Chapter 15

CHAPTER 15

I don’t know, Doc.” Marino sighs, leaning back in the seat, looking up at the Doomsday Bird’s silvery headliner. “I’m bothered by shit that didn’t used to put a dent in me. I know a lot of people who’ve died, and I worry about other people dying, including you and me most of all.”

“When we first started working together, we knew more about death than most of the population,” I reply. “But at some level we believed it wouldn’t touch us personally.”

“That’s exactly how I felt, and wish I still did.”

“It’s called denial. Something you’re quite skilled at.”

“You’re one to talk,” his voice retorts in my headset. “I remember you showing up at scenes in the worst neighborhoods with nothing to protect you but a scalpel.”

“I’m pretty good with sharp instruments.”

“And how many times have I told you not to bring a knife to a gunfight?”

“You’ve always been there when I roll up. I’ve always felt safe when you’re around,” I reply as a rainbow arches across the clearing sky, and I point it out. “A good sign,” I tell him, and I feel it.

“Maybe.”

“How can it be a bad one, Marino?”

“If there’s no pot of gold and instead we crash at the end of it,” he says as the brilliant prism colors dim and are gone, the sun ducking behind streaming clouds.

He catches me staring down at the pouched body, dark red blood showing through plastic. Without warning, emotions well up again and I will them back into their walled-off space. Marino and I don’t talk for a while, and I feel his eyes on me. I sense his pressing questions like a persistent presence in the dark.

“If it makes you feel any better,” he says, “I’ve been there, Doc.”

“Been where?”

“Every cop I know has rolled up on a scene and realized the victim is their relative, a friend, a husband, a wife. Or maybe somebody they were having a relationship with. And maybe they can’t tell anyone for some reason,” he explains as I realize he has suspicions I’ve not anticipated.

I keep my attention out the window, finding nothing but the brooding sky as I look for the rainbow, hoping it was a message meant for me. I want to believe in symbols like the big cat appearing on the Yellow Brick Road. Metaphor may be the only language Sal has left, and he’d want to reassure me somehow. He’d protest that it’s not him in that ugly bag on the floor at my muddy feet. He’s moved on, leaving behind his spacesuit, as he referred to his strong, lithe body that I once loved.

Images rush back with fresh intensity of climbing steep steps worn smooth by the centuries, feeling the cool stone beneath my bare feet. We’d wait until the enchanted hour, as he described those early mornings when businesses were closed, most people asleep, the light pollution minimal. Carrying a bottle of wine to the rooftop, we’d sit amid flowers and marble sculptures, a fountain plashing, the primrose and phlox perfuming the warm darkness.

Spreading below was a sea of red barrel tiles, domes, and ruins overrun by feral cats that we often fed while out on long walks. The rooftop’s blood orange and lemon trees waved like wands in the breeze, casting their spell over the ancient city as we’d look through Sal’s telescope. He’d explain the dry lakes, canyons and craters of the moon. Pointing out rocky riverbeds on Mars, he’d tell me it was a beautiful place before losing its atmosphere.

For the first time I saw the bands of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn with my own eyes. He was convinced of planets existing beyond our solar system before it was known.

One day you’ll see, amore. Everything I tell you will be true. I know this because what will be already is, and has been before.

“… It was that summer in Italy, right?” Marino goes on, and I’ve not attended carefully to him.

“I’m sorry. I missed the last few things you said,” I reply. “Maybe move the mic closer to your lips. You’re cutting in and out a little bit.” It’s true, but that’s not the reason I wasn’t listening.

“I was talking about when it happened,” he goes on.

“When what did?” I don’t want to discuss this with him.

“Don’t make me say it.”

“Say what?”

“How pissed I was at you for a really long time for fleeing the coop the way you did.” His face is stony as he stares out his window, patches of blue showing through clouds.

“You’ve been pissed at me at one time or other for as long as we’ve known each other.”

“First, you were going to quit and run home to Miami. Then you suddenly decided to leave the country with no warning.” He looks out at the sky continuing to clear as the sun dips lower. “I had to find out from Style magazine that you were teaching forensics in Rome for the summer. You didn’t even bother to say goodbye or send a fucking postcard.”

“That’s ridiculous. At that point we weren’t friendly in the least,” I remind him, my attention tugged back to the floor again.

At times the vibration of the helicopter gives me the uncanny sense that Sal’s body is shivering inside its plastic cocoon.

“Well, I knew something must have happened while you were gone,” Marino says. “When you came back you’d changed.”

“That was the point of going.”

“You were different because of him.” He avoids saying Sal’s name when possible, always has, and maybe now I understand. “I knew for sure what was going on a couple of weeks after you were back. We ended up at a homicide in Gilpin Court, a drive-by shooting in the middle of the day. Remember?”

“There were more than one. I’m not sure—”

“I met you as you got out of that tank of a Mercedes you drove in those days. As I was walking up, I overheard you on that big-ass mobile phone you carried around back then. You were telling whoever it was that that you missed him,” Marino says. “And I asked you about it. You acted like he was nothing special, but I knew he was.”

“And you were right,” I reply, and I see it in Marino’s eyes.

The hurt after all these years. I’ve always been with someone. But it’s never been him.

“Are you going to come clean about it? You know, full disclosure? Seems like an important detail that could be used against you if you’re not careful.” He’s almost lecturing me.

“The romantic element of the relationship was short-lived and a very long time ago,” I reply.

“Really? Then how come I’ve caught how upset you are when you think I’m not looking?”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t do the job. It just means I care. And of course I cared for him. I cared very much.” I swallow hard, emotions threatening.

“I’m not trying to pick on you, Doc.”

“Good.”

“I just don’t want other people doing it.”

I stare at the lead-gray partition between the cabin and the cockpit, wishing I could hear what Lucy and Tron are talking about. I wonder where we’re going and what else they’re keeping from me about why Sal had to die so hideously.

“What about next of kin?” Marino starts in with other questions. “Who needs to be notified once the ID is confirmed?”

“His parents are gone, his mother dying a few years ago. But he has a sister,” I reply. “She lives in Rome, and Sal was there with her just a few weeks ago.”

“I guess he never married.”

“He was married to his work.” I can’t bring myself to say that Sal was selfish.

But he was, and didn’t see it. For someone so insightful, he had a blind spot when it came to his drives and ego.

“I’m betting the truth is he never got with anybody else because he never got over you,” Marino says.

“He dated plenty over the years,” I reply.

“And who was he with at the end? Who stopped by to wish him a happy birthday yesterday when he was feeling shitty about turning sixty? What I’m wondering is why you didn’t do anything about it if you both felt that way.”

“Part of life is accepting things that won’t change no matter how disappointing,” I reply, and I remember saying this very thing to Sal.

“Tell me about it.” Marino’s attention is fixed out the window again. “I know exactly what you’re describing. Sometimes it feels like all I’ve ever done is settle.”

I’m grateful Dorothy can’t hear us. It would be an ugly reminder of past conflicts when she’s suspected Marino’s interest. She knew about it long before the two of them were dating. Now she’s amused more than anything else that he once had the hots for me. She’d be devastated by the word settle and must never know he said it.

The downtown Richmond skyline is out our windows, the tops of the James Monroe Building and other skyscrapers shrouded in fog. We’re flying over the restaurants and bars of Shockoe Bottom, and the crowded neighborhoods of Libby Hill. I know what I’m seeing. It always comes back to me whenever I’m here.

Despite how much this part of Virginia has changed over the years, the bones of it are unmistakable. Lucy picks up I-64 on the other side of Oakwood Cemetery with its circuitous paths and rows of gray headstones. I recognize the New Kent County Airport tucked in trees, the numbers 11 and 29 painted in white on either end of the runway. Then there’s nothing below but trees, and a reservoir where people are fishing.

The farther east the better the weather, the sinking sun fiery on the horizon. Soon we’re over Colonial Williamsburg, and I catch a fleeting glimpse of the redbrick visitor center, the Governor’s Palace, the serpentine walls and open green fields enclosed by wooden palings. Knots of visitors stroll along walkways, and I can make out the historical interpreters in period costumes before the view is replaced by woods.

“Where the hell are they taking us?” Marino asks, and I don’t have an answer. I don’t even have a guess.

Several miles off to our right is the Busch Gardens theme park, its roller-coaster tracks arching across the dimming sky. I’m reminded of Sal’s body callously dumped inside the Haunted Forest. And of the see-through pouch inches from me on the helicopter floor. And who might be to blame. And it seems impossible that we’re confronted by the same enemy again.

If only she would die.

I think of Carrie Grethen as a human virus that can’t be eradicated. All it does is mutate into the next variant, each one crueler and wilier than the last. I send Benton a text without mentioning where we are or other details. He requires no update from me, knowing far more than I ever will about what’s going on. I tell him I’m checking in to see how he is. I’m thinking of him.

Heard it’s not been a pleasant flight, he writes back.

No fun but better now.

How’s Marino?

A little green around the gills, I type while making sure Marino isn’t looking on. We’re ok. But disturbing things are happening. Not sure what you’ve heard. I have little doubt that Benton knows exactly who I’m concerned about.

We’ll talk soon, he replies, and I hope that’s true.

“Hello? Hey!” Marino’s voice booms in my headset as he waves a hand, gesturing to the cameras. “You guys up?” He’s hoping Tron or Lucy might decide to answer, and they don’t. “You think they’re still awake?” He directs this at me. “Because I sure as hell hope AI isn’t flying this bucket.”

The sun smolders over the York River, burnishing it gold. A fishing pier, a gray wooden footbridge snake through marshland at Denbigh Park, and I recognize the modern brick and glass airport in Newport News flowing by. The Hampton Coliseum seems to hover like a concrete mothership in the waning light, and I know where we are. But not our destination.

I have no clue until I see the flashing red beacons on top of the colossal sawhorse-shaped gantry etched against the darkening sky. The Doomsday Bird thunders in low and slow as we near NASA Langley Research Center. The Aeronautical and Space Administration’s oldest campus dates back to the days of the Wright brothers. It’s where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin trained to walk on the moon.

“What the hell are we coming here for?” Marino is baffled, and I don’t have an answer.

Streetlights blink on below, the wind tunnels powered by massive white metal vacuum spheres that remind me of giant balloons. We lumber past a red-and-white-striped water tower, a tall stack in the distance gushing smoke and fire. The dull silver aircraft hangar glints into view, some ten stories high with a white radome on the roof, and we swoop around it, slowing into a hover.

Lights on tall poles are bright on the ramp and in the parking lot where a van and an SUV wait with headlights burning. Beyond is Langley Air Force Base, the long runway outlined in diamond-white lights. An F-22 Raptor fighter jet takes off while two others wait on the taxiway, streams of exhaust shimmering. We set down on the tarmac, the landing lights flaring on the NASA blue-and-red logo, faded on old aluminum siding.

Lucy shuts down, cutting the engines, braking the rotor blades, and the SUV and van rush in. The driver’s doors open, two soldiers in camouflage jumping out, heavily armed and in tactical gear. Their comrades emerge from the passenger doors, cradling submachine guns and wearing earpieces. We climb out of the helicopter, and Lucy retrieves the jump-out bags but not our Pelican cases.

“You won’t need your gear,” she explains.

Marino and I settle into the SUV’s third row of seats, Lucy and Tron in front of us, and we’re driven away. Around the north end of the airfield, we stop at the Armistead Gate, where the military police are expecting us. They confer briefly with our drivers while shining flashlights on ID badges. I can’t hear all of what they’re saying over the rumble of engines but it’s obvious they’re aware of our morbid cargo.

A K-9 handler begins to circle with a Belgian Malinois, checking for explosives and who knows what. Guards peer through our rolled-down windows, shining their lights, making sure we look like our photographs. They check the undercarriage with long-handled mirrors as drones orbit overhead. We’re waved through and wished a good night, the setting sun molten.