“Jesus,” said Leppo.
Odessa stopped so fast, Leppo bumped into her from behind.
Sirens replaced the fading roar of the plane’s engines. A cruiser went screaming past them into the cross street as Odessa slid into the driver’s seat of the Impala.
Leppo was already on his phone, talking to somebody at Claremont. The top six floors of the Claremont Tower overlooked Newark from the shore of the narrow brown Passaic River.
“Where to?” Odessa asked him, watching more blue lights plow through the spit.
“Don’t bother trying to follow it,” said Leppo, pointing her left at the intersection. Back to Claremont, then.
Leppo punched the phone audio through the Bluetooth of the automobile dash. “Davey, we were on dinner, we just saw it, what’s the word?”
“Terror bid,” said Davey. “They’ve scrambled jets from Otis.”
“Otis air base,” said Leppo, incredulous. “To do what? Shoot it down over Hoboken?”
“If that’s what it takes. He’s been back and forth across the Hudson, stunting, doing fly-bys, shooting up the city.”
“Give me what you got on the ‘he.’”
Odessa pulled over for another police cruiser, which went blasting past, going the opposite direction they were.
“Plane is reg’d to the CEO of Stow-Away Corporation. That’s a rental storage facility company, those big, boxy orange buildings. Suspected stolen, though. We have one dead on the ground at Teterboro, an airport worker. Hold on, Walt—”
The audio went muffled as Davey put his hand over the microphone, calling out to another agent nearby. Odessa and Leppo looked at each other.
“Stow-Away,” she said, feeling a dark ping in her chest.
Leppo nodded. “Not good.”
The CEO of Stow-Away, a man named Isaac Meerson, was a major donor to the New Jersey Republican Party…and a close friend of the governor of New Jersey, and Cary Peters.
“Can’t be,” said Leppo.
“What can’t be?” said Davey, coming back on the line.
“Stow-Away is getting pulled into the Peters corruption case Hardwicke and I have been working. Any description of the hijacker?”
“The pilot? No. I’ll check.”
Odessa was at a red light. The wipers worked frantically, making the traffic light look like it was flashing. “What should we do?”
“I don’t know,” said Leppo. “Can’t be related to us. Right?”
“Peters has been depressed and basically off the grid,” said Odessa. “There was that thing about the wife in the paper yesterday—”
“Her filing for divorce? No surprise there, though.”
“No,” said Odessa. “Still…”
Odessa knew Leppo well enough to sense that he was keying in on Peters now. “Stealing a plane? That’s way outside his profile.”
“He had taken flying lessons,” she said. “Remember? Stopped short of getting his license due to anxiety attacks. That was all on his background.”
Leppo nodded. He didn’t know what to do. He said, “Shit shit shit shit shit.”
Davey’s voice came back again. “Okay, I’ve got nothing on the hijacker yet.”
“Forget about that, Davey,” said Leppo. “What’s the plane’s last known position?”
“Northwest from Newark,” he said. “Over Glen Ridge. That’s the latest I got. Hey, Walt, I gotta go—”
“Go, yeah,” said Leppo, killing the call.
“Heading toward Montclair,” said Odessa. It was all happening so fast. “Do you think…?”
Leppo finished her thought. “He would crash an airplane into his own house?”
Odessa said, “It’s not going to be his house for very long. His wife’s house.”
Leppo nodded. It was decided. “Light it up.”
Odessa reached under the center console, flipping the switch that activated the Impala’s grille lights, blue and red, front and rear. She punched the gas and started weaving through traffic toward the nearby town of Montclair.
The aerial distraction caused multiple automobile accidents on the streets below, the worst being a seven-car pileup on the Garden State Parkway that snarled northbound traffic in a hopeless gridlock.
After a brief rise in altitude over East Orange, the airplane banked west and dipped below radar yet again. The aircraft’s left wing clipped a treetop over Nishuane Park, but the pilot leveled out the plane and flew on. Observers theorized that the pilot was looking for a place to land, or perhaps a familiar landmark to use for navigation.
Minutes later, the airplane dropped completely out of sight.
The first report of a plane crash came from west of Orange. Police and rescue vehicles from surrounding towns were dispatched to the area, awaiting the precise location. But after much searching and radio back-and-forth, the report was debunked as false.
The Beechcraft twin engine had set down on the first hole of the Second Nine course of the Montclair Golf Club: a straightaway, downhill par five. The plane bounced twice on its wheels, the left wing slicing a deep divot in the fairway, turning the aircraft sharply left where its wheel sank into a sand trap, and finally stopping nose-down on the edge of the trees.
Later, an eyewitness would report what he had seen. He had pulled into the golf course parking lot in order to continue an emotional telephone call with his roommate, and was standing outside of his vehicle, pacing and talking, when he saw a man exit the nearby wooded area, walking fast. He reported that the man appeared to be unaware that he was bleeding on the right side of his forehead, looking at the eyewitness with what he described as “dead eyes.” He thought at the time that the man was in shock, and called to him, ignoring his telephone conversation. But the bleeding man did not respond, instead striding toward the eyewitness’s still-running Jeep Trailhawk and climbing inside. With the eyewitness chasing after him, the man drove out of the golf course parking lot at high speed, not closing the driver’s-side door until the Jeep was almost out of sight.
The Impala’s flashing lights helped Odessa pass other cars, but traffic was jammed up everywhere. Leppo worked his phone navigation, calling out direction changes, taking them on side roads to Peters’s wife’s home in Upper Montclair.
They had already decided not to call it in to local PD. “This is a hunch,” said Leppo. “Besides, they’re busy enough. Last thing we want to do is draw away resources on a bad call.”
Odessa said, “You don’t think the plane is terror?”
“If so, it will be over soon. The fighter jets will see to that. If not…then it’s a guy at the end of his rope. Someone who’s got three kids and a restraining order and no way back to the life he once enjoyed.”
Odessa went back and forth in her mind about this. It was a long shot—never mind a huge coincidence—that this could be Cary Peters. Chances were slim.
Then again, the airplane was owned by the storage company tied up in his scandal. That alone was a major link.
“Divorce makes you crazy,” said Leppo. “I don’t think I ever told you this, but I was married before Debonair.”