He had not been expecting a corporate operation, for God’s sake. Wallace Blick and his trigger-happy associates in the Hawaiian shirts didn’t seem entirely like cops or federal agents, but they smelled a lot more like the law than they did like any corporate executives Joe had ever encountered.
Next he accessed the Post’s vast file of digitized back issues. Included was every word of every edition the newspaper had published since its inception—minus only the cartoons, horoscopes, crossword puzzles, and the like. Photographs were included.
He initiated a search for Medsped and found six mentions. They were small items from the business pages. He read them complete.
Medsped, a New Jersey corporation, had begun as an air ambulance service in several major cities. Later it had expanded to specialize in the nationwide express delivery of emergency medical supplies, refrigerated or otherwise delicately preserved blood and tissue samples, as well as expensive and frangible scientific instruments. The company even undertook to carry samples of highly contagious bacteria and viruses between cooperating research laboratories in both the public and military sectors. For these tasks, it maintained a modest fleet of aircraft and helicopters.
Helicopters.
And unmarked white vans?
Eight years ago, Medsped had been bought by Teknologik, Inc., a Delaware Corporation with a score of wholly owned subsidiaries in the medical and computer industry. Its computer-related holdings were all companies developing products, mostly software, for the medical and medical-research communities.
When Joe ran a search on Teknologik, he was rewarded with forty-one stories, mostly from the business pages. The first two articles were so dry, however, so full of investment and accounting jargon, that the reward quickly began to seem like punishment.
He ordered copies of the four longest articles for review later.
While those were sliding into the printer tray, he asked for a list of stories the Post had published about the crash of Nationwide Flight 353. A series of headlines, with accompanying dates, appeared on the screen.
Joe had to steel himself to scan this story file. He sat for a minute or two with his eyes closed, breathing deeply, trying to conjure, in his mind’s eye, an image of surf breaking on the beach at Santa Monica.
Finally, with teeth clenched so tightly that his jaw muscles twitched continuously, he called up story after story, scanning the contents. He wanted the one that, as a sidebar, would provide him with a complete passenger manifest.
He skipped quickly past photographs of the crash scene, which revealed debris chopped into such small chunks and tangled in such surreal shapes that the baffled eye could not begin to reconstruct the aircraft from its ruins. In the bleak dawn caught by these pictures, through the gray drizzle that had begun to fall about two hours after the disaster, National Transportation Safety Board investigators in biologically secure bodysuits with visored hoods prowled the blasted meadow. Looming in the background were scorched trees, gnarled black limbs clawing at the low sky.
He searched for and found the name of the NTSB Go-Team leader in charge of the investigation—Barbara Christman—and the fourteen specialists working under her.
A couple of the articles included photos of some of the crew and passengers. Not all of the three hundred and thirty souls aboard was pictured. The tendency was to focus on those victims who were Southern Californians returning home rather than on Easterners who had been coming to visit. Being part of the Post family, Michelle and the girls were prominently featured.
Eight months ago, upon moving into the apartment, in reaction to a morbid and obsessive preoccupation with family albums and loose snapshots, Joe had packed all the photos in a large cardboard box, reasoning that rubbing a wound retarded healing. He had taped the box shut and put it at the back of his only closet.
Now, in the course of his scanning, when their faces appeared on the screen, he was unable to breathe, though he had thought he would be prepared. Michelle’s publicity shot, taken by one of the Post’s staff photographers, captured her beauty but not her tenderness, not her intelligence, not her charm, not her laughter. A mere picture was so inadequate, but still it was Michelle. Still. Chrissie’s photo had been snapped at a Post Christmas party for children of the paper’s employees. She was caught in a grin, eyes shining. How they shone. And little Nina, who sometimes wanted it pronounced Neen-ah and other times nine-ah, was smiling that slightly lopsided smile that seemed to say she knew magical secrets.