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she looked up at him. She was young and attractive, blond hair and face streaked by sooty smudges and splotches of blood, but otherwise physically intact. Harlow’s eyes took in the shape of her exposed breasts and her flat stomach, his eyes automatically roaming to her waist and her shapely hips, covered now only by a torn pair of panties, her legs bare and smudged as well, a thoroughly incongruous image amidst such a gruesome scene of death and destruction. It registered that her clothes had been torn off in the trauma of the crash, and that he was looking at a disaster victim who needed his help. But all his training as a policeman was pushed aside by the frantic need to deny the horror of the situation, to find something good and comfortable and acceptable in this nightmare, and her femininity was exactly that.
    She was trying to speak to him over the noise, but he couldn’t hear. Harlow leaned down, careful not to touch her, not trusting himself suddenly, straining to hear her tiny, confused voice.
    â€œMy baby. My baby is here … but … I can’t find him.”
    Harlow saw the detached look in her eyes and watched her dreamy, confused gestures.
    â€œWhere, ma’am?”
    She looked into his eyes and bit her lower lip, her right hand flailing the air absently.
    â€œI … uh … was holding him.” She looked down slowly at her left arm and stared at it for a second as Harlow recognized the symptoms of shock.
    â€œHe’s only two months old, you know,” she said in a singsong voice, suddenly strong, then dropped her tone once again, looking up at him wide-eyed and chewing her lip once more. “I was holding him tight. They said I had to hold him on my lap. I had him … here. Where is he? Do you know where he is?”
    She held a small blanket, or what was left of a blanket, tightly in her left hand, gesturing as she spoke. Harlow followed her gesture, looking around, moving his flashlight back and forth, trying to find the child quickly and realizing at the same time that the distraught young mother was sitting many yards from where the 737 had been hit.
    Harlow looked at the inferno in the distance and knew instinctively her baby was gone. He had obviously not been in an infant seat, nor had he been restrained by a seatbelt. She had made the fatal mistake of trying to simply hold him in her arms, and for a baby, Harlow knew, that was a death sentence in any crash.
    â€œWe’ll find him.” He spoke the lie gently, helping her to her feet, holding her tenderly. “Let’s go now.” Harlow smelled the plastic aroma of an airliner cabin mingled with the odor of acrid smoke in her hair as he gave her his jacket and walked her to the safety of the squad car.
    They had been in row 12.
    Mark kept that thought turning over and over in his frantic mind as he struggled to function, guiding the little tug to a halt near the central portion of the flaming wreckage, seeing the severed cockpit and noting with a flicker of hope that the section in flames began at the front of the wing box, substantially behind row 12.
    But where was row 12? Mark saw the dark mass of wreckage and seats to his left. There were people standing around, looking dazed, and others—obviously rescuers—dashing onto the scene. The wail of sirens was rising by the second in the distance, flashing red-and-blue lights joining the eerie orange glare of burning machinery. He could see some survivors silhouetted now by the flames. The section in front of him was not burning. Could Kim and the boys be there? They were here, somewhere, and they must be safe. He willed them to be safe.
    Mark dodged dark shapes on the concrete as he sprinted toward the spot he had seen, finding several people struggling to get out of passenger seats which had been scattered around like the toys of an angry child. He ran figure to figure, seat to seat, looking into faces, pulling up the edges of sharp metal