Out of Season

CHAPTER FIVE

The downwash from the rotors of the JetRanger tore up half an acre of New Mexico prairie as we settled to earth. A hundred yards ahead of us, caught in the harsh underbelly spotlights, stood Deputy Thomas Pasquale. Around him was the litter of what had once been Phil Camp’s airplane.

A flash of light caught my eye, a set of headlights from a knoll a quarter mile to the west. If it was Bob Torrez, he’d damn near driven faster than the Bell JetRanger flew.

Eddie Mitchell hit the ground like a marine, followed by Donnie Smith, one of the state patrolmen assigned to the Posadas area. But I took my time, gingerly groping for solid footing before I released my grip on the thin door frame of the helicopter. Dr. Francis Guzman waited patiently behind me. Even as we stepped away from the chopper, the state police pilot was spooling the thing down into silence.

Pasquale walked toward us, head down against the wind and the treacherous footing. Mitchell joined him as he approached. “No survivors,” the young deputy said when we were within earshot. “The pilot’s over there, just a few yards from where the engine block ended up.” Pasquale held up a wallet. “If this is his, then he’s Philip Camp, out of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I don’t know who the passenger is. I didn’t want to touch anything there.”

“Philip Camp is Martin Holman’s brother-in-law, Thomas,” I said. “As far as we know, he and the sheriff were the only two on board.”

Pasquale ducked his head. “The sheriff? You mean Martin Holman?”

I nodded and took Pasquale by the arm. “Let’s go see.”

Even as we walked the short distance toward the main chunk of fuselage, I could hear vehicles in the distance. Four sets of headlights appeared around the bottom of the mesa to the west.

“Make sure they park behind the helicopter,” I said to Mitchell, and then Dr. Guzman, Pasquale, and I continued toward the wreckage.

In the thirty years that I’d worked for the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department, I’d visited the scene of three air crashes. That certainly didn’t make me an expert. Within the next twenty-four hours, investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board would arrive and begin their methodical sifting of the scene. Maybe they’d have some answers for us.

I stood on a jumble of rocks, taking care to avoid the cactus. Within the range of my flashlight beam, the pieces of the Beechcraft Bonanza spread out like confetti, making a crescent-shaped scar at least a hundred yards long, maybe more.

Ahead of us, the chunk of the central fuselage was a tangle of metal and tubing roughly the size of a small, imported sedan that had been torn in half lengthwise. Neither wing was attached, nor the tail aft of the rear cabin window. It would take someone far more expert than I was to make sense of the mess that remained. The windshield and its entire framework, including all of the cabin roof, were missing, as was everything from the firewall forward.

“Christ,” I muttered, and stepped closer so I could sweep the flashlight beam over the wreckage. What was left of Martin Holman was belted to the right front seat, and the seat was twisted and bent backward, mangled with the rest of the cabin’s right-side framework.

I felt a hand on my sleeve. “Let me do this, Bill,” Francis Guzman said. I nodded and held the light for him, then turned my head so I didn’t have to watch.

“Thomas,” I said, “did you walk over to the east to find the first point of impact?”

“No, sir,” Pasquale said. His voice was shaking. “You told me to stay right here, and that’s what I did.”

“Good man.” I stood quietly and gazed off to the east. If Philip Camp had been trying to land, the Bonanza would have been traveling in the neighborhood of eighty to a hundred miles an hour when it struck the rugged prairie. If it had hit flat, it would have been badly torn up. But it still would have been recognizable as an airplane.

If the plane had plowed straight in, or at a steep angle, the wreckage would have pulverized itself in a “smoking hole,” as military pilots were wont to say.

As I stood in the dark and listened to Dr. Guzman’s ragged breath behind me, I could imagine only one scenario that would have resulted in this kind of crash scatter: the Bonanza had struck the earth at a glancing angle, perhaps one wing down, at full speed-perhaps upward of two hundred miles an hour, maybe more. If that was the case, there could be a whole handful of explanations that were obvious, even to me. And an experienced pilot could provide far more, I was sure.

I had never met Philip Camp, and certainly had no idea of what kind of pilot he was-careful, careless, a hotdogger, a man who flew by the numbers, or a man who didn’t pay much attention to detail. Martin Holman had mentioned in the previous week that his wife’s sister and brother-in-law were planning a visit, but that had been the extent of our conversation. I didn’t even remember the context of the discussion that had prompted the sheriff to mention the upcoming occasion.

“Let’s look at the other one,” Dr. Guzman said, and he waited for me while I made my way down off the rock pile.

One hundred and four paces later, we reached the remains of the pilot’s seat. The frame was broken and the entire seat splayed out flat on the ground like a book facedown, its back broken. Thirty steps away lay most of Philip Camp’s remains.

Headlights swept the area, and the cavalcade from the west pulled up in a vast cloud of dust. I could see Bob Torrez’s county vehicle, along with one of the Posadas Emergency Rescue squad’s four-wheel-drive Suburbans. Bringing up the rear was a pickup truck with a rack of lights across the roof, a spotlight on the driver’s door pillar, and a large feed bin in the back. A dog perched on top of the feed bin, barking and dashing from one side to another.

The mutt was either well trained or tied, because when the truck jarred to a stop, it didn’t leap off.

Doors slammed, but Sergeant Robert Torrez was the only person who left the group of vehicles and approached.

“Over here, Robert,” I called and waved the flashlight. Torrez angled toward me, sweeping his own light from side to side as he approached.

“It is the sheriff,” I said when he reached me. “Apparently just the two of them. Holman and his brother-in-law. Both dead.”

“Well, my God,” Torrez muttered and waved a hand back toward the vehicles. “The Boyds have a generator in the back of the truck if we need more light. Edwin said we’re welcome to it.”

“Light isn’t what we need right now, Robert,” I said. “We can take the bodies back, what’s left of them, but beyond that, we’re going to be waiting on the feds. Did Estelle say anything to you over the radio on your way out?”

“No, but I can’t imagine that they’ll be able to get investigators here much before mid-morning.”

“Then all we can do is to secure the scene until they arrive,” I said. “The first thing we need to do is to walk the crash track and locate the body parts.”

Torrez made a little sigh, tucked his light under his arm and thrust both hands in his pockets. “That ain’t going to be pretty,” he muttered.

“Nope,” I said. “But we don’t want the coyotes, or the Boyds’ dog, for that matter, making off with parts of the sheriff, either.”

Torrez let out something that might have been a chuckle. I added, “And everything else stays untouched until the feds get here. Don’t move a thing.”

“Let’s get to it,” Torrez said.

“I want to use the radio in your truck first,” I said. “Estelle needs to be tracking down what information she can from her end. The feds are going to want some answers when they get here…like what Philip Camp and Martin Holman were doing flying at this time of day, in weather like this.”

“I didn’t think the sheriff even liked to fly,” Torrez said.

“He didn’t. And his brother-in-law should have known better.” I took a deep breath and turned back toward the wreckage. It was going to be a long night.