Even so, the breakthrough pumped Vera. What had at first been an unwelcome assignment become an engrossing quest. She called to find out which engine company had that part of the city and went down there. The guys told her they’d had nothing to do with it. When she wasn’t looking, one of them took her purse and hid it in a locker. It took her a few hours to figure out that her purse was gone and Engine Company 23 was responsible and to convince one of the firefighters to tell her which locker it was and trick the prankster in such a way as to get her purse back. During the back and forth, one paramedic said that the Coast Guard was part of the pilot’s rescue. He said to ask for a guy named Bert Banks at the Rescue Coordination Center. Vera drove to Norfolk, because that’s where Bert was, and he didn’t take her calls or return them. When she showed up at his office at seven-thirty in the morning, having had her third cup of coffee since five, when she started driving, he told her that he would have been happy to help over the phone and he was sorry she had driven all this way. So Vera got her hopes up. They went into his office, and she told him what she knew about the crash—the date, the time, that it was somewhere along the Potomac River, maybe across from the Watergate or behind the Thompson Boat Center. He tried every different way there was to search in his computer, but the crash didn’t show up. She asked him what he would do if he were her, and he started asking all these questions about what she knew about the crash, until finally, when she mentioned that the pilot had been cut down from a tree, he said, “That means it wouldn’t be us, because she wasn’t in the water.” That would be the Parks Service. U.S. Park Police, he spelled out for her. “A bit of history trivia,” he said. “George Washington himself created the park police. In 1791.”

Vera went to the Park Police Aviation Unit at Anacostia Park after the Park Police public-affairs commander told her it was true that the unit’s mission included aviation support for law enforcement, medevac, search and rescue, high-risk prisoner transport, and presidential and dignitary security, but they had no record of responding to a crash on Roosevelt Island, directly across from the Thompson Boat Center and the Watergate, which had to be where the pilot would have been found in a tree if the Park Police had jurisdiction.