"And no one ever got the updated numbers."

"According to Dickie, the storm was getting worse, the captain wanted to go, he couldn't find Little Pete, so he gave him the numbers he had, figuring Little Pete would have told him if he'd changed anything."

"Which meant the pilot's calculation didn't match the actual load, and it was enough of a difference to take the plane down. Jesus." I rested my forehead in the heels of my hands and considered the unusual confluence of events that had taken place that night. It's always that way with a plane crash. There are so many backups to the backups to the fail-safe systems and procedures that it always takes not just one but an unusual chain of strange events to bring one down. I looked up at Dan, who was sitting back in his chair as if it was a recliner. We were through with show-and-tell. Once again, the image left on the screen was that bare apron in the rain. "Why wouldn't the investigators figure this out?"

"No black boxes, for one thing. An aircraft either has to have been registered after October 1991, I think it is, or have more than twenty seats to require boxes. This one didn't qualify."

"I saw that in the NTSB report. No boxes and no surveillance tape because Dickie took it. The crew was dead. That means the only people left who knew what really happened were Dickie and Little Pete."

"They weren't the only ones who knew. When Dickie heard that the plane had gone down, he figured out what happened. He got scared and wanted to change the worksheet to cover his own ass. To make it look like the captain's mistake, he needed to know what the real load was. But nobody could find Little Pete or his plan. This is where our buddy Angie comes in."

"Angelo?"

"Big Pete called him at home that night after the accident and got him out to look for Little Pete. Angelo found him up in a bar in Chelsea and, get this, the knucklehead still had this right where he'd left the damn thing-in his pocket." He'd pulled a piece of paper from his stack and held it up. "This is Little Pete's load plan, that thing he kept pulling out of his pocket."

"Let me see that." It was a wrinkled, computer-generated load plan with one corner torn off, and it was a mess. Almost every position had been marked through or overwritten. "You've got to hand it to Dickie, he kept a thorough record."

Dan took the plan back. "Angelo stashed the kid somewhere and ran this copy back over to the airport. Dickie dummied up a second worksheet, gave a copy to Big Pete, who got it to Little Pete. Twelve hours later, the kid had sobered up, everyone was telling the same story to the investigators, and it looked like the fight crew made the mistake. Case closed."

"Until," I added, "Dickie decided he didn't want to go to his grave with the souls of twenty-one people on his conscience. No wonder he spent the rest of his life getting drunk. Does he talk about Lenny in there?"

"Oh, yeah." He smiled a killer smile. "Lenny was right there from the beginning. He came out that night, and according to Dickie, he and Angelo went on the Crescent Security payroll-at least for one big payday."

"That's what the pay stub in Ellen's file was all about. The ten grand, that was Dickie's portion of the hush money. Ten thousand bucks out of a total seven hundred thousand-dollar payoff. Not a very high price to sell your soul."

"Dickie always did get the short end of the stick."

We sat for a moment in silence with the papers and documents scattered all around us. All the pieces had come together in the worst possible way, and I felt the weight of all we had found out in that room. I felt crushed by the enormity of the thing-of all that had happened and all that was going to happen.

Finally, Dan roused himself to stand up and go over to the television. He was going to pop out the cassette, but I stopped him. "I want to watch it one more time."

He turned to look at me. "Why? Are you looking for something?"

"The passengers' faces." I needed to see them again, to see them as individuals-as men and women, children, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives. I didn't want them to be fused together into an entity that I knew only as "the twenty-one people killed in the crash of flight 1704."

Without a word, Dan qued through the tape and found the beginning of the boarding process. This time as we watched in normal speed, I made sure to look at each one as they passed by in the rain and climbed the boarding stairs.

Seeing their images on tape reminded me of Ellen's video, of how I had felt when I'd heard her voice, when I'd seen her smile, saw doubt on her face and frustration and determination-all the things that make us who we are. Seeing her that way had made real to me someone I'd never met. It had created a void in my life for someone I'd never even known.

As I stared at the screen, I thought about the surviving family and friends of these victims, what it was going to do to them to see the people they had loved, still loved, in their final moments, and the silent black-and-white image started to blur again.

Dan stared at my computer monitor. "Who's H. Jergensen?" he asked.

"I don't know." I was trying to wrangle the papers on the floor in my office into one pile so that Molly wouldn't have a heart attack when she arrived for work on Monday. The heat had finally stopped pouring in, and our offices were now merely sweltering as opposed to life-threatening. "Why?"

"Because you've got an e-mail message from him and it's urgent."

"What's in the subject line?"

"Matt Levesque."

Matt… H. Jergensen… H… Hazel. "Hazel. Is it Hazel Jergensen?" I raced over and almost lifted him bodily out of the way so that I could sit at the keyboard. "Move, move, move."

"All right. Jesus Christ. What is it?"

"It's the invoices to Crescent, finally. Or at least a reasonable facsimile." I sat down and clicked into the Majestic electronic mailroom to find the message. "Hazel Jergensen worked for Ellen on the task force and, according to Finance Guy, kept records of everything. He thought she might have a record of who signed the invoices to Crescent. Dammit." I was talking as fast as I could, typing as fast as I could, and missing keys. "We're going to find out once and for all if Ellen was in on this, at least the embezzlement part." After multiple tries I found the message, double-clicked, and waited for it to come up.

Dan hadn't responded, and when I turned to find him, he was as far away from the computer as he could be and still be in the office. "Don't you want to know?"

"To be honest," he said, "I've already found out more than I ever wanted to know."

"What if it wasn't her? We don't know for sure, Dan. This will tell us."

The CPU seemed to labor endlessly, whirring and clicking as I watched the blinking cursor on the screen. The wool fabric on my chair was making the hollows at the backs of my knees sweat right through my jeans. When the message finally appeared, it was in pieces. "Here it comes."

Half a note from Hazel appeared first, saying simply that Matt had asked her to… the rest of the message came up… forward the information. I punched up the attachment. The first section included titles and column headings-vendors, amounts paid, check numbers, and in the far right-hand column "Approved by:" I tried to stay calm, but it was tough. If it was all here, Hazel had sent us exactly what we needed.

"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon," Dan coaxed. I hadn't even noticed, but he was now leaning over my chair, breathing over my shoulder as the report began to appear.

The screen changed hues as the last of the data popped up. The spreadsheet was so big, we could see only the first few columns.

I scrolled down through the A's. There were lots of B's. Lawyers, accountants, auditors, consultants- advisers of every stripe. At one point I got frustrated and went too fast, and we ended up in the H's. Finally I found it. My heart did a little tap dance from just seeing it there. Crescent Consulting-big as life.