CHAPTER 6-2
367 Words
Bohannon’s duties as chauffeur began immediately. He drove his unmarked Chevy Caprice south to Gresham, a large suburb east of Portland.
“How many interviews are we doing?” he asked.
“There were 121 people on board. George’s folks are handling the crew. About a quarter of the passengers do not live in the Portland area. Luckily the flight was on Monday, so most of them were from here, as opposed to later in the week when more could have been out-of-towners leaving. We’ve got eighty-two people on our list.”
“Does the NTSB or FBI have other teams out doing interviews?”
“No. It’s just us for now. We’ll work our way through the list until we find something or until the NTSB says we’ve done enough.”
“That could take weeks if we go through the entire list.” Bohannon began mentally composing his plea for relief to his lieutenant.
“I doubt we’ll interview all of them. If George thought that was necessary, he’d ask them to come in to talk. Doing it this way allows us to work without drawing a lot of attention, which can slow things down.”
“If he was in a hurry, assigning more people to do interviews would do the trick. I’m sure you guys have the resources. You are the Feds after all.”
“We’re just here to talk to a few people. We want to quietly work through what happened, not draw a lot of attention. Most crashes, with a lot of fatalities, we don’t have that luxury. We just need to work it, calmly, methodically, until we find out what happened.”
Bohannon focused on the two-lane highway, keeping an eye on a knot of traffic ahead while scanning the green road signs to make sure he didn’t miss the exit heading east.
“Before we get there, let’s discuss our approach with these people,” Suter said, turning his face toward the detective but not looking at him. His eyes remained fixed in space beyond the windshield, his gaze locked onto nothing. When his eyes did follow his head, they looked through Bohannon, not at him. “I’ll do all the talking, for now. I need you to observe, see how they respond. Look for tells.”
“Tells?” Bohannon tried to track the FBI man’s eyes, which seemed to move independent of his head.
“You know, indicators that something more is going on. Are they nervous, ticky, uptight? How are their family members responding? Stuff like that.”
*
- Writer
