The chief was one of those people who got things done. Within an hour Cam and Bailey each had a new cell phone, programmed with their old numbers, delivered to them at city hall. He also had food brought in; even though they’d eaten at the hospital, he seemed to know that they wouldn’t have been able to eat much at first, and they needed calories. So the food was there for them to graze on: fruit, chocolate, bowls of potato soup they could heat in the microwave in the break room, crackers and cheese spread. Bailey couldn’t seem to stop eating. All she could tolerate was a couple of bites at a time, but in five minutes she’d be back for more.
The newspaper reporter had wanted to interview them, but neither Cam nor Bailey were interested in any publicity. The reason they’d crashed wasn’t something either of them felt like exploiting. Chief Hester took care of that, too, shielding them from calls and preventing anyone from bothering them. Chief Hester, in short, was fast becoming one of Bailey’s favorite people.
When Charles MaGuire arrived, the chief turned his office over to them. The NTSB investigator was frankly astounded they were alive, and puzzled by where they’d crashed. On the chief’s topographical wall map, Cam pointed out where they’d been rescued, and traced a line to where he estimated they had crashed. “Here’s approximately where we were when we ran out of fuel,” he said, and tapped another spot in the mountains.
MaGuire stared at the map. “If that’s where you ran out of fuel, how the hell did you get over here?”
“Air rises on the windward side of the mountains,” Cam said. “I wanted to make it down to the tree line, to use the trees as shock absorbers instead of going nose-first into a rock face. As a rule of thumb, when you’re gliding, you travel twenty feet forward for each foot you lose in altitude, right?” He moved his finger along the map. “By catching the rising air currents, we made it about two or three miles in this direction, to about right here, and down to the timber line. I put it down where I judged the trees were big enough to cushion us but not so big that we might as well be crashing into rock. I had to find a patch of trees thick enough, too, because they’re pretty thin where the timber first starts.”
MaGuire visually measured the distance, looking bemused. “Your partner, Larsen, said if anyone could put it safely down, you could. He said you wouldn’t panic.”
“I was doing enough panicking for both of us,” Bailey said drily.
Cam made a scoffing noise. “You didn’t make a sound.”
“I panic quietly. I was also praying as hard as I could.”
“What happened then?” MaGuire asked. He glanced at the bandage on Cam’s forehead. “You were obviously hurt.”
“I was knocked out cold,” Cam said, shrugging. “And bleeding like a stuck pig. The left wing and part of the fuselage was torn off, so there was no protection from the cold. Bailey dragged me out, got the bleeding stopped, got me warm, and stitched up my head.” The smile he gave her was so full of pride it almost blinded her. “She saved my life then, and again when she built a shelter for us. If we hadn’t been able to get out of the wind, we wouldn’t have made it.”
MaGuire turned to her then, looking at her with a great deal of curiosity, because he’d learned a lot about the Wingates in the past several days and he was having a tough time adjusting his mental image of Jim Wingate’s trophy wife to this calm, unpretentious woman wearing surgical scrubs, no makeup, and a bruised eye. “You’ve had medical training?”
“No. The plane’s first-aid kit had an instruction book that detailed how to set sutures, so I did it.” She wrinkled her nose. “And I never want to do it again.” She was glad she’d been able to do it, but she didn’t want to remember the gory details.
“I’d lost a lot of blood and I was concussed, so I wasn’t able to help her at all. She scavenged stuff from the plane that we could use. She used practically her entire wardrobe to cover me, keep me warm—and let me tell you, that was a lot of clothes, three big suitcases full. Thank God.”
“When did you begin walking out?”
“The fourth day. Bailey’s arm was injured, there was a piece of metal in it, and she didn’t bother taking care of herself. The second day, neither of us was capable of doing much of anything. We slept. I was so weak I could barely move. Bailey’s arm was infected, and she had a fever. The third day, we both felt better, and I could walk around some. I checked the ELT, but the battery was almost dead, so I knew if we hadn’t been located by then we weren’t going to be, and there was no way of telling whether or not the ELT had ever worked anyway.”
“It didn’t,” said MaGuire. “There was no signal.”
Cam stared at the map, but mentally he was back in the Skylane’s cockpit, his jaw set and hard. “When the engine quit on us, all the gauges read exactly the way they were supposed to read. Nothing seemed to be wrong, but the engine stopped. On the third day I found the left wing. There was a clear plastic bag hanging out of the fuel tank. When I saw that, I knew someone deliberately brought us down.”
MaGuire blew out a breath and hitched a hip onto a corner of Chief Hester’s desk. “We didn’t suspect anything at first, but Larsen had been going over and over the Skylane’s maintenance records, fueling reports, any piece of paper that pertained to the plane. Finally he noticed that the fuel records showed the plane holding only thirty-nine gallons that morning. We checked with the guy who fueled it, and he specifically remembered checking that it was full. As of this morning we still hadn’t received a court order for the airfield’s security tapes, but we suspected the plane had been tampered with.”