directed the pilot to rock the wings of the plane in a mock salute before turning away.
For a long time, neither agent spoke, until finally Woeshack said: 'They just gave us the finger, didn't they?'
Henry Lightstone continued to watch the large blue floatplane until it finally disappeared off in the distance. Then he nodded his head slowly. 'Yeah, I'd say so.'
Woeshack thought about that for a few more seconds. 'So what do we do now?' he asked.
Then Henry Lightstone turned his head to stare straight into the dark, questioning eyes of his thoroughly bruised, battered, and bleeding partner, and said:
'Find us another airplane.'
Chapter Thirty-Five
'Understand you're still the senior law-enforcement officer here representing your agency.'
There were at least eight of them on the scene, and they'd been working diligently for three hours now: chalking the locations of the bodies, taking measurements, making sketches, filling paper bags with pieces of neatly tagged evidence, photographing everything at right angles at least twice, and videotaping the whole thing. They worked with such methodical thoroughness that Lightstone found it easy to accept that the 'new' FBI was really something else.
The only trouble was, they still hadn't put it all together yet. And based upon what Henry Lightstone was seeing with his own CSI-trained eyes, he wasn't sure that they were going to. At least not right away.
Which was beginning to worry him, because if there was ever a time when he wanted a crime-scene team to come in, pick up the clues, and get back to their desks with plenty of time to complete all the paperwork, it was right now.
'Apparently,' Lightstone answered in a carefully neutral voice. 'I don't think we've met.' He felt like his body was a mass of cracked bones and torn muscles.
'A1 Grynard, assistant special agent in charge of the Anchorage office,' the gray-haired man said politely, offering his hand. He was dressed in a neatly pressed sport shirt, new blue jeans, and gray Gor-Tex hiking boots that looked like they'd just come out of the box.
'Henry Lightstone. Senior resident agent, on special-duty assignment to our Anchorage office,' Lightstone responded equally politely, making a mental note that the ASAC's light gray eyes seemed just a little too intense and skeptical to have any serious connection with that infamous FBI smile. 'And this is one of our agent-pilots, Tom Woeshack.'
'You must be the fellow who made that fancy emergency landing back there,' Grynard said as he turned to shake Woeshack's hand. 'What is it you pilots say? Any landing you can walk away from must be a good one?'
'Uh, yes sir, that's about it.'
'Nice landing any way you look at it,' the FBI agent smiled. 'Too bad you couldn't have made it to water, though. Probably would have been a lot easier on you two, and you might have been able to save the plane. Gets rough on the budget when you lose an expensive floatplane like that.'
Feeling every bit as bruised and battered as his new senior-agent partner, Thomas Woeshack was suddenly finding it difficult to remain composed in the face of the FBI agent's comments. He had no idea of whether they were rooted in interagency camaraderie, warped amusement, or simple accusation. Woeshack recognized him as the man who had arrived in a fancy executive helicopter and who had waited until the rotors had shut off before he opened the door.
Being new at the game, of course, Thomas Woeshack had no way of knowing that the elaborate helicopter incident had just been the opening move in a very intricate game. By arriving at the scene in such a way that the subjects in question would naively focus on the FBI agent's perceived arrogance and vanity, they would presumably fail to notice later the signs of his carefully contrived traps.
Henry Lightstone, however, had seen this sort of thing many times in his earlier police career, and he was very interested in seeing where this particular interrogation was headed.
'In my opinion, Agent-Pilot Woeshack simply made the best choice he could under what I judged to be extremely difficult circumstances,' Lightstone interjected in a courteous but firm voice.
'Ah,' the FBI agent nodded noncommittally.
Woeshack glanced over at Lightstone, who gave him a steady look and a barely perceptible shrug that basically said: 'Don't let him bug you, kid.' A glance that A1 Grynard observed.
'Gave it my best shot, sir,' Woeshack shrugged.
'Yes, I'm sure you did. And I'm sure that your Accident Review Board will take that into account. Ah, I assume your agency does maintain a standing AR Board?' Grynard asked, turning to Lightstone.
'Far as I know, we've got every kind of bureaucratic committee imaginable, so we probably have one of those, too. But to tell you the truth, I'm kind of new up here, so I really haven't the slightest idea,' Lightstone replied evenly. He was finding it increasingly difficult to keep from telling the FBI agent that one of the bodies under those tarps was their senior agent, as well as a cherished friend, and that he really didn't give a flying fuck about overspent equipment budgets or Accident Review Boards right now.
But he didn't tell ASAC A1 Grynard anything of the sort, mostly because he'd interrogated more than his share of homicide suspects in his previous career, and he knew exactly what the FBI agent was doing.
'You have already given your statement for the records,' Grynard said to Lightstone. 'Now I would like to try to fill in the gaps. I understand that you were injured in the shooting, as well as in the airplane crash.' The FBI agent glanced down at Lightstone's torn and bloody jacket. 'Are you sure you wouldn't like to continue this conversation back in Anchorage, where we can get you some first-rate medical attention?'
Lightstone smiled and shrugged. 'I'm fine right now.'
'Okay, well let us know if either of you change your mind and decide that you'd like to be medivaced out of here.'
'Appreciate the offer. We'll let you know if either of us starts feeling bad.'
'Fair deal. Rough having something like this happen your first day on at a new duty station,' the FBI agent offered. 'Guess you Fish and Wildlife guys don't run across this kind of thing very often, do you?'
'What? Oh… you mean the human bodies? No, not really.'
'I'm sure you see some really gory stuff,' the FBI agent said in a tone that somehow didn't quite cross the line of being patronizing, 'but as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing I hate worse than working a scene where a fellow law-enforcement officer's been killed. Especially over something as senseless as this.'
'Yeah, he knew better than to work by himself,' Lightstone nodded. 'But I guess we all do it. Part of the game when you're short on agents.'
'Yeah, well, it's too bad you guys don't have some kind of portable computer system so you could run makes on your contacts in the field,' Grynard suggested. 'If your buddy there had known who he was up against, he might have backed off and tried to find you guys first.'
'Oh, yeah? Why's that?'
'See the guy lying there next to the bear? Well, we just ran a make on him. Name's Butch Chareaux. Turns out he and his brothers were part of some poaching ring, whatever the hell that is, back in Louisiana. They all have outstanding felony warrants related to the murder of two-' Grynard glanced down at his notebook-'Louisana Department of Fish and Game officers. You'd think that some of your agents would have run across one of these characters during the last few months.' Grynard shook his head sadly. 'Too bad they didn't. Might have given your buddy a fighting chance.'
'You sure none of us ever did?' Lightstone asked carefully. 'We're pretty well spread out, and it's a big county.'
'I don't know,' the FBI agent shrugged. 'According to your Records Bureau back in D.C., nobody in your agency has ever worked these guys. Or at least the name Butch Chareaux doesn't show up in any of your computerized case files.'
'So Paul stops by to check on a couple of hunters and runs into a buzz saw,' Lightstone nodded in apparent understanding. 'Any idea what they were doing out here?'
