Deadly Reckoning

Deadly Reckoning

  By Marian Jensen

  www.miningcitymysteries.com

  Published by Marian Jensen

  Copyright © 2013 Marian Jensen

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used ficticiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Terri Porter

  Book Design by Luanne Thibault

  Dedication

  To Butte, “the most unplastic place in America,”

  and what’s left of the Wild West

  Acknowledgements

  It may not take a village to write a book but it feels like it takes a similar kind of support to see one to publication. The first person to give me the confidence to call myself a writer was Liz Trupin-Pulli, my one time agent who I met at the still fabulous Antioch Writers’ Workshop. She invested time and effort in me and did her best to place my work in an increasingly turbulent publishing world. Without her encouragement, I would not have continued to write.

  Likewise I must acknowledge my writerly buddies coast to coast (women, you know who you are). You read drafts and offered critiques, cheerleaded, and commiserated, and never once did any of you shake your head or say, “Give it up.” Many of you still struggle to write, when so often keeping body and soul together is a full time endeavor. I honor the creative spirit in each of you as it certainly inspires me.

  In Butte, Sheriff John Walsh; Coroner Lee LeBreche; and Butte Weekly Publisher, Norlene Holt, provided me with factual information and helped ‘keep it real.’ Also, thanks to pilots Hugh Dresser and David Daughtery who generously flew me around the twenty plus mountain ranges of Southwestern Montana and never snapped at me once when I asked questions like, “If you had to bring this plane down right now, where would you put it?”

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  About the Author

  Map of Uptown Butte

  Chapter 1

  When Chance Dawson saw the Cessna go down, he thought he was hallucinating. Maybe if the street hadn’t been empty, he could have asked someone, “Did you see that? That plane disappeared from the horizon.”

  But it was Labor Day weekend, which in Butte, Montana, translated into the last decent opportunity to get out of town before the cold nights put an end to the short summer. The town was deserted.

  He had taken to the road on his aging Bianchi alone as the sun peeked over the East Ridge, the temperature a balmy thirty-eight degrees. Adrienne had snuggled under the covers, and begged off. “You are a handsome rogue,” she said when he had tickled her feet. Kissing her all the way up her spine, he declared that her years in California had softened her. Then he ventured out for the twelve-mile ride around the town’s perimeter unaccompanied.

  His chain busted at the top of Park Street, which was where he had propped his bicycle in front of the Marcus Daly statue, a tribute to the Copper King’s long lost mining empire. He had begun to rummage for his chain tool when the drone of a plane in the distance distracted him, a single engine Cessna making a wide circle above Uptown. He recognized most of the local aircraft, but this one he didn’t know. Some out-of-towner had stopped to refuel in Butte probably, and then do a little low-level sightseeing before continuing its journey.

  Maybe he would go flying later himself, he had thought. For sure, his bike ride was over. The chain tool was missing in action.

  Across the skyline, he had caught another glimpse of the Cessna just north of the Mother Lode Theater. The plane had seemed suspended in air—like the miniature models from the numerous bedroom ceilings of his childhood. Then with a sudden dip of the wing, the Cessna had careened downward and disappeared as quickly as a bleep on a radar screen.

  The faint wail of a siren interrupted his attempt to order events. He focused his attention on the direction of the unfolding emergency. Then he broke into a trot eastward down Park Street, propelled by a mixture of apprehension and excitement. The anxiety of what every pilot had imagined consciously or in his nightmares—crashing his plane—gripped him. What if someone he knew was in that plane? What if it had come down hard?

  Another siren joined the first, and Chance looked around to see if anybody could give him a lift. Not a single car went by. Park Street might as well be in a ghost town.

  He reached the Islamic Center, an adobe duplex recently acquired by the college’s Arabic student group, and boosted the disabled bicycle over the wrought-iron fence that fronted the house, and tossed his helmet down next to it. He grabbed his digital camera from the seat bag and tried not to think of himself as an ambulance chaser as he raced down three long blocks of Park and turned south on Excelsior.

  His thoughts were already at the crash scene, not on the best route to get there—or where exactly “there” was. He turned east again onto Mercury, his heart thumping as he tried to figure out where the plane would have come down.

  He had heard nothing that sounded like he thought a plane crash should sound. Maybe the pilot had been able to ditch safely after all. He could have steered the plane down onto Washington or maybe Idaho Street. Either would provide a wide enough straightaway for a small plane to land—provided, of course, no unsuspecting traffic got in its way, and the pilot had the skill to maneuver the downward slope and stay under the utility wires.

  Mercury Street opened up into Chester Steele Park, and Chance welcomed the flat ball field. A gust of wind cooled his clammy cycling jersey as he ran diagonally across the outfield and then east again up Silver Street. The terrain rose in front of him but he ran easily, the upper floors of St. James Hospital visible to his right. At least if anyone was hurt, the emergency room was nearby.

  He crested the block, lined with aging miners’ cottages and bungalows, as a fire engine sped by, heading south. Chance turned in the same direction, but didn’t have to go far.

  A half block beyond, at the corner of Washington and Porphyry, the nightmare became reality. Regal with its red and gold trim, a shiny Cessna 180 rested upright, its nose buried in the splintered siding of a small, square house. The sight of the crash was surreal—like a cow atop a barn roof, or a pickup poking halfway through a billboard.

  Chance doubled over with his hands on his knees. His chest heaved as he willed himself to catch his breath after what seemed like a mile-long sprint.

  “If a plane crashes into your house, you gotta wonder if the good Lord is trying to tell you something,” a man standing nearby muttered. The woman next to him hovered with her hand to her mouth, her eyes tense with fear as she watched the police and other emergency workers moving back and forth around the wreckage.

  The Cessna’s white fuselage with its high wings jutting out from the clapboard dwelling was a relief to Chance. A small plane’s gas tanks rest in the wings which, had they been connected to the underside of the fuselage like some models, might have split open. Spilling fuel across its path, the inevitable explosion could have engulfed half a dozen nearby homes with flames by now.

  Chance maneuvered cautiously
toward the yellow emergency tape that already circled the house and the adjacent, vacant corner lot. Walking toward the barricade, he shuddered to see the track of the tail dragger—the plane’s back wheel—which had snagged a roll of chain-link fencing and pulled it across the lot.

  His stomach became queasy thinking about the pilot’s reaction in those last few seconds. Had he tried to catch that fencing? Quick thinking if he had. The drag had probably helped to slow the plane and lessen its impact. It was possible, if not slightly miraculous, if no one had gotten hurt after all.

  He turned and scanned the skyline to the north, looking back at the dome of the synagogue, the spire of St. Patrick’s and the Mother Lode Theater, and shook his head in amazement that the plane had missed all three.

  The Cessna probably needed about five or six hundred feet to land on flat ground. With the gentle incline of Washington Street, the plane would have needed twice, three times as much landing distance, depending on the airspeed when it came down. If the pilot lived to tell this one, he might want to contact Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

  Chance tried to imagine what he might have done in his own plane, a smaller Cessna 152. A, if he had sensed even the slightest possible problem, he would have turned the plane toward the sprawling open space that surrounds Butte. Hell, anything west of where they stood now was wide-open along the interstate toward Rocker. Novice fliers always practiced there to avoid potential disasters involving any structures, let alone houses and their occupants.

  And B, if he thought he was going down so fast he might have to ditch, he could have at least tried to land on Park Street, the boulevard that ran east to west. Even Granite could have worked. Both had level stretches and were much wider. And on a Sunday morning, the traffic would have been light. Not that it would have been that simple, or that he would actually have been able to pull off such a landing. The utility wires and the traffic lights would have been damn tricky, but at least you would have flat ground.

  An older couple stood on the steps of their house across the street, the man with his arm around his wife’s shoulders. She hugged herself tightly, as though trying to contain her trembling. “Dear God, it could have been our house,” she said.

  Chance asked if he could stand on the bumper of the pickup parked in front of their house to get another angle of the scene. Even if the Mining City Messenger didn’t run gore on the front page, they would be hard-pressed to deny the crash was newsworthy.

  Chance lined up a photograph, wondering where the plane had come from. What was it doing flying that low over uptown Butte anyway, especially if it had just taken off from the airport? It had gotten into some kind of trouble that was for sure, but how? He scanned the handful of spectators for possible witnesses.

  “Did you see the crash?” Chance asked a trio of kids standing just beyond the wooden horse barriers the cops had set up.

  “We were walking home from Mass,” a redheaded ten-year-old said, standing on his tiptoes to take in as much of the scene as he could. “You should have heard it—kaboom! Mom says the Lord looks after the ones that look after themselves. Think it’s going to explode?” the kid asked, his voice ripe with anticipation as Chance moved away.

  Still no sign of who was in the plane, although Chance could see a cluster of uniforms wading through the debris of house siding and twisted pieces of gutter. He could see now that the bottom half of the house was brick, which explained why the whole side of the wall hadn’t collapsed.

  For once, he wished he had carried his cell phone on his bike ride. He hated talking on the phone, although he had to admit they could be damned handy. He could already be making calls to find out who owned the plane.

  Silver Bow Aviation was like a home away from home. Tyler Fitzgerald, who managed the place, might even know the plane’s owner, especially if the Cessna had stopped to refuel. If Tyler didn’t know, his mechanic, Kev, might have helped them gas up. He usually subbed as lineman on the weekends to accommodate the occasional weekend flyer who might want to fuel up.

  Either way, Chance would find out. He took a picture of the tail number, still visible even though the cockpit and most of the fuselage lay hidden in a six-foot hedge of lilac bushes next to the house. He scoped the scene for the best shot of both the house and the wrecked plane so bizarrely joined—like Siamese twins of different species.

  He couldn’t help feeling the excitement the story would generate, especially if he could get a line on the plane’s owner, who hopefully had survived the landing.

  “Mom says maybe Mr. Mandic should have been at church too.”

  Chance smiled at the boy who was now following him. He was most likely a Tutty—a family on the west side who had been supplying Butte with redheads for generations. He made a mental note of the name “Mandic” and wondered if the guy had the misfortune to be at home when the plane dropped from the sky, and whether he would end up a victim or a witness. “Who’s Mr. Mandic?” Chance asked.

  The boy shrugged. “He likes motorcycles.”

  Chance smiled to himself. Boys and their toys, his sister would say.

  “I seen it. I seen it all,” said a voice from behind, and Chance turned to see Ozzy Fentner.

  “Hey, Ozzy,” Chance said. A wiry man of indeterminate age, Ozzy had been around Butte for as long as Chance could remember. When Ozzy was sober, he worked as a swamper—a Butte euphemism, or as Chance liked to call it, a Buphemism for one who cleans up the swill left at the end of the night in any one of Butte’s countless bars. The rest of the time Ozzy seemed to wander the streets, usually cradling a forty ouncer of Colt 41.

  “What you doing up this early?” Chance asked with a wry smile. “It’s not even noon.”

  Ozzy’s shabby flannel shirt and dusty, worn jeans could well have been slept in, but he looked distinctly awake. “Cleaning up over at the Hoist House,” he said. “I come outside to dump the trash and heard the plane real close, you know. Didn’t seem right.”

  The Hoist House was at the corner of Galena and Montana, only three blocks north. “Engine trouble?” Chance asked, again trying to piece together how the accident might have happened.

  “No sputtering or smoke or nothing. One minute it’s up in the air and the next minute, the wings are waddling and down she goes. Lost sight of it behind the houses, but I heard it hit. Sounded like a train driving through a lumber yard.”

  “What else did you see?” Chance asked. He wanted as much detail as he could in case Ozzy’s story wasn’t so much an eyewitness account as an exaggeration from what he might have overheard.

  “Well, I had to lock up, didn’t I?” Ozzy said. “Then I high-tailed it over here to see what happened. I knew the plane was headed for them houses, and when I didn’t see no smoke or fire, I figured the people in the neighborhood would call the ambulance or the cops. I mean, I figured they would have heard it if I did.”

  “Okay, okay,” Chance said to calm Ozzy, who was rubbing a hand across his stubbly chin as if he were worried someone might think he had shirked his duty. “You did the right thing.”

  “How many was in it?” Ozzy asked, giving voice to what everyone around them must be wondering. He stood on his tiptoes to try and see into the cabin of the plane.

  Nick Philippoussis, an ambulance driver and a deputy coroner, appeared in the doorway of the house. Chance wondered in what capacity Nick had arrived at the scene.

  A broad-shouldered guy with the beginnings of a beer gut, Nick motioned to an EMS worker who came toward the front part of the plane carrying a stretcher. “Guess we’re about to find out,” Chance said, his voice grim.

  He jockeyed for a position among the growing crowd of spectators and finally retreated to the bumper of the pickup. He took a deep breath as an evidence technician wedged against the back window of the cockpit, trying to photograph inside the plane. Two clicks later, he watched Nick and an EMS guy, with the help of two police officers, slowly extract a body past the plane’s dual controls and through the d
oor on the right side of the plane.

  The bystanders stepped back, fighting curiosity, when Nick and the EMS worker reappeared minutes later. A woman gasped when she saw the stretcher loaded with a black-bagged body. Another crossed herself as the stretcher passed by. Neighbors whispered to each other, and then quickly turned back toward the house to see if more victims would be forthcoming.

  Chance snapped shots of the corpse being loaded into the coroner’s van and then called out quietly to Nick. “Anybody else?”

  Nick shook his head. Chance’s heart sank. The pilot hadn’t made it after all.

  “Got a minute?” Chance asked. Nick was a golfing buddy from way back, at least when he had the time. When he wasn’t driving an ambulance or subbing for the coroner, he worked at Duggan Dolan mortuary. Like a lot of people in Butte, he worked three jobs to make ends meet.

  “I’m headed to Missoula,” Nick said. “Crash investigator is coming in from Seattle tomorrow, and he wants the autopsy results ASAP.”

  National Transportation Safety Board investigators would figure out what went wrong, that was for sure. Might take them months, not that it would matter much to the pilot now. “Any idea about what happened?” Chance asked.

  “Gotta book,” Nick said, tapping his watch. “The medical examiner is cutting short his weekend in the Bitterroot. He said he’d do the autopsy soon as we can get the body there. Let’s have a beer later,” Nick said quietly. “Something ain’t right about this one.” Then he hopped into the van, which sped down the hill toward I-90 and the State Crime Lab.

  Chance looked at his own watch. “Oh, crap,” he said, a predictable apprehension beginning to rise in him. He raced the two blocks to his Land Rover parked in front of his duplex on Mercury Street and sped away.

  Chapter 2

  Mesa Dawson hoisted her carry-on bag to her shoulder with a deep sense of gratitude. The landing approach into Butte over the mile-wide Berkeley Pit, filled with 800 feet of toxic mine seepage, seemed to tempt fate in ways her nerves barely tolerated. The largest open-mine pit in the world and the pilot has to fly right over it to land? Give me a break, she thought.

  Consolation lay in the fact that within two minutes she had de-planed the Sky West commuter from Salt Lake and stood inside Bert Mooney Airport, known as Bert and Ernie’s to some locals. The terminal still looked like a ski chalet from a Doris Day movie, but at least baggage claim was less than twenty yards away. She looked half-heartedly for Chance over the heads of the dozen or so other passengers, unsurprised that her brother was nowhere in sight.