-motion. Dan switched to normal speed as the fueler walked toward the camera. "Here's Billy coming into Operations to turn in his numbers for the fuel load."

The next time he stopped the tape was after the last passenger had boarded. The ticket agent who had worked the flight closed up the airplane and approached the camera just as Billy had. "Here's the gate agent coming to turn in the passenger count."

Now we were back up to the point where Little Pete came flying into the picture, skidding recklessly up to the aircraft. He let it fast-forward through the loading. Before he stopped it again, I understood. "He never came into Operations."

"Bingo. He doesn't have a radio, and if he'd given them directly to the crew we would have seen."

"How do you know he didn't have a radio?"

"Dickie said."

"Okay, but he updated his own plan," I said. "We saw him."

Dan had his head down, checking the facts in Dickie's chronology. "Little Pete changed the load, updated his numbers, and never told anyone."

I tried to follow how this would have worked. We were supposed to have safeguards in place for this sort of screw-up. "First of all, Kevin Corrigan is a good operations agent. Without the ramp's input, he would have had a great big hole in his worksheet. He never would have let that happen, and even if he had, the crew couldn't have calculated the center of gravity without the cargo load. They wouldn't have even taken off."

"I agree with you. Kevin is a good ops man. It's too bad he wasn't working that night."

"Who was working?"

"Kevin was back in Ireland at his brother's wedding. It was Dickie."

I sat forward in my chair and concentrated hard. Between the heat and everything else that had gone on tonight, I was feeling addle-brained. "Are you saying that Dickie Flynn,
ramp manager
Dickie Flynn was working as an operations agent the night of the crash?"

Dan was nodding. "Yes. He was a manager then, but he started out as an ops agent and he used to cover Kevin's shift now and then when he couldn't find anyone else to do it. That's what he was doing here that night"-he tapped the confession with two fingers-"and that's why he knew so much. He worked the trip, he and Little Pete."

"Dickie," I said, "was in a position to cover for Little Pete."

He nodded. "Now you're getting it."

"But Dickie still had to give the captain a number. Did he just make it up?"

"As near as I can tell, Little Pete called a preliminary load plan to Dickie over the phone before he ever left the ready room to work the trip. They're not supposed to do that, but sometimes they do because the loads never change on these little airplanes. Little Pete was drunk, which we just saw, and didn't load the airplane according to the plan. He put all the weight in the tail. He marked the changes on his own load sheet, probably intending to call it in. Then he disappeared."

"And no one ever got the updated numbers."

"According to Dickie, the storm was getting worse, the captain wanted to go, he couldn't find Little Pete, so he gave him the numbers he had, figuring Little Pete would have told him if he'd changed anything."

"Which meant the pilot's calculation didn't match the actual load, and it was enough of a difference to take the plane down. Jesus." I rested my forehead in the heels of my hands and considered the unusual confluence of events that had taken place that night. It's always that way with a plane crash. There are so many backups to the backups to the fail-safe systems and procedures that it always takes not just one but an unusual chain of strange events to bring one down. I looked up at Dan, who was sitting back in his chair as if it was a recliner. We were through with show-and-tell. Once again, the image left on the screen was that bare apron in the rain. "Why wouldn't the investigators figure this out?"

"No black boxes, for one thing. An aircraft either has to have been registered after October 1991, I think it is, or have more than twenty seats to require boxes. This one didn't qualify."

"I saw that in the NTSB report. No boxes and no surveillance tape because Dickie took it. The crew was dead. That means the only people left who knew what really happened were Dickie and Little Pete."

"They weren't the only ones who knew. When Dickie heard that the plane had gone down, he figured out what happened. He got scared and wanted to change the worksheet to cover his own ass. To make it look like the captain's mistake, he needed to know what the real load was. But nobody could find Little Pete or his plan. This is where our buddy Angie comes in."

"Angelo?"

"Big Pete called him at home that night after the accident and got him out to look for Little Pete. Angelo found him up in a bar in Chelsea and, get this, the knucklehead still had this right where he'd left the damn thing-in his pocket." He'd pulled a piece of paper from his stack and held it up. "This is Little Pete's load plan, that thing he kept pulling out of his pocket."

"Let me see that." It was a wrinkled, computer-generated load plan with one corner torn off, and it was a mess. Almost every position had been marked through or overwritten. "You've got to hand it to Dickie, he kept a thorough record."

Dan took the plan back. "Angelo stashed the kid somewhere and ran this copy back over to the airport. Dickie dummied up a second worksheet, gave a copy to Big Pete, who got it to Little Pete. Twelve hours later, the kid had sobered up, everyone was telling the same story to the investigators, and it looked like the fight crew made the mistake. Case closed."

"Until," I added, "Dickie decided he didn't want to go to his grave with the souls of twenty-one people on his conscience. No wonder he spent the rest of his life getting drunk. Does he talk about Lenny in there?"

"Oh, yeah." He smiled a killer smile. "Lenny was right there from the beginning. He came out that night, and according to Dickie, he and Angelo went on the Crescent Security payroll-at least for one big payday."

"That's what the pay stub in Ellen's file was all about. The ten grand, that was Dickie's portion of the hush money. Ten thousand bucks out of a total seven hundred thousand-dollar payoff. Not a very high price to sell your soul."

"Dickie always did get the short end of the stick."

We sat for a moment in silence with the papers and documents scattered all around us. All the pieces had come together in the worst possible way, and I felt the weight of all we had found out in that room. I felt crushed by the enormity of the thing-of all that had happened and all that was going to happen.

Finally, Dan roused himself to stand up and go over to the television. He was going to pop out the cassette, but I stopped him. "I want to watch it one more time."