Page 10 of Gryphon

He twisted from the front seat to look behind him. Jeremy and Miranda sat in the back seat of the police car discussing the ISASI lectures. Holly and Tad had ended up together in the other car without his noticing.

Stop being paranoid, Munroe.

Though for every single woman since Sister Mary Pat at the orphanage until joining Miranda’s team, being paranoid about women had served him very well.

The one time he’d let his guard down, he’d almost eaten the wrong end of a shotgun. There’d been a little family spat that had wiped out half of the Denver Giovanni mafia family—including the incredibly lustful Violetta who he’d unwittingly been helping to defraud her older brothers. Then Mike’s FBI controller’s bosses had stepped in to wipe out the other half, again almost taking him down as a not entirely innocent bystander.

Violetta had almost out-conned his best con, until it cost her life.

The next day Mike had been dragged into the NTSB and met Holly. And, against his usual nature, had flown straight ever since.

Dealing with Holly and Tad flirting was his payback for toeing the line?

Well, he sure didn’t need that garbage.

6

“Looks like a war zone,” Tad whispered.

“I’ve never been to a war zone,” Miranda looked around. “It looks like an airplane crash to me.”

“Man, don’t know if I’m cut out for this shit.”

Fjällberget ski resort was a small area cleared among the thick trees. The hill’s prominence stood only a hundred and thirty meters above the surrounding topography. There was a single lift climbing a half kilometer through the dark conifers and three trails winding down. Typical for the rolling landscape of central Sweden. It was Norway that claimed all the high mountains and rugged slopes. The most notable things about Fjällberget were that it lay beneath no regular flight path and that there was a Boeing 737 that had planted nose-first in the middle of the primary ski run then flopped down onto its belly.

A line of wide-spaced high-pressure sodium lights mounted on the ski lift support poles cast a yellowish glow across the snowfield. A snowcat had been driven up near the wreck and its high-intensity white lights chopped the wreckage into sharply delineated areas of sun-bright and deepest shadow.

Miranda turned away before she saw more.

Not yet ready to study the crash, she kept her back to it—and Tad. Seeing Tad where Andi was supposed to be…hurt. Right in the center of her chest.

First, she checked her vest to make sure it wasn’t pinching her there. It wasn’t. Then she verified that every tool resided in its proper pocket. Then she pulled out a headlamp and turned it on.

As soon as she’d chosen a fresh notebook and labeled it with LuftSvenska Boeing 737-700 and the date, Jeremy began reading out the weather data from his handheld meter.

“Three degrees Celsius below freezing. No wind. Winter-low humidity of twenty-seven percent.” Just as she’d trained him, he kept the white clouds of his breath directed to the side as he took the measurements to not skew the readings.

“Dark,” she looked around and recorded it dutifully along with his data.

“Local sunset at 1450 hours today,” Jeremy announced after accessing his phone.

She’d forgotten they used to work this way. None of the others had adapted as neatly to her methods as Jeremy had. Or hadn’t she let them? Had she kept Andi at a distance? Is that what had happened between them?

Before she had considered that question, Jeremy began describing the sloping terrain and the low altitude of the crash site. The jet should have been at thirty thousand feet, not three hundred meters. Yet it wasn’t.

The next sphere of her investigation method after weather and terrain was the extent of the debris field. It had—

“Ms. Chase? I’m Kurt Anderson, the lead investigator for the SHK.” Like most older Swedes, his English sounded slightly stilted. The younger ones could have been American-born by their accents.

She looked at his extended hand. He wore heavy gloves and she wore light ones. She still didn’t want to shake hands.

Meg was looking up at her expectantly.

Miranda sighed and shook Kurt’s gloved hand as briefly as possible, hoping that satisfied Meg. “My name is Miranda Chase. I’m the Investigator-in-Charge for the NTSB.”

“Thank you for coming so quickly. We have focused so far on body recovery,” he waved toward long lines of body bags laid out on the snow along the track of the ski lift. The black bags absorbed the yellow night lights until they looked like rectangular black holes in the hillside. It seemed that should be a metaphor for something, but she wasn’t sure what.

“Did you photograph the bodies in position?”

---