Autopsy (Kay Scarpetta, #25)(91)

“Richmond tower.” She gets on the air, announcing her tail number and how far we are from the airport. “Requesting the Alpha Corridor, inbound for HeloAir,” she says.

We can’t hear the tower’s reply but she continues her calls, wending around the pristine Capitol grounds, and it’s a beautiful morning. The temperature is mild, the sun out, and Virginia is always green even in the winter. There are multiple cranes, a lot of construction going on, but the skyline is pretty much the same as it was when I was getting started here.

It’s not much more than a modest cluster of high-rises, and the tallest among them is the twenty-nine-story James Monroe Building. I know it very well. In days of old, I had many trips to the health commissioner’s suite of offices, and I didn’t get along with him all that well, either. But he was a prince compared to Elvin Reddy.

I imagine him looking out from his lofty perch. I wonder if he might see us flying by as Lucy does a loop around his building. Then she does another, keeping the tower informed, indicating that we’re filming. I suppose we are. At least Marino is taking video with his phone.

“I thought it only polite to buzz him,” my niece explains, and I can see workers looking out the windows.

If Elvin is in his office, he hears us for sure as Lucy holds the chopper in a high hover long enough to make her point. All he has to do is Google her tail number, and he’ll know it’s us. But I don’t care. What’s done is done, and I’m resigned to a fate that likely was set into motion long before I returned to Virginia. As Marino likes to say, payback’s a bitch.

Or to quote my father, revenge is best served cold, and what Elvin has masterminded couldn’t be colder. We curve toward the river past the gothic redbrick Main Street Station, its tower announcing the time of almost nine. Across from it is a parking deck where my headquarters used to be.

I remember watching as it was demolished. And how that felt. Empty. A sense of disbelief. Even though the old morgue was a horror. The new central district office is near the coliseum, in the heart of Virginia Commonwealth University, which has taken over most of downtown. What never changes is the James River, winding and sparkling deep blue in the sun, its unnavigable rock-choked waters a metaphor for the city’s proud stubbornness.

Richmond didn’t used to be all that welcoming to outsiders like me, and I’m reminded that feeling like a misfit and a nuisance is nothing new. When I moved here from Miami as the first woman chief, the person I replaced was of the same cloth as Elvin Reddy. I was called in to clean up some other person’s mess, and when I did it was suggested I quit.

Now here we go again, and there will always be those in charge who hire me to find out the truth as long as it’s the truth they want. I’ve about had enough of it. I’m trying hard to keep a lid on rage fueled by old setups and slights, and I can’t promise I’m going to be on my best behavior today.

“Remember to stay seated until we shut down,” Clare lets us know as we fly lower and slower over Williamsburg Road.

The blue and white air traffic control tower is in sight, and then we’re settling into a hover taxi, and effortlessly landing on a wooden dolly, the touchdown as light as a feather. While our pilots run through their laminated shutdown checklist, I let Benton know we’re down and secure.

I unfasten my shoulder harness, and I shouldn’t have worn the simple white cotton blouse I decided on. Already it’s wrinkled, and I feel frumpy in the same suit I had on at the White House yesterday. The rotor blades are braked, the battery shut off, and the doors open front and back.





CHAPTER 36


STEPPING DOWN ON ONE of the helicopter’s skids, I notice the courtesy vehicle parked nearby, a pickup truck that’s neither small nor green.

“I assume this is for us?” I ask Clare.

“Yes, ma’am,” she says, and I tell her, Lucy and Bob that I probably won’t be very long.

I don’t elaborate on the reason, expecting the health commissioner to spend just enough time to threaten or outright fire me, and that’s fine.

“I’ll be waiting right here,” Lucy says, and I’ve not seen her this engaged and confident in recent memory.

“I couldn’t even feel the landing.” I resist the impulse to hug her in front of a crowd. “You haven’t lost your touch.”

“I’ll say she hasn’t. I didn’t have my hands on the controls even once,” Clare brags about her, and she’s one of the few people my niece talks to as far as I know.

At least Lucy confides in someone who’s not an avatar, I can’t help but think as I climb into the passenger seat of our borrowed gas guzzler. Marino slides behind the wheel while I check my phone, and Benton has texted me back. He has an update I read as other messages land, two of them from DNA analyst Clark Givens. I try Benton first.

“Hi,” I say when he answers. “We just landed, are driving away from the airport.”

“You might want Marino to hear what I’m about to tell you.”

“That sounds ominous,” I reply. “You’re now on speakerphone. What’s going on?”

“I don’t guess you’ve talked to your DNA lab.”

“I have messages from Clark to call him,” I reply as we take I-64 West, heading downtown.

“Apparently, he got started at oh-dark-hundred on the blanket, the clothing Officer Fruge brought in,” Benton says. “And it’s looking like I’m headed to Boston.”