Trace

30

It isn't hard for him to imagine. All these years, he has preferred not to imagine what she has done with other men, especially with Benton.

Marino stares past her head out the window. His plain single room is on the third floor, and he can't see the street, just the gray sky beyond her head. He feels very small inside and has a childish urge to hide under the covers, to sleep and hope when he wakes up he'll discover that nothing has happened. He wants to wake up and discover he is here in Richmond with the Doc, working a case, and nothing has happened. Funny how many times he has opened his eyes in a hotel room and wished he would find her there looking at him. Now here she is in his hotel room looking at him. He tries to think where to begin, then the childish urge clutches him again and he loses his voice. His voice dies somewhere between his heart and his mouth, like a firefly going out in the dark.

His thoughts about her have been long and drawn out, for years they have been, ever since they first met, if he is honest about it. His erotic imaginings are the most skillful, creative, incredible sex he's ever had, and he would never want her to know, he could never let her know, and he has not stopped hoping something might happen with her, but if he starts talking about what he remembers, then she might get an idea of what it would be like to be with him. That would ruin any chance. No matter how remote the chance, it would be killed. To confess in detail what little he does remember would be to show her what it would be like to be with him. That would ruin it. His fantasies wouldn't survive, either, and then he wouldn't even have them, never again. He considers lying.

"Let's go back to when you arrived at the FOP lounge," Scarpetta says, her eyes steady on him. "What time did you go there?"

Good. He can talk abour the FOP lounge, "Around seven," Marino says. "I met Eise there and then Browning got there and we had something to eat."

"Details," she tells him without moving in the chair, her eyes directly on his. "What did you eat and what had you eaten during the day?"

"I thought we were starting with the FOP, not what I ate earlier."

"Did you eat breakfast yesterday?" she persists with the same steadiness and patience she has when she talks to those left behind after someone is annihilated by randomness or by an Act of God or by a murderer.

"Had coffee in my room," he replies.

"Snacks? Lunch?"

"Nope."

"I'll lecture you about that another time," she says. "No food all day, just coffee, and then you went to the FOP lounge at seven. Did you drink on an empty stomach?"

"I started with a couple beers. Then I had a steak and a salad."

"No potato or bread? No carbs? You were on your diet."

"Huh. About the only good habit I stuck to last night, that's for sure."

She doesn't answer, and he senses she is thinking that his low-carb habit isn't exactly a good habit, but she isn't going to lecture him about nutrition right now when he's sitting on a bed, miserable with a hangover and in pain and panicky because he might have committed a felony or is about to be accused of committing one, assuming he hasn't already been accused. He looks at the gray sky out the window and imagines a Richmond police unmarked Crown Victoria prowling the streets, looking for him. Hell, it could be Detective Browning himself out there ready to serve a warrant on him.

"Then what?" Scarpetta asks.

Marino imagines himself in the backseat of the Crown Vic and wonders if Browning would handcuff him. Out of professional respect he could let Marino sit in the back unrestrained, or he could forget respect and snap handcuffs on him. He would have to handcuff him, Marino decides.

"You drank a few beers and ate a steak and a salad starting at seven," Scarpetta prods him in that easygoing but unstoppable way of hers. "How many beers, exactly?"

"Four, I think."

"Not think. How many, exactly."

"Six," he replies.

"Glasses or bottles or cans? Tall ones? Regulars? What size, in other words?"

"Six bottles of Budweiser, regular size. That ain't all that much for me, by the way. I can hold it. Six beers for me is like half a beer for you."

"Unlikely," she replies. "We'll talk about your math later."

"Well, I don't need a lecture," he mutters, glancing at her, then staring steadily at her in sullen silence.

"Six beers, one steak, a salad at the FOP with Junius Eise and Detective Browning, and about when did you hear the rumor that I'm moving back to Richmond? Might this have been while you were eating with Eise and Browning?"

"Now you're really putting two and two together," he says crabbily.

Eise and Browning were sitting across from him in the booth, a candle moving in the red glass globe, all three of them drinking beer. Eise asks Marino what he thinks of Scarpetta, what he really thinks. Is she a big shot doctor-chief, what is she really like? She's a big shot but don't act like one, were Marino's exact words. He does remember that much, and he remembers the way he felt when Eise and Browning started talking about her, about her getting reappointed as chief and moving back to Richmond. She hadn't said a word to Marino about any such thing, not even given him a hint, and he was humiliated and furious. That's when he switched from beer to bourbon.

I always thought she was hot, that idiot Eise had the balls to say, and then he switched to bourbon. Quite a set that one's got, he added a few minutes later, cupping his hands at his chest, grinning. Wouldn't mind getting into the lab coat of that one. Well, you've worked with her forever, haven't you, so maybe when you've been around her enough, you don't notice her looks anymore. Browning said he's never seen her, but he'd heard about her, and he was grinning too.

Marino didn't know what to say, so he drank the first bourbon and ordered another one. The thought of Eise looking at her body put him in a mood to punch him. Of course he didn't. He just sat in the booth and drank and tried not to think about the way she looks when she takes off her lab coat, when she drapes it over her chair or hangs it on the hook behind her door. He did his best to block out images of her taking off her suit jacket at a scene, unbuttoning the sleeves of her blouse, doing and undoing whatever is needed when a dead body is waiting for her. She has always been easy about herself, not showing it, not conscious of what she's got and whether anyone might be looking at it when she's unbuttoning and taking off and reaching and moving, because she has work and because the dead don't care about seeing it. They're dead. It's just Marino who isn't dead. Maybe she thinks he's dead.

"I'll say it again, I have no plans for moving back to Richmond," Scarpetta says from her chair, her legs crossed, the hem of her dark blue pants speckled with mud, her shoes so smeared with mud it's hard to remember they were shiny black earlier today. "Besides, you don't really think I would make plans like that and not tell you, do you?"

"You never know," he replies.

"You do know."

"I ain't moving back here. Especially not now."

Someone knocks on the door and Marino's heart jumps and he thinks of the police and of jail and court. He shuts his eyes in relief when a voice on the other side of the door says, "Room service."

"I'll get it," Scarpetta says.

Marino sits still on the bed, and his eyes follow her as she moves across the small room and opens the door. If she were alone, were he not sitting right here, she would probably ask who is there and look through the peephole. But she isn't worried because Marino is right here and wears a Colt.280 semiautomatic in an ankle holster, not that it would be necessary to shoot anyone. He wouldn't mind beating the hell out of someone, though. Right now he would be happy to slam his big fists into someone's jaw and solar plexus, like he used to do when he boxed.

"How you folks today?" the pimply-faced young man in a uniform asks as he rolls in the cart.

"Fine, just fine," she says, digging in a pocket of her pants and pulling out a ten-dollar bill that is neatly folded. "You can leave it right there. Thank you." She hands him the folded bill.

"Thank you, ma'am. You all have a really nice day now." And he leaves. And the door shuts softly.

Marino doesn't move on the bed, only his eyes do as he watches her. He watches her loosen plastic wrap from the bagel and the oatmeal. He watches her open a pat of butter and mix the butter into the oatmeal, then sprinkle it with salt. She opens another pat of butter and spreads it on the bagel, then she pours two cups of tea. She does not put sugar in the tea. In fact, there is no sugar, none at all, on the cart.

"Here," she says, setting the oatmeal and a cup of strong tea on the table by the bed. "Eat." She walks back to the cart and carries the bagel to him. "The more you eat, the better. Maybe when you start feeling better, your memory will have a miraculous recovery."

The vision of the oatmeal causes a protest that rocks his gut, but he picks up the bowl and slowly dips in the spoon, and the spoon digging into the congealing oatmeal makes him think of Scarpetta digging the tongue depressor into the mud on the pavement, and then he imagines something else similar to oatmeal that causes another wave of disgust and remorse. If only he had been too drunk to do it. But he's done it. Seeing the oatmeal makes him certain he did it last night, finished what he started.

"I can't eat this," he says.

"Eat it," she replies, sitting back in the same chair like a judge, sitting up straight, looking right at him.

He tastes the oatmeal and is surprised that it's pretty good. It feels good going down. Before he knows it, he's eaten the entire bowl and is working on the bagel, and while he's doing this, he can feel her watching him. She isn't talking and he knows damn well why she's not saying anything and is watching him. He hasn't told her the truth yet. He is holding back the details that he is certain will kill the fantasy. Once she knows, he'll have no chance, and the bagel is suddenly dry in his throat and he can't swallow it.

"Feel a little bit better? Drink some of the tea," she suggests, and now she really is a judge dressed in dark clothes, sitting upright in the chair beneath the gray window. "Eat all of the bagel and drink at least one cup of the tea. You need food and you're dehydrated. I've got Advil."

"Yeah, Advil might be good," he says, chewing.

She reaches down into her nylon bag, and pills rattle as she pulls out a small bottle of Advil. He chews and gulps tea, suddenly very hungry, and he watches her walk back to him again, all the way to where he is propped against the pillows, and she removes the childproof cap easily because anything childproof may as well not exist when it gets into her hands. She shakes out two pills and places them in his palm. Her fingers are agile and strong and seem small against his huge palm, and they lightly brush his skin, and her touch feels better to him than most things he has felt in life.

"Thanks," he says as she returns to her chair.

She'll sit in that chair for a month if she has to, he thinks. Maybe I should just let her sit there for a month. She's not going anywhere until I tell her. I wish she'd quit looking at me like that.

"How's our memory doing?" she asks.

"Some things are lost for good, you know. It happens," he replies, draining the cup of tea and concentrating on the pills to make sure they haven't gotten stuck somewhere in his throat.

"Some things never do come back," she agrees. "Or were never completely gone. Other things are just hard to talk about. You were drinking bourbon with Eise and Browning, then what? About what time was if when you started on the bourbon?"

"Maybe eight-thirty, nine. My cell phone rings and it was Suz. She was upset and said she needed to talk to me, asked me if I could come by her house." He pauses, waiting for Scarpetta's reaction. She doesn't have to say it. She is thinking it.

"Please continue," she says.

"I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I shouldn't have gone over there after drinking a few."

"You have no idea what I'm thinking," she replies from her chair.

"I was feeling all right."

"Define few," she adds.

"The beer, a couple bourbons."

"A couple?"

"No more than three."

"Six beers equals six ounces of alcohol. Three bourbons is another four or five ounces, depending on how well you know the bartender," she calculates. "Let's say over a three-hour period. That equals approximately ten ounces, I'm being conservative. Let's say you metabolized one ounce per hour, that's the norm. You still had at least seven ounces on board when you headed out of the FOP lounge."

"Shit," he says. "I sure could do without the math. I was feeling all right. I'm telling you I was."

"You hold it well. But you were legally drunk, more than legally drunk," the doctor-lawyer says. "By my calculations, more than point one-oh. You got to her house safe and sound, I presume. And by now it is what time?"

"Ten-thirty, maybe. I mean, I wasn't looking at my watch every damn minute." He stares at her and feels dark and sluggish slumped against pillows on the bed. What happened next heaves darkly inside him and he doesn't want to step into that darkness.

"I'm listening," Scarpetta says. "How are you feeling? Do you need some more tea? More food?"

He shakes his head no and feels again for the pills, worried they might be stuck somewhere and burning holes inside his throat. He burns in so many places, two more little burns might be hard to detect, but he doesn't need them.

"The headache better?"

"You ever been to a shrink?" he suddenly asks. "'Cause that's what I'm feeling like. Like I'm sitting in a room with a shrink. But since I ain't never been to a shrink, I don't know if it feels like this. I thought you would know." He isn't sure why he said it, but it came out. He looks at her, helpless and angry and desperate to do anything that keeps him out of the heaving darkness.

"Let's not talk about me," she replies. "I'm not a shrink, and you know that better than anyone. This isn't about why you did what you did or why you didn't. This is about what. What is where trouble lies or doesn't. Psychiatrists don't care much about what."

"I know. What is it. What sure as hell is the problem, all right. I don't know what, Doc. That's the God's truth," he lies.

"We'll back up a little. You got to her house. How? You didn't have the rental car."

"You have the receipt?"

"Probably in my coat pocket."

"It would be good if you still have it," she suggests.

"It should be in a pocket."

"You can look later. What happened next?"

"I got out and walked to the door. I rang the bell, she came to the door and let me in." The heaving darkness is right in front of his face now, like a storm about to break open on top of him. He takes a deep breath and his head throbs.

"Marino, it's all right," she says quietly. "You can tell me. Let's find out what. Exactly what. That's all we're trying to do."

"She… uh, she was wearing boots, like paratrooper boots, like steel toed black leather boots. Military boots. And she had on a big camouflage t-shirt." The darkness swallows him, seems to swallow him whole, swallows more of him than he knew he had. "Nothing else, just that, and I was just sort of shocked, and didn't know why she was dressed like that. I didn't think nothing of it, not the way you might think. Then she shut the door behind me and put her hands on me."

"Where did she put her hands on you?"

"She said she'd wanted me the minute we walked in that morning," he says, embellishing a little, but not a lot, because whatever her exact words were, the message he got was just that. She wanted him. She had wanted him the first instant she saw him when he and Scarpetta showed up at her house to ask about Gilly.

"You said she put her hands on you. Where? What part of your body?"

"My pockets. In my pockets."

"Front or back pockets?"

"Front." His eyes drop to his lap and he blinks as he looks at the deep front pockets of his black cargo pants. | \

"The same pants you have on now?" Scarpetta asks, her eyes never leaving him.

"Yeah. These pants. I didn't exactly get around to changing my clothes. I didn't exactly get back to my room this morning. I got a cab and went straight to the morgue."

"We'll get to that," she replies. "After she put her hands in your pockets, then what?"

"Why do you want to know all this?"

"You know why. You know exactly why," she says in that same calm, steady tone, her eyes on him.

He remembers Suz's hands digging deep into his pockets and her pulling him into her house, laughing, sa'ying how good he looked as she pushed the door shut with her foot. A fog swirls in his thoughts like fog swirling in the headlights as the taxi drove him to her house, and he knew he was heading into the unknown, but he went, and then she had her hands in his pockets and was pulling him into the living room, laughing, dressed in nothing but a camouflage t-shirt and combat boots. She pressed against him and he knew she could feel him and she knew he could feel her soft and tight against him.

"She got a bottle of bourbon out of the kitchen," he says, and he listens to his voice but he isn't seeing anything inside the hotel room as he tells Scarpetta. He's in a trance as he tells her. "She poured us drinks and I said I shouldn't have any more. Maybe I didn't say that. I don't know. She had me going. What can I tell you? She had me going. I asked her what's the thing with the camouflage, and she said he was into that, Frank was. Uniforms. He used to get her to dress up for him and they would play."

"Was Gilly around when he would ask Suz to wear uniforms and play?"

"What?"

"Maybe we'll get to Gilly later. What did Frank and Suz play?"

"Games."

"Did she want you to play games last night?" Scarpetta asks.

The room is dark and he feels the darkness, and he can't see what he did because it is unbearable, and all he can think about as he tries to be truthful is how the fantasy will die forever. She will imagine him and it will never happen, never, and there will be no point in his ever hoping again, remotely hoping, because she will know what it might be like with him.

"This is important, Marino," she says quietly. "Tell me about the game."

He swallows and imagines he feels the pills in his throat, deep inside it and burning. He wants more tea but can't move and he can't bear to ask her to get him tea or anything else. She is sitting straight in the chair but not tensely, her strong, capable hands on the armrests. She is erect but relaxed in her mud-spattered suit. Her eyes are keen as she listens.

"She told me to chase her," he begins. "I was drinking. And I said what do you mean by chase. And she told me to go into the bedroom, her bedroom, and hide behind the door and to time it. She said for me to wait five minutes, exactly five minutes, and then start looking for her like… Like I was going to kill her. And I told her it wasn't right. Well, I didn't really tell her." He takes another deep breath. "I probably didn't tell her, because she had me going."

"What time was it by now?"

"I'd been there maybe an hour."

"She puts her hands in your pants the minute you walked through the front door at approximately ten-thirty and then an hour passes? Nothing happened during that hour?"

"We were drinking. In the living room, on the couch." He won't look at her now. He will never look at her again.

"Lights on? Curtains open or closed?"

"She'd built a fire. The lights were off. I don't remember if the curtains were open." He thinks about it. "They were closed."

"What did you do on the couch?"

"Talked. And made out, I guess."

"Don't guess. And 1 don't know what that means. What does it mean when you say you made out?" Scarpetta replies. "Kissing, fondling? Did you take your clothes off? Did you have intercourse? Oral sex?"

He feels his face turn hot. "No. I mean, the first part we did. Kissing, mostly. You know, making out. Like people do. Making out. We were on the couch and talked about the game." His face burns. He knows she can see how hot his face is and he refuses to look at her.

The lights were out and the light from the fire moved over her flesh, her pale flesh, and when she grabbed him, it hurt and excited him, and then it simply hurt. He told her to be careful because it hurt, and she laughed and said she liked it rough, liked'it very rough, and would he bite her, and he said no, he didn't want to bite her, not hard. You'll like it, she promised, you'll like biting hard. You don't know what you're missing if you've never done it rough, and all the while she talked her flesh caught the light of the fire as she moved, and he tried to keep his tongue in her mouth and please her while he crossed his legs and maneuvered himself so she wouldn't hurt him. Don't be such a sissy, she kept saying as she tried to shove him down hard on the couch and force his zipper, but he managed to keep her from getting to him. He was thinking about her teeth showing white in the firelight and what it would be like if she got those white teeth on him.

"The game began on the couch?" Scarpetta asks from her distant chair.

"That's where we talked about it. Then I got up and she took me into the bedroom and told me to step behind the door and wait five minutes, like I said."

"Were you still drinking?"

"She'd poured me another drink, I guess."

"Don't guess. Big drinks? Little drinks? How many by now?"

"Nothing that woman does is in a small way. Big drinks. Three at least by the time she told me to go behind the door. It starts getting really fuzzy now," he says. "After the game started, it all starts to fade. Maybe it's a damn good thing."

"It's not a good thing. Try to remember. We need to know the what. The what. Not the why. I don't care about the why, Marino. Trust me. There's nothing you can tell me that I haven't heard before. Or seen. I don't shock easily."

"No, Doc. I'm sure you don't. But maybe I do. Maybe I didn't think so, but maybe I do. I remember looking at my watch and having a real hard time seeing the time. My eyesight ain't what it used to be anyway, but it was blurring bad and I was keyed up, real keyed up, not in a real ^

good way. I don't know why I went along with it, to tell you the truth.".J

He was sweating profusely behind the door, trying to read his watch, then he starting counting silently, counting up to sixty and losing his place and starting again until he was sure five minutes had passed. His excitement was not the sort that he had ever felt with a woman, no s

woman or encounter with a woman he could recall, not ever. He stepped out from behind the door and realized the entire house was dark. He couldn't see his own hands unless he held them very close to his face, and he felt along the walls and realized she could hear him, and this was when he realized in his drunken obtuseness, somehow as drunk as he was he realized his heart was pounding and he was breathing hard because he was excited and scared, and he doesn't want Scarpetta to know he was scared. He reached down to his ankle and lost his balance and found himself on the hallway floor, feeling for his gun, but his gun wasn't in its holster. He doesn't know how long he sat there. It's possible he fell asleep, briefly.

When he came to, he didn't have his gun and his heart was pounding in his neck as he sat without moving, barely breathing, on the wooden floor, sweat streaming into his eyes, listening, trying to hear where the son of a bitch was. The darkness was so complete it was thick and airless and it wrapped around him like black cloth as he tried to get to his feet without making noise and giving away his position. The bastard was in here somewhere, and Marino didn't have his gun. With his arms out like oars, he barely brushed the walls as he moved himself forward, listening, ready to pounce, knowing he was going to get shot if he didn't catch the piece of shit by surprise.

He moved slowly like a cat, his brain focused on the enemy, and the thought that kept coming to him was how did he get into the house and what house and what son of a bitch and where was his backup? Where the fuck was everybody? Oh Christ, maybe they were down. Maybe he was the only one left and now he was going down because he didn't have his gun and somehow he had lost his radio, and he didn't know where he was. And then he felt something hit him. And then he passed in and out of a heaving darkness, a hot darkness that drove the air out of him as it moved and he became aware of pain, of burning pain as the darkness moved and grabbed at him and made terrible wet noises.

"I don't know what happened," he hears himself say, and it surprises him that his voice sounds sane because inside he feels crazy. "I just don't know. I woke up in her bed."

"Clothed?"

"No."

"Where were your clothes, your belongings?"

"In a chair."

"In a chair? Neatly in a chair?"

"Yeah, pretty neatly. My clothes and my pistol was on top of them. I sat up in bed and nobody else was there," he says.

"Was her side of the bed unmade? Did it look slept in?"

"The covers were pulled down and messed up, real messed up. But nobody was there. I looked around and didn't know where the hell I was and then I remembered I'd taken a taxi to her house, and I remembered her coming to the door dressed the way she was, you know, the night before. I looked around and saw a glass of bourbon on the table on my side of the bed, and a towel. The towel had blood on it and it scared the shit out of me. I tried to get up and couldn't. I just sat there. I couldn't get up."

He realizes his teacup is full, and it terrifies him that he has no recollection of Scarpetta getting up from her chair and refilling his tea or if maybe he did, but he doubts he did. He has a sense that he is in the same position on the bed that he has been in, and he notices the clock and more than three hours have passed since he and Scarpetta started talking in his hotel room.

"Do you think it's possible she drugged you?" Scarpetta asks him. "Unfortunately, I don't think a drug test would be helpful at this point. Too much time has passed. It depends on the drug."

"Oh, that would be great. If I go get a drug test, then I may as well call the police myself, assuming she ain't already done it."

"Tell me about the bloody towel," she says.

"I don't know whose blood it was. Maybe it was mine. My mouth hurt." He touches it. "I hurt like shit. I guess that's what she's into, hurting, but all I can say is… Well, I don't know what I did because I didn't see her. She was in the bathroom and when I started calling out her name to see where the hell she was, she started screaming at me, screaming for me to leave her house and saying I… She was saying all these things."

"I don't guess you thought to take the bloody towel with you."

"I don't even know how I managed to call a taxi to get out of there. In fact, I don't remember doing it. Obviously I did. No, I didn't take the towel, goddamn it."

"You came straight to the morgue." She frowns a little, as if this part doesn't make sense.

"I stopped for coffee. A Seven-Eleven. Finally, I got the cabdriver to drop me off several blocks from the office so I could walk, hoping I could clear my head. It helped a little. I felt half human again, and then I walked in the office and damn if she's not there."

"Before you got to the OCME, did you listen to your phone messages?"

"Oh. Maybe I did."

"Otherwise you couldn't have known about the meeting."

"No. I knew about the meeting," Marino says. "Eise told me at the FOP lounge that he'd passed on some information to Marcus. An email, that's what he said." He tries to remember. "Oh yeah, now I know. Marcus was on the phone as soon as he opened the e-mail and said he was going to have to call a meeting for the next morning and he told Eise to make sure he was in the building in case he needed him to come down and explain things."

"So you knew about the meeting last night," Scarpetta says.

"Yeah, last night was the first I heard about it, and it seemed like Eise said something to make me think you was going to be there, so I knew I had to be there."

"You knew the meeting was to be at nine-thirty?"

"I must have. I'm sorry I'm so foggy, Doc. But I knew about the meeting." He looks at her and can't figure out"what's going through her mind. "Why? What's the big deal about the meeting?"

"He didn't tell me about it until eight-thirty this morning," she replies.

"He's shooting; bullets at your feet, making you dance," Marino says, and he hates Dr. Marcus. "Let's get us a plane and go back to Florida. Fuck him."

"When you saw Mrs. Paulsson at the office this morning, did she speak to you?"

"She looked at me and walked off. Like she didn't know me. I don't understand nothing about this, Doc. I just know something happened and it's bad, and I'm scared shitless I did something really bad and now I'm going to get it. After all the shit I've done, now this is going to do it. This is it."

Scarpetta slowly gets up from her chair, and she looks tired, but she is alert, and he can see the worry in her eyes but he can also see she is thinking, she is making connections that he sure as hell isn't making. Her eyes are full of thoughts as she looks out the window and walks over to the service cart and drains the last little bit of tea into her cup.

"She injured you, didn't she?" she says, standing near the bed, looking down at him. "Show me what she did to you."

"Hell no! Hell no, I can't," he says in a whine that makes him sound ten years old. "I can't do that. No way."

"Do you want me to help you or not? You think you have something I've never seen before?"

He covers his face with his hands. "I can't do it."

"You can call the police and they'll get you down to the station and photograph your injuries. Then you've just started a case. Maybe that's what you want. Not a bad plan, assuming she's already called the police. But I suspect she hasn't."

He lowers his hands and looks up at her. "Why?"

"Why do I suspect that? Very simple. People know we're staying here. Doesn't Detective Browning know you're staying here? Doesn't he have your phone numbers? So why haven't the police shown up to arrest you? You think they wouldn't be all over you if Gilly Paulsson's mother called nine-one-one and said you raped her? And why didn't she scream when she saw you at the office? You just raped her and she doesn't make a scene or call the police right then?"

"Ain't no way I'm calling the police," he says.

"Then I'm all you've got." She walks back to her chair and picks up her nylon scene kit. She unzips it and pulls out a digital camera.

"Holy shit," he says, staring at the camera as if it is a gun pointed at him.

"Sounds like the victim here is you," she says. "Sounds like she wants you to think you did something to her. Why?"

"Shit if I know. I can't do it."

"You're hung over but not stupid, Marino."

He looks at her. He looks at the camera down by her side. He looks at Scarpetta standing in the middle of his room in her dark, mud-spattered suit.

"We're here working the death of her daughter, Marino. Mama clearly wants some kind of leverage or money or attention or some kind of something, and I intend to find out what it is she wants. Oh yes. I will find out. Take your shirt off, your pants off, take off whatever you need to take off to show me what that woman did to you during her sick little game last night."

"Now what are you gonna think of me?" he says, pulling his black Polo shirt over his head, carefully, the fabric hurting him where it rubs the bite and suck marks all over his chest.

"God. Sit still. God damn it, why didn't you show me this earlier? We've got to take care of this or you're going to get infections. And you're worried about her calling the police? Are you out of your mind?" All this while she takes photographs, moving over him, getting close-ups of each wound.

"Thing is, I ain't seen what I did to her," he says, a little calmer, realizing that getting checked out by the Doc might not be as bad as he thought.

"You did even half of this to her, your teeth should hurt."

He pays very close attention to his teeth and feels nothing at all, just his usual teeth and the usual way they feel. Thank God his teeth don't hurt.

"What about your back?" she asks, standing over him.

"It don't hurt."

"Lean forward. Let me look."

He bends over and feels her carefully move the pillows away from his back. He feels her warm fingers between his shoulder blades, her hands lightly touching his bare skin and pushing him farther forward as she examines his back, and he tries to remember whether she's ever touched his bare back before. She hasn't. He would remember.

"What about your genitals?" she asks as if it is nothing. When he doesn't respond, she says, "Marino, did she injure your genitals? Is there something there I should photograph, not to mention treat, or are we going to pretend that I somehow don't know that you have male genitalia like half the rest of the human race? Well, obviously she hurt your genitals or else you would simply tell me no. Correct?"

"Correct," he mutters, covering his crotch with his hands. "Yeah, I'm hurting, okay? But maybe you got enough already to prove your point, to prove she hurt me, no matter what I did to her, assuming I did something."

She sits on the edge of the bed not more than two feet from him and looks at him. "How about a verbal description. Then we'll decide if you need to take your pants off."

"She bit me. All over. And I got bruises."

"I'm a doctor," Scarpetta says.

"I know that all right. But you ain't my doctor."

"I would be if you died. If she'd killed you, who do you think would want to see you and know every damn thing about it? But you're not dead, for which I'm extremely grateful, but you got attacked and have the same sort of injuries you might have were you dead. And this all sounds perfectly ridiculous, even to me, even as I'm saying it. Will you please let me take a look and see if you need medical treatment and if we need to take photographs?"

"What kind of medical treatment?"

"Probably nothing that a little Betadine won't cure. I'll pick some up at the drugstore."

He tries to imagine what will happen if she sees him. She has never seen him. She doesn't know what he has, and he might not be above aver- 1 I'll age or below average, and ordinarily just being ordinary will get one by but he doesn't know what to expect because he has no idea what she likes or is accustomed to. So it's probably not smart to take off his pants. Then he thinks of riding in the back of an unmarked car and being photographed in lockup and going to court, and he unbuttons his pants and pulls down the zipper.

"If you laugh I'll hate you the rest of your life," he says, and his face burns hot and he is sweating, and the sweat stings whatever it touches.

"You poor boy," she says. "That crazy bitch," she says.