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noticed a mass of crumpled black metal wedged beneath the cockpit door. A video camera. She pulled it free, and it broke apart in her hands, an untidy heap of circuit boards, silver motors, and loops of tape hanging from a cracked cassette. She gave it to Richman.
    “What do I do with this?”
    “Keep it.”
    Casey headed aft, knowing it would be worse in the back. Already she was forming a picture in her mind of what had happened on this flight. “There’s no question: this aircraft underwent severe pitch oscillations. That’s when the plane noses up and down,” she explained.
    “How do you know?” Richman said.
    “Because that’s what makes passengers vomit. They can take yaw and roll. But pitching makes them puke.”
    “Why are the oxygen masks missing?” Richman said.
    “People grabbed them as they fell,” she said. It must have happened that way. “And the seat backs are broken—do you know how much force it takes to break an airplane seat? They’re designed to withstand an impact of sixteen Gs. Peoplein this cabin bounced around like dice in a cup. And from the damage, it looks like it went on for a while.”
    “How long?”
    “At least two minutes,” she said. An eternity for an incident like this, she thought.
    Passing a shattered midships galley, they came into the center cabin. Here damage was much worse. Many seats were broken. There was a broad swath of blood across the ceiling. The aisles were cluttered with debris—shoes, torn clothing, children’s toys.
    A cleanup crew in blue uniforms marked NORTON IRT was collecting the personal belongings, putting them into big plastic bags. Casey turned to a woman. “Have you found any cameras?”
    “Five or six, so far,” the woman said. “Couple of video cameras. There’s all sorts of stuff here.” She reached under a seat, came out with a brown rubber diaphragm. “Like I said.”
    Stepping carefully over the litter in the aisles, Casey moved farther aft. She passed another divider and entered the aft cabin, near the tail.
    Richman sucked in his breath.
    It looked as if a giant hand had smashed the interior. Seats were crushed flat. Overhead bins hung down, almost touching the floor; ceiling panels had split apart, exposing wiring and silver insulation. There was blood everywhere; some of the seats were soaked deep maroon. The aft lavs were ripped apart, mirrors shattered, stainless-steel drawers hanging open, twisted.
    Casey’s attention was drawn to the left of the cabin, where six paramedics were struggling to hold a heavy shape, wrapped in white nylon mesh, that hung near a ceiling bin. The paramedics adjusted their position, the nylon webbing shifted, and suddenly a man’s head flopped out of the mesh—the face gray, mouth open, eyes sightless, wisps of hair dangling.
    “Oh God,” Richman said. He turned and fled.
    Casey went over to the paramedics. The corpse was a middle-aged Chinese man. “What’s the problem here?” she said.
    “Sorry, ma’am,” one of the medics said. “But we can’t get him out. We found him wedged here, and he’s stuck pretty good. His left leg.”
    One of the paramedics shined a light upward. The left leg was jammed through the overhead bin, into the silver insulation above the window panel. She tried to remember what cabling ran there, whether it was flight critical. “Just be careful getting him out,” she said.
    From the galley, she heard a cleanup woman say, “Strangest damn thing I ever saw.”
    Another woman said, “How’d it get here?”
    “Damned if I know, honey.”
    Casey went over to see what they were talking about. The cleaning woman was holding a blue pilot’s cap. It had a bloody footprint on the top.
    Casey reached for it. “Where’d you find this?”
    “Right here,” the cleaning woman said. “Outside the aft galley. Long way from the cockpit, isn’t it?”
    “Yes.” Casey turned the cap in her hands. Silver wings on the front, the yellow TransPacific medallion in the