“Maybe you should cancel tonight,” he said when he got to her.
She turned to him, surprised, happy, her deep blue eyes like the sky, her thoughts and feelings like the weather, light and shadow, bright sun and clouds and haze.
“We should go have a nice, quiet dinner,” he added, taking her arm, keeping her close, as if they needed each other to stay warm. “Il Cantinori. I’ll call Frank, see if he can fit us in.”
“Don’t torment me,” she said, her arm tight around his waist. “Melanzane alla parmigiana. A Brunello di Montalcino. I might eat your share and drink the whole bottle.”
“That would be incredibly greedy.” He kept her protectively close as they walked toward First Avenue. The wind blasted, and it was beginning to rain. “You really could cancel, you know. Tell Alex you’ve got the flu.” He signaled for a taxi and one darted toward them.
“I can’t, and we have to get home,” she said. “We have a conference call.”
Benton opened the cab’s back door. “What conference call?”
“Jaime.” Scarpetta slid across to the other side of the backseat and he climbed in after her. She gave the driver their address and said to Benton, “Fasten your seat belt.” Her quirky habit to remind people, even if they didn’t need to be told. “Lucy thinks they can get out of Vermont in a couple of hours, that the front should have cleared south of us by then. In the meantime, Jaime wants you, me, Marino, all of us, on the phone. She called me about ten minutes ago when I was on the sidewalk, on my way here. It wasn’t a good time to talk, so I don’t know details.”
“Not even a clue what she wants?” Benton asked as the taxi cut over to Third Avenue, headed north, the windshield wipers dragging loudly in a misty rain, the tops of lighted buildings shrouded.
“This morning’s situation.” She wasn’t going to be specific in front of their driver, didn’t matter if he understood English or could hear them.
“The situation you’ve been involved in all day.” Benton meant the Toni Darien case.
“A tip called in this afternoon,” Scarpetta said. “Apparently, somebody saw something.”
5
Marino’s was an unfortunate address: room number 666 at One Hogan Place. It bothered him more than usual as he and L.A. Bonnell paused in the gray-tile hallway stacked to the ceiling with banker’s boxes, the three sixes over his door seeming like an in dictment of his character, a warning to whom it may concern to beware.
“Uh, okay,” Bonnell said, looking up. “I couldn’t work here. If nothing else, it causes negative thinking. If people believe something’s bad luck, it will be. Me, I’d definitely move.”
He unlocked his beige door, dingy around the knob, the paint chipped at the edges, the aroma of Chinese food overwhelming. He was starved, couldn’t wait to dig into his crispy duck spring rolls and BBQ baby ribs, and pleased that Bonnell had ordered similarly, beef teriyaki, noodles, and nothing raw, none of that sushi shit that reminded him of fish bait. She wasn’t anything like he’d imagined, having envisioned someone tiny and perky, a spitfire who could have you on the floor, hands cuffed behind your back, before you knew what was happening. With Bonnell, you’d know what was happening.
She was close to six feet tall, big-boned, big hands, big feet, big-breasted, the kind of woman who could keep a man fully occupied in bed or kick his ass, like Xena the Warrior Princess in a business suit, only Bonnell had ice-blue eyes and her hair was short and pale blond, and Marino was pretty sure it was natural. He’d felt cocky when he was with her at High Roller Lanes, saw some of the guys staring, nudging each other. Marino wished he could have bowled a few and strutted his stuff.
Bonnell carried the bags of takeout into Marino’s office and commented, “Maybe we should go into the conference room.”
He wasn’t sure if this was about the 666 over the door or the fact that his work space was a landfill, and said, “Berger will be calling on the line in here. It’s better we stay put. Plus, I need my computer and don’t want anyone overhearing the conversation.” He set down his crime scene case, a slate-gray four-drawer tackle box perfect for his needs, and shut the door. “I figured you’d notice.” He meant his room number. “Don’t go thinking it means something personal about me.”
“Why would I think it’s about you personally? Did you decide what number this office is?” She moved paperwork, a flak jacket, and the tackle box off a chair and sat.
“Imagine my reaction when I was showed this office the first time.” Marino settled behind mountain ranges of clutter on his metal desk. “You want to wait and eat until after the call?”
“A good idea.” She looked around as if there was no place to eat, which wasn’t true. Marino could always find a spot to set a burger or a bowl or a foam box.
“We’ll do the call in here and eat in the conference room,” he said.
“Even better.”
“I got to admit I almost quit. I really thought about it.” He picked up where he’d left off in his story. “The first time I was showed this office, I was like, you got to be shitting me.”
He’d honestly thought Jaime Berger was joking, that the number over the door was the usual sick humor of people in criminal justice. It had even occurred to him that maybe she was rubbing his nose in the truth about why he’d ended up with her to begin with-that she’d hired him as a favor, was giving him a second chance after the bad thing he’d done. What a reminder every time he walked into his office. All those years he and Scarpetta had been together and then he hurt her like that. He was glad he didn’t remember much, had been fucked up, shitface drunk, had never meant to put his hands on her, to do what he did.
“I don’t consider myself superstitious,” he was telling Bonnell, “but I grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey. Went to Catholic school, was confirmed, was even an altar boy, which didn’t last long because I was always getting into fights, started boxing. Not the Bayonne Bleeder, probably wouldn’t have made it fifteen rounds with Mu hammad Ali, but I was a semifinalist in the National Golden Gloves one year, thought of turning pro, became a cop instead.” Making sure she knew a few things about him. “It’s never been contested by anyone that six-six-six is the symbol of the Beast, a number to be avoided at all costs. And I always have, whether it’s an address, a post office box, a license plate, the time of day.”
“The time of day?” Bonnell questioned, and Marino couldn’t tell if she was amused, her demeanor difficult to anticipate or decipher. “There’s no such time as sixty-six minutes past six,” she said.
“Six minutes past six on the sixth day of the month, for example.”
“Why won’t she move you? Isn’t there some other place you can work?” Bonnell dug into her pocketbook and pulled out a thumb drive, tossing it to him.
“This everything?” Marino plugged it into his computer. “Apartment, crime scene, and WAV files?”
“Except the pictures you took when you were there today.”
“I got to download them from my camera. Nothing all that important. Probably nothing you didn’t get when you were there with the CSU guys. Berger says I’m on the sixth floor and my office is the sixty-sixth one in sequence. I told her yeah, well, it’s also in the book of Revelation.”
“Berger’s Jewish,” Bonnell said. “She doesn’t read the book of Revelation.”
“That’s like saying if she doesn’t read the paper nothing happened yesterday.”
“It’s not like that. Revelation isn’t about something that happened.”