Lucy calculated the best approach to her dolly, the small wooden platform on wheels parked too close to other aircraft, the tow bar pointed the wrong way. Best plan was a high hover altitude between the wingtips of the Learjet and the King Air at ten o’clock. They’d handle her rotorwash better than the little guys. Then directly over her dolly, a steeper angle of descent than she liked, and she’d have to land with a twenty-eight-knot wind gusting up the tail, assuming the air traffic controller ever got back to her. That much wind blowing up her ass and she had to worry about settling with power, setting down ugly and hard, and exhaust fumes were going to back up into the cabin. Berger would complain about the fumes, get one of her headaches, wouldn’t want to fly with Lucy again anytime soon. One more thing they wouldn’t do together.
“This is deliberate,” Lucy said over the intercom, her arms and legs tense, hands and feet firm on the controls, working the helicopter hard so it basically did nothing but hold its position some thirty feet above ground level. “I’m getting his name and number.”
“Tower has nothing to do with where dollies are parked.” Berger’s voice in Lucy’s headset.
“You heard him.” Lucy’s attention was outside the windscreen. She scanned the dark shapes of aircraft, a thick herd of them, noticing tie-down ropes anchored in the pavement, loosely coiled, frayed ends fluttering in her twenty-million-candlepower NightSun spotlight. “Told me to take the Echo Route. Exactly what I did, sure as hell didn’t disregard his instructions. He’s jerking me around.”
“Tower’s got bigger things to worry about than where dollies are parked.”
“He can do what he wants.”
“Let it go. Not worth it.” The rich timbre of Berger’s firm voice like fine hardwood. Rain-forest ironwood, mahogany, teak. Beautiful but unyielding, bruising.
“Whenever he’s on duty, it’s something. It’s personal.” Lucy hovered, looking out, careful not to drift.
“Doesn’t matter. Let it go.” Berger the lawyer.
Lucy felt unfairly accused, of what she wasn’t sure. She felt controlled and judged and wasn’t sure why. The same way her aunt made her feel. The way everybody made her feel. Even when Scarpetta said she wasn’t being controlling or judgmental, she had always made Lucy feel controlled and judged. Scarpetta and Berger weren’t separated by many years, almost the same age, of an entirely different generation, a full layer of civilization between Lucy and them. She hadn’t thought it was a problem, had believed quite the opposite. At last she’d found someone who commanded her respect, someone powerful and accomplished and never boring.
Jaime Berger was compelling, with short, dark brown hair and beautiful features, a genetic thoroughbred who had taken good care of herself and was stunning, really, and wickedly smart. Lucy loved the way Berger looked and moved and expressed herself, loved the way she dressed, her suits or soft corduroys and denim, her politically incorrect fucking fur coat. Lucy still found it hard to believe she’d finally gotten what she’d always wanted, always imagined. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t close to perfect, and she didn’t understand what had happened. They’d been together not quite a year. The last few weeks had been horrid.
Pressing the transmit button on the cyclic, she said over the radio, “Helicopter niner-lima-foxtrot still holding.”
After a long pause, the officious voice came back, “Helicopter calling, you were stepped on. Repeat request.”
“Helicopter niner-lima-foxtrot still holding,” Lucy repeated curtly, and releasing the transmit button, she said to Berger over the intercom, “I wasn’t stepped on. You hear any other traffic right this second?”
Berger didn’t answer, and Lucy didn’t look at her, didn’t look anywhere except out the windscreen. One good thing about flying, she didn’t have to look at someone if she was angry or hurt. No good deed goes unpunished. How many times had Marino said that to her, only he used the word favor, not deed. No favor goes unpunished, what he’d been saying since she was a kid and on his nerves something awful. Right about now it felt as if he was her only friend. Unbelievable. It wasn’t long ago she wanted to put a bullet in his head just like she’d done to his piece-of-shit son, a fugitive, an Interpol Red Notice, wanted for murder, sitting in a chair, room 511, the Radisson in Szczecin, Poland. Sometimes out of nowhere Rocco Junior was in her mind, sweating and shaking and bug-eyed, dirty food trays everywhere, the air foul from him soiling himself. Begging. And when that didn’t work, bribing. After all he’d done to innocent people, pleading for a second chance, for mercy, or trying to buy his way out.
No good deed goes unpunished, and Lucy hadn’t done a good deed, wasn’t about to, because had she been charitable and let Rocco live, he would have killed his cop father, a hit, payback. Peter Rocco Marino Junior had changed his name to Caggiano, he hated his own father that much, and little Rocco the bad seed had orders, had a precise cold-blooded plan to take out his old man Marino while he was on his yearly fishing trip, minding his own business in his cabin at Buggs Lake. Make it look like a home invasion gone bad. Well, think again, little Rocco. When Lucy walked out of that hotel, her ears ringing from the gunshot, all she felt was relief-well, not exactly all. It was something she and Marino didn’t talk about. She’d killed his son, a judicious execution that looked like a suicide, black ops, her job, the right thing. But still, it was Marino’s son, his only offspring, the last branch on his family tree as far as she knew.
The controller got back to her. “Niner-lima-foxtrot standby.”
Fucking loser. Lucy imagined him sitting inside the dark control room, smirking as he looked down on her from the top of his tower.
“Niner-lima-foxtrot,” she acknowledged, then to Berger, “Same thing he did last time. Messing with me.”
“Don’t get worked up.”
“I should get his phone number. I’m going to find out who the fuck he is.”
“You’re getting worked up.”
“They better not have lost my car or fucked with it.”
“Tower has nothing to do with parking.”
“Hope you’ve got clout with state troopers; I’m going to speed,” Lucy said. “We can’t be late.”
“This was a bad idea. We should have done it another time.”
“Another time wouldn’t have been your birthday,” Lucy said.
She wasn’t going to allow herself to feel the sting, not when she was pulling in almost ninety percent torque, a crosswind slamming her tail boom, trying to swing it around while she held it steady with the pedals, making tiny corrections with the cyclic and collective. Berger was admitting it, telling the truth: She hadn’t wanted to go to Vermont for her birthday. Not that Lucy needed to be told, good Christ. Alone in front of the fire, looking out at the lights of Stowe, looking out at the snow, and Berger may as well have been in Mexico, she was so distant, so preoccupied. As the head of the New York County DA ’s Sex Crimes Unit, she supervised what always turned out to be the most heinous cases in the five boroughs, and it was assumed within hours of Hannah Starr’s disappearance that she was the victim of foul play, possibly a sex crime. After three weeks of digging, Berger had a very different theory-thanks to Lucy and her forensic computer skills. Lucy’s reward? Berger could think of little else. Then the jogger had to die. A surprise getaway Lucy had planned for months, fucked. Another good deed punished.