Miranda Chase

Chapter 6

Elmendorf Air Force Base

Anchorage, Alaska

“Jeremy look at how…” For the seventeenth time today, Miranda Chase turned and discovered that Jeremy wasn’t there.

A light dusting of snow, probably the last of the year, was holding on beneath late afternoon gray skies. At three degrees below freezing, atypically chilly for late May, a bare centimeter had fallen. It made the site of the air-crash look safe and clean, masking the disaster underneath. But the weak sunlight was already melting it into blotchy patches. It looked like a skin disease.

Turning quickly away from where Jeremy wasn’t, she inspected the sprawl of the shattered KC-46 Pegasus aerial tanker spread down Runway 06 at Elmendorf Air Force Base.

JBER—Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson—had a T-placed pair of runways. The main buildings and all current air traffic were along the shorter top stroke. The KC-46 had splattered itself over the first one thousand and ninety-two meters of the long vertical of the T, closing the main runway.

This was limiting Air Force operations. Already two super-heavy flights were on hold, awaiting her permission for the Air Force to clear and reopen of this runway. That at least was familiar, they were always pressuring her to cut short an investigation to clear a field for operation before she was done. It was wrong in so many ways and always made her feel as if she was choking.

A KC-46 was a Boeing 767 modified into a flying fuel truck—except this one had become a fuel bomb.

“How am I supposed to do this without Jeremy?” She’d come to rely on him so much in the last two years that it felt as if…as if…he wasn’t there. No metaphor came to mind. As if she was missing a hand? Would that be an appropriate correlation? She simply didn’t know. Metaphor failure was a common challenge for autistics, but that didn’t mean she shouldn’t fight against it. They seemed…useful. To others at least. Yes, she would keep working on them.

would “Really? But you’re the best there is. You’ve solved more crash investigations than anyone in the entire history of the NTSB.” Andi Wu held a fistful of small orange flags on wires for staking out the perimeter of the debris field.

“No, Terence has done more than—”

“Not according to him.”

Terence Graham had been with the NTSB for his entire career. Had she covered more ground in nineteen years than her mentor had in forty? That was hard to believe, though now he headed up the NTSB Training Academy and rarely went into the field. So, perhaps. She’d have to search the database to be sure. Actually, there was no need. Terence’s word had always been good enough for her, even transmitted through a third party.

Miranda dusted the last of the snow off the airplane tire that had rolled three hundred and eleven meters past the next nearest piece of debris, then sat on it. Andi had laughed that cheery laugh of hers when Miranda had insisted that it be properly staked. Nothing else here but the tire. Usually her laugh made Miranda feel better, but not today.

Nothing else here but the tire. Andi had done the staking of the debris field, Jeremy’s usual task, without complaint but her laugh reminded Miranda of his excitement about every aspect of a new crash.

Worse, Andi was right. The wheel had broken free during the crash and rolled way out here. They’d photographed it in place, as well as the breakage of the axle, and were done with it. There’d been no surprises except the extreme nature of the shearing fracture in the steel of the shock tower attachment point. The pilot hadn’t merely landed hard, he’d slammed it down.

slammed You can’t control every aspect of an investigation. Terence’s admonition was a familiar one, dating back to her first investigation as a student investigator nineteen years ago. It was a concept that constantly battled with the tendencies driven by her Autism Spectrum Disorder. She wanted everything in its proper place and hated anything that wasn’t complete. It wasn’t merely unnerving. An incomplete action was a fundamentally wrong state of being. She needed the completion.

You can’t control every aspect of an investigation.hated wrong Yet Andi was right. A lone tire three hundred and eleven meters from the crash really left little worth marking.

“So why do I feel the need to have it staked?”

“Do you want me to try answering that?” Andi shifted briefly foot-to-foot. Perhaps she was cold, though there was little wind and the air didn’t seem chilly to Miranda herself. Two inches shorter than Miranda’s own five-four, Andi was a slender Chinese woman without an extra ounce of insulation on her physique but she was dressed properly for such outdoors work.

Unsure if she’d like the answer, Miranda nodded yes anyway. Andi stopped shuffling, planted her feet, and faced Miranda directly. Had her shuffling warmed her sufficiently for the moment? Or was there some other cause? Did her feet hurt? She wore the boots she always chose for site visits.

“Perhaps, Miranda, it’s a need for control of something? Of anything? Jeremy and Taz climbed into their truck four days ago, turned east, and are gone. That must be a hard shock…” Andi hesitated and glanced at her carefully.

“…to my autism.” Miranda knew the look. Other NTSB investigators knew she was on the Spectrum and treated her differently because of it. Maybe they thought they were helping by not directly addressing her issues, but they weren’t. Instead that help morphed it into an annoying array of broken statements and incomplete thoughts. Unsure why, she pulled her personal notebook out of its vest pocket and made a note to think about that later. She made a second note that she especially didn’t like it coming from her own team. That was enough for now, she didn’t want to delay the crash investigation.

helpAndi nodded, shrugged, then nodded again. They’d only been dating for a few weeks—twenty-two days—and they were both being careful around each other. Weren’t new beginnings supposed to be the easy part? She’d read that somewhere.

“Jeremy always…” Miranda sighed.

For two years she could simply turn and there he’d be for whatever she needed.

Then, because she hated unfinished sentences in herself as much as she did in others, continued, “…simply spoke to me as if I was a normal person.”

Andi winced. “You know it was time for him to fly on his own.”

“Knowing that and liking that are proving to be quite disparate thoughts in my head.”

“You still have Mike, Holly, and me.”

“I do.” That cheered her up some.

“I promise to be less careful around you. It’s only that everything between us is so new, I don’t want to screw it up.”

“To me, everything is always new, except when it’s also overwhelming. That at least is familiar.”

everything “Right. I didn’t think of it that way.”

And by Andi’s single, simple nod, so unlike Jeremy’s multiple excited nods when he grasped any new idea, Miranda understood that Andi had filed the change away and would never make that particular mistake again.

“Also, if you need it, we can request a new person.”

Miranda shuddered. New. Such an awful word. In these last months, her autism seemed to be becoming more reactive, squeezing in harder and harder like a cherry tomato that was going to burst and spray out everywhere with no warning. She hated cherry tomatoes for that reason—didn’t even like removing them from her salad when a restaurant included them against her instructions, in case they went off without warning.

New. hated And finding a good metaphor wasn’t cheering her up either. Everything that was supposed to become easier was harder than ever. Knowing that Jeremy and Taz’s departure was probably the root cause did nothing to ease the pressure that squeezed in on her.

Although…perhaps Andi was right as usual.

“Last year you were new.”

you “Last year I was a goddamn train wreck,” Andi groaned in that way of hers that said she was half joking. Miranda still didn’t always get why, but it was a good measure of Andi’s generally positive mood.

“But now you’re a good thing.”

In answer, Andi leaned in and whispered so close to her ear that it tickled, “Then let’s go solve a plane wreck.”

“Good idea.” She could either focus on her mood or on the crash, but her ASD made it almost impossible for her to do both at once. She pulled out her notebook and entered a note.

“What was that one?” Andi asked as Miranda stood.

“My Advantages of ASD page: able to fully concentrate on only one thing at a time.”

Advantages of ASDAndi took her hand and squeezed it tightly. “I can personally attest to the advantages of that particular ability.”

Miranda assumed that was clever in some way she didn’t understand.

Without staking the lone wheel, they headed back along the runway to where Mike and Holly had finished photographing the wreck and were investigating the debris field itself.

Miranda turned to see if Jeremy was following…and sighed.

Eighteen times today.

Eighteen