Say Goodbye Read Free Page A

had still been struggling up the densely wooded, forty-five-degree incline.
    “You gonna tell Rachel?” Harold was asking now. “Or do I have to?”
    “Oh, I think you should take all the credit.”
    “No, no, really, you’re the team leader. Besides, she won’t hurt you.”
    He stressed the last sentence more than he needed to. Kimberly understood what he meant. And of course he was right.
    She rubbed her side, and pretended she didn’t resent it.
             
    The problem had started on Saturday, when a 727 had taken off from the Charlotte, North Carolina, airport at 6:05 a.m. With three crew members and a belly full of mail, it was due to arrive in Atlanta at 7:20 a.m. Conditions were damp and foggy, with potential for ice.
    What exactly had gone wrong was left for the NTSB to sort out. But shortly after 7:15 a.m., during the initial approach to the runway, the 727 had descended, clipped the right wing on the top of a dense grove of trees, and careened into a farmer’s field, where it did an aviator’s version of a cartwheel, nailing one combine, two trucks, and a tractor, while raining metallic debris down a half-mile-long skid that ended with the fuselage bursting into flame.
    By the time emergency vehicles had arrived, the crew members had perished and all that was left was the minor detail of processing a mile-long debris field that involved three human remains, one plane, four pieces of farming equipment, and a blizzard’s worth of U.S. mail. The NTSB moved in to manage the scene. And per the “Memorandum of Understanding” between the NTSB and the FBI, Atlanta’s three ERTs were mobilized to assist with evidence collection.
    First thing FBI Senior Team Leader Rachel Childs had done was establish the perimeter. Rule of thumb for explosions and airline crashes—perimeter is set up fifty percent of the distance from the scene of the primary explosion to the farthest piece of evidence. So if the final piece of evidence is a hundred yards out, the perimeter is one hundred and fifty yards out. Or, in this case, the perimeter stretched two and a half miles long and half a mile wide. Not your normal the-butler-did-it-in-the-library-with-a-candlestick-leaving-behind-one-chalk-outline crime scene.
    And absolutely perfect for the FBI’s latest and greatest toy, the Total Station.
    Modified from the standard surveyor’s tool used by road crews, the Total Station was a laser-sighted gun, linked to special crime scene software. It turned data collection into literally a pull of a trigger, while spitting out up-to-the-minute 3-D models for death investigators to pore over at the end of each shift.
    The process was relatively simple, but labor intensive. First, dozens of crime scene technicians worked the scene, flagging each piece of evidence, then classifying it—plane part, human remain, personal effect. Next, a designated “rod man” placed a glass reflector on each piece of tagged evidence. Finally, the “gun operator” homed in on the reflector and pulled the trigger, entering the evidence into the software’s database from distances up to three miles away, while the “spotter/recorder” oversaw the operation, detailing and numbering each item entered into evidence.
    Everyone worked hard, and next thing you knew, a sprawling chaos of wreckage had been reduced into a neat computer model that almost made sense out of the vagaries of fate. It was enough to make any anal-retentive control freak happy, and Kimberly was guilty on both counts. She loved being rod man, though this time out, she’d had to content herself with recording duties instead.
    The command center came into view. Kimberly spotted a cluster of white shirts and navy blue suits—the NTSB officials, poring over a huge blueprint of the original 727; then a pool of Windex blue—half a dozen crime scene techs, still wearing their hazmat gear; and finally, a pinprick of burnished copper. Rachel Childs, redhead, ERT senior team leader,