Spin (Captain Chase)

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I’m trying to understand how it is you’re not coming in but going out,” he says in his peculiar twang.

  Tangier Island, I’m pretty sure, where the name Crockett is as common as crab pots, and the natives talk like Jamestown.

  “When I know for a fact I already saw you leave earlier,” tall and whippet-thin, he’s bent over awkwardly peering at me.

  MP Crockett is careful not to bang his weapons and equipment against my truck’s chameleon skin, this moment the default matte gray, and splashed with road grit and salt. All the while I’m dealing with him, I’m remotely monitoring the cavernous concrete receiving bay in the back of the OCME.

  I’m watching Joan in my smart lenses sitting inside, taking a load off as she likes to say. The rolling steel door is retracted all the way up, and I can see the consolidated lab building, its forensic evidence bay, the clearing afternoon showing through the huge square opening.

  How weird to be spying on my death investigator friend like Big Brother as she sits in a folding chair. A brown ski jacket is zipped up over her scrubs, and she’s smoking in her makeshift break area at the bottom of the concrete ramp leading inside the morgue.

  “. . . I mean, I’m not imagining things, am I?” MP Crockett is saying to me through my open window, and I smell peppermint, his jaw muscles bunching as he chews gum. “That was you who came through a couple hours ago, bringing me an extra-large coffee with extra sugar?” and it’s not me he’s been seeing, possibly chatting with, that’s for sure.

  It’s not this Captain Chase who brought him an extra-large coffee with extra sugar (his salacious emphasis, not mine), and I’m up against another problem I didn’t anticipate. I don’t think Carme has yet to meet anyone she can’t cast her spell on, going all the way back to grade school when her name was spray-painted on the Fox Hill water tower. And mine never was.

  We’re used to being mistaken for each other, and it can be awkward when one of her dates or smitten wannabes is on the prowl. But I’ve never had to follow up on her seductions as if they’re mine. Should someone get us confused, I’ve always clarified in a heck of a hurry, and it’s one more thing I can’t do going forward.

  I can’t say I’m not her. Or that she’s not me. Neither of us can let on that we’re both and neither.

  “I’m not sure what all you’re up to,” MP Crockett is looking me over a bit invasively, and I find it flattering when in the past I assumed he was looking for flaws. “You see, I’m trying to figure how it can be that I saw you drive off the base a couple hours ago. And now you’re driving off it again. When I never saw you drive back on it.”

  “This isn’t the only gate, you know . . . ,” I remind him, nudging his arm, noting that for someone so thin he’s surprisingly muscular. “But I like yours best. Because you know me, I prefer back doors and quiet . . . ,” I lead him on easily as if a tincture of Hyde has been added to my Dr. Jekyll.

  Suddenly, I’m a tease. I’m acting like my bold sister, and if MP Crockett leans any closer through my open window, we’ll practically be kissing. I let him gaze deeply into my PEEPS and SPIES, facial recognition kicking in, his first name David. He goes by Davy, and 23 is way too young for me when it comes to male neurological development and emotional maturity.

  He’s also somewhat sheltered, having never left Tangier Island until graduating from the twelfth grade and enlisting in the Air Force. Father’s a waterman. Mom’s a bird-watching tour guide who runs the Spar Grass B&B where Carme and I stayed several times during high school when we’d take the Onancock ferry with Mom, who’s big into history, different cultures and cooking.

  “. . . Seems like you’ve got a lot going on at NASA these past few days,” Davy Crockett is saying as I read about him in my lenses.

  He has one sibling, a disabled younger sister, the family’s Tangier Island home going back many generations. Wood sided with a metal roof and striped awnings, it’s set back from marshland on Mailboat Harbor where the father keeps his trawler.

  “. . . What’s got you so busy during a shutdown when no one’s around? Huh?” Davy may look serious but he’s flirting up a storm. “Or maybe you keep coming in and out because you don’t miss me,” he winks.

  “Busted, I don’t,” I wink back as I think, Holy smoke!

  Every time Carme has passed through this gate of late, she must have morphed her tags to mirror mine, implying we have matching Chase Cars. I suspect that until now she’s not been driving hers around here.

  She waited until I’d been implanted with my SIN for the games to begin, and inserting herself into my investigations, my professional life, is one thing. I might even get used to it. But my relationships, especially those that could fall into the dating category, are a different kettle of fish, maybe a whole school of them I don’t know how to fry.

  I’ve never been fresh or forward. I don’t ask people out or pick them up. At least I haven’t before. But I guess it’s not too late to learn a new trick and besides, Carme wouldn’t be friendly with Davy Crockett unless she expects me to follow up for some reason.

  00:00:00:00:0

  SO BE IT, I tell myself. How hard is it to act sexy? To be a woman of the world, someone who’s been around the block a few times? Now or never, deep breath, here goes . . .

  “I was thinking of asking if you’d like to have a beer sometime,” I sound surprisingly easygoing and sure of myself. “But I hear that people from your neck of the woods don’t drink,” and anyone who’s visited Tangier Island knows it’s as dry as a bone, not a drop of alcohol to be found (except what’s sneaked into the fishing boats).

  “A beer sounds good,” Davy Crockett steps back from my SUV. “Or maybe a bite one night like we talked about earlier?”

  Not with me he didn’t, I think but don’t say. We’ll make a plan, I promise, rolling up the window, driving away. El Diablo Loco might be an idea. Maybe the Barking Dog on Sunset Creek if he’s into fried seafood, hot dogs, and my stomach grumbles again. Or the Deadrise restaurant at Fort Monroe where I bet he’d like the crab cakes, and I watch him in my mirrors until I can’t see him anymore.

  I’m stewing over the idea of tag teaming in my personal life, of Carme laying the romantic groundwork while I follow up or maybe the other way around. It’s not like we haven’t swapped places before, most memorably our junior year in high school when she thought it would be a fine idea to switch prom dates (didn’t turn out very well).

  I ask ART to restore images on the truck’s displays since it’s just us again, and I’m back to monitoring what’s going on at the OCME in Norfolk.

  “. . . It’s the latest twist in a drama that’s getting only more bizarre,” Mason Dixon broadcasts off to one side of the OCME’s glass front door.

  He somberly reminds his audience that Vera Young’s body is scheduled for release to a local funeral home where it will be cremated later today. And I worry again about the slightest possibility the GOD chip is somehow mixed in with her remains.

  “Easy does it,” I caution myself out loud, slowing down around a curve.

  I almost sail off the road, the heft of my Chase Car reminding me of a Humvee. Now that I’m on NASA’s side of the peninsula, the conditions are terrible. Nothing but solid white and melting ice, any tire tracks probably left by the protective services officers taking turns manning our guard gate up ahead. Nobody else is coming back here if avoidable.

  “. . . This is according to her daughter in California who says that’s what her mother would have wanted,” Mason Dixon says in the live feed I’m seeing in one of my displays, windblown, his coat collar flipped up around his ears like he’s James Dean. “But it’s over the very vocal protests of Vera’s sister, Dr. Rong, who we’re expecting to hear from momentarily . . .”

  The NASA back gate isn’t much, just a guard booth, t
he usual barricades and a yellow-and-white-striped mechanical arm.

  “Please turn off the displays and mute the audio,” I say to ART. “And by the way, that should be automatic when there’s a risk of other people seeing or hearing what you’re showing me. I shouldn’t have to keep telling you. Just do it as a matter of routine, please.”

  Copy, in a text, all of the flat-screens going dark.

  I roll down my window as my colleague Celeste approaches in her winter and ballistic gear, and she’s always been much hipper than I am, although that’s not saying much. About my age, she wears her hair short on top, shaved on the sides, and has lots of tattoos and body piercings.

  “You back again?” she checks my badge.

  “So much for being furloughed, right?” I commiserate the way I always do with boots on the ground, the officers assigned onerous tasks like guard duty. “Some of us always have to show up no matter what.”

  “Tell me about it, I never catch a break. And I’ve got so much to do before the holidays. It would have been nice to have a few weeks off,” she says, her breath puffing out in the windy cold. “It sure would be a lot easier using the front gate like everybody else, Calli. I don’t know why you don’t listen,” and obviously, she’s had encounters with Carme parading as me. “But hey, maybe you like off-roading in the tundra.”

  “We need to keep a close eye on the most vulnerable areas,” I remind her of our responsibility during a furlough while I get her off the subject of my allegedly driving in and out. “We have to worry about the data center, I don’t need to remind you. And other highly sensitive facilities more off the beaten path than I like under the circumstances.”

  “Well, if anything can get through the roads back there, this thing can,” she gives my Tahoe a covetous once-over, and doesn’t know the half of it.

  Obviously, whenever Carme has passed through in her own Chase Car, Celeste has assumed it was me driving mine. It makes me uncomfortable to think my sister is that adept at passing herself off as me, including with my colleagues, people I work with daily.

  I suppose it should be reassuring considering our mission. But it doesn’t feel that way as I drive off. At least ART turns my truck’s displays back on without my asking this time, and the OCME live feed resumes with Joan getting up from her chair inside the receiving bay as the pedestrian door opens at the top of the concrete ramp that leads into the morgue.

  An unfamiliar man steps out dressed in a cheap black suit and tie, someone young, nicely built with a prosthetic left eye.

  “That damn showboat,” he says in a syrupy drawl. “God, I can’t stand Mason Dixon. Everything’s a conspiracy and somehow about him.”

  “Huh! Sounds familiar,” Joan looks extremely unhappy as she smokes.

  “Don’t start in again,” an ugly look on the man’s otherwise handsome face.

  “Who’s shown up so far?” angrily tapping an ash, she seems about ready to kill him.

  “The Daily Press and Virginian-Pilot, Channels 10 and 13, plus a couple radio stations are rolling up now that the accident has cleared. At least a dozen reporters, photographers, TV people. You’d think Elvis croaked,” a sneer in his voice echoing off the mammoth concrete space where the dead are delivered and carried away.

  Meanwhile, I’m churning through the frozen wasteland area of the NASA campus, passing silvery barnlike maintenance sheds, and a posted sign reminding people to Buckle Up, that they’re in a controlled area. Except it doesn’t feel very controlled right now, drifted snow, ice littered with snapped-off trees and branches everywhere. The low sun seeps through the overcast on and off, my PEEPS changing tint as the light varies.

  “. . . They want a statement from someone since the chief’s not available. I’m thinking it’s a good idea,” the man in the cheap suit leans against the open door, and behind him I get a good view of the intake area where bodies are signed in and out, weighed, measured and tagged.

  In the back wall is the bulletproof-glass-enclosed morgue office, and walls of stainless steel cooler doors, their digital data displays and gauges lit up green. I see no sign of Wally the security guard, of autopsies or anything much going on. Probably everyone is upstairs, keeping a low profile in their offices while Neva causes her usual pandemonium.

  “. . . I was thinking maybe you could say something. Don’t you think somebody should?” the man goes on and on, and when the security camera catches his prosthetic eye at certain angles, it’s as if a crash dummy has come alive.

  I ask ART if he can use facial recognition, other data to get the skinny on this guy, who he is, where he’s from. Most of all, I want to know how long he’s worked with Joan. I’ve not run into him before, and I have a bad feeling he’s the latest in her unhealthy diet of self-obsessed boy toys.

  15

  “EASY DOES IT . . . ,” I tap-tap the brakes, gently slowing down at a particularly bad stretch of iced-over snow that’s not been sanded or plowed.

  Joan stabs out the cigarette in a cat-litter-filled plastic bucket riddled with butts while I’m given info on the man she’s glaring at. Dylan Vince, 34, from the mountains of Lynchburg, Virginia, and that explains his thick accent.

  Graduated from Tidewater Community College with a degree in mortuary science, he worked in various funeral homes before being hired by the OCME’s Norfolk office last month to replace the administrator who’d retired.

  “It shouldn’t be up to me!” she exclaims to him.

  “If you don’t want to do it yourself, write something up,” Dylan says. “I guess I could go out there and read it for you. But it would be better if you did,” he adds disingenuously, and what a piece of garbage.

  “I’m not talking to anyone about Vera Young or anything else,” Joan’s not going to take his bull crap. “I’m not commenting and neither are you. Because that’s what you want. To get in front of the camera, you and your ego . . .”

  I’m crunching past the deserted Composites & Model Development Lab, going slowly, ducking and dodging pockets of deep snow and slicks of ice. Hardly anyone has been back here since the nor’easter, and I’m not surprised. Like Celeste said, those authorized to access the NASA Langley campus during the shutdown use the main gate near the Badge and Pass Office.

  Where I am on East Durand Street, nothing has been touched, and it’s beautiful and awful, trees thick with snow, ice sparkling like crystal.

  “. . . May as well head over to the evidence bay to deal with our crispy critter,” Joan says with a loud sigh in the video feed playing inside my SUV.

  “If it’s the car stolen from the coliseum, there may not have been anybody in it,” Dylan, her newbie administrator, replies. “I’m surprised you wouldn’t have thought of that by now with what’s all over the news,” insultingly from the top of the ramp. “Based on what I’m hearing, it probably was controlled remotely,” self-importantly as if he’s the investigator.

  “Won’t that be a sucky new problem as if I don’t have enough! Looking for bodies that aren’t there and weren’t to begin with!” Joan storms out of the bay into the blustery afternoon. “Don’t forget to roll down the door!”

  Dylan steps back inside the morgue’s intake area as I pass empty fields and parking lots whited out, keeping up my scan for deer while monitoring other live feeds . . .

  The same blue-striped Bell 407 I saw earlier has returned for its passenger, hovering over the pad while Mason Dixon broadcasts near the OCME front door . . .

  As it opens and Neva Rong emerges in her sexy high heels, stunning in a fitted black skirt suit under her long black fur coat, her diamonds winking as the sun peeks in and out of fast-moving clouds . . .

  “Dr. Rong . . . ! Dr. Rong . . . !” microphones are thrust her way.

  “Hey, hey . . . ! Look over here . . . !”
camera shutters whirring.

  “Dr. Rong . . . ! Have you viewed your sister’s body yet . . . ?”

  Everyone hushes as she dramatically unfolds a sheet of paper, holding it up. And I can see the important-looking letterhead, the fancy holographic watermark in the creamy heavy stock. She shows the document all around, every camera and microphone trained on her.

  “My dear Vera’s last wishes! Right here. See this?” She shakes the page for dramatic effect. “My sister named me the executor of her estate, her most trusted ally and faithful retainer . . . ,” Neva says, and there’s no question in my mind this is more of her manipulative fakery. “It’s right here in black and white . . .”

  “Seriously?” I say under my breath, getting increasingly irate as I creep along a deserted frozen road, marveling over her audaciousness and that nothing seems to daunt her. “I mean, who can stand it?”

  “Did you have a question?” ART pipes up.

  “Just muttering to myself.”

  I pass closed building after building, institutional redbrick with mind-numbing names that don’t begin to tell you what goes on. The Electronics Application Technology Lab, for example. The National Transonic Facility. The Simulation Development and Analysis Branch. Other jargony tongue twisters include the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate and the CERTAIN UAS Test Range.

  One of my favorite clunkers is the Advanced Manufacturing office complex where Dad and I often park ourselves. Home of ISAAC the robot and the electron beam gun, Building 1232 is one of the oldest left on campus, an ancient rusty bicycle forever parked in front near a tarnished brass plaque That Reads Space Technology from the days of Sputnik.