Blow Fly

16

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."

"Did you come here to project your own anger onto me?"

"I just thought while I was in the neighborhood I'd point out, now that I got your attention, that I don't see how dying can be worse than the way you live."

"Be quiet," Benton quietly says with flinty self-control. "We'll talk inside."