“… In ‘Nam. So that would have been, what, an F-Four?” Lucy chats with him.
“Oh, yeah, and the Tomcat. That was the last one I flew. But Phantoms were still around, you know, as late as the eighties. You build them right and they last like you wouldn’t believe. Look how long the C-Five’s been around. And still some Phantoms in Israel, I think. Maybe Iran. Nowadays those left in the US, we use them for unmanned targets, as drones. One hell of an aircraft. You ever seen one?”
“In Belle Chasse, Louisiana, at the Naval Air Station. Took my helicopter down there to help with Katrina.”
“They’ve been experimenting with hurricane-busting, using Phantoms to fly into the eye.” He nods.
The screen on the iPad goes black. The headphones weren’t recording anymore, and I’m convinced that when the man fell to the ground they must have ended up some distance away under a bench. The motion sensor wasn’t detecting enough activity to prevent it from dozing, and that’s curious to me. How exactly did his headphones get knocked off and end up where they did? Maybe someone kicked them out of the way. It could have been accidental if that’s what happened, perhaps by a person trying to help him, or it could have been deliberate by a person who was covertly recording him, stalking him. I think of the hem of the black coat flapping by, and I fast-forward intermittently, looking for the next images, listening for sounds, but nothing until four-thirty-seven p.m., when the woods and the darkening sky swing wildly, and bare hands loom large and paper crackles as the headphones are placed inside a brown bag, and I hear a voice say, “… Colts all the way.” And another voice says, “Saints are gonna take it. They got…” Then murky darkness and muffled voices, and nothing.
Finding the TV remote on the arm of a couch inside the terminal, I switch the channel to CNN and listen to the news and watch the crawl, but not a word about the man on the video clips. I need to ask about Sock again. Where is the dog? It’s not acceptable that no one seems to know. I fix on Marino as he enters the sitting area, pretending not to see me because he is sulking, or maybe he regrets what he’s done and is embarrassed. I refuse to ask him anything, and it feels as if the missing dog is somehow his fault, as if everything is Marino’s fault. I don’t want to forgive him for e-mailing the video clips to Briggs, for talking to him first. If I don’t forgive Marino for once, maybe he’ll learn a lesson for once, but the problem is I’m never quite able to convince myself of any case I make against him, against anyone I care about. Catholic guilt. I don’t know what it is, but already I am softening toward him, my resolve getting weaker. I feel it happening as I search channels on the television, looking for news that might damage the CFC, and he walks over to Lucy, keeping his back to me. I don’t want to fight with him. I don’t want to hurt his feelings.
I walk away from the TV, convinced at least for the moment that the media doesn’t know about the body waiting for me in my Cambridge morgue. Something as sensational as that would be a headline, I reason. Messages would be landing nonstop on my iPhone. Briggs would have heard about it and said something. Even Fielding would have alerted me. Except I’ve heard nothing from Fielding about anything at all, and I try to call him again. He doesn’t answer his cell phone, and he’s not in his office. Of course not. He never works this late, for God’s sake. I try him at his home in Concord and get voicemail again.
“Jack? It’s Kay,” I leave another message. “We’re about to take off from Dover. Maybe you can text or e-mail me an update. Investigator Law hasn’t called back, I assume? We’re still waiting for photographs, and have you heard anything about a missing dog, a greyhound? The victim’s dog, named Sock, last seen in Norton’s Woods.” My voice has an edge. Fielding is ducking me, and it’s not the first time. He’s a master at disappearing acts, and he should be. He’s staged enough of them. “Well, I’ll try you again when we land. I assume you’ll meet us at the office, probably sometime between nine-thirty and ten. I’ve sent messages to Anne and Ollie, and maybe you can make sure they are there. We need to take care of this tonight. Maybe you could check with Cambridge PD about the dog? He might have a microchip….”
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.
