Point of Origin (3 page)

'I was wondering where you were.' I raised my voice above rotors chopping as I latched my door.

'Airport,' Pete Marino answered as I sat next to him. 'It's closer.'

'No, it's not,' I said.

'At least they got coffee and a john there,' he said, and I knew he did not mean them in that order. 'I guess Benton headed out on vacation without you,' he added for the effect.

Lucy was rolling the throttle to full power, and the blades were going faster.

'I can tell you right now I got one of those feelings,' he let me know in his grumpy tone as the helicopter got light and began to lift. 'We're headed for big trouble.'

Marino's specialty was investigating death, although he was completely unnerved by possibilities of his own. He did not like being airborne, especially in something that did not have flight attendants or wings. The Richmond Times Dispatch was a mess in his lap, and he refused to look down at fast retreating earth and the distant city skyline slowly rising from the horizon like someone tall standing up.

The front page of the paper prominently displayed a story about the fire, including a distant AP aerial photograph of ruins smoldering in the dark. I read closely but learned nothing new, for mostly the coverage was a rehash of Kenneth Sparkes's alleged death, and his power and wealthy lifestyle in Warrenton. I had not known of his horses before or that one named Wind had sailed in last one year at the Kentucky Derby and was worth a million dollars. But I was not surprised. Sparkes had always been enterprising, his ego as enormous as his pride. I set the newspaper on the opposite seat and noted that Marino's seat belt was unbuckled and collecting dust from the floor.

'What happens if we hit severe turbulence when you're not belted in?' I talked loudly above the turbine engine.

'So I spill my coffee.' He adjusted the pistol on his hip, his khaki suit a sausage skin about to split. 'In case you ain't figured it out after all those bodies you've cut up, if this bird goes down, Doc, a seat belt ain't gonna save you. Not airbags either, if we had them.'

In truth, he hated anything around his girth and had come to wear his pants so low I marveled that his hips could keep them up. Paper crackled as he dug two Hardee's biscuits out of a bag stained gray with grease. Cigarettes bunched in his shirt pocket, and his face had its typical hypertensive flush. When I had moved to Virginia from my native city of Miami, he was a homicide detective as obnoxious as he was gifted. I remembered our early encounters in the morgue when he had referred to me as Mrs Scarpetta as he bullied my staff and helped himself to any evidence he pleased. He had taken bullets before I could label them, to infuriate me. He had smoked cigarettes with bloody gloves and made jokes about bodies that had once been living human beings.

I looked out my window at clouds skating across the sky and thought of time going by. Marino was almost fifty-five, and I could not believe it. We had defended and irritated each other almost daily for more than eleven years.

'Want one?' He held up a cold biscuit wrapped in waxy paper.

'I don't even want to look at it,' I said ungraciously.

Pete Marino knew how much his rotten health habits worried me and was simply trying to get my attention. He carefully stirred more sugar in the plastic cup of coffee he was floating up and down with the turbulence, using his meaty arm for suspension.

'What about coffee?' he asked me. 'I'm pouring.'

'No thanks. How about an update?' I got to the point as my tension mounted. 'Do we know anything more than we did last night?'

'The fire's still smoldering in places. Mostly in the stables,' he said. 'A lot more horses than we thought. Must be twenty cooked out there, including thoroughbreds, quarter horses, and two foals with racehorse pedigrees. And of course you know about the one that ran the Derby. Talk about the insurance money alone. A so-called witness said you could hear them screaming like humans.'

'What witness?' It was the first I'd heard of it.

'Oh, all kinds of drones have been calling in, saying they saw this and know that. Same old shit that always happens when a case gets a lot of attention. And it don't take an eyewitness to know the horses would have been screaming and trying to kick down their stalls.' His tone turned to flint. 'We're gonna get the son of a bitch who did this. Let's see how he likes it when it's his ass burning.'

'We don't know that there is a son of a bitch, at least not for a fact,' I reminded him. 'No one has said it's arson yet, although I certainly am assuming you and I haven't been invited along for the ride.'

He turned his attention out a window.

'I hate it when it's animals.' He spilled coffee on his knee. 'Shit.' He glared at me as if I were somehow to blame. 'Animals and kids. The thought makes me sick.'

He did not seem to care about the famous man who may have died in the fire, but I knew Marino well enough to understand that he targeted his feelings where he could tolerate them. He did not hate human beings half as much as he led others to believe, and as I envisioned what he had just described, I saw thoroughbreds and foals with terror in their eyes.

I could not bear to imagine screams, or battering hooves splintering wood. Flames had flowed like rivers of lava over the Warrenton farm with its mansion, stables, reserve aged whiskey, and collection of guns. Fire had spared nothing but hollow walls of stone.

I looked past Marino into the cockpit, where Lucy talked into the radio, making comments to her ATF copilot as they nodded at a Chinook helicopter below horizon and a plane so distant it was a sliver of glass. The sun lit up our journey by degrees, and it was difficult to concentrate as I watched my niece and felt wounded again.

She had quit the FBI because it had made certain she would. She had left the artificial intelligence computer system she had created and robots she had programmed and the helicopters she had learned to fly for her beloved Bureau. Lucy had walked off from her heart and was no longer within my reach. I did not want to talk to her about Carrie.

I silently leaned back in my seat and began reviewing paperwork on the Warrenton case. Long ago I had learned how to focus my attention to a very sharp point, no matter what I thought and in spite of my mood. I felt Marino staring again as he touched the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, making sure he was not without his vice. The chopping and flapping of blades was loud as he slid open his window and tapped his pack of cigarettes to shake one loose.

'Don't,' I said, turning a page. 'Don't even think about it.'

'I don't see a No Smoking sign,' he said, stuffing a Marlboro into his mouth.

'You never do, no matter how many of them are posted.' I reviewed more of my notes, puzzling again over one particular statement the fire marshal had made to me over the phone yesterday.

'Arson for profit?' I commented, glancing up. 'Implicating the owner, Kenneth Sparkes, who may have accidentally been overcome by the fire he started? Based on what?'

'Is his the name of an arsonist or what?' Marino said. 'Gotta be guilty.' He inhaled deeply and with lust. 'And if that's the case, he got what he deserves. You know, you can take them off the street but can't take the street out of them.'

'Sparkes was not raised on the street,' I said. 'And by the way, he was a Rhodes scholar.'

'Road scholar and street sound like the same damn thing to me,' Marino went on. 'I remember when all the son of a bitch did was criticize the police through his newspaper chain. Everybody knew he was doing cocaine and women. But we couldn't prove it because nobody would come forward to help us out.'

'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 Cebe 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.

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.