He’s suing me because I cited his sixteen-year-old daughter for minor in possession.”
“She has one lousy beer and you treat her like it’s her third strike.”
Woo kept his calm. “Mr. Logan’s a transient pilot. He thinks he may have observed a downed airplane while he was flying in this morning.”
“Welcome.” Priest unwrapped a Big Mac and devoured half of it in one bite. “What kind of plane was it?”
“Couldn’t tell. All I saw was what looked like a section of a wing.”
“The Civil Air Patrol routinely notifies us of any missing or overdue planes,” Priest said, a bit of lettuce clinging to his lower lip. “Same goes for any ELT signals anywhere in northern California and western Nevada, and we haven’t gotten any of those in a long time.”
Not everybody files a flight plan, which requires a pilot to list, among other information, the estimated time of arrival at his intended destination. If he’s late getting there, the FAA will begin looking for him in short order. Without a flight plan on file, nobody will come looking unless someone reports that plane missing, or saw it go down.
Moreover, not all emergency locator transmitters, which are designed to automatically trigger after a plane crashes, will prompt rescue teams to swing into action. The problem is that most older airplanes are equipped with transmitters that broadcast emergency signals on a frequency no longer monitored by orbiting satellites. In other words, if what I’d seen was, in fact, a missing airplane, there was a good possibility that nobody in officialdom even knew about it. If injured souls were on board, it was imperative to reach the crash site as quickly as possible.
“Where’d you see this supposed wreck?” Priest said, polishing off his Big Mac and unwrapping a second.
I showed him on the chart.
He frowned. “I haven’t heard of any airplanes going down in that area in all the time I’ve been working here. You ask me, if it is a plane, it’s probably been up there for years, and it’s already been reported. Happens all the time, old wrecks getting reported as new.”
“I hope you’re right. You appear to be a man who usually is.”
He was too busy stuffing his face to acknowledge the dig.
Woo asked me if I’d be willing to accompany him on a drive up to the mountains, to give him better perspective of where to begin looking. I said yes. Anyone with any sense of responsibility would’ve done the same.
The nuptials would have to wait.
S AVANNAH SAID she more than understood, though I’m not sure she did. Our suite at the romantic Victorian B&B that she’d found online, she told me over the phone, didn’t disappoint. We had an antique poster bed with a view of the lake and our own private deck. She wanted to know when I’d be back.
I looked across the center console shotgun mount of Deputy Woo’s Jeep Wrangler, with the sheriff’s star on the doors, and relayed Savannah’s query to Woo as he and I rode west out of South Lake Tahoe on US 50, toward Echo Summit.
“Depends on what we see,” Woo said. “Probably around five.”
“The marriage license office closes at five,” Savannah said.
“We’ll pick up the license tomorrow. What’s one more day? No big deal, right?”
“Right.” She was disappointed, but trying not to sound it.
“I’m not changing my mind between now and then, Savannah. I’m not bailing, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I know. It’s just that . . . I had everything all planned out for tonight. I wanted it to be . . . special.”
“It’ll still be special tomorrow night.”
“Let’s hope so.” She cleared her throat. “See you tonight.”
“You can count on it.”
I slid my phone into the front pocket of my jeans and gazed out at the passing landscape: rocky escarpments to the right and a sheer drop-off into steep canyons to our left. Traffic was sparse.
“You getting married?” Woo said.
“Remarried. We split a few years