She had taken to flying like everything else she had ever tried. She had gotten her private and commercial ratings in the minimum required hours and next got her certificated flight instructor rating simply because it gave her joy to pass on her gifts to others.
I needed no announcement that we were reaching the end of our flight as we skimmed over woods littered with felled trees scattered haphazardly like Lincoln Logs. Dirt trails and lanes wound narrowly, and on the other side of gentle hills, gray clouds got vertical as they turned into vague columns of tired smoke left by an inferno that had killed. Kenneth Sparkes’s farm was a shocking black pit, a scorched earth of smoldering carnage.
The fire had left its trail as it had slaughtered, and from the air I followed the devastation of splendid stone dwellings and stables and barn to wide charred swaths that had denuded the grounds. Fire trucks had rolled over sections of the white fence surrounding the property and had churned up acres of manicured grass. Miles in the distance were more pasture land and a narrow paved public road, then a Virginia Power substation, and farther off, more homes.
We invaded Sparkes’s privileged Virginia farm at not quite eight A.M., landing far enough away from ruins that our rotor wash did not disturb them. Marino climbed out and went on without me as I waited for our pilots to brake the main rotor and turn off all switches.
‘Thanks for the lift,’ I said to Special Agent Jim Mowery, who had helped Lucy fly this day.
‘She did the driving.’
He popped open the baggage door.
‘I’ll tie her down if you guys want to go on,’ he added to my niece.
‘Seems like you’re getting the hang of that thing,’ I lightly teased Lucy as we walked away.
‘I limp along the best I can,’ she said. ‘Here, let me get one of those bags.’
She relieved me of my aluminum case, which did not seem to weigh much in her firm hand. We walked together, dressed alike, although I did not wear gun or portable radio. Our steel-reinforced boots were so battered they were peeling and almost gray. Black mud sucked at our soles as we drew closer to the gray inflatable tent that would be our command post for the next few days. Parked next to it was the big white Pierce supertruck with Department of the Treasury seals and emergency lights, and ATF and EXPLOSIVES INVESTIGATION announced in vivid blue.
Lucy was a step ahead of me, her face shadowed by a dark blue cap. She had been transferred to Philadelphia, and would be moving from D.C. soon, and the thought made me feel old and used up. She was grown. She was as accomplished as I had been at her age, and I did not want her moving farther away. But I had not told her.
‘This one’s pretty bad.’ She initiated the conversation. ‘At least the basement is ground level, but there’s only one door. So most of the water’s in a pool down there. We got a truck on the way with pumps.’
‘How deep?’
I thought of thousands of gallons of water from fire hoses and imagined a cold black soup thick with dangerous debris.
‘Depends on where you’re stepping. If I were you, I wouldn’t have taken this call,’ she said in a way that made me feel unwanted.
‘Yes, you would have,’ I said, hurt.
Lucy had made little effort to hide her feelings about working cases with me. She wasn’t rude, but often acted as if she barely knew me when she was with her colleagues. I remembered earlier years when I would visit her at UVA and she did not want students to see us together. I knew she was not ashamed of me but perceived me as an overwhelming shadow that I had worked very hard not to cast over her life.
‘Have you finished packing?’ I asked her with an ease that was not true.
‘Please don’t remind me,’ she said.
‘But you still want to go.’
‘Of course. It’s a great opportunity.’
‘Yes, it is, and I am so pleased for you,’ I said. ‘How’s Janet? I know this must be hard . . .’