THE SOUTHEAST REGIONAL AIR FACILITY was a local helipad and airport that housed single-engine planes, a couple aircraft tied to the nearby Marine Corps base, and two regional airlines, each of them flying short-haul passenger routes under the Delta banner.
The airport itself was a small terminal with a shiny metal roof shaped like a wing.
I drove around the terminal and headed to a hangar where the crop-dusting planes were housed, slowing my truck outside a chain-link fence and holding up my badge to a camera.
The gate stirred to life, and I saw a runway used for small aircraft in front of me. About two hundred yards ahead, a tiny white plane lifted into the air.
Brodie Sands was the crop duster who’d called 911 to report the fire in Harmony. From the short phone interview that Abe had done back when the arson-murder was just an arson, there was nothing to do here except to dot some i’s and cross some t’s. But I kept having visions of flying. Who knows? Maybe it was nothing. Maybe I was a bird in a former life. Or I needed a vacation.
I found a large metal hangar to my right and got out.
Inside, about ten planes were parked at angles to each other, to maximize the space.
A man in a yellow windbreaker lay on his back under one wing of a plane, his body positioned on a dolly padded with carpet. The words Topeka Sands were painted on the side of his red single-engine.
“Brodie Sands?” I asked, and the man slid out. He was in his late sixties, tall and bone thin, in corduroy pants, a windbreaker, and a baseball hat.
“Detective Marsh,” I said. “Mason Falls PD. You got a minute?”
Sands directed me over to a ten-by-ten patch of green artificial turf, glued to the polished concrete in between his plane and the next one over.
“Welcome to paradise,” he said, motioning for me to sit down. A handful of five-dollar lawn chairs were placed on the fake green grass.
“Mr. Sands, you reported a fire out at Harmony Farms three days ago.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, grabbing a chair.
I sat down next to him. The stubble on Sands’s face looked like it could cut me. “Can you walk me through that morning?”
“Not much to walk through,” he said. “I saw a fire. Took her down to get a better look and called in here.” Sands pointed. “We have a little ATC upstairs. He connected me to you guys.”
I blinked. “ATC?”
“Air traffic control,” he said. “Granted, it’s not a real ATC. But most of us are ex-commercial or -military, so we call it that.”
“How ’bout we start earlier,” I said. “What time you got up. What time you got here.”
Sands nodded. “Up at four usually. Here by four forty-five. In the air over there, a little after six that day.”
I flipped through my notes. Unger, the farmer, had left for his church service at five a.m. And the 911 call from Sands had come in at five-thirty.
Which put the fire starting around five-fifteen.
I let Sands keep going. He wasn’t a suspect. Maybe he had no idea when he was in the air.
“And it’s the same route every day?” I asked.
Sands shook his head. “No, some clients are three days a week. Others once a week.”
“So you’re flying along,” I said, getting him back on track.
“Sure,” he said. “I saw a little burst of light off Highway 903.” Sands motioned with his hand in that direction. “I called the ATC, and they called y’all.”
Paging backward in my notebook, I got to when the 911 call happened.
“Would it surprise you to know that you made the call at 5:32?” I asked. “That you were up in the air much earlier than you just said?”
Sands made a funny look. “Does that matter? I checked in later that day with the ATC. They said the fire department got out there. Not much land was burned.”
I looked from my notes to a giant aerial map on the wall behind us. Had Sands been under a rock? Did he not know about Kendrick?
On the map, I could see where we were now. Up and to the right was Harmony. Six or seven fields were highlighted in yellow marker.
“These yellow fields are your clients?” I asked.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
My eyes followed an imaginary line from the airfield to the yellow areas. It didn’t go over Unger’s place.
Something wasn’t right, but I needed a moment to think. “Can you tell me how it works?” I pointed to his plane. “The spraying.”
“It’s pretty simple.” He motioned at a pipe that ran along the edge under each wing. “The sprayers are attached to the trailing edges of the wings, and the two pumps are driven by wind turbines. That way you’re not stealing power from the engine when you spray.”
I cocked my head. “I remember there was an issue a couple years ago about insecticide going off course,” I said. “People were protesting you guys. We had to send two squad cars out here.”
“It’s called drift,” Sands said, his voice a touch defensive. “That’s why we fly lower now when we’re spraying.”
“Gotcha,” I said. “So when you saw the fire, you must’ve been pretty low. I mean, you wouldn’t want to guess that it was a fire, right? Send the fire department on a wild-goose chase?”
“I wasn’t guessing, Detective. I done saw it.”
“So in terms of height,” I asked.
“I probably brought her down to forty feet.”
I got up and glanced again at the aerial poster. The smell of grease in the open hangar reminded me of a Civil War armory I’d visited with Jonas. Hints of gunmetal mixed with the smell of rosemary blowing in from the fields nearby.
“Were you spraying at the Unger place?” I said. “Or flying near it on the way to somewhere else?”
“I wasn’t spraying there, no.”
“So why would you be down at forty feet then?” I asked. “I mean, it’s clearly not on the way to these other fields in yellow.”
Sands put his hands in his pockets. “Geez, I dunno. Maybe I didn’t take it down that low. This cold medicine I’m on—it’s making me as useful as a screen door on a submarine.”
I stared at the map again. Sands was dodging my questions. Which made no sense. He had nothing to hide.
“Do you know Tripp Unger?” I asked.
“He’s a former client,” Sands said.
I hesitated. Looked over at Sands. “A boy’s body was found in that fire, Mr. Sands.”
“Excuse me,” he said, his surprise genuine. “It wasn’t one of Tripp’s boys, was it?”
“You don’t watch the news?”
“My TV broke a couple years ago. I go to the counter at the Waffle House if there’s a Braves game. Watch it while I eat.”
“Is there a reason you never mentioned to Detective Kaplan that Unger was a former client?”
“Didn’t seem relevant,” Sands said. “Tripp and me—we had a fallin’ out. We’ve known each other since the sixth grade. Then he sued me.”
“And?” I said.
“And nothing,” Sands answered. “There’s a whole lotta reasons a crop don’t grow beyond what comes out of these little pipes. But insurance kicked in some cash. So did I. And we parted ways. That’s the end of the story.”
“Mr. Sands, timing’s important here. See, ten minutes earlier, you wouldn’t have seen that fire. But you mighta seen the perpetrator.”
“But I didn’t see nothin’,” Sands said.
There was a connection here, but my head hurt. I should’ve gotten more sleep last night.
“There’s something I can’t understand, Mr. Sands.” I shook my head. “And I mean, from day one.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“It took the fire department fifteen minutes to get out there,” I said. “And the body still hadn’t burnt all the way. I’ve been trying to figure out how that’s possible.”
“Well, it was raining on and off.” Sands shrugged.
“Sure, but that loblolly . . . it’s a thick tree, you know? So it shelters most of that rain. Which would’ve kept the body burning.”
Sands’s eyes were on the floor, and I ran my hand along the body of his plane.
I was thinking of the smell I’d noticed when Remy and I had first walked the field. Cow shit, meet rain, Remy had said. Or something like that.
“There was a fire last year up near the hills,” I said to Sands. “It destroyed a couple houses. But this farmer I met—he was beside himself on where his cattle were gonna feed. I mean he was a big man, but I watched him weep.”
I pointed at Sands’s plane. “But then one of you guys laid something down. Rain came the following week, and there were buds coming out of the ground ten days after that. I think he called it ‘top dressing.’ Does the Topeka Sands spray top dressing?”
Sands offered a pleading look. “C’mon, man,” he said. “What is this—no good deed goes unpunished?”
I opened my case file, pulling out the photo of the tiny green crystals I’d seen around the loblolly. “Mr. Sands, I saw these on the ground by the body. And there was this smell.”
He took off his baseball hat. Ran his hands through his stringy gray hair.
“So here’s where I remind you this is a murder investigation,” I said. “You oughta be real careful if you lie.”
“I didn’t see no kid,” Sands said.
“But you saw the fire?”
He nodded. “I took her down to forty feet, and I thought, Tripp and Barb are probably gone to church. And some instinct kicked in.”
“What do you mean—some instinct?”
“I knew I couldn’t land. So I dumped thirty gallons of TD-71 to slow down the blaze ’til the fire department got there. And if Unger knew that, he’d go after my license—even if I’m doing him a favor saving his land.”
“Go after your license—why?” I asked.
“I was up in the sky too early, Detective. You can’t be flying ’til six a.m.”
So this was why he lied about the time. It was against city rules to be spraying at that hour.
“But I promise,” he said. “It’s all natural slurry. Water and fertilizer. No pesticide.”
This explained the odd burn pattern on Kendrick. The slurry had dripped through the trees and onto his burning body.
But something bigger was popping in my head.
“How many people know this sort of thing?” I asked. “About when you can and can’t fly.”
“Pilots.” Sands shrugged. “Farmers. People in the industry.”
My mind was advancing the clock. Thinking about an alternate timeline. Building a scene in which Sands never got there ’til six a.m. Or later.
“So if you hadn’t put that fire out at five-thirty,” I said, “it might have been raging by six.”
“For sure.”
Which meant the blaze might’ve devoured half of Unger’s farm if Sands had flown at the time he was legally supposed to.
I started walking away. Out of the hangar.
“Are we good then?” Sands hollered.
I turned around. Walked back toward him. “No,” I said, pointing at the map on the wall. “There’s something else. What made you fly in that direction in the first place—if you weren’t doing anything on Unger’s farm?”
He bit at his lip. “It don’t make sense.”
“Try me.”
“Something called to me,” he said. “I heard a voice that sounded like my late wife.”
I hesitated. “You’re right. It doesn’t make any sense.” I walked back toward my truck.
“You gonna tell Tripp?” he yelled.
I didn’t answer. I needed to talk to a friend at the fire department.