Up Close and Dangerous (32 page)

Bailey looked at the rescuer who was crouched beside her, taking her pulse and shining a light into her eyes. “I hope you have some food with you.”

“Not with us, no ma’am, but we’ll get you fed as soon as we get you back to headquarters.”

As it turned out, he lied. After they were lowered down the side of the mountain and everyone was loaded onto the helicopter, the decision was made that they needed medical care. The pilot radioed ahead, and then they were taken to the nearest hospital, a two-story facility in a small Idaho town.

The ER nurses, bless them, expertly assessed their most urgent need and rounded up food and coffee before they were even seen by a doctor. To Bailey’s surprise she couldn’t eat much, just a few spoonfuls of soup, along with a couple of saltines, that the nurse brought to her. The soup was canned soup, heated in a microwave, and it tasted like ambrosia; she simply couldn’t eat it all. Cam made a better showing than she did, wolfing down an entire bowl of soup and a cup of coffee.

After a quick exam, the doctor said, “Well, you’re basically sound. You need to eat and sleep, in that order. You’re lucky; your arm is healing well. By the way, when did you have your last tetanus shot?”

Bailey stared blankly at him. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a tetanus shot.”

He smiled. “You have now.”

After getting the injection, a nurse led her to the nurse’s lounge and the attached locker facility, complete with showers. Bailey stood under the hot water for so long her skin began to shrivel, but when she emerged she was squeaky clean from head to toe. The nurse gave her a set of clean green surgical scrubs to wear, and a pair of socks, over which she slipped a pair of surgical booties. She so didn’t want to put on her hiking boots again; she’d been wearing those things for six days, and her feet were as tired as the rest of her.

Cam wasn’t so lucky. He got stuck with an IV drip and a brain CT scan. Bailey sat with him while waiting for the IV bag to empty, which took a couple of hours. Only then was he allowed to shower and shave, his head was bandaged again, and he, too, was given a set of clean scrubs.

Then all the questioning started. They had crashed in a national recreational area, so the Forestry Service was involved. The rescue team leader had to fill out his report. The NTSB was notified. A reporter with an area newspaper heard about them on his scanner, and he showed up. The town’s chief of police came by to check them out. Cam talked quietly with the two men from the Forestry Service, with the chief of police, and he talked on the phone to an NTSB investigator. Neither he nor Bailey breathed a word about sabotage to the reporter.

Things moved fast. Charles MaGuire, the NTSB investigator, was on his way. Someone loaned Cam a cell phone, and he called his parents. When he was finished, Bailey asked if she could borrow it, too, and she called Logan’s cell number.

“Hello?” He answered on the first ring, giving her the impression that he’d pounced on the phone.

“Logan, it’s me. Bailey.”

There was a moment of dead silence, then in a shaky voice he said, “What?”

“I’m at a hospital in…I don’t know the name of the town…Idaho. I’m not hurt,” she said quickly. “We were rescued from the mountain early this morning.”

“Bailey?”

The disbelief in his voice was so profound that she wondered if he believed her, or if he thought someone was playing a trick on him. “It’s really me.” She wiped away a tear as it slid from the corner of her eye. “Want me to tell you what your middle name is? Or what our first dog’s name was?”

Warily he said, “Yeah. What was our first dog’s name?”

“We never had a dog. Mom doesn’t like animals.”

“Bailey.” His voice shook, and she realized he was crying. “You’re really alive.”

“I really am. I have some bruises, a black eye, I just ate some real food for the first time in six days, and I had to have a tetanus shot which hurt like hell, but I’m okay.” She could hear Peaches in the background, her light, sweet voice asking questions so fast she was incoherent, or maybe that was because she was crying, too. “An investigator is flying down to talk to us, and then I guess we’ll come home. I don’t know how yet, because I don’t have any money, credit cards, or ID with me, but we’ll get there somehow. Where are you?”

“In Seattle. At a hotel.”

“There’s no sense in paying for a hotel room; stay at the house. I’ll call the housekeeper and tell her to let you in.”

“Ah…I think Tamzin is staying there.”

“She’s what?”
Bailey felt her blood begin to boil, and sparks shoot from her eyes. Her rage was so immediate and consuming that she wouldn’t have been surprised if her head had started spinning around and around.

“She was there the day after the crash. I haven’t called there since to check.”

“Well, check now! If she’s there, have her arrested for breaking and entering! I’m serious, Logan. I want her out.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll get her out. Bailey…Tamzin said something about Seth. I think he could have had something to do with the crash. He denied it, but what else would he do?”

“I know,” she said.

“You do?”

“Cam figured it out.”

“Cam…the pilot?”

“The one and only,” she said, smiling at Cam the Pilot himself, who winked at her.

“I think we might get married. Listen, this is a borrowed cell phone, so you can’t call me at this number. I don’t know where we’ll be before we come home, but I’ll get in touch with you when I know. Go eject the bitch from that house before she trashes it. Love you.”

“Love you, too,” he said, and she disconnected before he could ask any more questions, which he was guaranteed to do considering what she’d just told him.

“
Might
get married?” Cam drawled, his eyebrows lifted.

“He’d had enough shocks for one day,” she said, going to him and nestling against him. They had spent a large part of the past five and a half days in each other’s arms, asleep or awake, and something in her felt wrong if they weren’t touching. She rested her head on his shoulder. “Tamzin’s in my house.”

“I heard.”

“It really isn’t my house, but I live there, and she has no business going through my things. She’s probably already donated all my clothes to a church charity—if she didn’t dump them in the trash.”

“She definitely needs ejecting.”

“She told Logan that Seth had something to do with the crash.”

“Hmm. Why would she say something like that? That was stupid.”

A rather obvious conclusion occurred. “Unless she
wants
Seth arrested.”

Thoughtfully, Cam scratched his newly shaved jaw. “That’s something to think about,” he said quietly.

34

C
HARLES
M
A
G
UIRE HAD TUFTED EARS LIKE A LYNX, BUT
that was where his resemblance to a cat began and ended. He was as solidly built as a fireplug, with a thick shock of gray hair and shrewd blue eyes. How he’d gotten there so fast Bailey couldn’t imagine, but she guessed that when you worked for the NTSB you could take a flight to anywhere at any time.

No one had seemed to know what to do with them, and though a lot of people in the friendly little town were offering their hospitality to two strangers, in the end the chief of police, Kyle Hester, had offered to let them use his office at city hall, and that had seemed the best bet all around. Chief Hester was a no-nonsense guy in his forties, former military like Cam, so they seemed to be on the same wavelength. Cam told Bailey that he’d informed Chief Hester about the sabotage of the plane, so the chief was well aware there was more going on than just the usual hoopla over a rescue.

The chief was one of those people who got things done. Within an hour Cam and Bailey each had a new cell phone, programmed with their old numbers, delivered to them at city hall. He also had food brought in; even though they’d eaten at the hospital, he seemed to know that they wouldn’t have been able to eat much at first, and they needed calories. So the food was there for them to graze on: fruit, chocolate, bowls of potato soup they could heat in the microwave in the break room, crackers and cheese spread. Bailey couldn’t seem to stop eating. All she could tolerate was a couple of bites at a time, but in five minutes she’d be back for more.

The newspaper reporter had wanted to interview them, but neither Cam nor Bailey were interested in any publicity. The reason they’d crashed wasn’t something either of them felt like exploiting. Chief Hester took care of that, too, shielding them from calls and preventing anyone from bothering them. Chief Hester, in short, was fast becoming one of Bailey’s favorite people.

When Charles MaGuire arrived, the chief turned his office over to them. The NTSB investigator was frankly astounded they were alive, and puzzled by where they’d crashed. On the chief’s topographical wall map, Cam pointed out where they’d been rescued, and traced a line to where he estimated they had crashed. “Here’s approximately where we were when we ran out of fuel,” he said, and tapped another spot in the mountains.

MaGuire stared at the map. “If that’s where you ran out of fuel, how the hell did you get over here?”

“Air rises on the windward side of the mountains,” Cam said. “I wanted to make it down to the tree line, to use the trees as shock absorbers instead of going nose-first into a rock face. As a rule of thumb, when you’re gliding, you travel twenty feet forward for each foot you lose in altitude, right?” He moved his finger along the map. “By catching the rising air currents, we made it about two or three miles in this direction, to about right here, and down to the timber line. I put it down where I judged the trees were big enough to cushion us but not so big that we might as well be crashing into rock. I had to find a patch of trees thick enough, too, because they’re pretty thin where the timber first starts.”

MaGuire visually measured the distance, looking bemused. “Your partner, Larsen, said if anyone could put it safely down, you could. He said you wouldn’t panic.”

“I was doing enough panicking for both of us,” Bailey said drily.

Cam made a scoffing noise. “You didn’t make a sound.”

“I panic quietly. I was also praying as hard as I could.”

“What happened then?” MaGuire asked. He glanced at the bandage on Cam’s forehead. “You were obviously hurt.”

“I was knocked out cold,” Cam said, shrugging. “And bleeding like a stuck pig. The left wing and part of the fuselage was torn off, so there was no protection from the cold. Bailey dragged me out, got the bleeding stopped, got me warm, and stitched up my head.” The smile he gave her was so full of pride it almost blinded her. “She saved my life then, and again when she built a shelter for us. If we hadn’t been able to get out of the wind, we wouldn’t have made it.”

MaGuire turned to her then, looking at her with a great deal of curiosity, because he’d learned a lot about the Wingates in the past several days and he was having a tough time adjusting his mental image of Jim Wingate’s trophy wife to this calm, unpretentious woman wearing surgical scrubs, no makeup, and a bruised eye. “You’ve had medical training?”

“No. The plane’s first-aid kit had an instruction book that detailed how to set sutures, so I did it.” She wrinkled her nose. “And I never want to do it again.” She was glad she’d been able to do it, but she didn’t want to remember the gory details.

“I’d lost a lot of blood and I was concussed, so I wasn’t able to help her at all. She scavenged stuff from the plane that we could use. She used practically her entire wardrobe to cover me, keep me warm—and let me tell you, that was a lot of clothes, three big suitcases full. Thank God.”

“When did you begin walking out?”

“The fourth day. Bailey’s arm was injured, there was a piece of metal in it, and she didn’t bother taking care of herself. The second day, neither of us was capable of doing much of anything. We slept. I was so weak I could barely move. Bailey’s arm was infected, and she had a fever. The third day, we both felt better, and I could walk around some. I checked the ELT, but the battery was almost dead, so I knew if we hadn’t been located by then we weren’t going to be, and there was no way of telling whether or not the ELT had ever worked anyway.”

“It didn’t,” said MaGuire. “There was no signal.”

Cam stared at the map, but mentally he was back in the Skylane’s cockpit, his jaw set and hard. “When the engine quit on us, all the gauges read exactly the way they were supposed to read. Nothing seemed to be wrong, but the engine stopped. On the third day I found the left wing. There was a clear plastic bag hanging out of the fuel tank. When I saw that, I knew someone deliberately brought us down.”

MaGuire blew out a breath and hitched a hip onto a corner of Chief Hester’s desk. “We didn’t suspect anything at first, but Larsen had been going over and over the Skylane’s maintenance records, fueling reports, any piece of paper that pertained to the plane. Finally he noticed that the fuel records showed the plane holding only thirty-nine gallons that morning. We checked with the guy who fueled it, and he specifically remembered checking that it was full. As of this morning we still hadn’t received a court order for the airfield’s security tapes, but we suspected the plane had been tampered with.”

“Seth Wingate,” Cam growled. “He called the office the day before the flight to verify that Bailey was going to Denver. He might have enough juice for a judge to do him a favor by delaying a court order, though I don’t know what that would accomplish in the long run, unless he needed time to get his hands on the security tape and destroy it, or something.”

“That’s what your secretary kept insisting. He definitely behaved suspiciously, but that’s also stupid behavior. Suspicions are one thing, proof is another. So far, we don’t have any proof at all, just an anomaly in the fueling records.”

“We’ve already figured that out. Unless the security tapes caught him fooling around with the plane, all the evidence is at the crash site, and retrieving it would be a bitch. The wind’s brutal up there, there’s no way for a chopper to do even a one-skid touchdown. The only way up is on foot.”