Gus bobbled his head to say, Maybe it was bad luck. Maybe it wasn’t.
“Your nephew caught a jump seat on a charter to New York the next day. We don’t yet know why. Gaston says the switch was Charlie’s idea. Said he just felt like going to New York. Apparently he was like that, though—impulsive.”
“He was young.”
Gus thought about that.
“He may also have had some boundary issues with women.”
Birch made a face as if to say, That’s not a real thing.
“What are you gonna do? He was a handsome guy. His whole life he basically skated by on a smile. If he was my kid I’da taken him out to the woodshed and beat some discipline into him, but his mama thought the sun rose and set up his ass. But I did what I could, made some calls, got him into pilot training at the guard, helped him find his footing.”
Gus nodded. He was less interested in knowing what kind of person the copilot was, and more interested in understanding his physical and mental state on the day of the event. Planes don’t crash because pilots grew up without fathers. Backstory gives you context, but it doesn’t tell you what you really need to know. Which is, what happened in the eighteen minutes between the wheels leaving the tarmac and the plane touching down in the ocean? Were there any mechanical faults with the aircraft?
As far as he was concerned, the rest was just something to do while they waited for a real lead.
Across from him, Birch nodded to his aide. Time to wrap it up. He stood, extended his hand.
“If this thing looks like it’s going to reflect badly on Charlie, I want you to tell me. I’m not asking you to do anything illegal, just a heads-up. I’d like to protect the boy’s mother as much as possible.”
Gus stood, shook the senator’s hand.
“Of course, sir,” he said. “Thank you for seeing me.”
Now, in a high-rise conference room, Gus watches himself in the glass, tuning out the suited men around him. They too are filling time. Right now the investigation is a game of Clue where the cards are missing. He needs a plane. Until then, all they can do is guess.
Hex bumps Gus’s arm. He realizes O’Brien is talking to him.
“What?”
“I said I got a warrant,” says O’Brien.
“For what?” Gus asks.
“The paintings. We seized them from Burroughs’s studio about an hour ago.”
Gus rubs his eyes. He knows from O’Brien’s file that he is the son of a boarding school principal, Andover or Blair Academy, he can’t remember which. This seems like as good way as any to design a judgment machine, one whose function is to police and punish—which is clearly how O’Brien sees his role in life.
“The man saved a child,” he says.
“He was in the right place at the right time, and I’m wondering why.”
Gus tries to keep his temper under control.
“I’ve done this job for twenty years,” he says, “and no one has ever described being in a plane crash as being in the right place at the right time.”
O’Brien shrugs.
“I gave you the chance to make this your idea. Now I’m moving on it myself.”
“Just—bring them to the hangar,” Gus tells him, then, before O’Brien can protest. “And you’re right. We should look. I would have done it differently, but it’s done now. So bring them to the hangar. And then pack your bags, because you’re off the task force.”
“What?”
“I brought you on because Colby said you were his best man, but we’re not going to do this. It’s my investigation, and how we treat the survivors and the suspects is a tone that I set. So it’s done now. You seized artwork created by a man who may one day get a medal of honor from the president. You’ve decided he’s hiding something, or maybe you just can’t accept that life is full of random coincidence, that not everything that seems meaningful is meaningful, but the truth is, it’s not your decision to make. So pack your shit. I’m giving you back to the FBI.”
O’Brien stares at him, jaw tight, then stands slowly.
“We’ll see,” he says, and walks out.
Chapter 22
Painting #3
You are underwater. Below you there is only darkness. High above, you see light, a gradual gray hinting toward white. There is texture to the murk, what appear to be black crosses peppering your field of vision. They are not obvious at first, these slashes of black, like something has been drawn and crossed out, but as your eyes adjust to the painting you realize they are everywhere, not simply brush technique, but content.
In the bottom right corner of the frame you can make out something shiny, a black object catching some glint of light from the surface. The letters USS are visible, the final S sinking below the edge of frame. Seeing it draws your eye to something else, cresting the very bottom of the canvas, the tip of something triangular, something primordial rising.
It is in this moment you realize that the crosses are bodies.
Chapter 23
TRANSCRIPT