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park behind the helicopter,” I said to Mitchell, and then Dr. Guzman, Pasquale, and I continued toward the wreckage.
    In the thirty years that I’d worked for the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department, I’d visited the scene of three air crashes. That certainly didn’t make me an expert. Within the next twenty-four hours, investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board would arrive and begin their methodical sifting of the scene. Maybe they’d have some answers for us.
    I stood on a jumble of rocks, taking care to avoid the cactus. Within the range of my flashlight beam, the pieces of the Beechcraft Bonanza spread out like confetti, making a crescent-shaped scar at least a hundred yards long, maybe more.
    Ahead of us, the chunk of the central fuselage was a tangle of metal and tubing roughly the size of a small, imported sedan that had been torn in half lengthwise. Neither wing was attached, nor the tail aft of the rear cabin window. It would take someone far more expert than I was to make sense of the mess that remained. The windshield and its entire framework, including all of the cabin roof, were missing, as was everything from the firewall forward.
    “Christ,” I muttered, and stepped closer so I could sweep the flashlight beam over the wreckage. What was left of Martin Holman was belted to the right front seat, and the seat was twisted and bent backward, mangled with the rest of the cabin’s right-side framework.
    I felt a hand on my sleeve. “Let me do this, Bill,” Francis Guzman said. I nodded and held the light for him, then turned my head so I didn’t have to watch.
    “Thomas,” I said, “did you walk over to the east to find the first point of impact?”
    “No, sir,” Pasquale said. His voice was shaking. “You told me to stay right here, and that’s what I did.”
    “Good man.” I stood quietly and gazed off to the east. If Philip Camp had been trying to land, the Bonanza would have been traveling in the neighborhood of eighty to a hundred miles an hour when it struck the rugged prairie. If it had hit flat, it would have been badly torn up. But it still would have been recognizable as an airplane.
    If the plane had plowed straight in, or at a steep angle, the wreckage would have pulverized itself in a “smoking hole,” as military pilots were wont to say.
    As I stood in the dark and listened to Dr. Guzman’s ragged breath behind me, I could imagine only one scenario that would have resulted in this kind of crash scatter: the Bonanza had struck the earth at a glancing angle, perhaps one wing down, at full speed—perhaps upward of two hundred miles an hour, maybe more. If that was the case, there could be a whole handful of explanations that were obvious, even to me. And an experienced pilot could provide far more, I was sure.
    I had never met Philip Camp, and certainly had no idea of what kind of pilot he was—careful, careless, a hotdogger, a man who flew by the numbers, or a man who didn’t pay much attention to detail. Martin Holman had mentioned in the previous week that his wife’s sister and brother-in-law were planning a visit, but that had been the extent of our conversation. I didn’t even remember the context of the discussion that had prompted the sheriff to mention the upcoming occasion.
    “Let’s look at the other one,” Dr. Guzman said, and he waited for me while I made my way down off the rock pile.
    One hundred and four paces later, we reached the remains of the pilot’s seat. The frame was broken and the entire seat splayed out flat on the ground like a book facedown, its back broken. Thirty steps away lay most of Philip Camp’s remains.
    Headlights swept the area, and the cavalcade from the west pulled up in a vast cloud of dust. I could see Bob Torrez’s county vehicle, along with one of the Posadas Emergency Rescue squad’s four-wheel-drive Suburbans. Bringing up the rear was a pickup truck with a rack of