Free Trail of Blood by Lisa Black Page B

a young mother and her baby son. The air show shut down for the next fifteen years.
    Today, the usual commercial and air taxi services at Burke Lakefront Airport are suspended every Labor Day weekend as citizens pack the bleachers to watch pilots, wing walkers, and parachutists defy the law of gravity. Nearly all of them would remain unaware of this year’s tragedy, but then, this death had nothing to do with airplanes.
    When Clevelanders say “lakefront airport,” they mean it. Walk north one hundred and some feet from the runway and your shoes will get wet. The edge is built up with piled rock to keep the grassy buffer from washing away, though the Port Authority officers patrolling this Labor Day were not concerned about natural predators. Only human ones. Cleveland did not have a large number of possible terrorist targets (much to the relief of its citizenry), but the air show, with its large military presence, had to qualify.
    And so the Port Authority officer had been policing the perimeter on foot when he discovered the girl’s body. Or rather, part of it. He stared at it for a long time, that completely obvious yet somehow indecipherable object. Then the officer took out his radio, called his supervisor, and said a silent prayer of thanks that the piled stones sloped downward to the water and therefore the body or part of a body lay just below the line of sight from the bleachers. There were a hundred thousand spectators on the south side of the tarmac. At least half of them carried binoculars.
    Theresa had attended the show in exactly two of her (almost) forty years. She wondered if this visit counted as number three, though they didn’t enter the show, only skirted around it down a small access road between the runways and the water.
    A marked patrol vehicle led the way, without activating his lights or sirens—the air show organizers wanted only scripted drama for the customers. Theresa did not feel discretion to be the better part of valor while on such an active tarmac and tried to look in all directions at once as she drove. Did someone tell the pilots that they were coming? Around her were biplanes, fighter jets, and one massive thing that had to be some kind of military transport. What if one landed on her?
    The patrol car ahead pulled off the road and parked on the patchy lawn next to the seawall.
    Noise assaulted her ears as she stepped from the car. A deafening, thorough noise that invaded the head and then bounced around inside, crowding out the smell of gasoline and dead fish and the excited hum of the spectators. Theresa forgot all about the dead body she had come to see, forgot about getting her camera or crime scene kit, nearly forgot her own name, just stared at the sharp-edged jet suspended in space between her and the bleachers. The people in those seats appeared as oscillating pixels of color through the light-bending waves of heat put out by its engines.
    Frank appeared at her elbow. “Come on.”
    “What
is
that thing?”
    “Harrier. It hovers. Come on.”
    He helped by carrying the toolbox with the large plastic markers numbered one through thirty. She would use them to photograph small pieces of evidence within the scene. She also took her camera case, her sketching kit, and a plastic crate stuffed with paper bags, evidence stickers, and measuring tape. That covered the necessary equipment for most of her duties, though if there had been a shooting she would have had to get the laser trajectory kit and maybe the metal detector to find spent casings. If there had been a sexual assault, she’d have needed the battery-operated alternate light source, so that the semen would glow in the ultraviolet light. If the body had been buried, she’d have had to get the shovels and the sieves to sift the dirt. This was why Frank had driven Theresa back to her office, to pick up the battered county station wagon with all her equipment. At least they had gotten rid of the persistent Mr.