Mostly, though, the investigation would be Mayumi’s problem — figuring out what had happened, what had caused this crash. He knew that most of these light plane crashes were caused by inexperience, overconfidence, or other pilot error. What had been Lefebvre’s error?
The plane had landed on its belly and lay slightly askew. The right wing was buckled back, the right side of the cockpit caved in, the nose buried. The fuselage had taken a beating, but even so, it was relatively intact. Although it was dented and scraped, Frank saw no large tears or holes. There were stains where muddy water had reached the lowest portions of the wreckage.
He moved closer to the plane. Some of the covering vines had been cut away and a portion of a window cleaned. Mayumi assured him that they had both videotaped and photographed the scene before disturbing it. Frank cautiously approached the window and peered in.
He saw the body, or what remained of it, immediately. Directly in front of him, it sat at the controls. A seat belt was strapped across the headless form. One side of a bright blue nylon jacket was stained with large brownish-black patches of dried blood. Here and there, the jagged edges of broken ribs pierced the jacket, corresponding roughly to the impact from the right. The radius and ulna of one arm protruded from a sleeve; dark dried sinew still covered them. He did not see hand bones or a skull.
Once they knew remains were present, Mayumi was saying, they had called the coroner. Her voice seemed separated from what lay before him, as if she were the narrator of a documentary film.
With the help of Wilson and one of the other deputies, Frank pried the cockpit door open. A dry, musty smell greeted him. Ben stepped forward and shone a flashlight over the interior. Spiderwebs were everywhere. The material of Lefebvre’s pants had not fared as well as the jacket; mummified leg bones stuck out of a pair of boots.
“Luckily, it seems to have stayed fairly dry in here,” Ben said. “And I don’t see many signs of scavenger activity. No entry point large enough for most of them. Insects, spiders, mice… maybe a wood rat… that seems to be about it. We may want to look for a wood rat’s nest. Wish I had Bingle up here with me.”
“Bingle?” Wilson asked.
“Ben is also a cadaver dog handler,” Frank said. “Bingle is one of his dogs. He might be able to find bones carried off by other animals.”
“There has been disarticulation as the ligaments have decomposed, of course,” Ben said, absorbed in his study of the remains.
Wilson peered in, stepped back with a little shudder. “What I can’t figure out is, what tore his head off?”
“He wasn’t decapitated,” Ben said absently. “Nothing’s at the right level to act as a guillotine.” He slowly moved the flashlight beam across the floor. He paused as it lit a mandible — the horseshoe of lower teeth jutting up into space — then moved on. “There.”
A skull stared back at them. Gauzy webs filled the eye sockets, giving the appearance of pale eyelids. A long-legged brown spider, annoyed by the light, scurried out of the nasal passage.
“The skull wasn’t taken off,” Ben said. “It fell off after the neck muscles decomposed. Skulls only stay on upright skeletons on television.”
Ben kept moving the light, and they saw a dust-covered nylon bag stowed toward the back of the cabin. The spiders had been at work there, too. The bag was draped in cobwebs.
“Think anyone has been in here since the crash?” Wilson asked.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Frank said.
“So, you can see that we didn’t open this up before you got here, right?” Wilson asked.
“What do you mean?” Frank asked, looking at him sharply.
Wilson turned red again. “I mean, you can see all the dust and everything — you can tell we didn’t go inside, right?”
“What are you getting at?” Frank asked.
“I’m just wondering — you know — about the money.”
“What money?”
“The money Lefebvre was paid for killing that witness. You know, the kid.”
2
Saturday, July 8, 4:46 P.M.
San Bernardino Mountains
Wilson’s remark led to questions, and then Frank remembered long-ago talk of the case, but not from Las Piernas. The story of a cop who had taken a bribe to kill a witness — and then supposedly disappeared — had briefly made headlines and television news in Bakersfield. But Frank had been a patrolman then, pulling long shifts in a department that was dealing with its own problems. In those days, he had thought of Las Piernas as nothing more than an extension of L.A., a place where any weird-assed thing could happen, and so he had paid little attention to the stories about Lefebvre.
No one at the scene was able — or willing — to tell him much. Mayumi didn’t have the complete NTSB file yet, but promised to send a copy to Frank as soon as she got back to her office in Gardena. Even Cliff Garrett claimed to only vaguely remember the case — which had taken place “downhill” ten years ago. “Bad news for the Las Piernas Police Department,” Cliff said, “but not our case. I had my own cases to worry about then, just as I do now.” Frank had said as much to himself when he remembered mention of the case, but he sensed that Cliff knew more and was simply dodging involvement.
Over the next few hours, Frank never heard more than a half-told tale that made little sense to him. Lefebvre, they said, had been a homicide detective in Las Piernas. He was supposedly paid a large sum (recollections varied on this point, the amounts ranging from ten thousand to two million dollars) to steal evidence and kill a witness — a teenager. He had killed the witness while the kid was in his hospital bed, supposedly under the watchful eye of the Las Piernas police. “Guess the wrong officer was watching him,” Cliff said. Lefebvre fled Las Piernas in his Cessna that night and hadn’t been heard from since. Until today, everyone thought he was drinking piña coladas on some distant beach, laughing at Las Piernas’s failure to catch him.
No large sums of money were found hidden in the wreckage of Lefebvre’s plane, and nothing that resembled stolen evidence was discovered. Carefully working their way through the wreckage — all the while taking photographs, making notes — Frank and the other investigators found little to go on. Among Lefebvre’s effects were his pilot’s logbooks, a wallet, a small notebook, a cheap ballpoint pen, a set of keys, and a badge holder with his police ID. Most of these items were in a zippered side pocket in the jacket. In an inside pocket, near where the heart had been, Frank found a business card–size piece of paper, too blackened by bloodstains to be read. He bagged it and marked it for the lab’s documents examiner.
No duffel bags full of cash. No luggage. Not even so much as a change of clothes or a toothbrush. The nylon bag held nothing but a set of rusting tools.
Mayumi confirmed that the last entry in the flight log was dated June 22, the night Lefebvre made his escape from Las Piernas ten years ago. There were no remarks of note, except that it showed that Lefebvre had filled the tanks before taking off.
“So it seems unlikely that he ran out of fuel,” she said.
“Any ideas on what caused the crash?”
She smiled. “Far too early to say.”
He looked through the wallet. It held a driver’s license, two charge cards, and forty-three dollars. There were also two credit card receipts. One was dated June 21 — the day before Lefebvre had left Las Piernas — from a restaurant called the Prop Room. The total bill was high enough to make Frank wonder if the restaurant was pricey or if Lefebvre had met with someone else the night before he disappeared.
The other receipt was dated June 22, from Las Piernas Aviation Services, for fuel for the plane.
He showed the fuel receipt to Mayumi.
“Hmm. That matches what he wrote in the log. Unless he developed a fuel leak, he had more than enough to make it over these mountains.”