Millennium

Whatever that region was, Lilly was in it, and she'd never get out.

5 "Famous Last Words"

Testimony of Bill Smith

I never did find out who got the temporary morgue set up. Briley hadn't had the stomach for it, but apparently Rog Keane had somebody on his staff who had dealt with the problem before. When we got there it was already a going concern.

Personally, I think it would be much neater and sweeter, more compassionate all around, just to dig a big hole where the plane went down and shovel them all in and put up a big stone with everybody's name carved on it. But nobody's ever going to buy that idea. The next of kin all want a particular body in a specific grave.

In some crashes, we can accommodate them. In the worst ones, there's just no way, but they have to find that out for themselves. All that's left of uncle Charlie would fit into a plastic sandwich bag.

What are you going to do? Show them a severed hand and ask if that wedding ring looks familiar? Most of them don't even have faces.

This morgue was in a high school gym. The parking lot was full of cars belonging to relatives, and one news truck from a local television station.

"Easy, Bill," Tom said, and guided me gently away from the camera crew. "You don't want to wind up on the six o'clock news. Not that way."

"I hope there's a hell, Tom. And when those guys get there, I hope the devil's waiting to shove a camera in their faces and ask them what they feel like."

"Sure, Bill, sure."

It was a relief to get inside the gym with the corpses.

There were maybe seventy or eighty of them. What I mean is, that's how many long, narrow body bags were arranged in neat ranks. Against the far wall were many, many more bags with no shape at all. An FBI team had arrived from Washington. They'd already taken prints from the reasonably intact bodies, and now were at-"work on whatever fingers they could find. Later, jaws would be examined for dental work, though you'd be surprised how few people get identified that way.

We were introduced to the Oakland Special-Agent-in-Charge, or SAC, as they like to be called. We already knew the boys from the Washington fingerprint team. The FBI inherited this messy job simply because they have more fingerprints on file than everybody else put together. If you read their literature you might think they get about a ninety-nine percent match of names with carcasses. The plain fact is that, after a couple weeks, a lot of next of kin would be told there was just no way to find even a piece of their dead relative, and there would be a lot of memorial services in a lot of chapels. A lot of burned meat would go wherever such things end up for quiet disposal. I'd never asked where that was. Doctors and morticians should have some secrets.

We met the Contra Costa and Alameda County coroners, the heads of paramedic and fire department teams, and quite a few doctors. It was a busy place.

I've been to crashes where they were just letting relatives wander through the morgue lifting up the comers of blankets. There's no way you can make it pretty or easy to stomach, but there are limits. Here, they were mostly going by personal effects. In a separate room they had lines of tables covered with burnt clothing and jewelry, all tagged as to which corpse it had been taken from. A lot of people were looking through this stuff Tom and I were looking for Freddie Powers, the agent who had called us to the morgue in the first place. We spotted him on the far side of the property room. He's more or less your standard Texas blond-headed collegiate G-man, tall and conservatively dressed.

"Hello, Bill. Tom. Got something over here you might like to see." Not too long ago he'd have said "Howdy." They say you can't take the Texas out of the boy, but Freddie was working on it. His drawl was practically gone.

"Bill Smith, Tom Stanley, this is Jeff Brindle." Brindle was a short, curly-haired intern in his late twenties, dressed in a bloody smock. He had a quick smile and slightly buck teeth.

"Jeff put all this together and brought it to my attention," Freddie went on. I thought he was looking a little uncomfortable. Strictly speaking, he was here to put names on stiffs; maybe he was afraid he was encroaching into my territory. Or maybe it was something else.

"Actually, I don't know if it means a damn thing, but it sure as hell is fu

"I wish somebody would," I said.

Freddie nodded, and picked up a man's wristwatch. It was a Timex on an expansion band.

The band was stained with dried blood and the crystal was cracked, but you could see the second hand still moving.

"Takes a licking and keeps on ticking," Freddie drawled. I looked up at him. With Freddie, when the drawl gets thick, the kicker is on the way. I looked down at the watch. It read 10:45 and some seconds. I glanced at my own watch and saw that it was actually a couple seconds shy of 10 A.M.

"I've got ten and about eighteen seconds," Tom said.

Freddie beckoned me a few feet down the table, where he'd arranged about twenty watches. I leaned over and examined them.

Several things could be seen at once. They were all working, though some had completely lost the glass. They all showed the same time -- 10:45. There was something else about the group, but it eluded me for a moment.

"They're all mechanical," Tom put in. Of course, that was it.

Freddie didn't say anything. He just led me to a second group o f watches.

There were a lot more of these, though I could see down the table that the bulk of the weird exhibit was still to come. I sighed, and looked down.

Again, all mechanical. None of them were working. Some were so badly melted they might have been scraped off a Salvador Dali painting. But of the ones that were still readable, none had a time later than ten o'clock. The great bulk of them read 9:56, exactly.

"The planes hit the ground at 9:11," Freddie said.

"And eleven and forty-five is fifty-six. They're forty-five minutes fast, like the others.

What else have you got?"

He seemed to realize I was getting impatient, because he hurried through the next part.

"These four here, also mechanical, are reading 1:45. Still ru

"These people hadn't set their watches back to Pacific time yet," Tom suggested.

"That's the way I read it."

I thought it over. I couldn't think of anything real intelligent to say, but I had to try something.

"Are these from one plane, or both?"

"Both. Most from the 747 -- I doubt we'll ever find all of them from the DC-10. But those we did get from the DC-10 agree with the rest."

It was Tom who finally put into words what we'd all been wondering.

"Who sets their watch forty-five minutes ahead?"

I sure couldn't think up a good reason, much less explain why two planeloads of people would all get the same brilliant idea "Thanks, Freddie," I said, starting away from him. "I don't know what it means yet, but we'll sure look into it."

Freddie was looking a little guilty.

"That's not quite all, Bill," he said. I should have realized. He led me further down the table, to where a large number of digital watches were arranged. They all had blank or broken or melted faces.

"Maybe the old-fashioned stuff's the best," Freddie said. "At least the gear-and-

mainspring equipment came through better than these things did. But we did get a couple of survivors. Like this one."