Page 15 of Gryphon

“I didn’t say a thing.” He raised his hands in surrender as if she was about to shoot him. In one hand he held his tablet computer, in the other, a hard drive that must have come from the Quick Access Recorder. His gaze flickered downward for a second.

She followed the line and saw that her dagger was no longer in its sheath, but instead clenched in her fist. Very slowly and carefully, she slipped it into its sheath, pushing down to make sure it was fully seated.

“You know…” Jeremy glanced after Mike’s retreating back, then apparently thought better of it. Instead, he waggled his computer at her. “Wanna hear something weird? According to this, the pilots didn’t say a single word once they flew clear of local air traffic control in Stockholm. From climb out to crash, fourteen minutes, not a word.”

9

“I need the pilots’ bodies,” Holly sprinted over to Ski Patrol Girl with Tad lumbering along close behind. She’d show Mike who was paying attention to the details.

In fact…

She pulled off a glove to put a thumb and finger into her mouth and unleashed a shrill whistle. Mike’s headlamp turned in her direction. She waved for him to come along. When he didn’t respond, she noticed that she was standing in yet another of the heavy shadows cast across the bright snow. She aimed her headlamp at her own arm so that he’d see it and waved again—following it with the military double fist-pump of hurry that she’d taught him.

Mike bent to scoop up Meg, then he and Miranda headed in her direction.

Jeremy had crawled out through the broken cockpit window and arrived on their heels.

“The pilots are—” Ski Patrol Girl looked at the long lines of body bags. Obviously not a clue. Her face pale, even by blonde Swedish standards. Probably trying not to toss her cookies. Another airhead conquest for Mike, an easy target because she’d obviously need consoling after this. Except, knowing Mike, what he’d probably been doing was giving her a chance to vent followed by a pep talk. Damn man was inscrutable.

“Do the bags’ tags have seat numbers?” Jeremy leaned in to inspect one where he stood downslope of them. “Nope.”

“They’re laid out by seat number,” the girl said. “Each row of bags is a row of seats.”

Holly looked down and saw that they were indeed laid out in a neat pattern: three bags, a gap for an aisle, and three more bags.

“And you’re going in the wrong direction. The flight crew’s bodies would be in the two body bags at the upslope end of the line. We’ve been putting the cabin crew where we located them. Those off to the side include severed limbs that could not be identified to a particular seat and are grouped by general area in the cabin.”

Holly felt sick. She hadn’t had to gather up unknown body parts since her team’s deaths. But the girl didn’t even blanch; her skin must be normally that pale.

Not so airheaded.

She headed upslope, trying not to count the rows or acknowledge that the body in each one had been alive and breathing this morning. It wasn’t very often that they reached a crash site while the corpses were still there. So, maybe she wouldn’t blame the ski patroller for her blanched complexion. A bag lay in the center aisle area, probably one of the cabin crew.

There were a few gaps. Unrecovered bodies? No, they were Swedes, they would have worked methodically through the plane. Were the empty seats actually empty, or some numb-nuts out of his seat during a pending crash?

No scattered bags. The cabin crew had gotten the passengers seated and strapped in, for what little good it had done them.

They had to know they were going down; it had still been daylight at the time of the crash and someone must have looked out the window.

At the head of the line, she saw true proof of idiocy; a body bag lay all by itself on the forward right side ahead of the front row—some fool had chosen the lavatory as his final place of refuge. Not even a seatbelt in there.

Past the last forward cabin crew member, where the fold-down seat would have been, lay the two flight crew members.

“What are you thinking, Holly?” Jeremy knelt beside her.

She didn’t answer, instead pulled down the long zippers, then folded the sides back. As she’d expected, one was covered in blood, the other one not.

Mike had arrived. “I know that look.”

Holly glanced up at him.

“DOA.” He was studying the one who hadn’t bled much.

Holly knew he was right. The copilot, so bloody she’d first thought that he’d been the one murdered, wasn’t the issue. It was the pilot, with barely a drop on him. There were plenty of lacerations from the crash, but they hadn’t bled much.

Why?

Because the pilot’s heart had already stopped beating. No pumping blood. DOA—dead on arrival.

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