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the Jeep, and I opened the door for Kate. I got in, started the engine, and backed onto the sand road. The scrub pine bounced back, taller and fuller than before I’d run over it. Trauma is good for wildlife. Survival of the fittest.
    I joined a long line of vehicles leaving the memorial service.
    Kate stayed quiet for a while, then said, “I get myself worked up when I come here.”
    “I can see why.”
    We made our way slowly toward the bridge.
    I suddenly recalled, very distinctly, a conversation I’d had with Special Agent Kate Mayfield, not too long after we’d met. We were working the case of Asad Khalil, recently mentioned by my new friend, Liam. Mr. Khalil, a Libyan gentleman, had come to America with the purpose of murdering a number of U.S. Air Force pilots who had dropped some bombs on his country. Anyway, I guess I was complaining about the long hours or something, and Kate had said to me, “You know, when the ATTF worked the TWA explosion, they worked around the clock, seven days a week.”
    I had responded, perhaps sarcastically, maybe presciently, “And that wasn’t even a terrorist attack.”
    Kate had not replied, and I recalled thinking at the time that no one in the know replied to questions about TWA 800, and that there were still unanswered questions.
    And here we were, a year later, now married, and she still wasn’t saying much. But she was telling me something.
    I turned onto the bridge and crept along with the traffic. To the left was the Great South Bay, to the right Moriches Bay. Lights from the far shore sparkled on the water. Stars twinkled in the clear night sky, and the smell of salt air came through the open windows.
    On a flawless summer night, very much like this one, exactly five years ago, a great airliner, eleven and a half minutes out of Kennedy Airport, on its way to Paris with 230 passengers and crew on board, exploded in midair, then fell in fiery pieces into the water, and set the sea ablaze.
    I tried to imagine what that must have looked like to an eyewitness. Certainly, it would have been so far out of the realm of anything they’d ever seen that they couldn’t comprehend it or make any sense of it.
    I said to Kate, “I once had an eyewitness to a shooting who said he’d been standing ten feet from the assailant, who shot the victim once from a range of five feet. In fact, a security camera had recorded the whole scene, which showed the witness at about thirty feet from the assailant, the assailant twenty feet from the victim, and three shots being fired.” I added, unnecessarily, “In cases of extreme and traumatic situations, the brain does not always comprehend what the eyes see or the ears hear.”
    “There were hundreds of eyewitnesses.”
    “The power of suggestion,” I said, “or false-memory syndrome, or the desire to please the interrogator, or in this case, a night sky and an optical illusion. Take your pick.”
    “I don’t have to. The official report picked them all, with emphasis on optical illusion.”
    “Yeah. I remember that.” In fact, the CIA had made a speculative reconstruction animation of the explosion, which they’d shown on TV, and which seemed to explain the streak of light. In the animation, as I recalled, the streak of light, which over two hundred people had seen rising toward the aircraft, was, according to the animation, actually coming
from
the aircraft as a result of burning fuel dropping from the ruptured fuel tank. The way this was explained in the animation was that it was not the initial explosion that caught the attention of the witnesses-it was the
sound
of the explosion that would have reached them fifteen to thirty seconds afterward, depending on where they were located. Then, when they looked up toward the sound, what they saw was the burning stream of jet fuel, which could be mistaken for a rocket or missile streaking upward. Also, the main fuselage of the aircraft actually rose, according to radar sightings, a few