Chapter 27

CHAPTER 27

S till no sign of the pilot,” Lucy says as we drive through the back of the NASA campus. “Long before now he should have egressed the cockpit. He should be floating on the surface with his life vest inflated. Assuming he was wearing one. And he might not have been if he wasn’t planning on flying over wide stretches of water.”

As she describes the perils of extricating oneself from a submerged helicopter, I find the number for my Tidewater district deputy chief. I inform Rena Peace that I’m twenty minutes from Fort Monroe responding to a helicopter crash with what appears to be one fatality.

“We’ve gotten no notifications from the police,” she replies, surprised.

“You will soon enough unless by some miracle the pilot survives.”

“And I didn’t know you were in the area,” she says. “I would have asked you to drop by for coffee. Or drinks better yet if you’re staying over.”

“Another time. We’ve got a sensitive situation, Rena.”

I explain that we can expect sensational news coverage about the crash since Dana Diletti could have been on board. She’ll milk that for all it’s worth, I have no doubt.

“And we’re not sure that this isn’t connected to other things going on.” I’m careful what I say.

“Are the police suspicious of foul play?” Rena asks, and it’s hard to hear inside the Secret Service muscle car.

“It’s too early to say,” I answer. “In light of other things, one has to wonder.”

“I saw the piece Dana Diletti did on Ryder Briley last night. She all but came out and said he murdered his child.”

“And he very well might have,” I reply.

“She drops that bombshell? Then this morning her helicopter crashes? Interesting timing.”

“That seems to be a pattern when Ryder Briley’s involved. Bad things happen to people who cross him. We’ll have to see what caused the crash.”

“Do you plan to handle the body recovery?” she asks.

“Fred’s at a meeting in San Diego, and I happen to be here on business unexpectedly,” I reply. “So it makes the most sense.”

Her forensic pathologist husband is one of my medical examiners, and also a master diver and a boat captain. Fred often works underwater recoveries with the police, and we’ve been diving together in the past on cases.

“He’ll be most unhappy that you’re here and he’s not,” Rena says.

“Once the body gets to your office, I’ll trust you to handle it from there,” I explain. “The biggest question is what incapacitated the pilot while he was flying, and was he dead before the crash. We’ll want a rush on toxicology.”

“You always want a rush on everything,” she says with a smile in her tone.

“An extra rush on it, then.”

“Who’s in charge of the investigation? Who should I expect to hear from?”

“The Secret Service,” I reply as Tron blows through a yellow light. “I’m with them now. I need one of your vans to meet us at the Old Point Comfort Marina in Fort Monroe as soon as possible.”

“Nathan’s just getting back from a suspected overdose. He’ll leave right away.”

“Make sure he brings underwater body bags. More than one to be on the safe side,” I reply. “They have to be on the boat with me. It’s believed the pilot was the only one on board, but we can’t be sure until we reach the wreckage.”

When I’m off the phone, I ask Lucy and Tron how we’re supposed to manage. I’ve been scuba diving most of my adult life and worked numerous underwater scenes in Virginia and other places. But my dive bag is at home. I don’t have a swimsuit with me. I prefer not wearing my skivvies under a wetsuit, and no way I’m going commando.

“Not a problem. We can fix you right up.” Tron weaves in and out of traffic as if escaping a fire. “Agents from our Norfolk office will supply the dive gear. And we always have extra bike shorts with us.”

“Lucy and I don’t wear the same size shorts,” I reply. “But thanks for thinking we might.”

“Mine should fit you fine,” Tron offers.

“We can’t help you with a sports bra, though,” Lucy adds, and it’s true they can’t.

We don’t wear the same size, and fortunately, I’m wearing one under my polo shirt. After that I’ll have to figure things out as I go along.

“Hampton police divers are getting the boat ready at the marina in Fort Monroe, and a sky crane is being mobilized out of Norfolk.” Lucy gives us the latest updates as information appears in the lenses of her glasses. “Rescue boats are looking for any sign of survivors. Nothing so far, but the wreckage has been located on sonar.”

She says that witnesses claim the helicopter flew over Fort Monroe, and all seemed normal until it was beyond the beach and well offshore. Then the engine started sputtering. The helicopter began losing altitude, plunging nose-first into the bay dangerously close to several sailboats.

“The people on board reported that the pop-up floats on the skids weren’t deployed,” Lucy explains. “They said the helicopter filled with water, disappearing below the surface within minutes.”

“If people heard the engine sputtering, that doesn’t sound like an autopilot problem,” I point out. “And if Bret Jones was unconscious, how could he have disengaged it?”

“Maybe it malfunctioned?” Lucy says dubiously. “But the sputtering makes me wonder if the engine flamed out for some reason. That’s the more likely scenario, explaining why the helicopter suddenly dropped out of the sky.”

“Could he have run out of fuel?” I ask.

“Not unless he didn’t start out with a full tank, and he wouldn’t be that stupid.”

“As Doctor Peace just pointed out, Dana Diletti aired a big story about Ryder Briley last night that all but suggests he’s a murderer,” I say to them. “Now suddenly, her chopper’s down, and it’s just lucky for her that she wasn’t in it.”

“She and her crew have got to be thinking about that right about now,” Tron says, her eyes constantly scanning the mirrors. “They’ve got to be realizing they could be fish food on the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay.”

“Where did the news station keep the helicopter?” I ask.

“She uses the same terminal we fly out of at Washington National, Briley Flight Services,” Lucy says as my suspicions continue to gather.

I envision the cameras in the ceiling, and the bin of candy-coated peanuts. Bret Jones and his passengers were there often when flying on assignment. Everything they did and said was recorded.

“It would be interesting to know who else might have been around while they were there this morning,” I suggest as Tron guns the muscle car along East Mercury Boulevard, crossing Mill Creek.

She has the grille lights strobing, slaloming past other cars like an Olympic skier, some of them pulling over. Beyond a golf course, she floors it through another yellow light as we near the Chesapeake Bay.

“It would be helpful to see video of the pilot while he was inside the terminal. Was he acting unusually? What can we find out about his medical history?” I’m glancing at a text from Rena Peace telling me the van from her office is fifteen minutes away.

“Was he depressed, maybe suicidal, for example?” Tron picks up the thought. “You know, he drops off everybody and then crashes into the bay on purpose.”

“It’s happened before. But I have a feeling that’s not what we’re dealing with,” Lucy says, and I sense who’s in her thoughts.

We’re conditioned to expect that Carrie Grethen is behind every horrible thing that happens. I realize it’s not rational. But we may as well talk about it.

“What would be her reason?” I come right out and ask.

“She probably has more than one,” Lucy says. “Including luring us into something.”

“If she’s tied in with Ryder Briley, then it very well could have been an attempted hit on Dana Diletti,” Tron suggests as we near our destination.

The sky is empty and bright over the deep blue water of the bay on our left. People are sunbathing on the sandy strip of Outlook Beach, others strolling and jogging along the boardwalk. They stare at the emergency lights flashing about a mile offshore where boats have gathered while a Coast Guard helicopter searches.

We drive past the massive stone walls of the Fort Monroe former military installation, now an upscale residential community with acres of hiking trails and parks. Crumbling batteries, cannon emplacements, the moat go back to the early 1800s when the hexagonal fortress was constructed to protect the Chesapeake Bay from enemy ships.

We pass street after street of brick apartments that were barracks, the writer Edgar Allan Poe famously staying in one when he was stationed here. He would have lived in a cramped brick room with creaking wooden floors and a fireplace casting shadows after dark. No doubt it fed his spooky imagination.

Tree-shaded mansions now turned into condos have sweeping views of the bay, the distant shore of Norfolk a sliver on the horizon. I imagine generals back in the day standing on their grand front porches looking out at battleships and submarines offshore. Long before that it would have been frigates in full sail and men at the oars of barges.

An abandoned airstrip is off to our left, then the Old Point Comfort lighthouse looms ahead, bright white in the sun. Across from the marina on a grassy knoll is the Hampton police department’s redbrick marine unit. Tron slows down, a paved lane leading around to the back of the one-story building. The parking lot is practically empty, just an SUV, a van and a Zodiac boat on a trailer.

“We’ve been given permission to change here, and I’m leaving the car so no one will mess with it.” Tron stops near the back door. “Most of the officers are out in boats at the crash site or doing other things related. So there shouldn’t be anybody much around.”

The building dates back to an earlier century and is in poor repair, the paint peeling on white window frames, the gray slate roof missing tiles. An air conditioner rattles loudly from a window with a cracked pane of glass, and the boxwoods flanking the back door haven’t been trimmed in years, I’m guessing.

Tron rings the buzzer, and we’re let in by a woman on crutches, one foot in a cast, the other in a rubber Birkenstock. Dressed in tactical shorts and a baggy Tommy Bahama shirt, she has a lot of sun damage for someone her age. In her twenties, I estimate. Not much more than that. A chatterbox with a chip on her shoulder, and I often forget that local police tend to resent the feds.

“You can see why I’m not out in the boat with everyone else,” she’s saying boisterously, and I can tell by her accent that she was born and raised around here. “Never fails when something big goes down.”

We follow her through metal desks arranged with laptop computers and video displays, the chairs parked haphazardly as if officers left in a hurry. A workbench is cluttered with dive computers, regulators, a speargun and a takeout fish sandwich partially eaten.

“I know you’re not supposed to wish for things to crash, right?” Only she pronounces it cresh . “But when it happens in the water I want to be there. Anyway, I’m Sergeant Walker. You can call me Dixie. As in that Dixie Chick . Go ahead and make the joke. Everyone else does.”

She swings herself along a hallway as we follow. I can tell she’s been in the cast for a while, the leg muscles atrophied.

“What did you do to yourself??” I ask her.

“Shark attack.”

“This isn’t a good time to hear that,” Tron complains.

“I hope it wasn’t in the bay,” Lucy adds.

“There are sharks in there for sure, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise,” Dixie says with all seriousness. “Supposedly even an alligator now and then, but I’ve not seen one of those. I tell everyone a shark got me just to see the look on their face. Truth is, I slipped while walking my boyfriend’s dog. Busted my ankle in two places and tore my Achilles. He wasn’t worth it, either. The boyfriend, not the dog.”

She stops at the locker room, opening the door for us. It’s little more than a bathroom tiled and painted institutional green. Inside are four metal lockers, a toilet stall and a shower. Sunlight seeps through the slats of the dusty Venetian blinds in the only window. On a shelf next to the sink are a blow dryer, a hairbrush, a large bottle of baby powder.

“Give me a holler if y’all need anything else. I’ll be in the kitchen eating lunch,” Dixie says as we set down our bags. “Maybe next time, I’ll go down with you. I know where some of the old shipwrecks are.”

“You don’t really see sharks in the bay.” Tron is back to that.

“All the time.” Dixie nods her head. “The bull sharks are the worst, aggressive as hell and can swim up rivers.”

“That’s not really true.” Tron laughs uneasily.

“It’s true,” Lucy answers as Dixie swings back down the hallway on her crutches.

“Shit.” Tron digs inside her backpack. “I’m one of those who saw Jaws and never got over it.”

“What’s to get over? Shark attacks really happen,” Lucy says. “I won’t swim in the ocean.”

“Yet you don’t mind diving,” Tron points out.

“Down there it’s a level playing field because I can see what I’m doing.”

“It’s not a level playing field,” I remind them. “We don’t live there.”

As they continue to discuss sharks and other things that can kill you while diving, Tron tosses me a pair of stretchy bike shorts. Not keen on stripping in front of others, I disappear into the stall. Sitting on the closed toilet lid, I take off everything except my sports bra.

The shorts fit like a second skin, and I stand up to shimmy into them. They have padding I could do without when I check myself in the mirror. I emerge from the stall to find Lucy and Tron dressed the same. But I sure as hell don’t look the way they do.

“You’re smokin’ hot.” Tron grins, sensing my insecurities. “Seriously.” Giving me a thumbs-up.

“You’d flunk the polygraph,” I reply as we pack up the clothes we had on earlier.