Chapter 28
Reed Osgood stared at the clipboard lying on the dusty floor like a dead thing, taking a long moment before raising his eyes to meet Izzy's. His face had gone the color of old paper. "Twenty million?" His voice cracked. "Where did you get that number?"
"Does it matter?" She kept her position by the window, watching both Reed and the empty airstrip beyond. The desert stretched endlessly, heat shimmers making the distant mountains dance. "The FBI will be very interested in how an FAA investigator accumulated that kind of wealth."
"It's not what you think." Reed sank into his chair, suddenly looking every one of his sixty-odd years. "It's not... I didn't..."
"Didn't what?" Cory sat facing Reed, close enough to invade personal space. "Didn't take bribes to rule sabotage as mechanical failure? Didn't help someone destroy Mountain Angel?"
"I never took a bribe." The words came out fierce, desperate. "Never. Not once in thirty years."
Izzy snorted. "Right. Twenty million just fell from the sky."
"It did." Reed's hands shook as he reached for his wallet. "In a way, it did."
He pulled out a photograph, edges worn from handling. A young woman smiled from the faded paper—maybe twenty-five, dark hair, Reed's nose and stubborn chin.
"Sarah. My daughter." His thumb traced her face. "Killed six years ago. Driving home from Vegas to Reno. Drunk driver."
The words hung in the stale office air. Somewhere outside, a dust devil swirled across the tarmac.
"Turned out, the idiot who killed her has one of those last names that comes with huge bank accounts attached. Family offered us a fortune. Literally. Our lawyer told us to take it. Said it would be the only justice we’d see.
Twenty-two million." Reed's voice had gone hollow. "Blood money for my baby girl."
Izzy felt the ground shift under her assumptions. She caught Cory's eye—he looked as wrongfooted as she felt.
"The Mountain Angel incidents," Cory said carefully. "You ruled them mechanical failure."
"Because that's what they looked like." Reed slipped the photo back into his wallet with reverent care. "Servo actuator degradation. Hydraulic line wear. Things that happen to aircraft flying hard schedules in mountain conditions."
"But they were sabotage," Izzy pressed. "We have proof—"
"Then I missed it." The admission seemed to break something in him. "I haven’t been…right…since Sarah died."
He looked up, and Izzy saw a man drowning in his own guilt.
"After she died, I couldn't..." He gestured helplessly.
"Everything felt pointless. Going through the motions.
I thought about quitting a million times, but what would I do all day?
Maybe I wasn't as thorough as I should've been.
Maybe I saw mechanical failure because that's all I could see anymore. "
"Seven companies went under," Izzy said, but the heat had left her voice. "People lost their livelihoods."
"I know." Reed rubbed his face. "I've been telling myself I need to retire, but the job was all I had left. That and my wife. But Robyn’s shattered, too. Sarah loved flying. Loved that I kept people safe in the air."
The irony of it twisted like a knife. Izzy thought of Chantal, of what losing her would do to her ability to function. To care about anything.
"Did anyone pressure you?" Cory asked. "Suggest certain findings? Offer guidance on your reports?"
Reed shook his head. “If what you say is true, they didn’t have to." He laughed bitterly. "You want to know what twenty million buys? Nothing. Absolutely nothing that matters."
"The other investigators," Izzy tried. "Did you coordinate with—"
The window exploded.
The crack of a rifle shot followed a heartbeat later—long distance, high-powered. Izzy's world contracted to that single instant: Reed's eyes widening in shock, Cory already moving, and her own body dropping to the floor as military instincts overrode conscious thought.