My name’s Pete and I’m an alcoholic.
Hi, Pete.
He sent Nancy e-mails explaining that it went against the nature and training of a cop to confess to anything, especially in a room packed with strangers, any one of whom might turn out to be a potential dry-drunk shitcan Marino might have to lock up someday. Besides, it had taken only three meetings for him to complete all twelve steps, although he’d decided against making a list of persons he’d harmed and making amends. His reason was step nine, which clearly stated that one shouldn’t make amends if it would only further injure whoever had been harmed, and he decided that was everyone.
Step ten was easier, and he had filled an entire notebook with the names of those who had wronged him throughout his life.
He hadn’t included Scarpetta on either list until a strange coincidence occurred. He found the apartment where he now lived, made a deal with the landlord to lease it at an affordable price in exchange for services, such as handling evictions, only to discover the location was so close to former President Bill Clinton’s office that Marino often walked past the fourteen-story building on his way to the subway station at 125th and Lenox. Thinking of Bill Clinton caused Marino to think of Hillary Clinton, and that caused him to think about women who were powerful enough to be the president or some other world leader. That led to thoughts of Scarpetta.
It had gotten to where he almost confused the two in his fantasies. He would see Hillary on CNN, then see Scarpetta on CNN, and by the time he changed channels in a desperate attempt to divert his attention with ESPN or maybe a pay-per-view movie, he was depressed. His heart would ache like an abscessed tooth. He would obsess about Scarpetta and the lists she wasn’t on. He would jot her name on one list, then scratch through it and jot it on the other. He fantasized about what it would be like if she were president. He would suddenly find himself on the Secret Service’s security threat list and have to escape to Canada.
Maybe Mexico. He’d spent several years in South Florida and could handle Spanish-speaking people better than he could those who spoke French. He’d never understood the French, and didn’t like their food. What did it say about a country that didn’t have a national beer, like Budweiser, Corona, Dos Equis, Heineken, or Red Stripe?
He finished a second turkey roll-up, took another slug of Sharp’s, and watched people whose only ambitions were West Indian take-out, boutiques, juice bars, tailor shops, or maybe the nearby Apollo theater, the noise of cars, trucks, and pedestrians a jarring orchestra that Marino didn’t mind in the least. In warm weather he kept his windows open until he couldn’t stand the dust. What he avoided was silence. He’d had plenty enough of that in rehab, where he wasn’t allowed to listen to music or watch TV, couldn’t fill his head with anything but the confessions of drunks and drug addicts, and his own haunted thoughts and memories of embarrassingly naked talks with Nancy.
He got up from his chair and collected his soggy paper plate, his napkin, his empty Sharp’s bottle. The kitchen was no more than six steps away, with a small window above the sink that afforded him a view of artificial turf-covered concrete and aluminum tables and chairs surrounded by a chain-link fence—what was advertised as the apartment building’s backyard.
On the counter was his computer, and he read the gossip column from this morning that he’d saved on the desktop, determined to discover who was behind it, then find the scumbag and do something that would rearrange his or her body parts permanently.
No investigative tool he knew of worked. He could Google Gotham Gotcha until the cows came home, and nothing that popped up told him a damn thing he didn’t already know. It was useless trying to trace the columnist through the advertising companies that paid to push foods, liquor, books, electronics, movies, and TV shows. There was no pattern, only the validation that millions of fans were addicted to a fucking gossip column that this morning had made the worst episode of Marino’s life its centerpiece.
His phone rang.
It was Detective Mike Morales.
“What’s up,” Marino said.
“Data mining, bro,” Morales said in his slow, lazy way.
“I’m not your bro. Don’t waste your rapper-talk shit on me.”
Morales’s MO was to come across as half asleep and bored, and doped up on sedatives or painkillers, which Marino doubted, but then again, he didn’t know. Behind Morales’s haze was a snobby bastard who had gone to Dartmouth, then Johns Hopkins, where he’d completed medical school and decided he’d rather be one of New York’s finest, a cop, which Marino didn’t take at face value. Nobody who could be a doctor would end up a cop.
Besides, he was a bullshit artist who circulated all sorts of wild stories about himself and laughed his ass off when other cops believed him. Supposedly, his cousin was the president of Bolivia, and his father had moved the family to America because he believed in capitalism and was tired of herding llamas. Supposedly, Morales had grown up in the projects of Chicago and had been a pal of Barack Obama until politics interfered, which seemed reasonable to those who didn’t know better. No presidential candidate would want to be friends with someone who used words like bro and looked like a member of a street gang, right down to his half-mast baggy jeans, big gold chains and rings, and cornrow hair.
“Been running queries all day—not to be confused with homos, bro,” Morales said.
“Got no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Queer-ies? I forgot you got no sense of humor and barely finished high school. Looking for the usual patterns, trends, modus operandi, complaints, from here to Dollywood, and I think I hit on something.”
“What besides Berger?” Marino said.
“What is it about women like her and Kay Scarpetta? It might be worth dying to have her hands all over me. Goddamn. Can you imagine doing her and Berger at the same time? Well, who am I talking to? Of course you can imagine it.”
Marino’s dislike of Morales instantly turned to hate. He was always screwing with Marino, putting him down, and the only reason Marino didn’t screw him back, only harder, was Marino’s self-imposed probation. Benton had asked Berger for a favor. If she hadn’t granted it, God knows where Marino would be. Probably a dispatcher in some shitbox small-town police department somewhere. Or a drunk in a homeless shelter. Or dead.
“It’s possible our killer’s struck before,” Morales said. “I’ve found two other homicides that are somewhat similar. Not New York, but remember Oscar’s self-employed and doesn’t, quote, go to the office. He’s got a car. He’s got disposable income because he gets a tax-free check from his family every birthday, and right now the limit’s up to twelve grand—their way of not feeling guilty about their freako only son. He’s got no one to support but himself. So we got no idea how much he travels or what he does, now, do we? I might just get a couple of oldie goldies cleared while I’m at it.”
Marino opened the refrigerator, found another Sharp’s, twisted off the cap, and hurled it into the sink, where it clattered like shotgun pellets smacking a pop-up metal target.