Murder in Foggy Bottom Read Online Free PDF Page B

but what’s so important?”
    “A half hour.”
    Pauling held the dead phone away from his ear and said something decidedly not official—and certainly not military.

4
    That Same Day
New York
     
    First to reach the Dash 8 that had crashed less than three minutes after taking off were two New York State troopers, who arrived in separate marked cruisers. At first, they weren’t sure where the plane had gone down. They could see smoke when they’d first gotten the call while patrolling 684 and headed in that general direction, but it wasn’t until a homeowner a mile from the crash scene called 911 to report “some sort of accident” that they were able to home in, converging in front of the caller’s house and setting off on foot down a hiking trail leading to the shoreline of Kensico Reservoir.
    When they reached the downed aircraft, they were stunned by the carnage spread out before them. The fuselage of the Dash 8 must have exploded upon impact, sending passengers, and parts of passengers, flying in all directions. The troopers started toward what appeared to be the largest intact portion of the plane, but one of them suddenly stopped and recoiled. A few feet in front of him was a man’s torso, the lower portion of his body missing.
    “God Almighty,” the younger of the two troopers said, squeezing his eyes closed. He’d seen fatal auto accidents up close on the state’s highways, but this was beyond anything he’d ever imagined.
    “Nobody survived this,” his colleague said quietly. They stood side by side, not moving, saying only those things that tend to be said when there is nothing meaningful to say, hearts pounding, smoldering wreckage and brush ignited by the flames hissing in the background.
    The senior trooper pulled his radio from his belt and spoke into it: “Troopers Mencken and Robertson at scene of airliner crash. A couple hundred yards up from the reservoir, the Kensico. It’s a . . . it’s a mess. No apparent survivors.”
    The voice in his ear said, “I read. Secure scene. Nobody near it until you’re relieved.”
    They looked at each other before splitting up, one staying where they’d been, the other slowly, carefully circumventing the apparent perimeter of the crash site to take up a position on the opposite side.
    FBI Special Agent Frank Lazzara had been appointed agent in charge of the White Plains field office only a month earlier after serving three years with the Bureau’s organized crime unit in Manhattan. At first, he resisted the reassignment because he considered it a demotion. Working organized crime in New York City was where the action and visibility were. White Plains? In suburban Westchester County?
    But when his boss and mentor explained over dinner one night that the mob was in the process of shifting many of its more lucrative operations out of the five boroughs and into smaller but still sizable cities in New York and Connecticut—they’d already established a stranglehold on the carting industry in Westchester—and that the Bureau considered White Plains and adjacent cities and towns to be future hotbeds of mob activities, Lazzara changed his view of the new posting. He had started the reverse commute from Brooklyn, where he and his wife and their one-year-old child lived, and spent much of his first month in the new office being brought up to speed on pending cases and getting to know other special agents who’d be working under him.
    He was poring over a thick file that had been compiled on mob-connected carting companies in the county when another agent entered the office.
    “Frank, there’s been a commercial airline accident.”
    Lazzara looked up, wondering why he was being told.
    “It’s local,” the agent said. “A commuter plane out of Westchester airport. A Washington flight.”
    Lazzara sat back and frowned. He’d flown from Washington into Westchester the previous day after a round of meetings at the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
    “Any