The Three by Sarah Lotz Read Free Book Online Page A

the CVR [cockpit voice recorder] and black box; we’d need to get specialist divers in. It was bad in there. Hot as hell, crawling with flies, the stench… We needed full bio-hazard suits, which aren’t fun to wear in those sorts of conditions. Right from the get-go I could see that it was going take weeks for us to piece this one together, and we didn’t have weeks, not now that we knew other planes had gone down that day.
    I needed to talk to that kid. According to the passenger list, the only child of that age group on board was a Bobby Small, travelling back to New York City with a woman we assumed was his mother. I opted to go alone, leaving my team on the scene to do the preliminaries and liaise with the locals and other parties who were en route to the crash site.
    The press was swarming around the hospital, dogging me to make a statement, ‘Ace! Ace!’ they were calling. ‘Was it a bomb?’ ‘What about the other crashes, are they connected?’ ‘Is it true there’s a survivor?’ I told them the usual, that a press statement would be issued when we knew more, that investigations were still under way etc. etc.–the last thing I was going to do as IIC was shout my mouth off before we had something concrete.
    I’d called ahead to say I was on my way, but I knew it was a long shot that they’d let me talk to him. While I waited for the doctors to give me the go-ahead, one of the nurses hustled out of his room, careened straight into me. She looked like she was on the verge of tears. I caught her eye, said something like, ‘He’s all right, huh?’
    She just nodded, scuttled off to the nurses’ station. I tracked her down a week or so later, asked why she’d seemed so disturbed. She couldn’t put it into words. Said she had a feeling that something was off; she just didn’t like being in that room. She felt guilty for saying it, you could see. Said she must have been more affected by the thought of all those people dying at once than she realised; that Bobby was a living reminder of how many had lost their lives that day.
    The child psychologist who was on the case arrived a few minutes later. Nice gal, mid-thirties, but looked younger. I forgether name… Polanski? Oh right, Pankowski. Thanks. She had only just been assigned, and the last thing she wanted was some gung-ho investigator upsetting the boy. I said, ‘Lady, we got an international incident on our hands here, that boy in there may be one of the only witnesses who can help us.’
    I don’t want you to think I’m insensitive, Elspeth, but at that stage the info on the other incidents was sketchy, and for all I knew, that boy could be a key to the whole thing. Remember, in the Japanese situation, it was a while before they confirmed there were any survivors, and we didn’t get word about the girl from the UK incident till hours later. Anyway, this Dr Pankowski said the boy was awake, but hadn’t said a word, he didn’t know his mother was more than likely dead. Asked me to tread carefully, refused to let me film the interview. I agreed, although it was standard procedure to record all witness statements. Gotta say, afterwards, I couldn’t decide if I was glad I hadn’t been able to film it or not. I reassured her that I was trained in interviewing witnesses, that one of our specialist guys was on the way to do a follow-up interview. I just needed to know if there was anything specific he remembered that could help point us in the right direction.
    They’d given him a private room, bright walls, full of kids’ stuff. A
SpongeBob
mural, a stuffed giraffe that looked kind of creepy to me. The boy was lying flat on his back, a drip in his arm, you could see the abrasions where the saw-grass had sliced his skin (we all fell foul of that particular hazard in the days to come, let me tell you), but other than that, he’d suffered no other significant injuries. I still can’t get over that. Like everyone said at first, it really did look