Port Mortuary (10 page)

“So nobody should have been hired. Including you, I suppose.”

“Probably not me, either. I’m not exactly a team player.” She was fired by the FBI, by ATF. I don’t think Lucy can be supervised by anybody, including me.

“Well, this is a nice thing to come home to,” I reply.

“That’s the danger with a prototype installation that no matter what anyone says is in fact both civilian and military, has both local and federal jurisdiction and also academic ties,” Lucy says. “You’re neither-nor. Staff members don’t exactly know how to act or aren’t capable of staying within boundaries, assuming anyone even understands the boundaries. I warned you about that a long time ago.”

“I don’t remember you warning me. I just remember you pointing it out.”

“Let’s enter the freq for Lakehurst and squawk VFR, because I’m ditching flight following,” she decides. “We get pushed any farther west and we’re going to have a crosswind that will slow us down more than twenty knots and we’ll be grounded for the night in Harrisburg or Allentown.”

S
nowflakes are crazed like moths in landing lights and the wind of our blades as we set down on the wooden dolly. The skids tentatively touch, then spread heavily as the weight settles, and four sets of headlights begin to move toward us from the security gate near the FBO.

The headlights move slowly across the ramp, illuminating snow that is falling fast, and I recognize the silhouette of Benton’s green Porsche SUV. I recognize the Suburban and the Range Rover, both of them black. I don’t know the fourth car, a sleek, dark sedan with a chrome mesh grille. Lucy and Marino must have driven here separately today and left their SUVs with the line crew, which makes sense. My niece always arrives at the airport well in advance of everyone else so she can get the helicopter ready, so she can check it from the pitot tube on its nose to the stinger on its tail boom. I haven’t seen her like this in a while, and as we wait the two minutes in flight idle before she finishes the shutdown, I try to remember the last time, pinpoint it exactly, in hopes of figuring out what’s happening. Because she isn’t telling me.

She won’t unless it fits into her overall plan, and there is no getting information out of her when she’s not ready to offer it, which can be never in extreme situations. Lucy thrives on covert behavior, is far more comfortable being who she’s not than who she is, and that’s always been the case, going back to her earliest years. She feeds on the power of secrecy and is energized by the drama of risk, of real danger. The more threatening, the better. All she’s revealed to me so far is that an obsolete robot in the dead man’s apartment is a DARPA-funded packbot called MORT that at one time was intended for mortuary operations in theater, in other words, body removal in war, a mechanical Grim Reaper. MORT was insensitive and inappropriate, and I fought it aggressively years ago, but the peculiarity of the dead man having such a thing in his apartment doesn’t explain Lucy’s behavior.

When was it that she scared me so badly, not that it’s been only once, but the time I thought she might end up in prison? Seven or eight years ago, I decide, when she came back from Poland, where she was involved in a mission that had to do with Interpol, with special ops that to this day I’m unclear about. I’ll never know just how much she would tell me if I pushed hard enough, but I won’t. I’ve chosen to remain foggy about what she did over there. What I know is enough. It’s more than enough. I would never say that about Lucy’s feelings, health, or general well-being, because I care intensely about every molecule of her, but I can say it about some complex and clandestine aspects of the way she has lived. For her own good and mine, there are details I will not ask about. There are stories I don’t want to be told.

During the last hour of our flight here to Hanscom Field, she got increasingly preoccupied, impatient, and impossibly vigilant, and it is her vigilance that has a special caliber. That’s what I recognize. Vigilance is the weapon she draws when she feels threatened and goes into a certain mode I used to dread. In Oxford, Connecticut, where we stopped for fuel, she wouldn’t leave the helicopter unattended, not for a second. She supervised the fuel truck and made me stand guard in the cold while she trotted inside the FBO to pay because she didn’t trust Marino with guard duty, as she put it. She told me that when they had refueled in Wilmington, Delaware, earlier today en route to Dover, he was too busy on the phone to care about security or notice what was going on around them.

She said she watched him through the window as he paced on the tarmac, talking and gesturing, no doubt swept up in telling Briggs about the man who allegedly was still alive when he was locked inside my cooler. Not once did Marino look at the helicopter, Lucy reported to me. He was oblivious when another pilot strolled over to check it out, squatting so he could inspect the FLIR, the Nightsun, and peering through Plexiglas into the cabins. It didn’t enter Marino’s mind that the doors were unlocked, as was the fuel cap, and of course there is no such thing as securing the cowling. One can get to the transmission, the engine, the gear boxes, the vital organs of a helicopter, by the simple release of latches.

All it takes is water in the fuel tank for a flameout in flight, and the engine quits. Or sprinkle a small amount of contaminant into the hydraulic fluid, maybe dirt, oil, or water into the reservoir, and the controls will fail like power steering in a car, but a little more serious when you’re two thousand feet in the air. If you really want to create havoc, contaminate both the fuel and the hydraulic fluid so you have a flameout and a hydraulic failure simultaneously, Lucy described in gory detail as we flew with the intercom on “crew only” so Marino couldn’t hear. That would be especially unfortunate after dark, she said, when emergency landings, which are difficult enough, are far worse, because you can’t see what’s under you and had better hope it isn’t trees, power lines, or some other obstruction.

Of course, the sabotage she fears most is an explosive device, and she’s obsessed in general with explosives and what they’re really used for and who is using them against us, including the US government using them against us if it suits certain agendas. So I had to listen to that for a while before she went on to depress me further by explaining how simple it would be to plant such a thing, preferably under luggage or a floor mat in back so that when it detonates it takes out the main fuel tank beneath the rear seats. Then the helicopter turns into a crematorium, she told me, and this made me think of the soldier in the Humvee again and his devastated mother lashing out at me over the phone. I was making unfortunate associations most of the time we were flying, because for better or worse, any disaster described evokes vivid examples from my own cases. I know how people die. I know exactly what will happen to me if I do.

Lucy cuts the throttle and pulls the rotor brake down, and the instant the blades stop turning, the driver’s door of Benton’s SUV opens. The interior light doesn’t go on. It won’t in any one of the three SUVs on the ramp, because cops and federal agents, including former ones, have their quirks. They don’t sit with their backs to the door. They hate to fasten their seat belts, and they don’t like interior lights in their vehicles. They are imprinted to avoid ambushes and restraints that might impede their escape. They resist turning themselves into illuminated targets. They are vigilant but not as vigilant as Lucy has been these past few hours.

Benton walks toward the helicopter and waits near the dolly with his hands in the pockets of an old black shearling coat I gave him many Christmases ago, his silver hair mussed by the wind. He is tall and lean against the snowy night, and his features are keen in the uneven shadow and light. Whenever I see him after a long separation, it is with the eyes of a stranger, and I’m drawn to him all over again, just like the first time long ago in Virginia when I was the new chief, the first woman in America to run such a large medical examiner system, and he was a legend in the FBI, the star profiler and head of what was then the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico. He walked into my conference room, and I was suddenly unnerved and unsure of myself, and it had nothing to do with the serial murders we were there to discuss.

“You know this guy?” he says into my ear as we hug. He kisses me lightly on the lips, and I smell the woodsy fragrance of his aftershave and feel the soft leather of his coat against my cheek.

I look past him to a man climbing out of the sedan, what I now can see is a dark-blue or black Bentley that has the throaty purr of a V12 engine. He is big and overweight, with a jowly face and a fringe of thinning hair that flails in the wind. Dressed in a long overcoat, the collar up around his ears, and with gloves on, he stands a polite distance away with the detached demeanor of a limo driver. But I sense his awareness of us. He seems most interested in Benton.

“He must be waiting for someone else,” I decide as the man looks at the helicopter, then looks at Benton again. “Or he’s mixed up.”

“Can I help you?” Benton steps closer to him.

“I’m looking for Dr. Scarpetta?”

“And why might you be looking for Dr. Scarpetta?” Benton is friendly but firm, and he gives nothing away.

“I was sent here with a delivery, and the instructions I got is the party would be on Dr. Scarpetta’s helicopter or meeting it. What branch of service you with, or maybe you’re Homeland Security? I see it’s got a FLIR, a searchlight, a lot of special equipment. Pretty high-tech; how fast does it go?”

“What can I do for you?”

“I’m supposed to give something directly to Dr. Scarpetta. Is that you? I was told to ask for identification.” The driver watches Lucy and Marino carry my belongings out of the passenger and baggage compartments. The driver isn’t interested in me, not so much as a glance. I’m the wife of the tall, handsome man with silver hair. The driver thinks Benton is Dr. Scarpetta and that the helicopter is his.

“Let’s get you out of here before this turns into a blizzard,” Benton says, walking toward the Bentley in a way that gives the driver no choice but to follow. “I hear we’re getting six to eight inches, but I think we’re in for more, like we need it, right? What a winter. Where are you from? Not here. The south somewhere. I’m guessing Tennessee.”

“You can tell after twenty-seven years? Guess I need to work on talking Yankee. Nashville. Was stationed here with the Sixty-Sixth Air Base Wing and never got around to leaving. I’m not a pilot, but I drive pretty good.” He opens the passenger door and leans inside. “You fly that thing yourself? I’ve never been in one. I knew right away your chopper wasn’t air force. I guess if you’re CIA, you’re not going to tell me….”

Their voices drift back to me as I wait on the ramp where Benton left me. I know better than to follow him to the Bentley but am unwilling to sit inside our car when I have no idea who the man is or what delivery he’s talking about or how he knew someone named Scarpetta would be at Hanscom, either on a helicopter or meeting it, and what time it would land. The first person who comes to mind is Jack Fielding. It’s likely he knows my itinerary, and I check my iPhone. Anne and Ollie have answered my text messages and are already at the CFC, waiting for us. But nothing from Fielding.
What is going on with him?
Something is, something serious. This can’t be nothing more than his usual irresponsibility or indifference or erratic behavior. I hope he’s all right, that he’s not sick or injured or fighting with his wife, and I watch Benton tuck something into a coat pocket. He heads straight to the SUV, and that’s his message to me. Get in and don’t ask questions on the ramp. Something just transpired that he doesn’t like, despite his relaxed friendly act with the driver.

“What is it?” I ask him as we shut our doors at the same time Marino opens the back and starts shoving in my boxes and bags.

Benton turns up the heat and doesn’t answer as more of my belongings are loaded, and then Marino comes around to my door. He raps a knuckle on the glass.

“Who the hell was that?” He stares off in the direction of the Bentley, and snow is falling thick and hard, frosting the bill of his baseball cap and melting on his glasses.

“Did many people know you and Lucy were heading out to Dover today?” Benton leans his shoulder against me as he talks to him.

“The general. And Captain What’s-her-name Avallone when I called trying to get a message to the Doc. And certain people at our office knew. Why?”

“Nobody else? Maybe a mention in passing to the EMTs, to Cambridge police?”

Marino pauses, thinking, and a look passes over his face. He’s not sure whom he told. He’s trying to remember, and he’s calculating. If he did something foolish, he won’t want to admit it, has heard quite enough about how indiscreet he is. He doesn’t intend to be chastised yet again, although, to be fair, he wouldn’t have had a reason to behave as if it was classified information that he and Lucy were flying to Delaware to pick me up. It’s not a state secret where I’ve been, only why I’ve been there, and I was supposed to come home tomorrow, anyway.

“No big deal if you did.” Benton seems to be thinking the same thing I am. “I’m just trying to figure out how a messenger knew to meet the helicopter here, that’s all.”

“What kind of messenger drives a Bentley?” Marino says to him.

“Apparently, the kind who’s been told your itinerary, including the helicopter’s tail number,” Benton replies.

“Goddamn Fielding. What the hell’s he doing? He’s fucking lost it, that’s what.” Marino takes off his glasses and then has nothing to wipe them with, and his face looks naked and strange without his old wire-rims. “I mentioned to a few people that you were probably coming back today instead of tomorrow. I mean, obviously certain people knew because of the problem we have with the dead guy bleeding and everything else.” He directs this at me. “But Fielding’s the one who knew exactly what you were doing, and he sure as hell knows Lucy’s helicopter, since he’s been in it before. Shit, you don’t know the half of it,” he adds darkly.