“So much for being furloughed, right?” I commiserate the way I always do with boots on the ground, the officers assigned onerous tasks like guard duty. “Some of us always have to show up no matter what.”
“Tell me about it, I never catch a break. And I’ve got so much to do before the holidays. It would have been nice to have a few weeks off,” she says, her breath puffing out in the windy cold. “It sure would be a lot easier using the front gate like everybody else, Calli. I don’t know why you don’t listen,” and obviously, she’s had encounters with Carme parading as me. “But hey, maybe you like off-roading in the tundra.”
“We need to keep a close eye on the most vulnerable areas,” I remind her of our responsibility during a furlough while I get her off the subject of my allegedly driving in and out. “We have to worry about the data center, I don’t need to remind you. And other highly sensitive facilities more off the beaten path than I like under the circumstances.”
“Well, if anything can get through the roads back there, this thing can,” she gives my Tahoe a covetous once-over, and doesn’t know the half of it.
Obviously, whenever Carme has passed through in her own Chase Car, Celeste has assumed it was me driving mine. It makes me uncomfortable to think my sister is that adept at passing herself off as me, including with my colleagues, people I work with daily.
I suppose it should be reassuring considering our mission. But it doesn’t feel that way as I drive off. At least ART turns my truck’s displays back on without my asking this time, and the OCME live feed resumes with Joan getting up from her chair inside the receiving bay as the pedestrian door opens at the top of the concrete ramp that leads into the morgue.
An unfamiliar man steps out dressed in a cheap black suit and tie, someone young, nicely built with a prosthetic left eye.
“That damn showboat,” he says in a syrupy drawl. “God, I can’t stand Mason Dixon. Everything’s a conspiracy and somehow about him.”
“Huh! Sounds familiar,” Joan looks extremely unhappy as she smokes.
“Don’t start in again,” an ugly look on the man’s otherwise handsome face.
“Who’s shown up so far?” angrily tapping an ash, she seems about ready to kill him.
“The Daily Press and Virginian-Pilot, Channels 10 and 13, plus a couple radio stations are rolling up now that the accident has cleared. At least a dozen reporters, photographers, TV people. You’d think Elvis croaked,” a sneer in his voice echoing off the mammoth concrete space where the dead are delivered and carried away.
Meanwhile, I’m churning through the frozen wasteland area of the NASA campus, passing silvery barnlike maintenance sheds, and a posted sign reminding people to Buckle Up, that they’re in a controlled area. Except it doesn’t feel very controlled right now, drifted snow, ice littered with snapped-off trees and branches everywhere. The low sun seeps through the overcast on and off, my PEEPS changing tint as the light varies.
“. . . They want a statement from someone since the chief’s not available. I’m thinking it’s a good idea,” the man in the cheap suit leans against the open door, and behind him I get a good view of the intake area where bodies are signed in and out, weighed, measured and tagged.
In the back wall is the bulletproof-glass-enclosed morgue office, and walls of stainless steel cooler doors, their digital data displays and gauges lit up green. I see no sign of Wally the security guard, of autopsies or anything much going on. Probably everyone is upstairs, keeping a low profile in their offices while Neva causes her usual pandemonium.
“. . . I was thinking maybe you could say something. Don’t you think somebody should?” the man goes on and on, and when the security camera catches his prosthetic eye at certain angles, it’s as if a crash dummy has come alive.
I ask ART if he can use facial recognition, other data to get the skinny on this guy, who he is, where he’s from. Most of all, I want to know how long he’s worked with Joan. I’ve not run into him before, and I have a bad feeling he’s the latest in her unhealthy diet of self-obsessed boy toys.
15
“EASY DOES IT . . . ,” I tap-tap the brakes, gently slowing down at a particularly bad stretch of iced-over snow that’s not been sanded or plowed.
Joan stabs out the cigarette in a cat-litter-filled plastic bucket riddled with butts while I’m given info on the man she’s glaring at. Dylan Vince, 34, from the mountains of Lynchburg, Virginia, and that explains his thick accent.
Graduated from Tidewater Community College with a degree in mortuary science, he worked in various funeral homes before being hired by the OCME’s Norfolk office last month to replace the administrator who’d retired.
“It shouldn’t be up to me!” she exclaims to him.
“If you don’t want to do it yourself, write something up,” Dylan says. “I guess I could go out there and read it for you. But it would be better if you did,” he adds disingenuously, and what a piece of garbage.
“I’m not talking to anyone about Vera Young or anything else,” Joan’s not going to take his bull crap. “I’m not commenting and neither are you. Because that’s what you want. To get in front of the camera, you and your ego . . .”
I’m crunching past the deserted Composites & Model Development Lab, going slowly, ducking and dodging pockets of deep snow and slicks of ice. Hardly anyone has been back here since the nor’easter, and I’m not surprised. Like Celeste said, those authorized to access the NASA Langley campus during the shutdown use the main gate near the Badge and Pass Office.
Where I am on East Durand Street, nothing has been touched, and it’s beautiful and awful, trees thick with snow, ice sparkling like crystal.
“. . . May as well head over to the evidence bay to deal with our crispy critter,” Joan says with a loud sigh in the video feed playing inside my SUV.
“If it’s the car stolen from the coliseum, there may not have been anybody in it,” Dylan, her newbie administrator, replies. “I’m surprised you wouldn’t have thought of that by now with what’s all over the news,” insultingly from the top of the ramp. “Based on what I’m hearing, it probably was controlled remotely,” self-importantly as if he’s the investigator.