That thought remains right until the second plane hits.
Up until then, this is a tragedy, a horrible accident, a plane going horrendously off course.
When the second plane hits, everything changes.
It's like a switch is thrown. Now it's no longer an accident-it's an attack.
Mac Taylor feels the change in his gut, the instincts of a detective, the instincts of a Marine. But in his heart there is still only one thought: Claire.
He will spend that entire horrible Tuesday trying to find out if she survived.
He will never hear from her again.
The memories were always there, but today-when the chopper to and from Staten Island had flown over Ground Zero-they were particularly intense.
Almost six full years later, and it was still a hole in the ground. They still hadn't recovered all the remains, and the remains they had found had yet to all be identified. Mac had no idea if finding Claire's genetic material on the site would make a difference to him. Was there a part of him still holding on to the possibility that she was alive somewhere?
It was ridiculous, of course. Mac was a rationalist, through and through, and there was simply no way that Claire would have stayed away all this time if she had survived, no matter what she might have gone through. She definitely died when the towers collapsed.
But why was there a part of Mac that held on? It was hard to say. Mac had been working murders for years now, and if he'd learned one thing in all that time it was that everyone reacted differently to the death of a loved one.
This morning, he came into the lab alone, cup of coffee in hand, only to find Peyton waiting in his office, along with Sheldon and Deputy Inspector Gerrard.
Opening the glass door to his office, he said without preamble, "I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this is about the Barker case."
"I'm afraid so," Peyton said. Her apologetic tone set the mood for Mac: something had gone wrong, or at least sideways.
Peyton simply handed him the autopsy report. Mac flipped through it, then looked back up at her. "Anaphylactic shock?"
"That's my medical diagnosis, yes. The head wound was postmortem, which is why it bled so little."
"So how'd it happen?"
Sheldon stepped forward. "I actually have a theory on that, Mac. I haven't tested it out yet, but-"
"Then it's a hypothesis," Mac said, setting the report down on his desk. He walked around it, briefly looked at the view of Broadway out his large window, then sat in his leather chair. "Once you test it successfully, then it becomes a theory."
Hands on hips, Gerrard said, "Can we have grammar class some other time, please?"
Mac shot Gerrard an annoyed look, then said, "Go ahead, Sheldon."
"We found a thread on Washburne's shoulder, one that Adam identified as coming from RHCF prison dickies-but from the pants, not the shirt."
"So how'd it get on his shoulder?"
"My guess," Sheldon said, "is somebody bumped him when Barker got stabbed. Let's say he was lying on the weight bench when he went into anaphylactic shock. He could've died right there while lying down and nobody would've noticed."
"You think they'd miss that?" Gerrard asked.
"It's possible," Peyton said. "He stopped breathing when his throat closed up. He'd only be able to make incoherent whispery grunts."
Mac nodded. "Which wouldn't be all that different from the sounds people would be making while lifting weights."
Sheldon continued. "Besides, he had to have been dead for a few minutes before he got hit on the head in order for the wound to have had so little bleeding. Now when Barker got stabbed, it was chaos in there. Maybe someone bumped up against Washburne's body, knocking him off the weight bench, hitting his head on the weight hard enough to cause the gash and also knock the weight onto the ground."
Gerrard now folded his arms over his chest. "It's also possible that Melendez took the weight off the bar and hit Washburne over the head with it, not realizing he was already dead."
"I've met the man," Mac said, "and I can't say with a straight face that he wouldn't be that stupid."
"I'll run some simulations," Sheldon said, "see which scenario fits the evidence."
"All right," Gerrard said, "then what did Washburne react to?"
"That's the problem," Peyton said. "I haven't the foggiest. All his stomach contents were long digested, so it couldn't have been something he ate. The tox report only showed Klonopin. According to his prison record, he's been taking Klonopin since his trial, so it couldn't have been that."
"People develop allergies as they get older," Gerrard said. "When I turned forty, I suddenly became allergic to powdered detergents."
Peyton shook her head. "It's possible, but there would have been a sign of it. According to the prescriptions in prison records, Malik Washburne was taking one hundred milligrams of Klonopin every day for almost a year. That violent an allergy doesn't develop overnight."
Mac's Treo rang in his suit jacket. Pulling it out, he saw it was Flack. He put the call on speaker and said, "Don, it's Mac-I've got you on speaker with Peyton, Sheldon, and Inspector Gerrard."
Flack's tinny voice said, "I just got off the phone with Ursitti. Seems somebody beat the crap out of Jorge Melendez."
"What? Why?"
"Ursitti tells me that it's retribution for Washburne's death."
Gerrard said, "How the hell did anyone there know Melendez was a suspect?"
"That's the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, Inspector. I'm headin' back there now," Flack said.
"I'll meet you there," Mac told him.
"I'm stuck in traffic on the BQE, so you'll probably beat me there."
Mac looked at Gerrard, who said, "You will-you can have the chopper again."
"Thanks." He looked down at the phone. "I'll see you there, Don."
After hanging up, he looked at Sheldon. "You and Danny do a re-creation, see if you can figure out exactly how Washburne would've received his wound and gotten onto the ground."
"On it," Sheldon said, and left.
Before Mac could say anything else, Peyton said, "I'll run some more blood tests, see if we can find something exotic that a standard tox screen wouldn't find." He nodded in thanks, and Peyton also took her leave.
That left Mac and Gerrard in the room together, which wasn't particularly comfortable for either man. Though Mac found he didn't give a good goddamn what was comfortable for the deputy inspector.
"Can I help you with something else, Stan?"
"That's 'Inspector Gerrard,' Detective Taylor. You lost the right to use my first name when you stabbed me in the back."
"I stabbed you in the back?" Mac was incredulous. "I wasn't the one who sicced Internal on me after the DA had already cleared me!"
"Yeah, and neither was I-that was Sinclair. I was the one who did you the courtesy of meeting with you and informing you of the investigation. Sinclair didn't even want that much-he would've been happy for you to hear about it on New York 1 with the rest of the city, but I thought you deserved the consideration of a face-to-face. Your response to this courtesy was to insult me, and then, when you felt like the hearing wasn't going your way, you decided to dig up dirt on me." Gerrard stepped forward and leaned over Mac's desk, his palms flat on the wood surface. "If you think for a second that I'm going to forget what you did to me, Detective, you are sadly mistaken. From here on in, I'll be taking permanent residence up your rectum, and you'd better for damn sure walk straight and fly right. That goes for your usual gang of idiots out there, too. If Messer goes whacko again, if Monroe bolts a crime scene-yeah, I know about that-or if you decide to go vigilante again, I will be there with a giant hammer, and I will use it to nail your ass to the wall."