“No problem.” We were heading toward the beach on this warm, sunny day in July, but we weren’t going to sunbathe or swim. In fact, we were going to a beachside memorial service for the victims of Flight 800. This service is held every year on the July 17thanniversary date of the crash, and this was the fifth anniversary. I’d never been to this service, and there was no reason why I should. But, as I said, Kate had worked the case and that’s why, according to Kate, she attended every year. It occurred to me that over five hundred law enforcement people worked that case, and I was sure they didn’t attend every, or maybe any, memorial service. But good husbands take their wives at their word. Really.
I asked Kate, “What did you do on that case?”
She replied, “I mostly interviewed eyewitnesses.”
“How many?”
“I don’t remember. Lots.”
“How many witnesses saw this?”
“Over six hundred.”
“No kidding? What do you think actually caused the crash?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss the case.”
“Why not? It’s officially closed, and officially it was an accident brought about by a mechanical failure that caused the center fuel tank to explode. So?”
She didn’t reply, so I reminded her, “I have a top secret clearance.”
She said, “Information is given on a need-to-know basis. Why do you need to know?”
“I’m nosy.”
She looked out the windshield and said, “You need to get off at Exit 68.”
I got off at Exit 68 and headed south on the William Floyd Parkway. “William Floyd is a rock star. Right?”
“He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.”
“Are you sure?”
“You’re thinking of Pink Floyd,” she said.
“Right. You have a good memory.”
“Then why can’t I remember why I married you?” she asked.
“I’m funny. And sexy. And smart. Smart is sexy. That’s what you said.”
“I don’t remember saying that.”
“You love me.”
“I do love you. Very much.” She added, “But you’re a pain in the ass.”
“You’re not exactly easy to live with either, sweetheart.”
She smiled.
Ms. Mayfield was fourteen years younger than I, and the small generation gap was sometimes interesting, sometimes not.
I’ll mention here that Kate Mayfield is rather nice-looking, though it was her intelligence that first attracted me, of course. What I noticed second was her blond hair, deep blue eyes, and Ivory Soap skin. Very clean-cut. She works out a lot at a local health club and goes to classes called Bikram yoga, spin, step, and kick boxing, which she sometimes practices in the apartment, aiming her kicks at my groin, without actually connecting, though the possibility is always there. She seems to be obsessed with physical fitness while I am obsessed with firing my 9mm Glock at the pistol range. I could compile a long list of things we don’t have in common-music, food, drinks, attitudes toward the job, position of the toilet seat, and so forth-but for some reason that I can’t comprehend, we’re in love.
I went back to the previous subject and said, “The more you tell me about Flight 800, the more inner peace you’ll find.”
“I’ve told you everything I know. Please drop the subject.”
“I can’t testify against you. I’m your husband. That’s the law.”
“No, it isn’t. We’ll talk later. This car could be bugged.”
“This car is not bugged.”
“You could be wearing a wire,” she said. “I’ll need to strip-search you later.”
“Okay.”
We both laughed. Ha ha. End of discussion.
In truth, I had no personal or professional interest in the Flight 800 case beyond what any normal person would have who had followed this very tragic and peculiar accident in the news. The case had problems and inconsistencies from the beginning, which was why, five years later, it was still a hot, newsworthy topic.
In fact, two nights earlier, Kate had tuned in to several news programs to follow the story of a group called FIRO-Flight 800 Independent Researchers Organization-who’d just released some of their new findings, which did not match those of the government’s official conclusion.
This group was made up mostly of credible people who worked on the accident investigation for various civilian agencies, plus friends and family of the dead passengers and crew. Plus, of course, the usual conspiracy theory nuts.
FIRO was basically giving the government a hard time, which I appreciated on a visceral level.
They were also media-savvy, so, to coincide with this fifth anniversary of the crash, FIRO taped interviews with eight eyewitnesses to the crash, some of whom I’d seen on TV with my channel-surfing wife two nights earlier. The witnesses made a very compelling case that TWA Flight 800 had been blown out of the sky by a missile. The government had no comment, except to remind everyone that the case was solved and closed. Mechanical failure. End of story.
I continued south toward the Atlantic Ocean. It was a little after 7P.M., and the memorial service, according to Kate, started at 7:30 and ended at 8:31, the time of the crash.
I asked Kate, “Did you know anyone who died?”
“No.” After a moment, she added, “I got to know some of the family members.”
“I see.” Kate Mayfield, as best as I can tell after a year of marriage, keeps her job and her personal feelings separate. Therefore, her taking half a day AL-which is FBI talk for annual leave, and which everyone else calls vacation-to attend a memorial service for people she didn’t know seemed not completely understandable.
Kate caught the drift of my questions and my silence and said, “Sometimes I need to feel human. This job… sometimes it’s comforting to discover that what you thought was an act of evil was just a tragic accident.”
“Right.”
I won’t say at this point that I was getting a lot more curious about this case, but having spent the better part of my life nosing around for a living, I made a mental note to call a guy named Dick Kearns.
Dick was a homicide cop I’d worked with for years before he retired from the NYPD, then went over to the Anti-Terrorist Task Force as a contract agent, which is what I am. Dick, like Kate, worked the TWA case as a witness interviewer.
The FBI started this joint task force back in 1980 as a response to bombings in New York City by the Puerto Rican group called the FALN as well as bombings by the Black Liberation Army. The world has changed, and now probably ninety percent of the Anti-Terrorist Task Force is involved with Mideast terrorism. That’s where the action is, and that’s where I am, and where Kate is. I had a great second career ahead of me if I lived long enough.
The way this joint task force works is that the FBI is able to tap into the manpower of the NYPD, getting retired and active-duty cops to do a lot of the legwork, surveillance, and routine stuff for the FBI so that their overpaid and over-educated agents could be free to do really clever stuff.
The mixing of these two very different cultures did not work well at first, but over the years a sort of working relationship has developed. I mean, look, Kate and I fell in love and got married. We’re the poster couple for the ATTF.
Point is, when the Feds let the cops in the house to do manual labor, the cops got access to lots of information that used to be shared only among the FBI people. Ergo, Dick Kearns, my brother in blue, would be willing to give me more information than my FBI wife.
And why, one might ask, would I want that information? Certainly I didn’t think I was going to solve the mystery of what happened to TWA Flight 800. Half a thousand men and women had worked on the case for years, the case was five years old, it was closed, and the official conclusion actually seemed the most logical: a loose or frayed electrical wire in a fuel indicator, located in the center fuel tank, sparked and ignited jet fuel vapors that blew
