Free Port Mortuary by Patricia Cornwell

isn’t time. The blades rapidly beat the air, and the generator is online. Lucy and I put our headsets on. She flips more overhead switches, the avionics master, the flight and navigation instruments. I turn the intercom switch to “crew only” so Marino can’t hear us and we can’t hear him while Lucy talks to the air traffic controller. The strobes, the pulse and night scanner landing lights, blaze on the tarmac, painting it white as we wait for the tower to clear us for takeoff. Entering destinations in the touch-screen GPS and in the moving map display and the Chelton, I correct the altimeters. I make sure the digital fuel indicator matches the fuel gauge, doing most things at least twice, because Lucy believes in redundancy.
    The tower releases us, and we hover-taxi to the runway and climb on course to the northeast, crossing the Delaware River at eleven hundred feet. The water is dark and ruffled by the wind, like molten metal flowing thickly. The lights of land flicker through trees like small fires.

4

    W e change our heading, veering toward Philadelphia, because the visibility deteriorates closer to the coast. I flip the intercom switch so we can check on Marino.
    “You all right back there?” I’m calmer now, too preoccupied with the long, black coat and the man’s startled exclamation to be angry with Marino.
    “Be quicker to cut through New Jersey,” his voice sounds, and he knows where we are, because there is an in-flight map on a video screen inside the rear passenger compartment.
    “Fog and freezing rain, IFR conditions in Atlantic City. And it isn’t quicker,” Lucy replies. “We’ll be on ‘crew only’ most of the time so I can deal with flight following.”
    Marino is cut out of our conversation again as we are handed off from one tower to the next. The Washington sectional map is open in my lap, and I enter a new GPS destination of Oxford, Connecticut, for an eventual fuel stop, and we monitor weather on the radar, watching blocks of solid green and yellow encroach upon us from the Atlantic. We can outrun, duck, and dodge the storms, Lucy says, as long as we stay inland and the wind continues to favor us, increasing our ground speed to what at this moment is an impressive one hundred and fifty-two knots.
    “How are you doing?” I keep up my scan for cell towers and other aircraft.
    “Better when we get where we’re going. I’m sure we’ll be fine and can outrun this mess.” She points at what’s on the weather radar display. “But if there’s a shadow of a doubt, we’ll set down.”
    She wouldn’t have come to pick me up if she thought we might have to spend the night in a field somewhere. I’m not worried. Maybe I don’t have enough left in me to worry about yet one more thing.
    “How about in general? How are you doing?” I say into the mike, touching my lip. “You’ve been on my mind a lot these past few weeks.” I try to draw her out.
    “I know how hard it is to keep up with people under the circumstances,” she says. “Every time we think you’re coming back, something changes, so we’ve all quit thinking it.”
    Three times now the completion of my fellowship was delayed by one urgent matter or another. Two helicopters shot down in one day in Iraq with twenty-three killed. The mass murder at Fort Hood, and most recently, the earthquake in Haiti. Armed forces MEs got deployed or none could be spared, and Briggs wouldn’t release me from my training program. A few hours ago, he attempted to delay my departure again, suggesting I stay in Dover. As if he doesn’t want me to go home.
    “I figured we’d get to Dover and find out you had another week, two weeks, a month,” Lucy adds. “But you’re done.”
    “Apparently, they’re sick of me.”
    “Let’s hope you don’t get home only to turn around and go back.”
    “I passed my boards. I’m done. I’ve got an office to run.”
    “Someone needs to run it. That’s for sure.”
    I don’t want to hear