Read Online Port Mortuary by Patricia Cornwell - Free Book Online Page B

going back to day one. People who manipulate and lie and claim it is for a cause. The right cause, a godly or just cause. Noonie Pieste and Joanne Rule were smothered to death in bed, probably with a pillow. That’s why there was no tissue response to their injuries. The sexual assaults, the hacks with machetes and slashes with broken glass, and even the ligatures binding them when they were tied up in the chairs, all of it postmortem. A godly cause, a just cause, in the minds of those responsible. An unthinkable outrage, and they got away with it. To this day they did.
Don’t think about it. Focus on what is before you, not on the past.
    I open the left-front door and climb up on a skid, the wind gusting hard. Maneuvering myself around the collective and cyclic and into the left seat, I fasten my four-point harness as I hear Marino opening the door behind me. He is loud and big, and I feel the helicopter settle from his weight as he climbs into the back, where he always sits. Even when Lucy flies with only him as a passenger, he isn’t allowed up front where there are dual controls that he can nudge or bump or use as an armrest because he doesn’t think. He just doesn’t think.
    Lucy gets in and begins another preflight, and I help her by holding the checklist, and together we go through it. I’ve never had a desire to fly the various aircraft my niece has owned over the years, or to ride her motorcycles or drive her fast Italian cars, but I’m fine to copilot, am handy with maps and avionics. I know how to switch the radios to the necessary frequencies or enter squawks and other information into the transponder or Chelton Flight System. If there was an emergency, I probably could get the helicopter safely to the ground, but it wouldn’t be pretty.
    “… Overhead switches in the off position,” I continue going down the list.
    “Yes.”
    “Circuit breakers in.”
    “They are.” Lucy’s agile fingers touch everything she checks as we go down the plastic-laminated list.
    Momentarily, she flips on the boost pumps and rolls the throttle to flight idle.
    “Clear to the right.” As she looks out her side window.
    “Clear to the left.” As I look out at the dark ramp, at the small building with its lighted windows and a Piper Cub tied down a safe distance away in the shadows, its tarp shaking in the wind.
    Lucy pushes the start switch, and the main rotor blade begins to turn slowly, heavily, thudding faster like a heartbeat, and I think of the man. I think of his fear, of what I detected in those three words he exclaimed.
    “What the…? Hey… !”
    What did he feel? What did he see? The lower part of a black coat, the loose skirt of a black coat swishing past. Whose coat? A wool dress coat or a trench coat? It wasn’t fur. Who was wearing the long, black coat? Someone who didn’t stop to help him.
    “What the…? Hey… !” A startled cry of pain.
    I replay it in my mind again and again. The camera angle dropping suddenly, then fixing straight up at bare branches and gray sky, then the hem of the long, black coat moving past in the frame for an instant, maybe a second. Who would step around someone in distress as if he was an inanimate object, such as a rock or a log? What kind of human being would ignore someone who grabbed his chest and collapsed? The person who caused it, perhaps. Or someone who didn’t want to be involved for some reason. Like witnessing an accident or assault and speeding off so you don’t become part of the investigation. A man or a woman? Did I see shoes? No, just the hem or skirt of the coat flapping, and then another jostling sound and the picture was replaced by different bare trees showing through the underside of a green-painted bench. Did the person in the long, black coat kick the headphones under the bench there so they didn’t record something else that was done?
    I need to look at the video clips more closely, but I can’t do it now. The iPad is in back, and there