“What kind of plane?” I asked.
“A Piper Tomahawk,” Glancy answered. “At least I think that’s what he bought. He’s only had it for six months or so. He went down to Wichita, Kansas, and picked it up from the factory.”
“Any idea what he’ll do?”
Glancy shook his head. “It’s funny. If you had asked me that question yesterday, I would have answered it in a minute. We’ve worked together for three years now. I thought I knew him like a book, but it turns out I don’t know him at all. I wouldn’t dare hazard a guess about what he’ll do.”
We didn’t make fast work of crossing the bridge, but it was far better than it would have been if James hadn’t pulled rank and dragged us through the traffic jam. The state patrol officer directing the one open lane of traffic glared at us as we went past the wreck, but he let us through.
Once we cleared the last of the emergency vehicles, we made good time. We roared down Interstate-405 and onto I-90, where we headed east. As we passed Eastgate, Sergeant James turned off his emergency lights. The squad cars did the same.
James pulled off the freeway at the Newport Way exit. We all swung into line behind him and parked in a row in the parking lot at the trail head of a hiking trail. We were a group of grown-ups playing a deadly version of Follow the Leader.
The sergeant came up to the window. “If we all come off the freeway together, he’s sure to catch on. I’ll cross the freeway here and come up on the access road on the other side.”
James motioned the uniformed officers into the conference. “You guys go beyond the Lake Sammamish exit and come down on the other side. Beau, yours looks the least like a cop car. You try driving directly onto the field. If you see him, do what you can to stop him, but don’t do anything stupid.”
“In other words, no stunts. No hanging on the wings, right?” I said.
“Right,” James replied.
He sent the squad cars on ahead, giving them a minute or so lead time before he motioned us forward too. The idea was for us all to converge on the airport at pretty much the same time.
For years I’ve prided myself on being ignorant of events that happen on the east side of Lake Washington. That kind of prejudice is part and parcel of Seattle’s downtown-living mystique. So I confess I was surprised that the Issaquah Skyport still existed. Nestled in prime real-estate development space along the freeway, it’s been on borrowed time for years. I had assumed that the local haven for skydivers had long since succumbed to progress, but I was wrong.
Not only did the Skyport still exist, it had regressed a little. There were no landing lights on the short, seven-hundred-foot grass runway, and the scatter of buildings, open only on weekends except during skydiving season, were dark and deserted. It may have been skydiving season at the time, but it was also two o’clock in the morning, and all the skydiving enthusiasts had gone night-night.
I pulled off the access road into the Issaquah Holiday Inn parking lot, hoping that, if Wainwright saw our headlights, he would assume we were nothing but late-night arrivals stopping off at the motel.
“Can you see him?” I asked Glancy.
“I see something moving,” he replied. “Hot damn! It’s the cab! He’s just now pulling away. I never thought we’d catch him, but we’re going to make it. Try to get closer, can you?”
“Will do,” I said under my breath.
I saw a break in the grass, a place where there seemed to be a vehicle track leading from the motel parking lot onto the grass field next to the runway. I took it and was rewarded with a gut-wrenching bounce where thick grass, heavy with early-morning dew, had concealed a drainage ditch.
My Porsche is a finely tuned, lean, mean machine. On pavement, wet or dry, it’s impossible to stop, but an all-terrain vehicle it’s not. And for negotiating that lumpy open field of dew-slick grass, it was practically worthless. It was a wonder we didn’t high-center on that very first hole. We bumped along, slipping and sliding, with the rear end scraping ominously over every high spot.
The tension in the car was almost palpable. Glancy was like a bird dog on point, sitting forward in his seat, eyes straining to see through the early morning gloom.
“Why the hell isn’t this place better lit?” he demanded irritably. “And can’t you go any faster?”
“No, I can’t go any faster, goddamn it! Don’t you think Wainwright picked it because of the lack of lights? He chose this field because he knew it would be deserted, because he knew there’d be no landing lights.”
There was no question about it. If Wainwright had landed the plane after he got back from Bellingham and before he came to the theater, it must have been almost dark when he set down. It doesn’t take a Philadelphia lawyer to figure out that it’s a hell of a lot easier for a plane to take off in the dark than it is to land without lights.