MaGuire walked to the window and looked out, his hands stuffed in his pockets. “You don’t want to think there’s foul play involved, and I have to say, in all the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen anything that made me think a plane had been deliberately sabotaged. Until someone presents some evidence that tampering took place, I don’t see any point in worrying about it. On the other hand, it’s always good to think about security. Is someone here twenty-four hours a day?”
Bret shot a look at Karen. She’d narrowed her eyes and looked belligerent, but she didn’t say anything. He guessed that if MaGuire worked here, his personal mail would disappear for the next millennium. “Sometimes, but it depends. The mechanics may work late, or we may have a late flight scheduled. A private plane may come or go. I’d say there’s no predictable pattern.”
“Not knowing when someone might show up would make it difficult to plan something like that. In the absence of, say, a hole cut in the fence or a break-in here in the terminal, I don’t think that’s an avenue of investigation that we should pursue. We’d be better off directing our available resources to locating the crash site.”
That was the correct response from a man who’d had to make hard decisions before, but Karen didn’t like having her theory shot down. She’d accepted that Cam was dead, but she hadn’t yet accepted that there was no one she could blame for it. “Stick your heads in the sand then,” she snapped, and stalked out of Bret’s office.
Bret sighed and dropped heavily into his chair. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “She’s having a hard time accepting this. We both are, I guess. I pulled all the Skylane’s service records and repair write-ups, and the mechanic and I have gone over them looking for something, anything, that could indicate what went wrong. It’s hard, not knowing what happened.”
“I’m sorry,” said MaGuire. “I wish I could do more. These situations, where we know they’re gone but we can’t find them, are the toughest we deal with. People need to know. One way or another, they need to know.”
“Yeah,” Bret said heavily. As if compelled, he picked up the Skylane’s file and opened it again, leafing through each copy of the maintenance reports, the fueling slips, the myriad pieces of paper required on each of their aircraft. Karen had everything on computer, backed up at an online data bank, but in the early days they’d lost all their records because of a catastrophic computer crash and filing their tax reports had been a nightmare. Since then they’d also kept a paper file, regardless of how redundant and archaic. Bret and Dennis had even compared each report with the computer file, to see if anything had been left out or entered incorrectly, something they hadn’t breathed a word of to Karen because she’d have taken their heads off for even suggesting she’d made an error.
MaGuire watched him with sympathy, knowing how difficult it was to accept that sometimes shit did just happen, with no rhyme or reason.
Suddenly Bret stiffened, and flipped back to the beginning of the file. MaGuire frowned, reading his body language, and went to stand beside him. “Don’t tell me you found something.”
“I don’t know,” said Bret. “Maybe I read it wrong. It was the fueling report for that morning.” He leafed through the file again, pulling out the paper that was third from the top and staring at it. “That’s wrong!” he said forcefully. “That’s just fucking wrong!”
“What is?”
“This is! Look at the number of gallons pumped. There’s no way.”
MaGuire looked at the fuel report. “Thirty-nine gallons.”
“Yeah. The Skylane’s usable capacity is eighty-seven gallons. This doesn’t make sense. The fueling order was to fill the tanks. With a full load, he’d have had to refuel in Salt Lake City, so there’s no way he’d take off with less than half what he needed to get there. Even if he had, when he saw the reading he’d have radioed in and refueled at Walla Walla, not flown right past it.”
“Yeah.” MaGuire frowned at the report, thinking hard. Karen had come to the doorway and stood there, watching and listening, every cell of her body broadcasting her alertness. “We need to get in touch with the fuel company, find out what their records show. Maybe this is an error.”
Fueling was handled by a licensed contractor. A phone call elicited the information that their records indicated thirty-nine gallons had been pumped into the Skylane at 6:02 the morning of the flight, and the reports from that day had matched the pump’s total. More phone calls, and soon they were talking to the truck’s operator, who said flatly, “I filled the tanks, just the way the order reads. I checked the valve, and I visually verified. I even thought it was unusual that so much fuel had been left in the tanks, but thought a charter might have been canceled after the plane was already fueled.”
A plane, especially a charter or commercial plane, didn’t carry unnecessary fuel. Fuel was heavy, and the more a plane carried, the more power was needed to get it where it was going. Usually the refueling order was for enough to get the plane to its destination, with a little extra in case it had to be rerouted or circumstances called for a delay in landing. “Little” was a relative term, of course, but Mike, who had flown the Skylane to Eugene the day before, would never have taken on over half a tank more than what was needed. To be certain, Bret pulled the fuel records from the day Mike had flown the plane. There was no way he could have flown to Eugene and back, and had that much fuel left.