Clare and Russ backed away. Above them, the rotors began to circle slowly, then faster and faster, until the hard- edged chop of the blades challenged the turbines’ whine. Clare stopped in front of the nose of the ambulance. The hair fallen from her knot danced in the updraft, strands the color of honey, caramel, and maple syrup. Russ was caught by the look on her face.
“You miss this, don’t you?” he yelled over the noise. She shrugged, never taking her eyes from the helicopter. He could feel the vibrations through the soles of his shoes. Looking inside the cockpit, he saw the outline of the pilot, dimmed and warped behind the reflective smoke-colored Plexiglas. The beat of the rotors increased to a sound he still heard sometimes in nightmares. And then the skids left the ground, bumped, rose, hovering half a foot off the parking lot, and the chopper was away, its fat insect body rising smoothly and improbably into the darkness over Glens Falls.
They both looked up into the sky. A freshening wind sprang up, and from the mountains Russ could hear a distant rumble. “Is it safe for them to fly with a storm coming on?” he asked her.
“Mmm. They’re headed south, in front of the leading edge. They’ll stay ahead of it with no problem.” Another gust sent a scrap of paper skittering across the asphalt. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”
“I hate helicopters,” he said.
She looked at him with surprise. Over her shoulder, there was a tapping from the ambulance windshield and the driver leaned out of his window. “Would you folks mind stepping out of the way? I’ve got to get back to the hospital. My shift’s just starting.”
Russ and Clare retreated to their parked cars. Russ waved as the ambulance pulled away.
“You hate helicopters, the machines, or you hate riding in them?” Clare asked, crossing her arms over her wilted black blouse.
“I don’t know. Both, I guess. I had a bad experience in one.” His brain caught up with his eyeballs. “Shit! I wanted to talk to the doctor! ’Scuse my French.”
“I was listening while he spoke with Paul. I think I got the gist of things. Dr. Dvorak has a lot of fractured ribs, a fractured skull, internal bleeding…. It sounds like someone kicked the crap out of him.” She glanced up at him. “Excuse my French. What happened to him? Why on earth would anyone try to murder the county’s pathologist?”
He shook his head. “That may be it right there. He’s been our medical examiner for ten years now. I don’t think he was ever involved in a capital case, but I’m sure he’s had a hand in sending lots of men to Comstock. Maybe he gave evidence against someone’s brother or buddy. Maybe someone he put away has been released without managing to rehabilitate himself into a model citizen.”
Clare glowered at him. “Don’t start in with that. If we made more services available to support prisoners—” She huffed and waved her hands. “Never mind. That scenario seems a little far-fetched. I mean, suppose you were this guy, just released and slavering for vengeance?”
“ ‘Slavering’?”
She ignored him. “Would you go after the medical examiner who gave some of the evidence first? Or would you go after the prosecuting attorney, or the arresting officers, or even your own attorney first?”
“Well, you know how I feel about lawyers. I’d definitely go for them first.” She whacked his arm. “No, I know. Point well taken. There’s another possibility. His car was in an accident, not bad enough to cause his injuries, but enough to give everyone involved a good smack. Maybe the other driver went ballistic. Cut loose on him.”
“Road rage run amok?”
“It happens.”
She worried her lower lip. “Could it have been personal? Someone he knew?”
He nodded. “In most assaults and homicides, the victim and the perpetrator know each other. That’s why I asked Paul about where Emil had been.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t know. There are too many possibilities right now. I don’t like that. The only thing we know for sure is that the vehicle he hit was red. We got some paint scraping on his left-front fender.”
“We know he wasn’t robbed.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“One of the nurses gave Paul Dr. Dvorak’s belongings—clothes and stuff. He had a very expensive watch and a wallet full of credit cards. Untouched.”
“I almost wish he had been robbed. We’re going to have some good prints off Emil’s car, but they’re not going to do us any good if whoever did this hasn’t been arrested before.” Thunder rumbled, closer and louder than before. He glanced up. Heavy clouds had moved in, their under-bellies reflecting a faint sodium glow from the lights of Glens Falls. “Time to go. You can follow me back to Millers Kill if you need to.”
She reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out her keys. “I need to.” He watched her get into that ridiculous mosquito of a car. Another impractical sports car, and a convertible to boot. He shook his head. She had slipped, slid, and stuck in her old MG last winter, finally wrecking the thing trying to drive through a snowstorm on Tenant’s Mountain. He had assumed that would have taught her to buy a sensible four-wheel-drive vehicle. He had assumed wrong.
As he climbed into his cruiser, it struck him that he didn’t feel like a hormonal teenager anymore. He felt… pleasant. Friendly. He had enjoyed Clare’s company without making an idiot of himself. He reached for the mike to let dispatch know his destination. He was going to work out this friendship thing after all.
Chapter Four
Thursday morning, Clare woke early with the sound of helicopter rotors in her mind. She ran through the tree-lined streets of her neighborhood as the sun was rising, looping east to return along Route 117, parallel to Riverside Park and the abandoned nineteenth-century mills. A short run on Thursdays, so she could shower and be ready for the 7:00A.M. weekday service of Morning Prayer. It was one of her favorites: cheerful and intimate, with the same five or six faces showing up regularly. Since Memorial Day weekend a month back, the size of her Sunday-morning congregation had dropped like a stone through water. She was lucky if she saw thirty faces at the ten o’clock Eucharist. But she could rely on her Morning Prayer people, and no matter how much turmoil she brought with her, she always found her center in the orderly succession of prayers, psalms, and canticles.
Today, though, she was seized by the thought of Paul and Dr. Dvorak as she and her tiny congregation read the Second Song of Isaiah, the Quaerite Dominum. “ ‘Let the wicked forsake their ways and the evil ones their
