Patricia Cornwell - Blow Fly

"Sure. What the fuck." Marino shrugs, stung.

For a big, tough cop, he is overly sensitive and takes the world personally. His capacity for interpreting an honest remark as an insult wearies those who know him and terrifies those who don't. Marino has a temper from hell, and his fury knows no bounds when he is sufficiently pissed off. The only reason he hasn't been killed during one of his outbursts is that his physical strength and survival skills are mixed with a strong dose of experience and luck. Even so, chance is never favorable forever. As Benton takes in every detail of Marino's appearance, he entertains the same worries from the past. He's going to be dropped by a bullet or a stroke one of these days.

"I sure as hell can't call you Tom" Marino counters. "Not to your face."

"Be my guest. I'm used to it."

Marino's jaw muscles flex as he smokes.

"You taking care of yourself better or worse since I saw you last?" Ben-ton stares down at his relaxed hands between his knees. His fingers slowly toy with a splinter he picks off the picnic table. "Although I think the answer is obvious," he adds with a slight smile.

Sweat rolls down Marino's balding head. He shifts his position, conscious of the 40-caliber Glock pistol strapped under his huge left arm and his desire to snatch off his bowling team windbreaker. Beneath it he is soaking wet, his heart beating hard, the dark-blue nylon absorbing sunlight like a sponge. He exhales a cloud of smoke, hopes it doesn't drift in Benton's direction. It does. Right in his face.

"Thanks."

"Don't mention it. I can't call you Tom."

Marino ogles a young woman in spandex shorts and sports bra trotting by, breasts bobbing. He can't get used to females running around in bras, and for a veteran homicide detective who has seen hundreds of naked women in his day-most of them in strip joints or on top of autopsy tables-he is surprisingly awed when he sees a female so scantily clad in public that he knows exactly what she looks like naked, right down to the size of her nipples.

"My daughter ran around like that, I'd kill her," he mutters, staring at the retreating pumping buttocks.

"The world is grateful you don't have a daughter, Pete," Benton remarks.

"No shit. Especially if she got my looks. Probably would've ended up some dyke professional wrestler."

I don't know about that. Rumor has it, you used to be quite the hunk."

Benton has seen photographs of Marino when he was a uniformed cop for NYPD in the long-ago days of his fledgling career. He was broad-shouldered and fine-looking, a real stud, before he let himself go to hell, unrelenting in his self-abuse, as if he hates his own flesh, as if he wants to kill it off and get it out of his way.

Benton climbs down from the picnic table. He and Marino start walking toward the footbridge.

"Oops." Marino smiles slyly. "Forgot you was gay. Guess I should be more sensitive about queers and dyke wrestlers, huh? But you try to hold my hand, I'll tear your head off."

Marino has always been homophobic, but never as uncomfortable and confused as he is at this stage in his life. His conviction that gay men are perverts and that lesbians can be cured by sex with men has evolved from clear as air to dark as ink. He can see neither in nor out of what he believes about people who lust for their own gender, and his cynical, ugly comments have the flat ring of a bell cast in lead. Not much is plain to him anymore. Not much seems unquestionably true. At least when he was devoutly bigoted, he didn't have to question. In the beginning, he lived by the gospel according to Marino. Over recent years, he has become an agnostic, a compass with no magnetic north. His convictions wobble all over the place.

"So what's it feel like to have people think you're… you know?" Marino asks. "Hope nobody's tried to beat you up or nothing."

"I feel nothing about what people think of me," Benton says under his breath, conscious of people passing them on the footbridge, of cars speeding below them on Storrow Drive, as if any person within a hundred feet of them might be watching and listening. "When's the last time you went fishing?"

MARINO'S DEMEANOR SOURS as they follow a cobblestone walk in the shade of double rows of Japanese cherry trees, maples and blue spruce.

During his most venomous moods, usually late at night when he is alone and throwing back beers or shots of bourbon, he resents Benton Wesley, almost despises him for how much he has damaged the lives of everyone who matters. If Benton really were dead, it would be easier. Marino tells himself he would have gotten over it by now. But how does he recover from a loss that didn't happen and live with its secrets?

So when Marino is alone and drunk and has worked himself into a rabid state, he swears out loud at Benton while crushing one beer can after another and hurling them across his small, slovenly living room.

"Look what you've done to her!" he rails to the walls. "Look what you've done to her, you fucking son of a bitch!"

Dr. Kay Scarpetta is an apparition between Marino and Benton as they walk. She is one of the most brilliant and remarkable women Marino has ever met, and Benton's torture and murder ripped off her skin. She stumbles over Benton's dead body everywhere she goes, and all along-from day one-Marino has known that Benton's gruesome homicide was faked right down to the autopsy and lab reports, death certificate and the ashes Scarpetta scattered into the wind at Hilton Head Island, a seaside resort she and Benton loved.

The ashes and bits of bone were scraped from the bottom of a crematorium oven in Philadelphia. Leftovers. God knows whose. Marino presented them to Scarpetta in a cheap little urn given to him at the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office, and all he could think to say was, "Sorry, Doc. I sure am sorry, Doc." Sweating in a suit and tie and standing on wet sand, he watched her fling those ashes into the wind of a hovering helicopter piloted by Lucy. In a hurricane of churning water and flying blades, the supposed remains of Scarpetta's lover were hurled as far out of reach as her pain. Marino stared at Lucy's hard face staring back at him through Plexiglas as she did exactly what her aunt had asked her to do, and all the while, Lucy knew, too.

Scarpetta trusts Lucy and Marino more than anyone else in her life. They helped plan Benton's staged murder and disappearance, and that truth is a brain infection, a sickness they battle daily, while Benton lives his life as a nobody named Tom.

"I guess no fishing," Benton goes on in the same light tone.

"They ain't biting." But Marino's anger is. His fury bares its fangs.

"I see. Not a single fish. And bowling? Last I remember, you were second in your league. The Firing Pins. I believe that was the name of your team."

"Last century, yeah. I don't spend time in Virginia. Only when I get dragged back down to Richmond for court. I'm not with their PD anymore. In the process of moving to Florida and signing on with the Hollywood PD, south of Lauderdale."

"If you're in Florida," Benton points out, "when you go to Richmond, it's up to Richmond, not down to Richmond. One thing you've always had is an amazing sense of direction, Pete."

Marino's caught in a lie, and he knows it. He constantly thinks of moving from Richmond. It shames him that he doesn't have the nerve. It is all he knows, even if there is nothing left for him in that city of old battles that continue to rage.

"I didn't come here to bother you with long stories," Marino says.

Benton's dark glasses glance in his direction as the two of them continue their leisurely pace.

"Well, I can tell you've missed me," Benton comments, a splinter of ice in his tone.

"It ain't fucking fair," Marino hisses, his fists clenched by his sides. "And I can't take it no more, pal. Lucy can't take it no more, pal. I wish you could be a fucking fly on the wall and see what you done to her. The Doc. Scarpetta. Or maybe you don't remember her, either."