Port Mortuary

by Patricia Cornwell

  It sounds silly to belabor my point about Sock. What the hell would Fielding know about it? He couldn’t be bothered to go to the scene, and Marino’s right. Someone should have gone.

  Lucy’s Bell 407 is black with dark tinted glass in back, and she unlocks the doors and baggage compartment as wind buffets the ramp.

  A wind sock is stiffly pointed north like a horizontal traffic cone, and that’s good and bad. The wind will still be on our tail but so will the storm front, heavy rains mixed with sleet and snow. Marino begins to load my luggage while Lucy walks around the helicopter, checking antennas, static ports, rotor blades, the emergency pop-out floats and the bottles of nitrogen that inflate them, then the aluminum alloy tail boom and its gear box, the hydraulic pump and reservoir.

  “If someone was spying on him, covertly recording him, and realized he was dead, then the person had something to do with it,” I say to her, apropos of nothing. “So wouldn’t you expect that person to have remotely deleted the video files recorded by the headphones, at least gotten rid of them on the hard drive and SD card? Wouldn’t such a person want to make sure we didn’t find any recordings or have a clue?”

  “Depends.” She grabs hold of a handle on the fuselage and inserts the toe of her boot into a built-in step, climbing up.

  “If it were you doing it,” I ask.

  “If it were me?” She opens fasteners and props open a panel of the lightweight aluminum skin. “If I didn’t think anything significant or incriminating had been recorded, I wouldn’t have deleted them.” Using a small but powerful SureFire flashlight, she inspects the engine and its mounts.

  “Why not?”

  Before she can answer, Marino walks over to me and says to no one in particular, “I got to make a visit. Anybody else needs to, now’s the time.” As if he’s the chief steward and reminding us that there is no restroom on the helicopter. He’s trying to make up to me.

  “Thanks, I’m fine,” I tell him, and he walks off across the dark ramp, back to the terminal.

  “If it were me, this is what I’d do after he’s dead,” Lucy continues as the strong light moves over hoses and tubing, as she makes sure nothing is loose or damaged. “I’d download the video files immediately by logging on to the webcam, and if I didn’t see anything that worried me, I’d leave them be.”

  She climbs up higher to check the main rotor, its mast, its swash plate, and I wait until she is back on the tarmac before I ask, “Why would you leave them be?”

  “Think about it.”

  I follow her around the helicopter so she can climb up and check the other side. She almost seems amused by my questions, as if what I’m asking should be obvious.

  “If they’re deleted after he’s dead, then someone else did it, right?” she says, checking under cowling, the light probing carefully.

  Then she drops back down to the ramp.

  “Of course he couldn’t do it after he was dead.” I wait to answer her, because she could get hurt climbing all over her helicopter, especially when she’s up around the rotor mast. I don’t want her distracted. “So that’s why you would leave them if you were the one spying on him and knew he was dead or were the one responsible for his death.”

  “If I were spying on him, if I followed him so I could kill him, hell, yes, I’d leave the last video recordings made, and I wouldn’t grab the headphones from the scene, either.” She shines the brilliant light along the fuselage again. “Because if people saw him wearing them out there in the park or on his way to the park, why are they now missing? The headphones are rather beefy and noticeable.”

  We walk around to the nose of the helicopter.

  “And if I take the headphones, I’d have to take his satellite radio, too, dig in his coat pocket and get that out, have to take time to go to all this trouble after he’s on the ground, and hope nobody saw me. And what about earlier files downloaded somewhere, assuming the spying has gone on for a while? How is that explained if there’s no recording device that shows up and we find recordings on a home computer or server somewhere? You know what they say.” She opens an access panel above the pitot tube and shines the light in there. “For every crime, there are two—the act itself and then what you do to cover it up. Be smarter to leave the headphones, the video files, alone, to let cops or someone like you or me assume he was recording himself, which is what Marino believes, but I doubt it.”

  She reconnects the battery. Her rationale for disconnecting it whenever she leaves the helicopter for any period of time is that if someone manages to get inside the cockpit and is lucky while fiddling with the throttle and switches, they could accidentally start the engine. But not if the battery is disconnected. Doesn’t matter her hurry, Lucy always does a thorough preflight, especially if she’s left her aircraft unattended, even if it’s on a military base. But it doesn’t escape my attention that she is checking everything more thoroughly than usual, as if she suspects something or is uneasy.

  “Everything A-okay?” I ask her. “Everything in good shape?”

  “Making sure of it,” she says, and I feel her distance more strongly. I sense her secrets.

  She trusts no one. She shouldn’t. I never should have trusted some people, either, going back to day one. People who manipulate and lie and claim it is for a cause. The right cause, a godly or just cause. Noonie Pieste and Joanne Rule were smothered to death in bed, probably with a pillow. That’s why there was no tissue response to their injuries. The sexual assaults, the hacks with machetes and slashes with broken glass, and even the ligatures binding them when they were tied up in the chairs, all of it postmortem. A godly cause, a just cause, in the minds of those responsible. An unthinkable outrage, and they got away with it. To this day they did. Don’t think about it. Focus on what is before you, not on the past.

  I open the left-front door and climb up on a skid, the wind gusting hard. Maneuvering myself around the collective and cyclic and into the left seat, I fasten my four-point harness as I hear Marino opening the door behind me. He is loud and big, and I feel the helicopter settle from his weight as he climbs into the back, where he always sits. Even when Lucy flies with only him as a passenger, he isn’t allowed up front where there are dual controls that he can nudge or bump or use as an armrest because he doesn’t think. He just doesn’t think.

  Lucy gets in and begins another preflight, and I help her by holding the checklist, and together we go through it. I’ve never had a desire to fly the various aircraft my niece has owned over the years, or to ride her motorcycles or drive her fast Italian cars, but I’m fine to copilot, am handy with maps and avionics. I know how to switch the radios to the necessary frequencies or enter squawks and other information into the transponder or Chelton Flight System. If there was an emergency, I probably could get the helicopter safely to the ground, but it wouldn’t be pretty.

  “… Overhead switches in the off position,” I continue going down the list.

  “Yes.”

  “Circuit breakers in.”

  “They are.” Lucy’s agile fingers touch everything she checks as we go down the plastic-laminated list.

  Momentarily, she flips on the boost pumps and rolls the throttle to flight idle.

  “Clear to the right.” As she looks out her side window.

  “Clear to the left.” As I look out at the dark ramp, at the small building with its lighted windows and a Piper Cub tied down a safe distance away in the shadows, its tarp shaking in the wind.

  Lucy pushes the start switch, and the main rotor blade begins to turn slowly, heavily, thudding faster like a heartbeat, and I think of the man. I think of his fear, of what I detected in those three words he exclaimed.

  “What the…? Hey… !”

  What did he feel? What did he see? The lower part of a black coat, the loose skirt of a black coat swishing past. Whose coat? A wool dress coat or a trench coat? It wasn’t fur. Who was wearing the long, black coat? Someone who didn’t stop to help him.

  “What the�
�? Hey… !” A startled cry of pain.

  I replay it in my mind again and again. The camera angle dropping suddenly, then fixing straight up at bare branches and gray sky, then the hem of the long, black coat moving past in the frame for an instant, maybe a second. Who would step around someone in distress as if he was an inanimate object, such as a rock or a log? What kind of human being would ignore someone who grabbed his chest and collapsed? The person who caused it, perhaps. Or someone who didn’t want to be involved for some reason. Like witnessing an accident or assault and speeding off so you don’t become part of the investigation. A man or a woman? Did I see shoes? No, just the hem or skirt of the coat flapping, and then another jostling sound and the picture was replaced by different bare trees showing through the underside of a green-painted bench. Did the person in the long, black coat kick the headphones under the bench there so they didn’t record something else that was done?

  I need to look at the video clips more closely, but I can’t do it now. The iPad is in back, and there isn’t time. The blades rapidly beat the air, and the generator is online. Lucy and I put our headsets on. She flips more overhead switches, the avionics master, the flight and navigation instruments. I turn the intercom switch to “crew only” so Marino can’t hear us and we can’t hear him while Lucy talks to the air traffic controller. The strobes, the pulse and night scanner landing lights, blaze on the tarmac, painting it white as we wait for the tower to clear us for takeoff. Entering destinations in the touch-screen GPS and in the moving map display and the Chelton, I correct the altimeters. I make sure the digital fuel indicator matches the fuel gauge, doing most things at least twice, because Lucy believes in redundancy.

  The tower releases us, and we hover-taxi to the runway and climb on course to the northeast, crossing the Delaware River at eleven hundred feet. The water is dark and ruffled by the wind, like molten metal flowing thickly. The lights of land flicker through trees like small fires.

  4

  We change our heading, veering toward Philadelphia, because the visibility deteriorates closer to the coast. I flip the intercom switch so we can check on Marino.

  “You all right back there?” I’m calmer now, too preoccupied with the long, black coat and the man’s startled exclamation to be angry with Marino.

  “Be quicker to cut through New Jersey,” his voice sounds, and he knows where we are, because there is an in-flight map on a video screen inside the rear passenger compartment.

  “Fog and freezing rain, IFR conditions in Atlantic City. And it isn’t quicker,” Lucy replies. “We’ll be on ‘crew only’ most of the time so I can deal with flight following.”

  Marino is cut out of our conversation again as we are handed off from one tower to the next. The Washington sectional map is open in my lap, and I enter a new GPS destination of Oxford, Connecticut, for an eventual fuel stop, and we monitor weather on the radar, watching blocks of solid green and yellow encroach upon us from the Atlantic. We can outrun, duck, and dodge the storms, Lucy says, as long as we stay inland and the wind continues to favor us, increasing our ground speed to what at this moment is an impressive one hundred and fifty-two knots.

  “How are you doing?” I keep up my scan for cell towers and other aircraft.

  “Better when we get where we’re going. I’m sure we’ll be fine and can outrun this mess.” She points at what’s on the weather radar display. “But if there’s a shadow of a doubt, we’ll set down.”

  She wouldn’t have come to pick me up if she thought we might have to spend the night in a field somewhere. I’m not worried. Maybe I don’t have enough left in me to worry about yet one more thing.

  “How about in general? How are you doing?” I say into the mike, touching my lip. “You’ve been on my mind a lot these past few weeks.” I try to draw her out.

  “I know how hard it is to keep up with people under the circumstances,” she says. “Every time we think you’re coming back, something changes, so we’ve all quit thinking it.”

  Three times now the completion of my fellowship was delayed by one urgent matter or another. Two helicopters shot down in one day in Iraq with twenty-three killed. The mass murder at Fort Hood, and most recently, the earthquake in Haiti. Armed forces MEs got deployed or none could be spared, and Briggs wouldn’t release me from my training program. A few hours ago, he attempted to delay my departure again, suggesting I stay in Dover. As if he doesn’t want me to go home.

  “I figured we’d get to Dover and find out you had another week, two weeks, a month,” Lucy adds. “But you’re done.”

  “Apparently, they’re sick of me.”

  “Let’s hope you don’t get home only to turn around and go back.”

  “I passed my boards. I’m done. I’ve got an office to run.”

  “Someone needs to run it. That’s for sure.”

  I don’t want to hear more damning comments about Jack Fielding.

  “And things are fine elsewhere?” I ask.

  “They’ve almost finished the garage, big enough for three cars even with the washing bay. Assuming you tandem park.” She starts on a construction update, reminding me how disengaged I’ve been from what’s going on at my own home. “The rubberized flooring is in, but the alarm system isn’t ready. They weren’t going to bother with glass breakers, and I said they had to. Unfortunately, one of the old wavy-glass windows original to the building didn’t survive the upgrade. So you’ve got a bit of a breeze in the garage at the moment. Did you know all this?”

  “Benton’s been in charge.”

  “Well, he’s been busy. You got the freq for Millville? I think one-two-three-point-six-five.”

  I check the sectional and affirm the frequency and enter it into Comm 1. “How are you?” I try again.

  I want to know what I’m coming home to in addition to a dead man awaiting me in the morgue cooler. Lucy won’t tell me how she is, and now she’s accusing Benton of being busy. When she says something like that, she doesn’t mean it literally. She’s very tense. She’s obsessively watching the instruments, the radar screens, and what’s outside the cockpit, as if she’s expecting to get into a dogfight or to be struck by lightning or to have a mechanical failure. I’m sensing something is off about her, or maybe I’m the one in a mood.

  “He has a big case,” I add. “An especially bad one.”

  We both know which one I mean. It’s been all over the news about Johnny Donahue, the patient at McLean, a Harvard student who last week confessed to murdering a six-year-old boy with a nail gun. Benton believes the confession is false, and the cops, the DA, are unhappy with him. People want the confession to be genuine, because they don’t want to think someone like that might still be loose. I wonder how the evaluation went today, as I envision Benton’s black Porsche backing out of our driveway on the video clips I just watched. He was on his way to McLean to pick up Johnny Donahue’s case file when a young man and a greyhound walked past our house. Several degrees of separation. The human web connecting all of us, connecting everyone on earth.

  “Let’s keep one-two-seven-point-three-five on Comm Two so we can monitor Philly,” Lucy is saying, “but I’m going to try to stay out of their Class B. I think we can, unless this stuff pushes in any tighter from the coast.”

  She indicates the green and yellow shapes on the satellite weather radar display that show precipitation moving closer, as if trying to bully us northwest into the bright skyline of downtown Philadelphia, fly us into the high-rises.

  “I’m fine,” she then says. “Sorry about him, because I can tell you’re pissed.” She points her thumb toward the back, meaning Marino. “What’d he do besides be his usual self?”

  “Were you listening when he talked to Briggs?”

  “That was in Wilmington. I was busy paying for fuel.”

  “He shouldn’t have called him.”

  “Like telling Jet Ranger not to drool when I get out the bag of treats. It’s Pavlovian for Marino to shoot off his mouth to Briggs,
to show off. Why are you more surprised than usual?” Lucy asks as if she already knows the answer, as if she’s probing, looking for something.

  “Maybe because it’s caused a worse problem than usual.” I tell her about Briggs wanting the body transported to Dover.

  I tell her that the chief of the armed forces medical examiners has information he’s not sharing, or at least I suspect that he is withholding something important from me. Probably because of Marino, I say. Because of what he’s managed to stir up by going over my head.

  “I don’t think that’s all of it by a long shot,” Lucy says as her tail number is called out over the air.

  She presses the radio switch on her cyclic and answers, and as she talks to flight following, I enter the next frequency. We hop-scotch from air space to air space, the shapes on the weather radar mostly yellow now and bird-dogging us from the southeast, indicating heavy rains that at this altitude will create hazardous conditions as supercooled water particles hit the leading edges of the rotor blades and freeze. I watch for moisture on the Plexiglas windscreen and don’t see anything, not one drop, while I wonder what Lucy is referring to. What’s not it by a long shot?

  “Did you notice what was in his apartment?” Lucy’s voice in my headset, and I assume she means the dead man and what I watched on the video clips recorded by his headphones.

  “You said that’s not all of it.” I go back to that first. “Tell me what you’re referring to.”

  “I’m about to and didn’t want to bring it up in front of Marino. He didn’t notice, wouldn’t know what it was, anyway, and I didn’t point it out because I wanted to talk to you and I’m not sure he should know about it, period.”

  “Didn’t point out what?”

  “My guess is Briggs didn’t need it pointed out,” Lucy goes on. “He had a lot more time to look at the video clips than you did, and he or whoever else he’s showed them to would have recognized the metal contraption near the door, sort of looks like a six-legged creepy crawler welded together with wires and composite pieces and parts, about the size of a stackable washer and dryer. Picked up by the camera for a second when the man and Sock were on their way out to Norton’s Woods. I’m sure it wasn’t lost on you, of all people.”