The Dead Sea Deception

Prologue

When despatch called to tell Sheriff Webster Gayle about the plane crash, he was at the bowling alley, just about to sink a spoon into an enormous bowl of ice cream. One of the thoughts that went through his mind as he listened, along with the first gripes of pity for the dead and bereaved, and dismay at the shit-storm this would bring him, was that this seven-dollar sundae was now surely going to waste.

‘Emergency landing?’ he asked, making sure he understood. He cupped his hand around the phone to shut out the reverberating sounds of pins falling and being reset in the adjacent lane.

‘Nope.’ Connie was definitive. ‘No kind of landing at all. That bird just fell out of the sky, hit the ground and blew the hell up. Don’t know how big it was or where it was coming from. I’ve put calls out to ATC at Phoenix and Los Angeles. I’ll let you know when they get back to me.’

‘And it’s definitely inside the county limits?’ Gayle asked, clutching at a feeble straw. ‘I thought the flight path was more to the west, out by Arcona.’

‘It came down right by the highway, Web. Honest to God, I can see the smoke right out the window here. It’s not just in the limits, it’s so close you could walk to it from the Gateway mall. I already passed the word along to Doc Beattie. Anything else you want me to do?’

Gayle considered. ‘Yeah,’ he said after a moment. ‘Tell Anstruther to get up there and rope it off, a good ways out. Far enough so we don’t get anyone stopping by to rubberneck or take pictures.’

‘What about Moggs?’ Meaning Eileen Moggs, who comprised the entirety of the full-time staff on the Peason Chronicler. Moggs was a journalist of the old school, in that she drove around and talked to people before she filed copy, and even took her own photos with an over-sized digital SLR that made Gayle think of a strap-on dildo he’d seen once in a sex toys catalogue and then tried to forget.

‘Moggs can go through,’ Gayle said. ‘I owe her a favour.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Connie queried, just blandly enough that Gayle couldn’t be sure there was any innuendo there. He shoved the bowl of ice cream away from him, disconsolate. It was one of those fancy flavours with a long name and an even longer list of ingredients, leaning heavily on chocolate, marshmallow and caramel in various combinations. Gayle was an addict, but had made peace with his weakness a long time ago. It beat booze, by a long way. Probably beat heroin and crack cocaine, too, although he’d never tried either.

‘I’m on my way over,’ he said. ‘Tell Anstruther a good quarter of a mile.’

‘A good quarter of a mile what, chief?’

He waved to the waitress to bring him the check. ‘The incident line, Connie. I want it to be at least five minutes’ walk from the wreck. There’ll be people coming in from all over when they get a sniff of this, and the less they see, the sooner they’ll turn around and go home again.’

‘Okay. Five minutes’ walk.’ Gayle could hear Connie scribbling it down. She hated numbers, claimed to be blind to them in the way some people are blind to colours. ‘Is that it?’

‘That’s it for now. Try the airports again. I’ll give you a call when I get out there.’

Gayle took his hat from the empty seat beside him and put it on. The waitress, an attractive dark-featured woman whose name tag said MADHUKSARA, brought him the cheque for the ice cream and for a hot dog and fries he’d had earlier. She affected to be scandalised at the fact that he hadn’t touched his dessert. ‘Well, I’d welcome a doggy bag if it was a practical proposition,’ he said, making the best of it. She got the joke, laughed louder and longer than it deserved. He creaked a little as he stood. Getting old, and getting rheumatic, even in this climate. ‘Ma’am.’ He touched the brim of his hat to her and headed out.

Gayle’s thoughts were on idle as he crossed the baking backlot towards his battered blue Chevrolet Biscayne. He was entitled to a new car on the police budget whenever he wanted one, but the Biscayne was a local landmark. Wherever he parked it, it was like a sign saying, THE DOCTOR IS IN.

How was Madhuksara pronounced? Where did she come from, and what had brought her to live in Peason, Arizona? This was Gayle’s town, and he was attached to it by strong, subterranean bonds, but he couldn’t imagine anyone coming from a great distance to be here. What would be the draw? The mall? The three-screen movie theatre? The desert?

Of course, he reminded himself, this was the twenty-first century. Madhuksara didn’t have to be an immigrant at all. She could have been born and raised right here in the south-western corner of the US of A. She certainly hadn’t had any trace of a foreign accent. On the other hand, he hadn’t ever seen her around town before. Gayle wasn’t a racist, which at some points in his career as a policeman had given him a certain novelty value. He liked variety, in humankind as much as in ice cream. But his instincts were a cop’s instincts and he tended to file new faces of any colour in a mental pending tray, on the grounds that unknown quantities could always turn out to be trouble.

Highway 68 was clear all the way to the interstate, but long before he got to the crossroads he could see the coal-black column stretching up into the sky. A pillar of smoke by day, a pillar of fire by night, Gayle thought irrelevantly. His mother had belonged to a Baptist church and quoted scripture the way some people talk about the weather. Gayle himself hadn’t opened a bible in thirty years, but some of that stuff had stuck with him.

He turned off on to the single-file blacktop that bordered Bassett’s Farm and came up through the fields on a nameless dirt track where once, a great many years before, he’d had his first kiss that hadn’t come from an elderly female relative.

He was surprised and pleased to find the road roped off with an emphatic strip of black-and-yellow incident tape, a hundred yards or so before he was close enough to see the sprawl of twisted metal from which the smoke was rising. The tape had been stretched between two pine fence posts, and Spence, one of his most taciturn and unexcitable deputies, was standing right there to see that drivers didn’t just bypass the roadblock by taking a short detour into the cornfield.

As Spence untied the tape to let him pass, Gayle wound his window down.

‘Where’s Anstruther?’ he asked.

Spence pointed with a sideways nod. ‘Up there.’

‘Who else?’

‘Lewscynski. Scuff. And Mizz Moggs.’

Gayle nodded and drove on.

Like heroin and cocaine, a major airplane crash was something outside Gayle’s experience. In his imagination, the plane had come down like an arrow and embedded itself in the soil, tail up. The reality was not so neat. He saw a broad ridge of gouged earth about two hundred yards long, maybe five or six feet high at its outer edge. The plane had broken up as it dug that furrow, shedding great curved pieces of its fuselage like giant eggshells along the whole, tortured stretch of ground. What was left of the fuselage was burning up at the far end and — now that Gayle’s window was down, he became aware — filling the air with a terrible stench of combustion. Whether it was flesh or plastic that smelled like that as it burned he could not be sure. He was in no hurry to find out.

He parked the Biscayne next to Anstruther’s black-and-white and got out. The wreck was a hundred yards away, but the heat from the fire laid itself across Gayle’s body like a bar across a door as he walked over to where a small group of people was standing, on top of the newly ploughed ridge. Anstruther, his senior deputy, was shielding his eyes as he looked out over the remade country. Joel Scuff, a no-account trooper who at age twenty-seven was already more of a disgrace to the force than men twice his age had managed, stood beside him, staring in the same direction. Both looked sombre and nonplussed, like people at a funeral for someone they didn’t know that well, fearful that they might be called on for small talk.

Sitting at their feet, on the rucked-up earth, was Eileen Moggs. Her phallic camera sat impotently in her lap and her head was bowed. It was hard to be sure from this angle, but her face had the crumpled look of someone who had recently been crying.

Gayle was about to say something to her, but at that point, as he trudged up the rising gradient of the earthworks, his head crested the ridge and he saw what they were seeing. He stopped dead, involuntarily, his brain too overloaded with that horrible image to maintain any commerce with his legs.

Bassett’s North 40 was sown with corpses: men and women and children, all strewn across the chewed-up earth, while the clothes disgorged from their burst suitcases arced and twisted above them in the searing thermals, as though their ghosts were dancing in fancy dress to celebrate their new-found freedom.

Gayle tried to swear, but his mouth was too dry, suddenly, for the sound to make it out. In the terrible heat, his tears evaporated right off his cheeks before anyone could see them.