The dark blue Impala was waiting at the hospital’s entrance when Benton and Scarpetta walked out into the night.
She recognized the fleece-lined leather jacket, then realized it was Marino who was wearing it. The trunk popped open, and he took the crime scene case from Benton and started talking about coffees he’d picked up for them, that the two coffees were in the backseat.
That was how he said hello after all this time, after all that had happened.
“I stopped at Starbucks,” he was saying, shutting the trunk. “Two Ventis,” which he didn’t pronounce correctly. “And some of those sweeteners in the yellow wrapper.”
He meant Splenda. He must have remembered that Scarpetta didn’t touch saccharin or aspartame.
“But no cream because it’s in those pitchers, so I couldn’t get it. I don’t think either of you drink it with cream, unless that’s changed. They’re in the console in back. Jaime Berger’s up front. You might not be able to see her, it’s so dark, so don’t start talking about her.”
Trying to be funny.
“Thank you,” Scarpetta said as she and Benton got into the car. “How are you?”
“I’m doing good.”
He slid behind the wheel, his seat back so far it was touching Scarpetta’s knees. Berger turned around and said hello, and she didn’t act as if the situation was unusual. That was better. It was easier.
Marino pulled away from the hospital, and Scarpetta looked at the back of his head, at the collar of the black leather bomber-style jacket. It was classic Hogan’s Heroes, as Lucy used to tease him, with its half-belt, sleeve zippers, and plenty of antique brass hardware. On and off over the twenty years Scarpetta had known him, he’d get too big to wear it, especially around the gut, or more recently, too bulked up from the gym and, in retrospect, probably steroids.
During the interim without Marino in her life, she’d had a lot of space to think about what had happened and what had led up to it. Insight came to her one day not that long ago, after she’d reconnected with her former deputy chief, Jack Fielding, and hired him. Fielding had practically ruined his life with steroids, and Marino had been witness to much of it, but as he had gotten more disgruntled and frightened about a growing sense of powerlessness that Scarpetta couldn’t seem to do anything about, he’d become obsessed with his own physical strength.
He’d always admired Fielding and his bodybuilding physique, all the while critical of the illicit and destructive means he used to obtain it. She was convinced Marino began taking steroids several years before the more recent sexual-performance drugs, which would help explain why he turned aggressive and, frankly, mean, long before his violent eruption in her carriage house last spring.
The sight of him pained her in ways she hadn’t anticipated and probably couldn’t explain, bringing back memories of the long span of their lives spent together when he’d let his graying hair grow long and would comb it over his baldness, Donald Trump-style, only Marino wasn’t the sort to believe in gels or hairspray. The slightest stir and long strands would drift below his ears. He’d started shaving his head and wearing a sinister-looking do-rag. Now he had fuzz shaped like a crescent moon, and he wasn’t wearing an earring and didn’t look like a hard-riding Outlaw or Hells Angel.
He looked like Marino, only in better shape but older, and on forced good behavior, as if he was taking the parole board on a drive.
He turned onto Third Avenue, toward Terri Bridges’s apartment, which was only a few minutes from the hospital.
Berger asked Scarpetta if she remembered Terri contacting her Charleston office last spring or early summer—or ever.
Scarpetta said no.
Berger fooled around with her BlackBerry and muttered something about Lucy’s opposition to paper, and then read an e-mail Terri had written to Berger last year, asking for assistance in contacting Scarpetta.
“July second,” Berger said. “That’s when she sent this e-mail to the Bermuda Triangle of New York City government’s general e-mail address, hoping it would get to me because she hadn’t been able to get to you. It appears she never got to either of us.”
“I’m not surprised, with a username like Lunasee,” Benton replied from the dark backseat while he looked out his window at the quiet neighborhood of Murray Hill, where so far Scarpetta had seen only one person out, a man walking a boxer.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the username was the Pope’s,” Berger replied. “But I didn’t get it. Question is, Kay, are you absolutely sure you don’t recall her calling your office in Charleston?”
“I’m absolutely sure I was never aware of it,” Scarpetta said. “But last spring and early summer my office was rather much of a Bermuda Triangle, too.”
She didn’t want to elaborate, not with Marino sitting directly in front of her. How was she supposed to talk about what it had been like for her after he disappeared without a word or a trace, and then Rose had gone into such a rapid decline that she no longer had the proud stubbornness to resist Scarpetta’s moving her and taking care of her, eventually spoon-feeding her, changing her gowns and sheets when she soiled the bed, and then the morphine and oxygen at the very end when Rose decided she’d suffered enough, and death was in her eyes?
How would Marino feel if he knew how angry Rose was with him for abandoning everyone in his life, especially her, when he knew she wasn’t long for this world? Rose had said it was wrong of him, and would Scarpetta please tell him that someday.
Rose had said, You tell him for me I’ll box his ears.
As if she’d been talking about a two-year-old.
You tell him for me I’m mad at Lucy, too, just mad as hell at both of them. I blame him for what she’s doing right now. Up there at Black-water or some training camp like that, shooting guns and kneeing huge men in the kidneys as if she’s Sylvester Stallone, because she’s too scared to be home.
Those last weeks Rose got disinhibited, her talk wild and loose, but nothing she said was utter nonsense.
You tell him when I’m on the Other Side it will only be easier for me to find him and take care of business. And I’m going to take care of it. You watch.
Scarpetta had set up a portable hospital bed, and had the French doors open so they could look at the garden and the birds, and hear the stirring of live oaks that had been there since before the Civil War. She and Rose would talk in that lovely old living room with its view, while the bracket clock on the mantel tick-tocked like a metronome measuring the final rhythm of their days together. Scarpetta never did go into detail about what Marino had done, but she did tell Rose something important about it, something she’d not told anyone.
She’d said, You know how people say if they could live something again?
You don’t hear me saying it,Rose had replied, propped up in bed, the morning light turning the sheets very white. Doesn’t do a damn bit of good to say something silly like that.
Well, I wouldn’t say it because I wouldn’t mean it, you’re exactly right. I wouldn’t live that night again if offered the chance, because it wouldn’t change anything. I can try to rewrite it all I want. Marino would still do what he did. The only way I could stop him would be to start the process years earlier, maybe a decade or two earlier. My culpability in his crime is I didn’t pay attention.
She’d done to him what he and Lucy had done to Rose in the end. Scarpetta hadn’t looked, had pretended not to notice, had absented herself by suddenly being busy and preoccupied or even in the midst of some crisis, instead of confronting him. She should have been more like Jaime Berger, who wouldn’t hesitate to tell some big cop with the appetites and insecurities that Marino had to stop looking down her blouse or up her skirt—to get over it because she wasn’t going to have sex with him. She wasn’t going to be his whore, his madonna, his wife, or his mother, or all of the above, and all of the above was what he’d really always wanted, what most men have always wanted because they don’t know any better.
She could have told Marino something to that effect when she’d first been appointed chief in Virginia and he’d gone out of his way to give her such a hard time, acting like a nasty little boy with a crush. She’d been so afraid of hurting him, because ultimately her biggest flaw was her overriding fear of hurting anyone, and so she’d hurt the hell out of him and herself and all of them.
What she’d finally admitted was she was selfish.
