the south—each popping into view like a giant Jack-in-the-box, which she’d never gotten over her fear of though she’d finally learned how to hide her reactions.
“Well, you aren’t going to find the answer up there. I’ve been flying fire crews in all morning and there’s not much to see. I was first on site around four a.m. this morning.”
Miranda didn’t want to hear this. It was in the wrong order. She hadn’t even begun the site investigation and suddenly she was receiving information from a witness, typically the very last step in her information-gathering process.
She always approached a crash in spheres of influence. Weather and terrain at the outermost; the pilot’s intellectual process (or lack thereof) at the very innermost. Eyewitness accounts were only the slightest shade removed from those of the pilots themselves—assuming they survived. She’d never found either source to be wholly reliable, emotionally neutral, or even, on occasion, coherent.
But she couldn’t think how to stop Brett Vance.
“I was in the oval office when—”
“The Oval Office? Why were you meeting with Roy?” And furthermore, President Roy Cole was sixteen hundred miles from here. “And how did you get here so quickly from DC?”
He glanced over at her for a long moment with a slight frown. She wanted to ask Mike what it meant, but he was in the back and wouldn’t be able to see his expression.
“The toilet. The room with the oval piece of porcelain. My oval office.”
“Oh.” Other than Mike, she had very little experience with Coloradan colloquialisms.
“Anyway, that’s where I was when the world lit up like daylight. Actinic white, like welding flame, not a gas fire.”
Following his detailed analysis of the A109’s strengths and weaknesses, she knew to trust Brett’s word on the spectral temperature of the light. A fuel fire, even an explosive one, trended deeply into the yellows and oranges. Even at its hottest, it would never be described as actinic white.
“I live just down there,” he nodded toward sprawling homes scattered among the trees at the base of the mountain’s ski area. “Old home, nothing fancy, but we like it and I didn’t want to sell off to the developers. We’re just two miles from the top of Snowmass, plus a mile down.”
A direct line of two-point-two-three miles—eleven seconds at the speed of sound.
“Counted thirteen seconds before a big boom rolled in—real sharp.”
Thirteen seconds would imply that his distances were inaccurate or his accelerated excitement level at the explosion had caused him to count inaccurately. Assuming he knew the elevation difference between his home and the top of Snowmass mountain, thirteen seconds would place his home two-point-four-five miles horizontally from Snowmass, not two miles.
Though such an inaccuracy seemed unlikely in Brett Vance’s case.
Oh! She’d neglected altitude. The speed of sound slowed in thinner air: nine percent slower at Aspen’s elevation and almost fourteen percent at Snowmass’ peak. If she integrated the speed of sound over the distance, thirteen seconds was surprisingly accurate for a human observer without a stopwatch or other aid.
“By that time I was out on the back deck. Not much to see until the two lower fires, sparked by the wings, started working. Early in the season for fire. Normally, the undergrowth is still damp from the snowmelt, though it was a dry winter. Whatever the conditions, the fire grabbed hold and burned up the slope hard and fast. Swept right over the crash site. Nothing much left to burn anyway after that explosion.”
Miranda decided that she was willing to accept Brett’s observations, pending further observation, despite the early stage of the investigation.
“ARTCC Denver said,” Mike had been on the phone even as he’d boarded the helo, “that the flight reported a depressurization event at Flight Level Three-niner-zero and basically augered in at over four hundred knots. Thirteen crew.”
Brett nodded, “Mountain Rescue has twelve of them off the mountain. Bits and pieces of them anyway. Can’t find the last one anywhere.”
Over four hundred knots, almost five hundred miles an hour, he didn’t need to mention that there hadn’t been any survivors.
“Wow! Look at those wings. They’re totally trashed!” Brett’s son Jeffrey’s high voice sounded over the intercom.
“You’ll have to pardon my boy, he’s quite the aviation enthusiast—”
“I’m gonna be a pilot, just like my dad!” Jeffrey declared loudly.
Brett’s tone shifted deeper, “—who rarely knows when to keep quiet about it.”
“Yet his assessment is wholly accurate.” Miranda inspected the wings herself, though that too was the wrong sphere of a proper investigation. Everything was all out of order but