I said to her, “The truth shall set you free.”

She sobbed and laughed at the same time and said, “The truth will get me divorced with the worst prenuptial agreement ever signed in New York State.” She looked at me and said, “And I have two sons who were eight and ten at that time.” She asked me, “Are you married?”

I held up my hand with my wedding ring.

“Do you have children?”

“Not that I know of.”

She smiled and dried her eyes again with the shredded tissue. She said, “It’s very complicated with children.”

“I understand.” I asked her, “Did they ask you to submit to a polygraph?”

She replied, “On their first visit, they asked if I would, and I said yes, I’m telling the whole truth. They said they’d bring a polygraph tester here the next time. But when they returned, there was no polygraph. I asked them about it, but they said it wasn’t necessary.”

I nodded. It wasn’t necessary because by this time, they’d restored the tape, and everything they wanted to know was on that tape. What they didn’t want were signed statements by Jill Winslow or Bud, or taped interviews, or a polygraph test-all of which might come to light later if Mrs. Winslow or Bud came forward, or were found by someone else-like me.

In effect, Nash, Griffith, and whoever were not trying to discover credible evidence of a missile strike on TWA 800; they were trying to suppress and destroy the evidence, which is what they accused Jill Winslow of doing.

I asked Mrs. Winslow, “Did these gentlemen from the FBI swear you to silence?”

She nodded.

“But after the official conclusion was announced-that it was an accident-didn’t you wonder why your eyewitness statement and Bud’s wasn’t taken into account?”

“I did… but then this man, Nash, called, and we met here again, and he explained that without the videotape, my statements and Bud’s had no more importance than the hundreds of other eyewitness statements.” She took a deep breath and said, “Nash told me I should consider myself lucky, and get on with my life, and never think about this again.”

“But that didn’t happen.”

“No, it didn’t… I still see the rocket…”

“And you saw that CIA animation of the accident?”

“I did. It was completely wrong.”

“It would have been nice to have your tape.”

She didn’t reply.

We sat there awhile in silence. She stood, got a tissue from the counter, and blew her nose. She opened the refrigerator and asked me, “Would you like some bottled water?”

“No, thanks, I don’t drink pure water.”

She took a bottle of water and poured it into a glass. Real lady.

I digested what she’d said so far, and it distilled down to a few key facts: Bud had not physically destroyed the tape; the FBI and CIA had undoubtedly restored the erased tape and seen what two hundred eyewitnesses had said they’d seen-a rising streak of light.

Therefore, what? I had only two words to describe it: conspiracy and cover-up.

But why? There were a lot of reasons why. But I wasn’t going to try to fathom how people in Washington thought, what their secret agendas were, what their motives were, and what they gained by a cover-up. I was certain they had good security reasons for covering up what could be friendly fire, an experimental weapon, or a terrorist attack-but I was also certain that those reasons were wrong.

Jill Winslow looked exhausted, sad, and troubled, as though something was on her mind. I thought I knew what was on her mind, and I wanted to help her get it off her mind.

Still standing, she asked me, “Are you going to see Bud today?”

“Today or tomorrow.”

She smiled and said, “He’s part of a foursome with my husband today.”

“Are they friends?”

“Social acquaintances.” She sat down with her glass of water, crossed her legs, and said, “Cheating on your husband is bad enough, but if Mark ever found out it was with Bud, he’d feel like a complete fool.”

“Why?”

“Mark thinksBud is a fool. For once, Mark is right. Mark once said to me, ‘Jill, if you ever cheat on me, at least pick someone who you won’t be embarrassed by if it became public.’ I should have listened.”

I thought about that advice, and I agreed. I mean, you don’t want to be caught having an affair with someone who everyone else thinks is a loser or a geek, or who’s ugly and a few pounds overweight. I asked Jill Winslow, “Is he good-looking?”

“Yes. But that’s about it. It was all physical.” She smiled. “I’m so shallow.”

It actually wasn’t all physical-it had a lot to do with Mark Winslow, and Jill Winslow’s need to be less than a perfect wife, even if Mark didn’t know it. But I didn’t reply. As the expression goes, “You can’t feel sorry for a rich girl drinking champagne on a yacht.” But in a way, I felt sorry for Jill Winslow.

As for Bud, I could assume he was a member of the same country club as the Winslows, and it would take me about ten minutes to go to the club and ask about Bud. But I didn’t think I needed Bud. What I wanted was here.

She asked me, “Is there anything else?”

I replied, “That’s about it… except for a few details about your time in the hotel room when you came back from the beach. You watched the videotape. Take me through that.”

“Well… we watched it… we fast-forwarded through the part where we were in the dunes on the beach blanket… and began as we ran down to the beach… then we played this part from the time we were making love on the beach until the time when we saw the streak of light… we rewound that and played it in slow motion… you could see this glow on the horizon… then this light rising into the air… in slow motion, you can see the smoke trail, and we realized we could also see the blinking lights of the aircraft that was about to…”

“How long did the tape run?”

“The part on the beach ran for about fifteen minutes, from us walking down to the beach to when Bud ran back and grabbed the camera. Then about five minutes of darkness when the camera sat in the rear seat, and you could hear us talking.”

“Okay. And the part on the beach blanket when you first started recording?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe fifteen minutes. I didn’t even want to see that. There was no reason to see it.”

“Right. So you ran the tape, paused, rewound, ran it in slow motion, and so forth?”

“Yes. It was… unbelievable.”

“Hypnotic. Mesmerizing.”

“Yes.”

“What did you do after you finished with the tape?”

“Bud erased it.”

“Just like that? You said you didn’t want to erase it.”

“I didn’t… we argued, but… he wanted to erase it. He also wanted to get out of the room in case someone had seen us coming from the beach. I didn’t think this was possible, but he wanted to leave and go home. Our cell phones were starting to ring now because people were seeing this on TV, and people who knew we were out there were trying to contact us, but we weren’t taking any calls. Then Bud went into the bathroom to call his wife-he was supposed to be fishing with friends.”

I commented, “Maybe he sloshed water in the bathtub and yelled, ‘Make for shore, me hearties.’”

She smiled and said, “He’s not that clever. But hewas paranoid.”

I said, “It’s not paranoid to cover your butt.”

She shrugged and said, “At that point, I thought we’d be found out one way or the other. It was a bad piece of luck that we both were out east with cover stories when this happened. Mark called my cell phone once, but I didn’t answer. When I got in my car and started driving home, I played his message, which said, ‘Jill, did you hear about the airplane crash out there? Give me a call.’ I called my girlfriend first, who I was supposed to be with in East Hampton, and she hadn’t heard from him. So, I called Mark back and told him I was upset and I was coming home.” She smiled and said, “It wasn’t even a close call.”