Autopsy (Kay Scarpetta, #25)(90)

“It’s a good day for flying but we won’t be able to talk much as busy as the airspace is around here,” she starts in for his benefit. “I mean, one false move?” She shakes her head, whistling under her breath. “Next thing, F-sixteens are coming after you.”

“You’re being funny, right?” It’s his first time flying in a restricted airspace.

“They’ll shoot you right out of the sky.”

“You’re a real comedian,” scowling as his face turns red.

“There’s nothing funny about it.” She eggs him on some more as two TSA agents approach with all seriousness.

They escort us into a private room to be searched, our carry-on bags rifled through. We’re scanned with a wand up one side and down the other, and all the while a man is watching. He looks familiar at first in a gray suit that hangs shapelessly on his slight frame, his gray hair and mustache shaggy.

“I’m Bob,” he introduces himself, and I realize he reminds me a bit of Captain Kangaroo. “I’ll be flying with you today.”

“Thanks for keeping everybody safe.” I say what I always do to the TSA.

“Looks like a good one for it.” He holds a tote bag that most likely has his gun in it.

We’re escorted to Lucy’s Bell 407 GXP, white with a blue stripe, and her copilot Clare is opening the back doors for us.

“If the winds don’t flip around, we’ll be there in no time,” she lets us know.

A little older than Lucy, she’s petite with short dark hair and smiling eyes. The two of them climb up front, Marino, Bob and I in back, and soon enough we’re swooping toward the Potomac River.

“Everybody all right back there?” Clare’s voice in our headsets. “Our ETA is thirty-five minutes.”

WE HAVE A FEROCIOUS tailwind, our airspeed a blistering 165 knots. We fly high and fast, hugging the river until we reach Quantico. Then we cut inland, following I-95 to Richmond.

I go hollow inside as I look out at a view I’ve not seen in five years. That’s the last time I was here, and since then the city has been ravaged by another civil war. The destruction is clearly visible as we chopper through the polished blue sky at an altitude of six hundred feet.

Some businesses have remained boarded up while others never reopened after they were vandalized, looted and burned down during protests and riots. That and the pandemic, and many places don’t exist anymore, including favorite haunts of mine, landmarks to my earlier life.

“It looks like a damn third-world country.” Marino’s voice through our headsets, and I can sense his mood as he sits next to me, staring out at the depressing view.

“You should have seen it earlier in the year,” Clare says, and we’ve flown with her before when she ferries Lucy’s bird wherever needed.

“A miracle nobody was killed,” says our TSA escort Bob, sitting in the leather seat across from me.

“It’s sure as heck not the city I used to know.” Marino stares down at East Broad Street where the damage is particularly bad. “I’m not sure I’d want to be a cop here anymore.”

Graffiti has been spray-painted everywhere, and I can’t read what it says from the air. But I don’t need to, the images have been all over the news, the usual hateful vulgarities about killing police, eating the rich. For a while, people went to bed hearing gunfire and Confederate flag–waving trucks in their once-civilized downtown neighborhoods.

The capital of the commonwealth is scarcely recognizable, especially its grandest thoroughfare, Monument Avenue. We can see the marble pedestals left from statues removed, some of them forcibly pulled down by angry crowds. Only the graffiti-shamed Robert E. Lee on his horse remains, his ousting tied up in litigation.

“Apparently, some good Samaritans go out before dawn every day to scrub off the obscenities,” Clare says over the intercom. “And then they just get spray-painted on again once night falls.”

“It will never end,” Marino says. “But you ask me, it’s stupid. You can’t erase history.”

“You also can’t rewrite it,” Lucy says from the right seat where she’s pilot in command, and I can see only the top of her head. “They shouldn’t have built the monuments to begin with. Last I checked, Jeb Stuart, Stonewall Jackson and those other dudes lost the war.”

“It would be like putting a statue of Bobby Riggs in front of the Astrodome instead of Billie Jean King,” Clare agrees. “The implication is you won when you didn’t.”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Bob confesses, downtown’s buildings all around us. “The thing is, where does it end when you start destroying monuments, statues, artwork and other things right and left? I hear they’re even going after Winston Churchill.”

“Christopher Columbus. Abraham Lincoln.” Marino is shaking his head, looking down on where we used to live.

“I can understand Columbus.” Clare again. “He was pretty brutal to the Native Americans.”

“Yeah, well, remember what they did to us at Jamestown,” Marino retorts, and he’ll never win awards for being politi cally correct. “Starving everybody to death, shooting arrows at them if they stepped foot out of the fort.”

“I’m beginning to think everybody’s awful to everybody,” I decide, and Lucy lets us know we need to stop chatting so she can deal with the radio.