Book of the Dead (57 page)

Chapter 22

    
Lucy goes through her pre-start checklist.

    
Landing lights, Nr switch, OEI limit, fuel valves. She checks the flight instrument indications, sets the altimeter, turns on the battery. She starts the first engine as Scarpetta emerges from the FBO and walks across the tarmac. She slides open the helicopter’s back door and sets her crime scene case and camera equipment on the floor, then opens the left front door. She steps up on the skid and climbs in.

    
Engine one locked into ground idle position, and Lucy fires up engine number two. The whining turbines and thud-thudding get louder, and Scarpetta buckles herself into the four-point harness. A linesman trots across the ramp, waving his marshaling wands, and Scarpetta puts her headset on.

    
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Lucy says into her mike. “Hey!” As if the linesman can hear her. “We don’t need your help. He’s gonna be standing there for a while.” Lucy opens her door, tries to motion for him to go away. “We’re not a plane.” She says more things he can’t hear. “Don’t need your help to take off. Go on now.”

    
“You’re awfully tense.” Scarpetta’s voice sounds inside Lucy’s headset. “Any word from other people searching?”

    
“Nothing. No helicopter up in the Hilton Head area yet, still too foggy there. No luck with the search on the ground. FLIR on standby.” Lucy turns on the overhead power switch. “Need about eight minutes for it to cool. Then we’re on the go. Hey!” As if the linesman has on a headset, too, and can hear her. “Go away. We’re busy. Damn, he must be new.”

    
The linesman stands there, orange wands down by his side, not marshaling anyone anywhere. The tower tells Lucy, “You got the heavy C-seventeen on downwind….”

    
The military cargo jet is a cluster of big, bright lights and barely seems to move, hangs hugely in the air, and Lucy radios back that she’s got it. The “heavy C-seventeen” and its “heavy wingtip vortices” aren’t a factor because she wants to head toward downtown, toward the Cooper River bridge. Referring to the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge. Toward whatever she wants. Doing figure-eights if she wants. Barely above the water or the ground if she wants. Because she isn’t a plane. That’s not how she explains it in radio talk, but it’s what she means.

    
“I called Turkington,” she then says to Scarpetta. “Filled him in. Benton called me, so I guess you talked to him and he’s filled you in. He should be here any minute, or he’d better be. I’m not sitting here forever. We know who the asshole is.”

    
“We just don’t know where he is,” Scarpetta says. “I’m supposing we still have no idea where Marino is.”

    
“If you want my opinion, we should be looking for the Sandman, not a dead body.”

    
“Within the hour, everybody will be looking for him. Benton’s notified the police, local and military. Somebody’s got to look for her. That’s my job, and I intend to do it. Did you bring the cargo net? And have we heard any word from Marino? Anything at all?”

    
“I’ve got the cargo net.”

    
“The usual gear’s in baggage?”

    
Benton is walking toward the linesman. He hands him a tip and Lucy laughs.

    
“I suppose every time I ask about Marino, you’re going to ignore me,” Scarpetta says, as Benton gets closer.

    
“Maybe you should be truthful with the person you’re supposed to marry.” Lucy watches Benton.

    
“What makes you think I haven’t been?”

    
“I wouldn’t know what you’ve done.”

    
“Benton and I have talked,” Scarpetta says, looking at her. “And you’re right, I should be truthful, and I have been.”

    
Benton slides open the back door and gets in.

    
“Good. Because the more you trust someone, the more criminal it is to lie. Including by omission,” Lucy says.

    
The clunking and scraping sounds of Benton putting his headset on.

    
“I have to get over this,” Lucy says.

    
“I should be the one who needs to get over it,” Scarpetta says. “And we can’t talk about this now.”

    
“What is it we can’t talk about?” Benton’s voice in Lucy’s headset.

    
“Aunt Kay’s clairvoyance,” Lucy says. “She’s convinced she knows where the body is. Just in case, I’ve got the gear and chemicals for decon. And body bags in case we need to slingload. Sorry to be insensitive, but no way a decomp’s riding in the back.”

    
“Not clairvoyance. Just gunshot residue,” Scarpetta says. “And he wants her found.”

    
“Then he should have made it easier,” Lucy says, rolling up the throttles.

    
“What about the gunshot residue?” Benton asks.

    
“I have an idea. If you ask what sand around here might have traces of GSR.”

    
“Jesus,” Lucy says. “The guy’s going to blow away. Look at him. Just standing there with his cones like a zombie referee for the NFL. I’m glad you tipped him, Benton. Poor guy. He’s trying.”

    
“Yes, a tip. Only not a hundred-dollar bill,” Scarpetta says, as Lucy waits to get on the radio.

    
Air traffic is almost impossible, because flights have been delayed all day, and now the tower can’t keep up.

    
“When I went off to UVA, what did you do?” Lucy says to Scarpetta. “Sent me a hundred bucks now and then. For no reason. That’s what you always wrote at the bottom of the check.”

    
“It wasn’t much to do.” Scarpetta’s voice goes straight into Lucy’s head.

    
“Books. Food. Clothes. Computer stuff.”

    
Voice-activated mikes, and people talk truncated talk.

    
“Well,” Scarpetta’s voice says. “It was nice of you. That’s a lot of money for someone like Ed.”

    
“Maybe I was bribing him.” Lucy leans closer to Scarpetta to check the FLIR’s video display. “Ready and waiting,” she says. “We’re out of here as soon as you’ll let us,” as if the tower can hear her. “We’re a damn helicopter, for Christ’s sake. Don’t need the damn runway. And we don’t need to be vectored. Makes me crazy.”

    
“Maybe you’re too cranky to fly.” Benton’s voice.

    
Lucy contacts the tower again, and at last is cleared to take off to the southeast.

    
“Going while the going’s good,” she says, and the helicopter gets light on its skids. The linesman is marshaling as if he’s going to park them. “Maybe he should get a job as a traffic cone,” Lucy says, lifting her three-and-a-quarter-ton bird into a hover. “We’ll follow the Ashley River a little ways, then turn east, track along the shoreline toward Folly Beach.” She hovers at the intersection of two taxiways. “Un-stowing the FLIR.”

    
She switches from standby to on, and the display turns dark gray, splotched with bright white hot spots. The C-17 does a thunderous touch-and-go, long plumes of white fire blasting from its engines. Lighted window of the FBO. The lights on the runways. All of it surreal in infrared.

    
“Low and slow, and we’ll scan everything along the way. Work in a grid?” Lucy says.

    
Scarpetta lifts the System Control Unit out of its holder, slaves the FLIR with the searchlight, which she keeps turned off. Gray images and ones hot-white displayed on the video monitor near her left knee. They fly past the port, its different-colored containers stacked like building blocks. Cranes are perched like monster praying mantises against the night, and the helicopter moves slowly over the lights of the city, as if it’s floating over them. Ahead, the harbor is black. No stars are out, the moon a charcoal smudge behind thick clouds that are flat on top like anvils.

    
“Where exactly are we headed?” Benton says.

    
Scarpetta works the FLIR’s trim button, moving images in and out of the screen. Lucy slows to eighty knots and holds the altitude down at five hundred feet.

    
Scarpetta says, “Imagine what you’d find if you did a microscopic analysis of sand from Iwo Jima. As long as the sand’s been protected all these years.”

    
“Away from the surf,” Lucy says. “In dunes, for example.”

    
“Iwo Jima?” Benton’s voice says, ironically. “We flying to Japan?”

    
Off Scarpetta’s door are the mansions of the Battery, their lights bright white smudges in infrared. She thinks about Henry Hollings. She thinks about Rose. The lights of habitation become spaced farther apart as they near the shore of James Island and slowly fly past it.

    
Scarpetta says, “A beach environment that’s remained untouched since the Civil War. In a place like that, if the sand’s protected, you’re likely to find gunshot residue. I believe this is it.” To Lucy, “Almost below us.”

    
She slows to a near hover and descends to three hundred feet at the northernmost tip of Morris Island. It is uninhabited and accessible only by helicopter or boat unless the tide is so low one can wade from Folly Beach. She looks down at eight hundred acres of desolate conservation land that during the Civil War was the scene of heavy fighting.

    
“Probably not much different than it was a hundred and forty years ago,” Scarpetta says, as Lucy descends another hundred feet.

    
“Where the African-American regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, was slaughtered,” Benton’s voice says. “That movie they made about it, what was it called?”

    
“You look out your side,” Lucy says to him. “Tell us if you see anything, and we’ll swoop around with the searchlight.”

    
“It was called Glory,” Scarpetta says. “Not the searchlight quite yet,” she adds. “It will interfere with infrared.”

    
The video screen displays mottled gray terrain and a rippled area that is the water, and the water glints like molten lead, flowing to the shore, breaking on the sand in scalloped white ruffles.

    
“I’m not seeing anything down here but the dark shapes of dunes and that damn lighthouse following us everywhere,” Scarpetta says.

    
“Be nice if they’d restore the beacon so people like us don’t crash into it,” Lucy says.

    
“Now I feel better.” Benton’s voice.

    
“I’m going to start working a grid. Sixty knots, two hundred feet, every inch of what’s down there,” Lucy says.

    
They don’t have to work the grid very long.

    
“Can you hover over there?” Scarpetta points to what Lucy just saw, too. “Whatever we just went past. That beach area. No, no, back that way. Distinct thermal variation.”

    
Lucy noses the helicopter around, and the lighthouse beyond her door is stubby and striped in infrared, and surrounded by the heaving, leaden water in the outer reaches of the harbor. Beyond, a cruise ship looks like a ghost ship with white-fire windows and a long plume from its stack.

    
“There. Twenty degrees to the left of that dune,” Scarpetta says. “I think I see something.”

    
“I see it,” Lucy says.

    
The image is white-hot on the screen in the midst of murky, mottled grayness. Lucy looks down, trying to position herself just right. She circles, going lower.

    
Scarpetta zooms in, and the shimmering white shape becomes a body, unearthly bright – as bright as a star – at the edge of a tidal creek that glints like glass.

    
Lucy stows the FLIR and flips a switch to turn on a searchlight as bright as ten million candles. Sea oats flatten to the ground and sand swirls as they land.

    
A black necktie fluttering in the wind of slowing blades.