He reached into his bag and pulled out his parachute and put it on, yanking the waist strap tight. From the same bag he took out a steel yardstick. He needed it to prop open the door while he climbed out. His Cessna had not been designed for skydivers. Luckily, the wings were above the cockpit, not below. They would not obstruct his path when he bailed out. He hoped the yardstick didn’t snap in his face.

His speed was eighty knots, ninety miles an hour. He pulled back on the throttle, strove for five thousand feet. Yet already he could see he wouldn’t reach half that height before he flew over his target. The clouds wiped away his last sight of the boat but he was certain he was directly above it.

Now or never. He could not circle back. No single act would be more suspicious to those in the towers who studied his course on their screens. At least his descending and climbing could be explained away as simple confusion or panic.

He cracked his door and shoved it open with his left hand. The wind slapped his face like a cold fist. Bringing the yardstick out, he wedged it between the top of the door and the side of his seat. The door remained open but the precarious situation could not last.

He had the nose up, now he had to bring it down hard. He wanted to give the impression that he had become completely disorientated—could not tell up from down. That he had fallen into the infamous graveyard spin that was the bane of all inexperienced pilots who had lost all visual clues. The problem with the Cessna 172 was that it naturally resisted such a spin and righted itself. Unless he forced the plane into the water, it would continue happily along for several more miles. It might even veer east and crash on land. Then how would a medical examiner explain his missing body?

Matt thrust the yoke flush with the control board. As the plane sank he pressed the throttle down. His altitude was twenty-two hundred feet and dropping quick. Now, even had he wanted, he could not have saved the plane. He was falling fast into a black cauldron. He had been falling since he had caught Amy with David.

Matt climbed out the door and leapt from the plane.

TWO

TWO

Four months before FBI Agent Kelly Fienman was called in on the James Techer case, and thirty-six hours after Matt Connor jumped from his plane, Kelly sat in a parked car in the Hollywood Hills with her partner, FBI Agent Charles Fitzsimmons. For twenty hours they had eaten doughnuts and drank coffee and hardly left the vehicle. They were both giddy with exhaustion and caffeine rushes, but they were having fun. Besides being each other’s favorite company, they were hoping for a big reward from their surveillance.