‘That’s right, no one could prove it,’ I said. ‘And you can’t assume someone is an arsonist because of his name or his editorial policy.’
‘Well, it just so happens you’re talking to the expert in weird-ass names and how they fit the squirrels who have them.’ Marino poured more coffee as he smoked. ‘Gore the coroner. Slaughter the serial killer. Childs the pedophile. Mr Bury buried his victims in cemeteries. Then we got Judges Gallow and Frye. Plus Freddie Gamble. He was running numbers out of his restaurant when he got whacked. Dr Faggart murdered five homosexual males. Stabbed their eyes out. You remember Crisp?’ He looked at me. ‘Struck by lightning. Blew his clothes all over the church parking lot and magnetized his belt buckle.’
I could not listen to all this so early in the morning and reached behind me to grab a headset so I could drown Marino out and monitor what was being said in the cockpit.
‘I wouldn’t want to get struck by lightning at no church and have everybody read something into it,’ Marino went on.
He got more coffee, as if he did not have prostate and urinary troubles.
‘I’ve been keeping a list all these years. Never told no one. Not even you, Doc. You don’t write down shit like this, you forget.’ He sipped. ‘I think there’s a market for it. Maybe one of those little books you see up by the cash register.’
I put the headset on and watched rural farms and dormant fields slowly turn into houses with big barns and long drives that were paved. Cows and calves were black-spotted clusters in fenced-in grass, and a combine churned up dust as it slowly drove past fields scattered with hay.
I looked down as the landscape slowly transformed into the wealth of Warrenton, where crime was low and mansions on hundreds of acres of land had guest houses, tennis courts and pools, and very fine stables. We flew lower over private airstrips and lakes with ducks and geese. Marino was gawking.
Our pilots were silent for a while as they waited to be in range of the NRT on the ground. Then I caught Lucy’s voice as she changed frequencies and began transmitting.
‘Echo One, helicopter niner-one-niner Delta Alpha. Teun, you read me?’
‘That’s affirmative, niner Delta Alpha,’ T. N. McGovern, the team leader, came back.
‘We’re ten miles south, inbound-landing with passengers,’ Lucy said. ‘ETA about eight hundred hours.’
‘Roger. It feels like winter up here and not getting any warmer.’
Lucy switched over to the Manassas Automated Weather Observation Service, or AWOS, and I listened to a long mechanical rendition of wind, visibility, sky condition, temperature, dew point, and altimeter setting according to Sierra time, which was the most recent update of the day. I wasn’t thrilled to learn that the temperature had dropped five degrees Celsius since I had left home, and I imagined Benton on his way to warm sunshine and the water.
‘We got rain over there,’ Lucy’s copilot said into his mike.
‘It’s at least twenty miles west and the winds are west,’ Lucy replied. ‘So much for June.’
‘Looks like we got another Chinook coming this way, below horizon.’
‘Let’s remind ’em we’re out here,’ Lucy said, switching to a different frequency again. ‘Chinook over Warrenton, helicopter niner-one-niner Delta Alpha, you up this push? We’re at your three o’clock, two miles northbound, one thousand feet.’
‘We see you, Delta Alpha,’ answered the twin rotor Army helicopter named for an Indian tribe. ‘Have a good’n.’
My niece double-clicked the transmit switch. Her calm, low voice seemed unfamiliar to me as it radiated through space and bounced off the antennae of strangers. I continued to eavesdrop and, as soon as I could, butted in.
‘What’s this about wind and cold?’ I asked, staring at the back of Lucy’s head.
‘Twenty, gusting to twenty-five out of the west,’ she sounded in my headset. ‘And gonna get worse. You guys doing all right back there?’
‘We’re fine,’ I said as I thought of Carrie’s deranged letter again.
Lucy flew in blue ATF fatigues, a pair of Cébé sunglasses blacking out her eyes. She had grown her hair, and it gracefully curled to her shoulders and reminded me of red jarrah wood, polished and exotic, and nothing like my own short silver-blond strands. I imagined her light touch on the collective and cyclic as she worked anti-torque pedals to keep the helicopter in trim.