Flight

“But you liked him.”

“Yes. Better than anybody else I met in the PD in those days.” She was quiet for a long moment, then said, “I guess down deep, I hoped he was still alive. What happened to him?”

“His plane crashed in the San Bernardinos.”

“I thought they looked for it.”

“They did, but the wreckage of small planes that crash in remote areas isn’t always easy to see. I was talking to the NTSB investigator about it. She said they estimate that there are over one hundred and fifty missing small aircraft in the Sierra Nevada mountains alone.”

“To think that he’s been up there all this time…”

He felt her shudder and pulled her closer. After a moment, he asked, “Did you cover the story of his disappearance?”

She shook her head against his shoulder. “Not once he was accused — in absentia — of killing Seth Randolph.” She looked up at him. “You know about that?”

“I’m learning more. Carlson has assigned the Randolph cases to me.”

“Wow. That’s—” She mentally calculated. “Ten years ago. Why do you keep getting assigned to cold cases?”

He shrugged. “Everybody in Homicide has been handling old investigations lately. The murder rate is down.”

“I know, I know. We’ve run stories on it. Everyone’s arguing over where the credit for that should go.”

“I’m just saying that the department has more time to reinvestigate the old ones and we have more tools now — new technologies to help solve them.”

“But there are new cases — you and Pete just seem to be getting more than your fair share of the old ones.”

“You can probably guess why.”

“You’re getting them because you’ve been clearing them — you’re good at it.”

“We’ve been lucky with the DNA on a couple of them.”

“Save the humility for your speech at the department awards banquet.”

He laughed.

Her brows drew together. “You don’t get these cases because you’re good at them, right? You get them because Carlson wants you to fail.”

“If that’s true, this time he’ll get what he wants. I can’t tell you how excited I am to be working a ten-year-old case in which all the physical evidence has been stolen — and apparently ninety percent of the department has a personal ax to grind with the alleged thief.”

“Lefebvre didn’t steal it.”

“I’m not saying he did — but what makes you so sure he didn’t?”

“It wasn’t like him. Totally unlike him. Except for flying that plane, the guy had no life outside of the department.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know him that well.”

“That’s not what I meant. We were friends, and I knew things about him, but I didn’t know him. No — don’t give me that look. What I mean is, Phil was one of those guys you could never really get to know. If you followed him around all day, day after day, you might get some idea of how his mind worked, and know that he was absolutely devoted to his job, or begin to see this — this sort of quiet sense of humor he had. But you would never get a word out of him about his past, or learn if he had the hots for someone, or much of anything else about the man underneath all of that.”

He was silent, thinking over what she had said, when she added, “There were two times when he seemed really happy to me and when I actually thought, ‘He does think of me as a friend, because he’s letting me in on this.’ Once, when he took me flying.”

“Oh, Christ — you went up in that little Cessna with him?” He thought of the wreckage he had seen — of both pilot and plane — and felt his stomach clench.

She bristled at his tone, then seemed to realize the direction of his thoughts. “I know you’ve just seen the worst possible results of being in that plane, but, Frank, I swear to you, he was a terrific pilot. He flew in the military and had lots of hours flying solo in that Cessna. He was careful, and safety conscious. He wasn’t a hot dog.” She paused, then said, “I got to know Phil when I was caring for my dad — when I was first starting to realize that my dad wasn’t going to recover from the cancer. I had some really rough days with that, and on one of those, I ran into Phil. It was one of his rare days off. He took one look at me and said, ‘Meet me at the airport.’ And he took me up. It was great. He was so in love with flying, it was contagious.”

“So — do I want to know about the other time you saw him happy?”

She hit him with her pillow. “You’re as bad as Vince Adams and those other clowns in Homicide.”

“I am one of the other ‘clowns,’ remember?”

“No, you are not. Vince was always so sure that I had something going on with Phil. He made remarks. It was bullshit, but it pissed me off — you know what I think Vince’s problem is?”

“Forget about Vince. Tell me about this other time Lefebvre was happy.”

She fell silent, all the fight of the moment before draining away. “The only other time,” she said quietly, “was at the hospital. He had waited there for hours while they operated on Seth Randolph. After that, he kept waiting — the