lay in the guest bed of her carriage house the morning after he’d hurt her, he’d started going through a list of possibilities, intermittently fighting off nausea while the worst headache of his life hammered his brain to pulp.
His first thought was to drive his truck or maybe his motorcycle off a bridge and drown himself. Then again, he might survive, and he was terrified of not being able to breathe. That meant smothering wasn’t a good choice, either, using a plastic bag, for example, and he couldn’t stomach the thought of hanging, of twisting and thrashing after kicking the chair out from under himself and then changing his mind. He’d briefly considered sitting in a bathtub and slashing his throat, but with the first spurt of blood from his carotid, he’d want to take it back and it would be too late.
As for carbon monoxide poisoning? It gave him too much time to think. Poison? Same thing, and it was painful, and if he chickened out and called 911, he’d end up with his stomach pumped and a complete loss of respect from all who knew about it. Jumping off a building? Never. His luck, he’d survive and be maimed beyond recognition. Last on the list was his nine-millimeter pistol. And Scarpetta had hidden it.
As he’d lain in her guest room bed trying to figure out where she might have tucked it out of sight, he decided he’d never find it, was too sick to find it, and he could always shoot himself later because he had a couple extra guns in his fishing shack, but it would have to be a precision shooting because the worst scenario of all was to end up in an iron lung.
When he’d eventually contacted Benton at McLean and confessed all this, Benton matter-of-factly informed him that if an iron lung was the only thing stopping him, he had no worries unless he tried to kill himself with polio. That was exactly what he’d said, adding that most likely, if he did a bad job shooting himself, he’d end up with brain damage that profoundly compromised him but left him vaguely aware of why he’d wanted to off himself in the first place.
What would be really shitty luck, Benton had said, was an irreversible coma that became a discussion among Supreme Court justices before someone got the go-ahead to pull the plug. While he’d said it wasn’t likely Marino would have any awareness that this was going on, no one knew for sure. You’d have to be the person who was brain-dead to know for sure, he’d said.
You mean I could hear people saying they were going to take me off that . . . ?Marino had asked.
Life support,Benton had said.
So it wouldn’t breathe for me anymore, and I might be aware of it but nobody knows I am?
You wouldn’t be able to breathe anymore. And it’s within the realm of possibility you might be aware that you were about to be taken off the respirator. Have the plug pulled, in other words.
Then I could literally watch the person walk to the wall and pull it out of the socket.
It’s possible.
And I’d instantly start smothering to death.
You wouldn’t be able to breathe. But hopefully loved ones would be there helping you through it, even though they wouldn’t know you were aware of them.
Which brought Marino right back to his fear of smothering, and the grim reminder that the only loved ones he had were the very people he’d just fucked over, most of all, her, Scarpetta. It was at this point in a motel room near the Boston Bowl Family Fun Center where he and Benton had been having this discussion that Marino decided not to kill himself but to take the longest vacation he’d ever had in his life, at the treatment center on Massachusetts’s North Shore.
If he showed improvement once the alcohol and the male-performance-enhancement drugs had been completely flushed out of his system, and if he stuck with therapy and was sincere about it, then the next step would be finding him a job. So here he was, about half a year later, in New York, working for Berger and hiding in a parking lot just to catch a glimpse of Scarpetta before she got into his car and they drove to a crime scene, business as usual.
He watched her move silently, eerily in bright green, her gestures familiar as she talked, every detail vivid but so far removed from him, he felt as if he were a ghost. He could see her but she couldn’t see him, and her life had gone on without him, and knowing her as well as he did, he was sure that by now she had gotten over what he’d done to her. What she wouldn’t have gotten over was his disappearing the way he did. Or maybe he was giving himself too much importance, he decided. It could very well be that she never thought about him anymore, and when she saw him, it wouldn’t matter. She wouldn’t feel anything, would scarcely remember the past.
So much had happened since. She’d gotten married. She’d left Charleston. She was the chief of a big office just outside Boston. She and Benton actually lived together like a couple, for the first time, in a beautiful old house in Belmont that Marino had driven past at night once or twice. Now they had a place in New York, too, and sometimes he walked along the Hudson several blocks west of Central Park and stared at their building, counting the floors until he was pretty sure he knew exactly which apartment was theirs, and he imagined what it must look like inside and the beautiful view they must have of the river, and of the city at night. She was on television all the time, was really famous, but whenever he tried to envision people asking her for her autograph, he drew a blank. That part he didn’t get. She wasn’t the type to like that sort of attention, or at least he hoped she wasn’t, because if she was, she had changed.
He watched her through the powerful night-vision scope that Lucy had given to him for his birthday two years ago, and was lonely for the sound of Scarpetta’s voice. He recognized her mood by the way she moved, shifting her position, slightly gesturing her dark-gloved hands. She was understated. People said that about her all the time, that she said and did less, rather than more, and because of it made her point more loudly, so to speak. She wasn’t histrionic. That was another word Marino had heard. In fact, he remembered, Berger had said it when describing how Scarpetta conducted herself on the witness stand. She didn’t need to raise her voice or flail away but could just sit there calmly and shoot straight with the jurors, and they trusted her, believed her.
Through the scope, Marino noticed her long coat and the shape of her neatly styled blond hair, a little longer than she used to wear it, a little bit over her collar and brushed straight back from her forehead. He could make out her familiar strong features, so hard to compare to anyone he could think of, because she was pretty and she wasn’t, her face too sharply defined to be of beauty-pageant quality or to fit in with the sticklike women in designer clothes who cruised the runways of fashion shows.
He thought he might throw up again, just like he had that morning in her carriage house. His heart began to pound as if it were trying to hurt itself.
He longed for her but as he hid in his rust-smelling, filthy shadowy space, he realized he didn’t love her the way he once did. He had driven the stake of self-destruction into the part of him where hope had always hidden, and it was dead. He no longer hoped she would fall in love with him someday. She was married, and hope was dead. Even if Benton was out of the picture, hope was dead. Marino had killed hope and killed it savagely, and he had never done anything like that in his life, and he had done it to her.
On his most disgusting, drunken dates, he had never forced himself on a woman.
If he kissed her and she didn’t want his tongue in her mouth, he withdrew. If she pushed his hands away, he didn’t touch her again uninvited. If he had a hard-on and she wasn’t interested, he never pushed himself against her or shoved her hand between his legs. If she noticed his soldier wouldn’t settle down, he’d make his same old jokes. He’s just saluting you, baby. He always stands up when there’s a lady in the room. Hey, babe, just ’cause I got a stick shift don’t mean you gotta drive my car.
Marino might be a crude, poorly educated man, but he wasn’t a sex offender. He wasn’t a bad human being. But how was Scarpetta supposed to know? He didn’t fix it the morning after, didn’t make even a feeble attempt at it when she appeared in the guest bedroom with dry toast and coffee. What did he do? He faked amnesia. He complained about the bourbon she kept in her bar, as if it was her fault for having something in her house that could cause such a wicked hangover and a blackout.
He acknowledged nothing. Shame and panic had made him mute because he wasn’t exactly sure what he’d done, and he wasn’t going to ask. Better if he figured it out on his own, and over weeks and months of investigating his own crime, he finally fit the pieces together. He couldn’t have gone but so far, because when he awakened the next morning, he was fully dressed, and the only body fluid detectable was his cold, stinking sweat.
With clarity, he remembered only fragments: pushing her against the wall, hearing the ripping of fabric, feeling the softness of her skin, her voice saying he was hurting her, and she knew he didn’t want that. He clearly remembered she didn’t move, and now he understood it and wondered how her instincts could have been so right. He was completely out of control, and she was smart enough not to incite him further by fighting. He remembered
