Page 11 of Gryphon

“Each one. To all appearances, they were killed by blunt force trauma from the impact of—”

“No, I don’t want to know.”

“But—”

“Kurt,” Mike stopped him. “It isn’t that she’s squeamish. It’s that she likes to approach a crash in a logical fashion.”

“And that doesn’t include the victims?”

“Not yet.”

At least Mike understood. She was never happy when another team was involved. They always had their own Safety Management System methodologies, even other NTSB teams. One of the conference talks had quantified the usage by sixteen different agencies of eight distinct SMS’s—many agencies using multiple methods.

She knew that no one else used her own Miranda’s Nested Sphere New Methodology, MNSNM. She’d added the New so that it would form a palindrome but the S and N blocked her attempts to make the entire title symmetrical about its center. Rotating it one-eighty created WNSNW, but her attempts to change the words to match had yet to prove noteworthy.

Her NTSB mentor had developed MNSNM specifically for how her autism needed to approach an investigation. She adhered to it whenever possible: environment, debris perimeter, debris field, airframe, electronic records, and finally human factors. She’d ultimately added an outermost Conjectural Sphere of Causality, CSC (also an asymmetric palindrome), to temporarily store various hypotheses that emerged from the other spheres of the investigation.

Despite concerted effort, she’d never managed to create an acceptable acronym for the spheres themselves. She’d come close, but then the addition of the CSC had thrown out earlier efforts. CEPFARF served no identifiable purpose and sounded silly even to her.

She’d never worked with the Swedes on an investigation before and had no experience of their process at all. Did they use Reason’s Swiss Cheese method, SHEL(L), or one of so many others? Removing the bodies first, she knew people liked to do that. The team from SHK had photographed them, which many failed to realize offered crucial analysis information. But were they the right type of photographs?

“Mike, find their photographer, then inspect and copy what they have. Make sure they’re what I need. Jeremy, you can begin photographing the wreck.” He knew what she liked, even better than Mike did.

He began conferring with Kurt of the SHK.

“Tad and Holly, you can start reviewing the debris field itself.”

“Really?” Holly’s voice had a tone that had Meg looking up at her.

“What’s the deal?” Tad asked.

Holly didn’t answer him directly. “Are you sure, Miranda? Isn’t that out of order for you?”

“No, I can see they’ve already staked the debris field.” There was a line of orange tape spread on the snow, with occasional ski poles jabbed into it. “I’ll go see if I have any adjustments to the perimeter marking. Only one person should be needed for that.”

As she turned to go, a Volvo XC90 painted in the same style as LuftSvenska’s airplanes skidded into the parking lot and nearly sideswiped one of the police cars. A tall man clambered out, shrugged a parka on over an expensive suit without zipping it, and didn’t bother with gloves or a hat over his silvered hair. He ducked under the tape line the police had erected to keep people out.

“Who’s in charge here?” he demanded.

Kurt of the SHK looked in her direction. No, that wasn’t correct. Hadn’t he heard? She’d been very careful.

“I’m the Investigator-in-charge for the NTSB.” No one laughed as if her repeating the phrase was funny—perhaps neurodiverse people didn’t have the knack for doing that. But her point was that the NTSB always remained subordinate when called to assist in a foreign country. She decided to try a clarification to reinforce the correct status. “Only for the NTSB. Not for the SHK.”

It must have worked as Kurt nodded, then turned to the new arrival. “Hello, Rolm, haven’t seen you in a while.” Kurt pushed back his parka’s hood as he greeted the man, which earned him a smile in return. They shook hands in a way very different from the one Miranda had managed.

Why didn’t her greetings ever earn her a smile? Was it the handshake? A secret handshake among neurotypicals? She’d never heard of one but that didn’t mean that one, or perhaps several, didn’t exist.

She pulled out her personal notebook and turned to a fresh page. It only took a few moments to develop a ranking and coding system for categorizing handshakes. She then charted the two she’d witnessed, her own and Rolm’s with Kurt.

Kurt made introductions, interrupting her before she completed her notes. “Rolm Lindgren, this is Miranda Chase from the American NTSB. Ms. Chase, Rolm is the president of the airline.”

“Oh. Well, at least your pilots were neat.”

He glared at her. She’d learned that meant she’d said something wrong. Clarifying often repaired such conversational issues.

“Rather than skimming in, as if they were fighting for recovery or a long sliding crash, they impacted almost directly perpendicular to the slope. It saves us from looking for the rest of the plane.”

A glance revealed no identifiable change in his overall expression.

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