Night Fall

me, “Look into my eyes.”

I stopped walking and looked at her.

She said, “I can’t get their words or their faces out of my mind.”

I replied, “It might be a good idea if you did.”

We got to the Jeep, and I opened the door for Kate. I got in, started the engine, and backed onto the sand road. The scrub pine bounced back, taller and fuller than before I’d run over it. Trauma is good for wildlife. Survival of the fittest.

I joined a long line of vehicles leaving the memorial service.

Kate stayed quiet for a while, then said, “I get myself worked up when I come here.”

“I can see why.”

We made our way slowly toward the bridge.

I suddenly recalled, very distinctly, a conversation I’d had with Special Agent Kate Mayfield, not too long after we’d met. We were working the case of Asad Khalil, recently mentioned by my new friend, Liam. Mr. Khalil, a Libyan gentleman, had come to America with the purpose of murdering a number of U.S. Air Force pilots who had dropped some bombs on his country. Anyway, I guess I was complaining about the long hours or something, and Kate had said to me, “You know, when the ATTF worked the TWA explosion, they worked around the clock, seven days a week.”

I had responded, perhaps sarcastically, maybe presciently, “And that wasn’t even a terrorist attack.”

Kate had not replied, and I recalled thinking at the time that no one in the know replied to questions about TWA 800, and that there were still unanswered questions.

And here we were, a year later, now married, and she still wasn’t saying much. But she was telling me something.

I turned onto the bridge and crept along with the traffic. To the left was the Great South Bay, to the right Moriches Bay. Lights from the far shore sparkled on the water. Stars twinkled in the clear night sky, and the smell of salt air came through the open windows.

On a flawless summer night, very much like this one, exactly five years ago, a great airliner, eleven and a half minutes out of Kennedy Airport, on its way to Paris with 230 passengers and crew on board, exploded in midair, then fell in fiery pieces into the water, and set the sea ablaze.

I tried to imagine what that must have looked like to an eyewitness. Certainly, it would have been so far out of the realm of anything they’d ever seen that they couldn’t comprehend it or make any sense of it.

I said to Kate, “I once had an eyewitness to a shooting who said he’d been standing ten feet from the assailant, who shot the victim once from a range of five feet. In fact, a security camera had recorded the whole scene, which showed the witness at about thirty feet from the assailant, the assailant twenty feet from the victim, and three shots being fired.” I added, unnecessarily, “In cases of extreme and traumatic situations, the brain does not always comprehend what the eyes see or the ears hear.”

“There were hundreds of eyewitnesses.”

“The power of suggestion,” I said, “or false-memory syndrome, or the desire to please the interrogator, or in this case, a night sky and an optical illusion. Take your pick.”

“I don’t have to. The official report picked them all, with emphasis on optical illusion.”

“Yeah. I remember that.” In fact, the CIA had made a speculative reconstruction animation of the explosion, which they’d shown on TV, and which seemed to explain the streak of light. In the animation, as I recalled, the streak of light, which over two hundred people had seen rising toward the aircraft, was, according to the animation, actually comingfrom the aircraft as a result of burning fuel dropping from the ruptured fuel tank. The way this was explained in the animation was that it was not the initial explosion that caught the attention of the witnesses-it was thesound of the explosion that would have reached them fifteen to thirty seconds afterward, depending on where they were located. Then, when they looked up toward the sound, what they saw was the burning stream of jet fuel, which could be mistaken for a rocket or missile streaking upward. Also, the main fuselage of the aircraft actually rose, according to radar sightings, a few thousand feet after the explosion, and this burning section of the plane may also have looked like an ascending missile.

Optical illusion, according to the CIA. Sounded like bullshit to me, but the animation looked better than it sounded. I needed to see that video animation again.

And I needed to ask myself again, as I did five years ago, why it was the CIA who made the animation, and not the FBI. What was that all about?

We reached the far side of the bridge and got onto the William Floyd Parkway. I looked at my dashboard clock and said, “We won’t get back to the city until about eleven.”

“Later than that, if you want.”

“Meaning?”

“One more stop. But only if you want to.”

“Are we talking about a quickie in a hot-sheet motel?”

“We are not.”

I seemed to recall Liam Griffith strongly advising me not to make this case my off-duty hobby. He didn’t actually say what would happen if I didn’t take his advice, but I guessed it wouldn’t be pleasant.

“John?”

I needed to consider Kate’s career more than my own-she makes more money than I do. Maybe I should tell her what Griffith said.

She said to me, “Okay, let’s go home.”

I said to her, “Okay, one more stop.”

CHAPTER FOUR

We got off the William Floyd Parkway and headed east on Montauk Highway. Kate directed me through the pleasant village of Westhampton Beach.

We crossed a bridge over Moriches Bay, which led to a thin barrier island where we turned onto the only road, Dune Road, and headed west. New houses lined the road-oceanfront houses to the left, ocean view houses to the right.

Kate said, “This was not very developed five years ago.”

An offhand observation, perhaps, but more likely she meant this was a more secluded area at the time of the accident, and therefore, what I was about to see and hear should be put into that context.

Within ten minutes a sign informed me that I was entering Cupsogue Beach County Park, officially closed at dusk, but I was officially on unofficial police business, so I drove into the big parking field.

We passed through the parking field, and Kate directed me to a sand road, which was actually a nature trail, according to the sign that also said NO VEHICLES. The trail was partially blocked by a roll-up fence, so I put the Jeep into four-wheel drive and drove around the fence, my headlights illuminating the narrowing trail, which was now the width of the Jeep, flanked by scrub brush and dunes.

At the end of the trail, Kate said, “Turn down here, toward the beach.”

I turned between two dunes and down a gradual slope, nailing a scrub oak on the way.

“Be careful of the vegetation, please. Turn right at this dune.”

I turned at the edge of the dune, and she said, “Stop here.”

I stopped, and she got out.

I shut off the ignition and the lights and followed her.

Kate stood near the front of the Jeep and stared out at the dark ocean. She said, “Okay, on the night of July 17, 1996, a vehicle, most likely a four-wheel drive like yours, left the road and stopped right about here.”

“How do you know that?”

“A Westhampton village police report. Right after the plane went down, a police car, an SUV, was dispatched here, and the officer was told to walk down to the beach and see if he could be of any help. He arrived at eight- forty-sixP.M. ”

“What kind of help?”

“The exact location of the crash wasn’t known at that point. There was a possibility of survivors-people with