He knew she still hadn’t completely forgiven him for crossing the line.
On the seat next to him was the videotape Polly Logan had given him. He hadn’t managed to watch it again yet. He wanted to see it without Polly’s commentary, to study the people who had surrounded Seth Randolph at that time. He could have locked it in his desk drawer, but he felt strangely uneasy about doing so. He decided to keep it with him. He’d take it home tonight, watch it after going over to visit Bredloe.
Thinking of Bredloe make him think about the paper airplane, and he wondered if there were paper airplane experts. He knew there were paper airplane competitions, but was there some kind of national paper airplane association? It would be far from the most absurd organization he had ever heard of.
He remembered reading about an annual contest among local engineering students to make the best paper airplane. Maybe the man who attacked Bredloe had learned to make paper airplanes in college. It wasn’t hard to believe that a man with a background in engineering could have made the device that toppled the bricks.
Mayumi must have been watching for his car, because she was waiting for him just inside the hangar. She gave him a visitor’s badge, then led him to a large work area where the Cessna was being examined.
It was a sight that unexpectedly disturbed him. On the mountainside, he had seen the plane as little more than a vine-covered tomb and had been interested only in who and what had been buried within it. But now the plane itself was at center stage — Lefebvre’s means of escape held captive. Frank could not rid himself of the notion that he was viewing an autopsy. The Cessna stood gutted — stark, battered, lifeless — delayed from its final disposition for the sake of an examination. A lone corpse, its damage too demanding — distracting observers from the remaining traces of its former beauty.
What had failed? What had brought on the beginning of this end?
“It will be a while before we release any official report of our findings,” Mayumi said, “but I wanted you to know what we’ve learned right away.”
He heard the anxiety in her voice and gave her his full attention.
“We have many factors to consider in an accident investigation,” she said. “The pilot’s experience, his state of mind, his health. The plane itself, especially its maintenance.”
“The pilot is supposed to log all maintenance, right?”
“Yes. There are three required logbooks — the pilot’s log, the propeller log, and an engine and airframe log. If a pilot so much as replaces a screw on his plane, it should be logged. Some pilots are better than others at keeping records, of course. Lefebvre was meticulous. And, I should add, meticulous in the care of his aircraft. Routine maintenance was performed on or even ahead of schedule. He didn’t push a single component of this Cessna past its life expectancy. He took measures to ensure that this machine was in prime condition.”
“Irene — my wife — knew him. She told me he really loved flying, that it was what made him happiest. She also said he was cautious.”
“I can tell you that’s true without ever having met him. You could have guessed it from his logbooks. When we were first notified that he was missing, we looked up what records we could and talked to people who knew him — not just friends and family, but his mechanic, other pilots, and so on. So even before I read these logs, I already knew that he had many hours of both military and civilian flying experience — he knew what he was doing. The logbooks confirmed that, but they tell me more. They tell me that he wasn’t just a weekend flier. In fact, until the first week of June in the year of the crash, Lefebvre never let more than a few days go by without flying.”
“The first week of June?” Frank asked. “You’re sure of that?”
“Yes. There are no entries dated between June third and June twenty-first.”
“The attack on the Randolph family happened just before midnight on June third,” Frank said. “Lefebvre saved Seth Randolph’s life that night — in the early hours of June fourth, and he was with the boy almost constantly after that. Until Seth Randolph was killed — on the night of the twenty-second.”
“My God.”
“You’re saying he completely put aside flying during that period?”
“He completely put aside something he loved.” She gave a small shrug and said, “That’s not a term you’ll find in my report, of course, but — I’m trying to get a picture across to you. I want you to see the kind of care that went into this plane, the hours he spent in it — I’m telling you, it was a love affair. He put a lot more time into its upkeep than most men put into their marriages.” She smiled wryly. “Which may not be saying much. The man who taught me to fly told me that the reason pilots spend more time with their planes than their wives is that there are more women than P-51s.”
Frank laughed. “Oh, sorry. Being the female trainee of a man who valued vintage military aircraft more than women must have been a pain.”
“Nah,” she said. “I was used to it. He was my dad. Anyway, Irene was right — Lefebvre was a cautious flier. We know he checked the weather before he took off that night. We know he filled his tanks. He also had relatively sophisticated navigational equipment aboard this plane, and he clearly knew how to use it.”
“So you don’t believe it was pilot error.”
“That’s not why I told you all of that — but no, I don’t believe it was pilot error. I know why the plane crashed, but I wouldn’t have ruled out pilot error just because he loved to fly and did the maintenance. Pilots make mistakes — even experienced pilots. Or they become incapacitated — have heart attacks, strokes, you name it.”
“But you don’t think it was a health problem or you wouldn’t have paged me to come down here — so tell me, why did it crash?”
“Because someone else wanted it to.”
He said nothing — his mind quickly retracing steps over a path of implications he had hoped he wouldn’t have to consider seriously.
“You aren’t especially surprised, are you?” Mayumi said quietly.
He shook his head. “No, I guess I’m not. I’ve had nothing more to go on than the sort of thing you just talked about — gut feeling, mostly. I haven’t been able to make the pieces fit the way everyone in the LPPD seems to insist they do. Killing a teenage witness, going for a bribe — nothing in Lefebvre’s background matched up with that.” He paused, remembering his conversation with Yvette Nereault, of her unwavering faith in her brother. “Tell
