He turns to his right as his keen peripheral vision catches the lumbering form of Pete Marino strolling in his direction. Benton's breath catches. He is electrified by anxiety and joy but does not wave or smile. He has not communicated with his old friend and former colleague since he supposedly died and vanished into what is called a level-one protected-witness program designed uniquely for him and jointly controlled by London's Metropolitan Police, Washington and Interpol.
Marino settles next to Benton on top of the picnic table, checking first for bird shit as he taps an unfiltered Lucky Strike from a soft pack and lights up after several sparked attempts with a disposable lighter low on fluid. Benton notes that Marino's hands are shaking. The two men are hunched over, staring out at a sailboat gliding away from the boathouse.
"You ever go to the band shell here?" Marino asks, overcome by emotions he strangles in his throat with repeated coughs and loud sucks of smoke.
"I heard the Boston Pops on the Fourth of July," Benton softly says. "You can't help but hear them from where I live. How are you?"
"But you don't come down in person." Marino does his best to sound normal, just like the old days. "Yeah, I can understand that. Me, I probably wouldn't, either, all those mobs of idiots, and I hate mobs of people. Like in the malls. It's gotten to where I can't take shopping malls no more." He blows out a large volume of smoke, the unfiltered cigarette trembling in his thick fingers. "Least you ain't so far away you can't hear the music, pal. Could be worse. That's what I always say, could be worse."
Benton's lean, handsome face does not register the volatile mix of thoughts and feelings inside his hidden places. His hands betray nothing. He controls his nerves and facial expressions. He is nobody's pal and never has been, and acute grief and anger heat up powerfully. Marino called him pal because he doesn't know what else to call him.
"I suppose I should ask you not to call me pal," Benton comments in a bland voice.
"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?"
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.