I press pause and get out of the van, and it is cold and very windy as I walk quickly into the terminal. It is small, with restrooms and a sitting area, and an old television is turned on. For a moment I watch Fox News and fast-forward the video on the iPad while Lucy leans against the front desk and pays the landing fee with a credit card. I continue to stare at images of bare branches showing between the slats of green-painted wood, certain now that the headphones ended up under a bench, the camera fixed straight up as the XM radio plays…. “Dark lady laughed and danced… ” The music is louder because the headphones aren’t pressed against the man’s head, and it seems absurdly incongruous to be listening to Cher.
Voices off camera are urgent and excited, and I hear the sounds of feet and the distant wail of a siren as my niece chats with an older man, a retired fighter pilot now working at Dover part-time as a fixed base operator, he is happy to tell her.
“… 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?”