“Benton,” I said, “I’ll be right back.” The faint sound of conversation drifted toward me as I neared the edge of the woods, and I wondered, bizarrely, if my niece were talking to herself. Lucy was perched on top of a picnic table, and as I drew closer I was about to call her name when I saw she was speaking to someone seated below her on the bench. They were so close to each other their silhouettes were one, and I froze in the darkness of a tall, dense pine.
“That’s because you always do that,” Lucy was saying in a wounded tone I knew well.
“No, it’s because you always assume I’m doing that.” The woman’s voice was soothing.
“Well, then, don’t give me cause.”
“Lucy, can’t we get past this? Please.”
“Let me have one of those.”
“I wish you wouldn’t start.”
“I’m not starting. I just want a puff.”
I heard the spurt of a match striking, and a small flame penetrated the darkness. For an instant, my niece’s profile was illuminated as she leaned closer to her friend, whose face I could not see. The tip of the cigarette glowed as they passed it back and forth. I silently turned and walked away. Wesley resumed his long strides when I got back to him.
“Someone you know?” he asked.
“I thought it was,” I said.
We walked without speaking past empty ranges with rows of target frames and steel silhouettes eternally standing at attention. Beyond, a control tower rose over a building constructed completely of tires, where HRT, the Bureau’s Green Berets, practiced maneuvers with live ammunition. A white-and-blue Bell Jetranger waited on the nearby grass like a sleeping insect, its pilot standing outside with Marino.
“We all here?” the pilot asked as we approached.
“Yes. Thanks, Whit,” Wesley said.
Whit, a perfect specimen of male fitness in a black flight suit, opened the helicopter’s doors to help us board. We strapped ourselves in, Marino and I in back, Wesley up front, and put on headsets as blades began to turn, the jet engine warming. Minutes later, the dark earth was suddenly far beneath our feet as we rose above the horizon, air vents open and cabin lights off. Our transmitted voices blurted on and off in our ears as the helicopter sped south toward a tiny mountain town where another person was dead.
“He couldn’t have been home long,” Marino said.
“We know… ?”
“He wasn’t.” Wesley’s voice cut in from the copilot’s seat.
“He left Quantico right after the consultation. Flew out of National at one.”
“We know what time his plane got to Asheville?”
“Around four-thirty. He could have been back to his house by five.”
“In Black Mountain?”
“Right.”
I spoke. “Mote found him at six.”
“Jesus.” Marino turned to me.
“Ferguson must’ve started beating off the minute he hit” — The pilot cut in! “We got music if anybody wants it.”
“Sure.”
“What flavor?”
“Classical.”
“Shit, Benton.”
“You’re outvoted, Pete.”
“Ferguson hadn’t been home long. That much is clear no matter who or what’s to blame,” I resumed our jerky conversation as Berlioz began in the background.
“Looks like an accident. Like auto eroticism gone bad. But we don’t know.” Marino nudged me.
“Got any aspirins?”
I dug in my pocketbook in the dark, then got a mini Maglite out of my medical bag and rooted around some more. Marino muttered profanities when I motioned I could not help him, and I realized he was still in the sweatpants, hooded sweatshirt, and lace-up boots he had been wearing at Hogan’s Alley. He looked like a hard drinking coach for some bush-league team, and I could not resist shining the light over incriminating red paint stains on his upper back and left shoulder. Marino had gotten shot.
“Yeah, well, you ought to see the other guys,” his voice abruptly sounded in my ears.
“Yo, Benton. Got any aspirins?”
“Airsick?”
“Having too much fun for that,” said Marino, who hated to fly. The weather was in our favor as we chopped a path through the clear night at around a hundred and five knots. Cars below us glided like bright-eyed water bugs as the lights of civilization flickered like small fires in the trees. The vibrating darkness might have soothed me to sleep were my nerves not running hot. My mind would not stay still as images clashed and questions screamed.