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"Half finished, yes. But at least he built something from the other trash. The oxygen tank and the nose gear he never touched. Why?"
"Nothing mysterious about that. Dad most likely was killed before he got around to them."
"Possibly."
"That's settled, then," she said firmly. "Let's get back to bed before I freeze to death."
"Sorry. I'm not through here yet."
"What's left to see?"
"Call it a pebble in the shoe of logic," he said. "Look here, at the fittings on the tank."
She leaned over his shoulder. "They're broken. What did you expect."
"If this was removed from an obsolete aircraft at a salvage yard, the mounting brackets and the fittings to the lines would have been disco
"So what does all that prove?"
"Nothing earth shattering. But it does indicate that these pieces did not come from an aircraft-salvage yard or a surplus store."
"Now are you satisfied?"
"Not entirely." He easily lifted the oxygen tank, carried it outside, and deposited it in the jeep. "I can't manage the nose gear by myself. You'll have to give me a hand."
"What are you up to?"
"You said we were driving down the mountains into Denver for a shopping spree."
"So?"
"So while you're buying out the town, I'll haul this stuff over to Stapleton Airport and find somebody who can identify the aircraft it came from."
"Pitt," she said, "you're not a Sherlock Holmes. Why go to all this trouble?"
"Something to do. I'm bored. You've got your congressional mail to keep you busy. I'm tired of talking to trees all day."
"You have my undivided attention nights."
"Man ca
She watched in mute fascination as he scrounged two long boards and propped them on the lowered tailgate of the jeep.
"Ready?" he asked.
"I'm not exactly dressed for the occasion," she said, a chill in her voice and goose bumps on her skin.
"Then take off that thing so you won't get it dirty."
As if in a dream, she hung her peignoir on a nail, mystified as to why women instinctively indulge men in their juvenile idiosyncrasies. Then the two of them — Pitt in his shorts, Congresswoman Loren Smith in the nude — heaved and grunted the dusty nose gear up the makeshift ramp into the back of the jeep.
While Pitt chained up the tailgate, Loren stood in the dawn's early light and gazed down at the dirt and grease smudged across her thighs and stomach and wondered what it was that possessed her to take a mad lover.
4
Harvey Dolan, principal maintenance inspector for the Air Carrier District Office of the FAA, lifted his glasses to the light and, detecting no smears, clamped them on a pyramid-shaped nose.
"Found them in the mountains, you say?"
"About thirty miles northwest of Leadville, in the Sawatch range," Pitt answered. He had to speak loudly to be heard above the roar of the forklift that was carrying the nose gear and oxygen tank from the Jeep through the huge, yawning door of the FAA inspection hangar.
"Not much to go on," said Dolan.
"But you can offer an educated guess."
Dolan shrugged noncommittally. "You might compare it to a policeman who's found a small lost child wandering the streets. The cop can see it's a boy with two arms and two legs, approximately two years old. The kid's clothes are J. C. Pe
"Could you translate your analogue into factual detail?" Pitt asked, smiling.
"Please observe," Dolan said with a professional flourish. He produced a ball-point pen from a breast pocket and probed it about like a pointer. "We have before us the frontal landing gear of an aircraft, an aircraft that weighed in the neighborhood of seventy or eighty thousand pounds. It was a propeller-driven craft, because the tires were not constructed for the stresses of a high-speed jet landing. Also, the strut design is of a type that has not been built since the nineteen fifties. Therefore, its age is somewhere between thirty and forty-five years. The tires came from Goodyear and the wheels from Rantoul Engineering, in Chicago. As to the make of the aircraft and its owner, however, I'm afraid there isn't too much to go on."
"So it ends here." Pitt said.
"You throw in the towel too early," said Dolan. "There is a perfectly legible serial number on the strut. If we can determine the type of ship this particular nose-gear model was designed for, then it becomes a simple matter of tracing the strut's number through the manufacturer and establishing the parent aircraft."
"You make it sound easy."
"Any other fragments?"
"Only what you see."
"How did you come to bring them here?"
"I figured that if anybody could identify them, it would be the Federal Aviation Administration."
"Putting us on the spot, huh?" Dolan said, gri
"No malice intended," Pitt said, gri
"Not much to go on," Dolan said, "but you never can tell; we might get lucky."
He made a thumbs-down motion toward a spot circled with red paint on the concrete floor. The forklift operator nodded and lowered the pallet holding the parts. Then he wheeled the forklift backward, cut a ninetydegree right turn, and clanked off toward another corner of the hangar.
Dolan picked up the oxygen tank, turned it over in his hands in the ma
Dolan began to warm to his task. He got down on his knees and examined every square inch of the nose gear. At one point he had Pitt help him roll it to a new position.
Five minutes went by and he didn't utter a word.
Pitt finally broke the silence. "Does it tell you anything?"
"A great deal." Dolan straightened up. "But not, unfortunately, the jackpot answer."
"The odds favor the proverbial wildgoose chase," said Pitt. "I don't feel right putting you to all this trouble."
"Nonsense," Dolan assured him. "This is what John Q. Public pays me for. The FAA has dozens of missing aircraft on file whose fates have never been solved. Any time we have an opportunity to mark a case closed, we jump at it."
"How do we go about laying our fingers on the make of aircraft?"
"Ordinarily I'd call in research technicians from our engineering division. But I think I'll take a stab in the dark and try a shortcut. Phil Devine, maintenance chief over at United Airlines, is a walking encyclopedia on aircraft. If anyone can tell us at a glance, he can."