Sole Survivor

this, but when he says ‘make them stop,’ there's a tremor in it, a fragility, as if he's actually in… not pain so much but emotional distress.”
        SANTORELLI: Captain… Roy, I'm taking over here now.
        BLANE: Are we recording?
        SANTORELLI: What?
        BLANE: Make them stop hurting me.
        SANTORELLI: (worriedly) Gonna be-
        BLANE: Are we recording?
        SANTORELLI: Gonna be all right now-
         A hard sound like a punch. A grunt, apparently from Santorelli. Another punch. Santorelli falls silent.
        BLANE: Are we recording?
        As a timpani of thunder drummed an overture in the east, Joe said, “He sucker-punched his copilot?”
        “Or hit him with some blunt object, maybe something he'd taken out of his flight bag and hidden beside his seat while Santorelli was in the lay, something he was ready with.”
        “Premeditation. What the hell?”
        “Probably hit him in the face, because Santorelli went right out. He's silent for ten or twelve seconds, and then”-she pointed to the transcript-“we hear him groaning.”
        “Dear God.”
        “On the tape, Blane's voice now loses the tremor, the fragility. There's a bitterness that makes your skin crawl.”
        BLANE: Make them stop or when I get the chance… when I get the chance, I'll kill everybody. Everybody. I will. I'll do it. I'll kill everybody, and I'll like it.
        The transcript rattled in Joe's hands.
        He thought of the passengers on 353: some dozing in their seats, others reading books, working on laptops, leafing through magazines, knitting, watching a movie, having a drink, making plans for the future, all of them complacent, none aware of the terrifying events occurring in the cockpit.
        Maybe Nina was at the window, gazing out at the stars or down at the top of the cloud cover below them; she liked the window seat. Michelle and Chrissie might have been playing a game of Go Fish or Old Maids; they travelled with decks for various games.
        He was torturing himself. He was good at it because a part of him believed that he deserved to be tortured.
        Forcing those thoughts out of his mind, Joe said, “What was going on with Blane, for God's sake? Drugs? Was his brain fried on something?”
        “No. That was ruled out.”
        “How?”
        “It's always a priority to find something of the pilots' remains to test for drugs and alcohol. It took some time in this case,” she said, as with a sweep of one hand she indicated the scorched pines and aspens uphill, “because a lot of the organic debris was scattered as much as a hundred yards into the trees west and north of the impact.”
        An internal darkness encroached on Joe's field of vision, until he seemed to be looking at the world through a tunnel. He bit his tongue almost hard enough to draw blood, breathed slowly and deeply, and tried not to let Barbara see how shaken he was by these details.
        She put her hands in her pockets. She kicked a stone into the crater. “Really need this stuff, Joe?”
        “Yes.”
        She sighed. “We found a portion of a hand we suspected was Blane's because of a half-melted wedding band that was fused to the ring finger, a relatively unique gold band. There was some other tissue as well. With that we identified-”
        “Fingerprints?”
        “No, those were burned off. But his father's still alive, so the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory was able to confirm it was Blane's tissue through a DNA match with a blood sample that his dad supplied.”
        “Reliable?”
        “A hundred percent. Then the remains went to the toxicologists. There were minute amounts of ethanol in both Blane and Santorelli, but that was just the consequences of putrefaction. Blane's partial hand was in those woods more than seventy-two hours before we found it. Santorelli's remains-four days. Some ethanol related to tissue decay was to be expected. But otherwise, they both passed all the toxicologicals. They were clean and sober.”
        Joe tried to reconcile the words on the transcript with the toxicological findings. He couldn't.
        He said, “What're the other possibilities? A stroke?”
        “No, it just didn't sound that way on the tape I listened to,” Barbara said. “Blane speaks clearly, with no slurring of the voice whatsoever. And although what he's saying is damn bizarre, it's nevertheless