Black and gracefully curved between my knees, it controls the pitch and roll of the rotor blades, the slightest pressure moving the helicopter up, down, sideways, backward. If I didn’t have a gentle touch, I wouldn’t be sitting in the copilot’s seat. Lucy would have relegated me to the back cabin of cognac leather and carbon fiber trim where our only passenger, Marino, is isolated.
I can’t see him. I’ve made sure I can’t hear him and he can’t hear us. He’s done nothing intentional to piss me off but I no longer pretend when I don’t have the emotional fortitude to listen to him anymore. Now of all times I don’t. Speculating, hypothesizing nonstop since we took off from Boston. Marino and his bold statements and questions and utter lack of discretion.
He didn’t care what Lucy heard. In fact he was picking on her as if it’s funny, giving her shit is the way he thinks of it. The killer has got to be someone who knows us, and by the way where was she yesterday? What were she and Janet up to? What kind of arsenal must she have at her indoor firing range? Have I been shooting there recently? His humor is about as tasteful and subtle as his favorite coffee mug, black with a white chalk body outline and the caption MY DAY BEGINS WHEN YOURS ENDS.
I listened to his boisterousness until we got close to New York airspace when I switched the intercom to crew only. He was aware of it when I did it. I doubt he took it personally. He figures it’s a busy airspace and knows I’m industrious about monitoring multiple towers and self-announcing our presence to other pilots at every checkpoint along various routes such as the Hudson River. He knows I consider it my inflight job to enter radio frequencies, to talk to air traffic control and tune in the most recent ATIS update about weather, wind, notices to airmen, potential restrictions, and hazards like ground fog or birds.
By aviation standards I can’t be trusted with much more than this although I’m confident I could land in an emergency. The helicopter might not fare well but I’d get us down safely. The entire flight I’ve replayed engine failures, bird strikes, every worst-case scenario and how I would respond. It’s easier to think about.
So damn much easier.
I press the radio trigger switch without disturbing the cyclic as Lucy skims over grass, holding a speed of sixty knots on a heading that will bisect the mile of grooved asphalt just ahead. The shorter of the airport’s two runways, it’s oriented north-south some two hundred feet above sea level, as straight and flat as a rolled-out black carpet, heat shimmering on it like a glaze of water.
“NINER LIMA CHARLIE CROSSING thirteen,” I announce to the tower, a small white building with a control room on top that looks like the bridge of a ship.
I can vaguely make out the shapes of people inside the glaring glass. The sky is the faded blue of old denim, reminding me of favorite jeans I wore until they literally fell apart, and the past continues sneaking through the back door of my thoughts. I sense the inevitable, a tragedy I can’t stop as my life parades behind my eyes when I least expect it. There is something about to happen like an Old Testament judgment. We should have stayed in Massachusetts. There isn’t time for this. It’s too predictable that we’d come here and I’m seething inside.
You’re being manipulated like a goddam pawn.
“Roger niner Lima Charlie,” the controller comes back, a woman whose voice I’ve heard before when I worked in Manhattan and would come to New Jersey on cases that had an ambiguous or shared jurisdiction, usually floaters carried by the current in the Hudson River.
“They already cleared us,” Lucy’s voice sounds inside my flight helmet.
“Correct,” I answer.
“You didn’t need to tell them again.”
“Roger that.”
“Don’t want them thinking we forgot,” she says from the right seat, her hands gentle on the controls, her tinted visor blacking out the upper half of her face.
All I can see is the tip of her narrow nose, her strong jaw firmly set and her attitude, which is all-business and as hard as metal. The word rude comes to mind. It often does with her especially when things are as dangerous as they are right now. But there’s more. She’s self-absorbed and distant, and something else is there that I can’t access.
“Redundancy,” I say into the mic against my lips. “Never hurts.”
“Does when controllers are busy.”
“Then they can disregard.” If there’s another thing I’m an expert at it’s not letting her outwardly rile me, especially when she’s right and in this instance she is.
There are no aircraft taking off. There’s no traffic in the pattern, nothing moving out here except shimmering heat. The tower granted permission minutes ago for us to enter its class D airspace, cross the active runway and land on the ramp near Signature flight service. In summary my radio call wasn’t necessary and Lucy is chiding me. I let it go. I don’t trust my mood. I don’t want to lose my temper with her or anyone, and it occurs to me that beneath anger is fear. I should get in touch with my fear so I’m not angry.
I’m going to find out this is all my fault.
No it isn’t dammit, and when I peel back anger I find more of it. Under more of it is rage. Beneath rage is a black pit I’ve never climbed inside. It’s the hole in my soul that would take me to the place where I might do something I shouldn’t.
“Talking to controllers, the less said the better,” Lucy is saying as if I haven’t flown with her hundreds of times, as if I don’t know a damn thing.
“Roger that,” I repeat blandly as I stare straight ahead.
I keep my scan going for other aircraft and most of all for him. I think him but I don’t know who or what, and as of this morning the press has dubbed the killer Copperhead. Marino volunteered the name to some reporter, and it will stick as names always do in big cases that seem destined never to be solved. Or if they are it’s much too late. The Boston Strangler. The Monster of Florence. The Zodiac Killer. The Doodler. Bible John.
I recheck the intercom switch, making sure Marino can’t hear a word Lucy and I say to each other. He’d like nothing better than to eavesdrop on us having a personal moment.
You’re a bad mother.
It’s as if Copperhead occupies my subconscious now, hissing ugliness, its fangs filled with poison from buried wounds.
“You got to relax, Aunt Kay.” Lucy’s twin-engine helicopter is as steady as a rock, directly over the taxiway’s yellow centerline that she follows with the precision of a gymnast on a balance beam. “Take care of what’s in front of you and don’t think too much.”
“We don’t know what’s in front of us. Or behind us. Or next to us.”
“There you go again.”
“I’m fine.”
But I’m not. My vigilance is about to overtorque and while she understands the reason, she can’t relate to it, not really. Lucy doesn’t perceive danger the way other people do. It doesn’t enter her brilliant mind that no matter how accomplished, brazen and rich she is, one day she’s going to die. Everyone does. That’s my job security as a forensic expert and chief medical examiner, and it’s the burden I bear. Long ago I lost the gift of denial. I’m not sure I ever had it.
I know all too well that what separates us from total annihilation is nothing more than a three-pound trigger pull. Struck down by a copper bullet fired from nowhere. Thinking a thought one second. Then gone. We’re on the killer’s radar. He watches us. He could be in a ghillie suit right now disguised as heavy foliage or sagebrush, and I scan the dense woods beyond the runways and the grassy strips bordering them.
For some reason he has chosen not to squeeze the trigger—at least not yet. I have no factual basis for thinking this but the feeling is as palpable as the turbine engines overhead. I will my mind to stop but it won’t, the hissing again, a cold-blooded whisper.
What fun to torture you like this.
And I have a sick feeling, an indescribably dreadful one
as we parallel the runway, following taxiway Delta at an altitude of thirty feet and the speed of a brisk walk. The same scenario plays vividly as if I’m watching a video recording of an event that’s already occurred. I see myself in the cross hairs of a thermal imaging computerized riflescope that emits no visible light or radio frequency energy. SNAP. Shattering the second cervical vertebra, dislocating the craniocervical junction, transecting the spinal cord.
Lucy gently flares her powerful flying machine as if she’s lightly pulling back on the reins of a horse. She couldn’t look more composed and sane. She couldn’t look more normal.
CHAPTER 39
SHE SETTLES INTO A hover over the ramp’s white tarmac where parked private jets and prop planes shine in the sun.
It occurs to me that shooting reconstructions are going to be miserable in this heat. Ballistic gelatin will get slimy and start stinking like rotting meat. Flies, sweat, stench and Jack Kuster, who I’ve never met, a macho man, a former Marine sniper, 103 kills in Iraq, Marino has continued to brag. I wonder who was counting.
I scan gauges and instrument lights, barely feeling the wheels touch down. I don’t bother saying nice landing. Lucy’s always are. They’re close to perfect, rather much the same way she executes everything in life. I’m not feeling charitable.
“Niner Lima Charlie down and secure,” I let the tower know as Lucy ground-taxis the helicopter, steering with her toes on the pedals as if she’s easing one of her supercars into a parking place.
“Welcome back, Doctor Scarpetta.” The familiar controller is slow-speaking and unflappable, and if I met her I could identify her by voice.
“Thanks. Nice to be here,” I continue in my typically truncated radio language, and my attention shifts to the passenger’s cabin, where I imagine Marino about to open his door while the blades are still turning.
How many times have I told him to wait until we’re completely shut down? I envision him in back, headset on, seat belt off as usual, looking out at the woods and hills of New Jersey. I give him five minutes before he starts joking around, talking like the Sopranos, drawing out his vowels and sounding ridiculous. I fuh-got. Or Fuck-dat. Or he’s a dewsh-bag. I switch the intercom to All.
“Stay put until the blades are stopped,” I remind him.
“Naw I’m-gunna get a haircut.” His big voice is loud in my helmet.
“You don’t have any hair and sound retarded,” Lucy says.
“Uh-oh. Not supposed to use that word. You’ll lose your allowance.”
“What’s this Pavlovian thing with you?” Her fingers move rapidly across overhead switches, flipping them off, and the colorful synthetic vision, terrain awareness and navigation screens go black. “The minute you’re back in New Jersey your IQ drops?”
“People here are smart as shit.”
“I’m not talking about people. I’m talking about you,” she says as the engines get quiet, and she begins jotting the flight time and other information in a small notebook.
“I dunno why I ever left.”
“You shouldn’t have. Then maybe we wouldn’t know you.” She flips off the avionics master switch before he can insult her back.
Shadows of the turning blades slow overhead in the cockpit’s roof windows, and I pull down the rotor brake, take off my flight helmet and hang it by the chinstrap on a hook. Releasing my harness, I arrange it neatly under me on the sheepskin-covered seat so it doesn’t dangle out the door and scratch the paint.
In the distance beyond miles of dense woods and on the other side of the Hudson, One World Trade Center rises high above the Manhattan skyline, which I can’t see from here. All I can make out is the top of the skyscraper and its spire, a reminder that if you hurt us we’ll strike back only harder. We’ll rebuild only bigger. As I’ve watched the construction over the years I’m reminded of the new enemy I face: hate-filled bombers and shooters who know nothing about the people they massacre in a skyscraper, a movie theater, a school building, at a marathon or out by their cars. I think of what John Briggs said to me the other day about the Homeland Security Alert. It’s suddenly foremost in my mind again.
Think of it as orange, but as far as the public goes it’s yellow.
He wasn’t just talking about Obama’s visit. He was alluding to intelligence gathered by the CIA, about events in Crimea. He mentioned money, drugs and thugs flowing into this country, and in light of what’s happened since he said that to me I wonder what he really meant.
Hot air hits me like a wall as I step down on the tarmac, where Marino is busy opening the baggage compartment, grabbing out black cases, one of them tagged as evidence. He sets down overnight bags, scanning for our ride as a bright yellow Shell fuel truck pulls up and a kid hops out of the cab.
“Where the hell is Kuster?” Marino asks no one in particular. His broad face is red, and sweat is beaded on top of his shiny shaved head, his eyes masked by his Ray-Bans. “I emailed him when we were thirty minutes out and I don’t want this shit sitting in the sun.”
“Nothing will melt or explode.” Lucy grabs rolled-up silver sun shields. “Except you maybe.”
“I could fry an egg on the pavement,” Marino complains.
“You couldn’t.” Lucy starts unrolling shields that on a windy day fight her like kites but in this hot calm are completely limp.
“We’ll carry everything into the FBO if need be,” I suggest.
“Hell no,” he says.
He looks sour and irritable even if he’s not, his wide brow deeply furrowed, the corners of his mouth pulled down. He parks his sunglasses on top of his head, squinting in the shade under the tail boom to type on his phone’s display as Lucy opens the fuel cap. Her rose-gold hair is polished by the sun, and she’s nimble and strong in a summer-weight khaki flight suit as she walks around her aircraft, placing the sun shields in the windows. Then she locks the doors as the fuel truck driver who looks all of sixteen clips the ground wire on a skid.
“Afternoon,” he says to Lucy. “This yours?”
“I’m just crew.” She secures the tires with bright yellow chocks.
“Kuster is pulling up,” Marino announces.
“Ready when I’m done.” Lucy’s not going anywhere until the helicopter has been refueled and she’s satisfied it’s safe from anyone who might be tempted to tamper with it.
She’s obsessive about locking the cabin, cockpit, baggage and battery compartments, the cowling, everything, and her precautions aren’t unusual. But I detect her vigilance is in overdrive and I know she’s armed, a Colt .45 in a concealment holster under her flight suit. I felt it when I hugged her in Boston. I asked her about it and she shrugged me off.
The security gate slides open on its tracks and Jack Kuster drives through in his dark blue SUV, parking a safe distance from the fuel truck. He rolls down his window.
“Sorry I’m late,” he calls out to us. “Been busy in the kitchen.”
I HAVE NO DOUBT he’s spent the day preoccupied with the onerous task of mixing up ballistic gelatin, creating blocks or molded shapes of a hydrolyzed collagen derived from animal skin, connective tissue and bone.
We have a lot of control test fires to do before it gets dark. We’re almost out of time. The day has cheated us. It seems nothing is on our side and I watch Jack Kuster carefully, knowing him only by reputation, specifically the praises Marino sings. Kuster climbs out and grins boldly at Lucy as if they know each other and she doesn’t smile back. She holds his stare for an instant, then grabs up several hard cases and bags, whichever are the heaviest.
“The biggest problem was how to mimic bone, specifically the skull,” Kuster says as if he’s in the middle of a conversation I know nothing about. “I considered putting a motorcycle helmet on the jelly head but it would be too unwieldy. A problem for another day and I gave up after making a mess. That leaves us one to play with.” He means one
molded gelatin block. “It’s not a situation I generally find myself in because usually we’re targeting center mass and not taking head shots.”
“There’s nothing usual about this killer,” I reply.
“Well he’s definitely aiming for the head, the upper spine unless he’s just damn lucky.”
“It’s not luck,” I answer. “Not three times. Possibly more if there are other shooting deaths we don’t know about.”
“There aren’t,” Lucy says as if she has information we don’t. “Three with more on the way. That’s the message we’re supposed to get. Number three out of seven.”
Because of the seven polished pennies on my wall but I don’t bring it up.
“My point is if he’s military or former, it’s not what he was taught.” Kuster rearranges gear in the back of the SUV, making room for what we brought. “We go for center mass.”
“Russian special forces don’t,” Lucy counters. “They’re trained for neck and head shots.”
“So now we’re looking for Russians?” Kuster stares at her.
“There’s an exodus of Russian-trained special ops because of what’s going on over there,” she says as if she’s been talking to Briggs. “That and hundreds of billions of dollars out the door, draining the economy. Not to mention drugs.”
Benton would know this too. The FBI gets briefed by the CIA. Lucy’s information probably came from him.
“It all depends on the weapon.” Marino shoves ammo boxes around. “There’s a shitload out there now that you didn’t have in Iraq.” He directs this at Kuster. “And yeah a shitload of stuff they’ve probably got overseas that’s not in circulation here, not public circulation anyway.”
“Smart guns, sniper rifles with computerized scopes and we do have them here,” Kuster says. “One ballistic gelatin head is what we got and I again apologize for that. I thought about getting a pig carcass. I still could if you’ve got time tomorrow, if you wanna hang around another day. I also know some pretty good bars.”