Random Hearts (5 page)

"I wasn't worrying," she said defensively. The
fact was that she was a worrywart. For some reason, stoicism alone had not come
down through her New England ancestors. As long as she could remember people
had told her to stop worrying. Something in her expression, she had finally
concluded. Worry was not a trait to be carelessly exhibited. It made people
overreact.

Orson went into the study, and Vivien heard him talking on
the telephone to his office. "It can wait till Thursday, Miss
Sparks." She cleaned the kitchen. Soon she heard the sound of the taxi's
horn, muffled by the snow.

Ben came in from the outside, bringing in the fresh scent
of the snowy outdoors. His cheeks were bright red. Orson kneeled and hugged the
boy.

"Listen to Mommy," Orson said.

"We're going to make a snowman," Ben said. He
lifted his arms. "A big one like Daddy." She caught a misty glint in
Orson's eyes as he stood up.

"I'm off," he said.

"Think of us," Vivien said.

A frown shadowed his face, for which she felt partly
responsible. She had not meant for him to feel guilty. Really, she rebuked
herself, it was only for four days.

"How about Saint Thomas in February?" she said as
she bent to offer her lips. She kissed him on the cheek.

"We'll talk about it when I get back." He kissed
her and went out the door.

With Ben waving beside her, she watched Orson slosh through
the snow and get into the cab. It rolled away slowly, the tires following their
earlier tracks. As always when she bid him good-bye, she felt brief tremors of
loss. This time she felt a bit foolish. It's only for four days!

She spent the day as she had promised, helping Ben build
the snowman. They stopped for lunch and finished it soon after. She used
chocolate chip cookies for eyes, stuck one of Orson's old bent pipes into a
slit of mouth, and put Orson's tweed rain hat on his head.

"Looks like Daddy," Ben said.

"Well, then, we won't miss him so much, will we?"

Alice, their baby-sitter and cleaning woman, called. She
was too frightened to drive because of the snow and wouldn't be coming in.
Vivien spent the entire day with Ben, which meant isolating herself completely
in his child's world. In late afternoon, she made him hot chocolate, sat him on
her lap and read to him from
My Book-house
until both of them dozed off.

When she awoke, it was dark. The snow continued to fall,
and a deep hush descended over the house. She felt serene, satisfied, and content.
She hugged Ben to her, breathing in the aroma of his sweet child's body,
feeling again the sense of completeness in her motherhood, her home, her
husband; a bird secure in her nest. Ben was the image of his father, a fact
that made her love him all the more. The pressure of her caresses woke him.

"Mommy loves you," she whispered. Tears brimmed
in her eyes. She was overwhelmed with the joy of it. Considering the perils of
this world, there was much to be thankful for. The telephone's ring shattered the
mood. Her mother's tense voice startled her.

"I saw it on television. Isn't it awful?"

"Awful?" She thought immediately of Orson. Had
something happened?

"I mean the plane crash."

"My God." Her heart jumped.

"It went right into the Potomac. Under the ice."
There was a long pause. "Vivien!"

Her throat felt constricted. She grunted an answer, and her
head began to pound.

Her mother continued, "It was this plane to Miami."

"Miami?"

Relieved, she felt the pounding subside as her mother
plunged on with the story: a handful of survivors; they think the rest are
dead. She listened patiently, understanding her mother's motive for telling her
this terrible news, imagining how many other parents and children were reacting
in just that way.

"Orson flew to Paris today," Vivien said.
"I've been here with Ben. We're fine. We built a snowman."

In the long silence she felt her mother's embarrassment.

"I'm so sorry, Viv. How stupid of me. I thought
everyone knew. I just called to hear your voice, that's all."

"I know, but you did scare the bejesus out of
me."

"I'm so sorry, dear."

"It's all right, Mother. You couldn't have known Orson
was flying today."

"They shouldn't fly in this weather," her mother
said firmly. A public tragedy, Vivien supposed, often triggered anxiety in
those whose loved ones were within geographical proximity of the event.

"We're all fine, Mama," she said reassuringly.
They talked for a while, and then she put Ben on. But the news, despite its
irrelevance to her, had shattered her sense of calm. While Ben talked she
turned on the television set. She saw the bridge, the wreckage of automobiles,
and the divers going down into the water through a screen of falling snow. A
young man's battered body was being extracted from a car.

"Oh, my God," she exclaimed. Ben looked at her,
then threw a kiss through the telephone mouthpiece and hung up. Quickly, Vivien
turned off the set.

"Nothing that concerns us, baby."

She gathered him into her arms and hugged him. How lucky we
are, she thought.

Sergeant Lee McCarthy of MPD Homicide could not remember
ever having been this cold. They had set up a ribbon bridge that jutted out
into the Potomac to make it more convenient for the rescue boats to bring up
the bodies. A few yards up the embankment, MPD had set up its Morgue Tent,
where the bodies were received, bagged, and their effects inventoried.

On the first day they had set up a heater in the tent, but
since the bodies were coming up either frozen solid or semi-frozen, a decision
was made to disconnect the heat. It was thawing the bodies.

They hadn't got things efficiently operational until the
second day. The Army Engineers brought in their diver teams. Sophisticated
radar scanners that could read under water were used to diagram the crash site
and divide it into segments so that the divers would be able to organize their
rescue efforts.

A ninety-foot crane was brought in to bring up parts of the
plane. Police and firefighter boats were summoned, as well as helicopters. In
the first hour a helicopter had rescued four people. Nearly eighty still
remained in twenty-five feet of water under a partial layer of ice.

On the third day they brought up twenty-six bodies. The
objective of the special emergency team that had been assembled, of which
McCarthy was a member, was to make a visual examination of the body, dictate
the details of observable injuries to a partner, catalogue personal property,
label and bag the bodies, and then accompany them to the Medical Examiner's
office where the team was to assist in identification and notification of the
next of kin.

Identifying the males was a simple process. Men normally
carried wallets that contained their IDs. The females were more difficult
unless a handbag was recovered in the vicinity of the body. If they had some
identifying object on their person, like an engraved ring or a charm with their
name or initial, it could be checked against the passenger manifest or, if
possible, against the seating assignments. Many females had never been
fingerprinted. Visual inspection by the next of kin was the swiftest and surest
method of female identification.

By the fourth day the bodies of more than half of the
people missing were recovered and fully identified. On that day a white female
had been deposited on the ribbon bridge. Nothing on her person gave a clue to
her identity, and a handbag had not been brought up with the body. Apparently
the woman had not been securely belted, and the impact of the crash had sent
her body hurtling through the fuselage. Assessing her, McCarthy dictated the characteristics
of her injuries, including physical markings that would be useful. Clutched in
her hand, inexplicably, were the remains of what looked like a flower, perhaps
a rose. When he looked at it more closely and touched her fingers, it slipped
from her grasp. A gust of wind carried it to the river where it sank below the
surface. Not important, McCarthy told himself as he continued his dictation.

"Age about thirty. Brunette. About one hundred and
twenty pounds. Blunt force trauma. A Casio wristwatch stopped at three-twenty
P.M., almost the recorded moment of impact. Front of skull caved in."
Kneeling, he had looked up and watched Charlie, his partner, turn away,
fighting the temptation to gag.

"Just bag her," he muttered.

"Looks like instant death. Not drowning like some of
the others."

"Lucky bitch."

"Lucky?"

At the Medical Examiner's office, partial autopsies were
made of every victim, personal property was assembled, and forms and
inventories were filled out and filed alphabetically. Polaroids were taken of
the face and body, and then the corpses were filed on trays in the Medical
Examiner's refrigerator.

Southair, reacting quickly, set up headquarters in a nearby
Marriott Hotel and took rooms for the relatives awaiting the news. After a body
was processed, the next of kin were brought in to the Medical Examiner's office
for a visual identification, and the body and personal property were released
to the relatives.

By the evening of the fourth day the woman's body had not
been identified. Her fingerprints had come back negative, which meant that she
had never been printed. Two sets of relatives with potential victims of the
same age and sex were brought in to view the body, also with negative results.
Relatives at the hotel had been questioned.

Since nearly half of the passengers were still to be
accounted for, McCarthy was not concerned. The lady would be identified by a
process of elimination. She was labeled Jane Doe and placed on a tray in the
refrigerator.

On the fifth day the weather was so severe that the divers
could not go down safely and operations were suspended, leaving the Homicide
division to concentrate on sorting personal property and cleaning up paperwork.
By then more than fifty bodies had been accounted for and claimed. Only Jane Doe
remained unidentified.

Because of the lull, McCarthy was able to pursue the
identity of the young woman. He matched all the known next of kin with the
various deceased yet to be recovered. There were a number of women in her age
category still on the river bottom, confirmed by relatives either waiting at
the Marriott or located in other parts of the country. A small number of the
dead still remained without confirmed next of kin.

Among those who appeared on the passenger list but were
still not recovered were a Mr. and Mrs. Calvin Marlboro. Jane Doe did wear a
marriage ring, the inside of which was unmarked, but there was no way of
knowing whether or not she fit the age category of the couple. As yet no next
of kin had come forward for the Marlboros. McCarthy checked the telephone
companies of all the surrounding jurisdictions. He could not find a single
Marlboro listed. He found a number in Florida, but they reported all relatives
with that name accounted for.

To make the process more complicated, the tickets purchased
by the Marlboros had been paid for in cash at the ticket counter. No telephone
number had been given or required. The ticket agent had absolutely no
recollection of the purchaser. A return trip had been booked for four days
later. In Miami, a rental car had been booked in Mr. Marlboro's name.

For McCarthy, the little mystery offered a welcome
diversion from what had become a tiresome and predictable routine. As for
death, fifteen years with homicide had desensitized him to most aspects
concerning the victims. Once death occurred, there was no more pain in it for
the victim. To a professional like himself, a corpse was evidence, nothing
else. Pain was for the living. Yet, despite his hard-boiled facade and
attitude, he could still feel something at times, especially anger. A child's
untimely death reminded him of his own children. Although his divorced wife had
them most of the time in Philadelphia and he rarely saw them, he could still
feel a parent's loss. Occasionally he did feel pity in varying degrees, but
always for the living relatives, friends, and spouses. Most of the time he
could easily shrug it off, like the aftermath of a sad movie.

In cases of murder he rarely dwelled on thoughts about
man's inhumanity to man. His job was to observe death, identify its victim,
define its real cause and, when the means of death went beyond the bounds of
legality, to pursue and bring the perpetrator to justice.

He did not speculate on the philosophical aspects of death,
especially when it occurred randomly, like the plane crash. Long ago, when he
was first exposed to violent death, he had formed his opinions about life and
death. People were part good and part evil, part lucky and part unlucky. The
poor bastards who were killed crossing the bridge at the exact moment of the
crash were unlucky, as were the passengers who went down with the plane. The
four survivors were lucky, very lucky. He never called it fate. Just luck. In
his life he hadn't had much of that.

As the day wore on, he found himself speculating more and
more on Jane Doe's identity. It was a loose end, and loose ends offered
challenges. He viewed the remains again with one of the assistant medical
examiners, and went over his report.

"From all physical indications, a healthy specimen.
Not a scar on her body. A couple of larger birthmarks, one under the left
breast and one on a shoulder blade."

He looked at the body, ignoring the smashed face. In
contrast with other ways of death, the body flesh looked pink and healthy, an
aberration caused by immersion in water of icy temperatures.

The assistant medical examiner, who was very close to the
age of the victim, clicked his tongue.

"Can't imagine that a specimen like that wouldn't have
people who really cared about her."

"How do you know she didn't?" McCarthy asked.

The assistant medical examiner flicked the tag attached to
the body's toe. It read Jane Doe in magic marker.

"Then where the hell are they?" He shrugged.