“Right.” He grinned, then—studying my expression—he frowned. “Something wrong? You look like you just saw a ghost.”
“I just heard an echo,” I said. “Somebody else used that word recently, exactly the same way—said jumping out of the Citation that night would’ve been pretty fascinating. I don’t suppose you know the NTSB crash investigator, Maddox? Any chance he was an Air America kicker too?”
“Pat Maddox? ‘Mad Dog’ Maddox?” Hickock’s expression darkened. “Hell, yeah, I know him. And hell no, he wasn’t a kicker. He was a Marine Corps pilot from ’Nam. He got scrubbed—given a fake discharge, civilian papers, a bogus contract—and sent to Laos as a so-called civilian. Mad Dog loved the black-ops stuff, the CIA dirty work. He used to call Richard ‘Boy Scout’ because he was such a straight arrow. Me, he called ‘Mild Bill.’ Maddox was a hard-ass. An asshole. But hey, it was war, and war is hell.”
“He came from the marines? You know what he flew in Vietnam?”
“Sure. He talked about it all the damn time. He flew F-4s.”
“Jets?”
“Hell, yeah. The F-4 Phantom was a supersonic attack fighter. Mad Dog loved to wave his top-gun dick in everybody’s face.”
I hated the image, but I liked the information. “So if he was flying dogfights at Mach 2 or whatever,” I said, “he’d have no trouble at the controls of a mild-mannered civilian jet, right?”
“Well, every aircraft’s different, but if he studied up on the pilot’s handbook and the panel . . .” He trailed off, and I could see him working to connect the dots that I had just begun to connect myself. “Let me get this straight,” he wheezed. “Are you thinking—”
I interrupted. “Maddox told me the Citation was like a Dodge Caravan,” I said excitedly. “Almost as if he’d flown one and found it kinda boring.”
Hickock held up a hand. “Slow down, slow down. Do you really, seriously—”
I cut him off again. “Fighter pilots get parachute training, too, right?”
Hickock furrowed his brow, then gave a grunt—“Huh”—and began to nod, slowly and tentatively at first, then more decisively. “Mad Dog loved the edgy stuff. Survival skills, commando training, inserting assassin teams. All that macho Rambo shit.”
“He was limping,” I went on. “The day after the crash. He was wearing a knee brace. He said he’d had surgery, but I bet he hadn’t—that’d be easy to find out. I bet he twisted his knee when he jumped out of the Citation—came down hard, or crooked, or something. Came down right over there!” I pointed toward the five burned tubes jutting from the sand. “Those are signal flares. A landing zone. A target. Somebody was waiting here. Maddox phoned just before takeoff, or maybe the guy here just listened for the sound of the jet. He lit the flares, the jet turned, and Maddox made the jump. Then—being the crash investigator assigned to this region—he was in a perfect position to cover his tracks.” Hickock rubbed his jaw, considering the scenario.
At that moment my watch began to beep, and when I looked at it and saw the time—two forty-five—I felt a wave of panic. “Oh shit,” I said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Maddox. He’s on his way.”
“On his way where?”
“His way here.”
“Here here?” I nodded. “Christ. When?”
“Now,” I said. “Actually, twenty or thirty minutes from now. That beep from my watch was reminding me to finish up at the prison and head back here to meet him.”
“But why, Doc? Why the hell’d you call him, if you think he killed Richard?”
“I didn’t think that when I called him,” I pointed out. “I called him two hours ago. Before you told me all this stuff about him and Richard. Before I put the pieces together.” He still looked confused and mad. “Look, I called to tell him I’d found the spot where Richard’s killer came down when he bailed out that night. Maddox offered to dash down from L.A. to take a look.” But as I said it, I realized that taking a look was the last thing Maddox needed, because Maddox had seen this spot already, at least three times: first, when he’d scouted it out; later, when he’d placed the flares in the sand, probably the afternoon before the crash; finally, when he’d floated down through the night sky toward the fiery marker, lit by an accomplice with a lighter, a bad nicotine addiction, and a getaway car. No, Maddox wasn’t coming to see what I’d found. Maddox was coming to kill me and scrub the site.
“We gotta get out of here,” I told Hickock. “Before he gets here.”