Patricia Cornwell - Book of the Dead

Who was called? Not him. Not Lucious, even after he radioed the dispatcher and said he was in the area, and she came back and told him in her snippy, terse tone that she hadn’t called him and what unit was he? He said he wasn’t a unit and she told him in so many words to stay off the cop channels and, for that matter, off the air. He snaps the rubber band until it stings like a whip. He bumps over pavers, past the iron gate behind the lady doctor’s carriage garden, and spots a white Cadillac blocking his way. It’s dark back here. He snaps the rubber band and swears. He recognizes the oval bumper sticker on the Cadillac’s rear bumper.

HH for Hilton Head.

He’ll just leave his damn hearse right here. Nobody drives through this damn alley anyway, and he has a mind to call in the Cadillac and laugh while the police give the driver a ticket. He gleefully thinks about You Tube and the trouble he’s about to cause. That damn investigator is in that damn bitch’s pants. He saw them walk into the house, sneaking and cheating. He has a girl, that sexy thing he was with in the morgue, and Lucious saw them carrying on when they weren’t paying attention. From what he hears, Dr. Scarpetta has a man up north. Isn’t that something. Lucious makes a fool of himself, promoting his business, telling the rude investigator that he — Lucious Meddick — would appreciate referrals from him and his boss, and their response? To disrespect him. To discriminate. Now they have to pay.

He turns off the engine and the lights and gets out as he glares at the Cadillac. He opens the back of the hearse and an empty stretcher is clamped to the floor, a stack of neatly folded white sheets and white body pouches on top of it. He finds the camcorder, and extra batteries in a utility box he keeps in back, and shuts the tailgate and stares at the Cadillac, walks past it, considering the best way to get close to her house.

Someone moves behind the glass of the driver’s door, just the faintest hint of something dark inside the dark car, shifting. Lucious is happy as he turns on the camcorder to see how much memory is left, and the darkness inside the Cadillac shifts again, and Lucious walks around the back of it and films the license plate.

Probably some couple making out, and he gets excited thinking about it. Then he’s offended. They saw his headlights and didn’t get out of the way. Disrespect. They saw him park his hearse in the dark because he couldn’t get past, and they couldn’t have been more inconsiderate. They’ll be sorry. He raps his knuckles against the glass, about to scare them but good.

“I got your plate number.” He raises his voice. “And I’m calling the damn police.”

The burning log crackles. An English bracket clock on the mantle tick-tocks .

“What’s really going on with you?” Scarpetta says, watching him. “What’s wrong?”

“You’re the one who asked me here. So I assume something’s wrong with you.”

“Something’s wrong with us. How about that? You seem miserable. You’re making me miserable. This past week has been out of control. Do you want to tell me what you’ve done and why?” she says. “Or do you want me to tell you?”

The fire crackles.

“Please, Marino. Talk to me.”

He stares at the fire. For a while, neither of them talk.

“I know about the e-mails,” she says. “But then, you probably already know that, since you asked Lucy to check out the alleged false alarm the other night.”

“So you have her snoop around my computer. So much for trust.”

“Oh, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to say anything about trust.”

“I’ll say what I want.”

“The tour you gave your girlfriend. All of it was caught on camera. I’ve seen it. Every minute of it.”

Marino’s face twitches. Of course he knew the cameras and microphones were there, but she can tell it didn’t occur to him that he and Shandy were being watched. Certainly, he would have known their every action and word was being captured, but most likely he assumed that Lucy would have no reason to review the recordings. He was right about that. She wouldn’t have had a reason. He was confident he would get away with it, and that makes what he did even worse.

“There are cameras everywhere,” she says. “Did you really think no one would find out what you did?”

He doesn’t answer.

“I thought you cared. I thought you cared about that murdered little boy. Yet you unzipped his pouch and played show-and-tell with your girlfriend. How could you do such a thing?”

He won’t look at her or respond.

“Marino. How could you do such a thing?” she asks him again.

“It was her idea. The tape should have showed you that,” he says.

“A tour without my permission is bad enough. But how could you let her look at bodies? Especially his.”

“You saw the tape from when Lucy was spying on me.” He glowers at her. “Shandy wouldn’t take no for an answer. She wouldn’t get out of the cooler. I tried.”

“There’s no excuse.”

“Spying. I’m sick of it.”

“Betrayal and disrespect. I’m sick of it,” Scarpetta says.

“I’ve been thinking of quitting anyway,” he goes on in a nasty tone. “If you stuck your nose in my e-mails from Dr. Self, you ought to know I got better opportunities than hanging out here with you for the rest of my life.”

“Quit? Or are you hoping I’ll fire you? Because that’s what you deserve after what you did. We don’t give tours of the morgue and make a spectacle of the poor people who end up there.”

“Jesus, I hate the way women overreact to everything. Get so damn emotional and irrational. Go ahead. Fire me,” he says thickly, over-enunciating, the way people do when they try too hard to sound sober.

“This is exactly what Dr. Self wants to happen.”

“You’re just jealous because she’s a hell of a lot more important than you.”

“This isn’t the Pete Marino I know.”

“You ain’t the Dr. Scarpetta I know. Did you read what else she said about you?”

“She said quite a lot about me.”

“The lie you live. Why don’t you finally admit to it? Maybe that’s where Lucy got it. From you.”

“My sexual preference? Is that what you’re so desperate to know?”

“You’re afraid to admit it.”

“If what Dr. Self implied were true, I certainly wouldn’t be afraid of it. It’s people like her, people like you, who seem to be afraid of it.”

He leans back in his chair, and for an instant, he seems near tears. Then his face turns hard again as he stares at the fire.

“What you did yesterday,” she says, “isn’t the Marino I’ve known all these years.”

“Maybe it is and you just never wanted to see it.”

“I know it isn’t. What’s happened to you?”

“I don’t know how I got here,” he says. “I look back on it and see this guy who did good as a boxer for a while, but I didn’t want to have mush for a brain. Got sick of being a uniform cop in New York. Married Doris, who got sick of me, had a sicko son who’s dead, and I’m still chasing sicko assholes. I’m not sure why. Never have been able to figure out why you do what you do, either. You probably won’t tell me.” Sullenly.

“Maybe because I grew up in a house where nobody talked to me in a way that conveyed anything I needed to hear or made me feel understood or important. Maybe because I watched my father die. Every day, that’s all any of us watched. Maybe I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to understand the thing that defeated me as a child. Death. I don’t think there are simple or even logical reasons for why we’re who we are and do what we do.” She looks over at him, but he doesn’t look at her. “Maybe there’s no simple or even logical answer that explains your behavior. But I wish there were.”