“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?”
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.”
IN AN AREA OF BEACON HILL lined with proud old brick homes and graceful trees, Benton Wesley managed to find an address to suit his present, peculiar needs.
His apartment building is ugly beige precast with plastic lawn chairs on balconies and a rusting wrought-iron fence that encloses a front yard, overgrown and depressingly dark. He and Marino take dimly lit stairs that smell of urine and stale cigarette smoke.
“Shit!” Marino gasps for breath. “Couldn’tcha at least find a joint with an elevator? I didn’t mean nothing by what I said. About dying. Nobody wants you to die.”
On the fifth landing, Benton unlocks the scratched gray metal door to apartment 56.
“Most people already think I did.”
“Shit. I can’t say anything right.” Marino wipes sweat off his face.
“I’ve got Dos Equis and limes.” Benton’s voice seems to mimic the flip of the dead-bolt lock. “And, of course, fresh juice.”
“No Budweiser?”
“Please make yourself comfortable.”
“You got Budweiser, don’t you?” Pain sounds in Marino’s voice. Benton doesn’t remember anything about him.
“Since I knew you were coming, of course I have Budweiser,” Benton says from the kitchen. “An entire refrigerator full of it.”
Marino looks around and decides on a floral printed couch, not a nice one. The apartment is furnished and bears the dingy patina of many threadbare and careless lives that have come and gone. Benton probably hasn’t lived in a decent place since he died and became Tom, and Marino sometimes wonders how the meticulous, refined man stands it. Benton is from a wealthy New England family and has always enjoyed a privileged life, although no amount of money would be enough ransom to free him from the horrors of his career. To see Benton living in an apartment typically occupied by partying college students or the lower middle class—to see him with a shaved head, facial hair, baggy jeans and sweatshirt, and to know he doesn’t even
own a car—is unimaginable to Marino.
“At least you’re in good shape,” Marino remarks with a yawn.
“At least, meaning that’s the best you can say about me.” Benton ducks inside the old white refrigerator and emerges with two beers.
The cold bottles clank together in one hand as he opens a drawer, rooting around for a church key, as Marino calls any gadget that flips the cap off a beer.
“Mind if I smoke?” Marino asks.
“Yes.” Benton opens and shuts a cabinet door.
“Okay, so I’ll go into fits and swallow my tongue.”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t smoke.” Benton walks across the dim, shabby living room and hands Marino a Budweiser. “I said I minded.”
He hands him a water glass that will have to do for an ashtray.
“Yeah, so maybe you’re in shape and don’t smoke and all the rest”—Marino gets back to that as he takes a slug of beer and sighs contentedly—“but your life sucks.”
Benton takes a seat across from Marino, the space between them occupied by a scratched Formica-topped coffee table neatly lined with news magazines and the television remote control.
“I don’t need you to drop out of the sky to tell me my life sucks,” he says. “If that’s why you’re here, I wish to hell you’d never come. You’ve violated the program, put me at risk . . .”
“And put myself at risk,” Marino snaps.
“I was about to point that out.” Benton’s voice heats up, his eyes burning. “We know damn well my being Tom isn’t just about me. If it was just about me, I would let them take their best shot.”
Marino begins picking at his beer bottle label. “No-Nuts Wolfman has agreed to spill the beans on his family, the great Chandonnes.”
Benton reads the papers several times a day, excavating the Internet, sending out queries on search engines to recover pieces of his past life. He knows all about Jean-Baptiste, the deformed, murderous son of Chandonne—the great Monsieur Chandonne, intimate friend of the noblesse in Paris, the head of the largest, most dangerous organized crime cartel in the world. Jean-Baptiste knows enough about his family business and those who carry out its terrible tasks to put everyone who matters behind bars or on a death-chamber gurney.
So far, Jean-Baptiste has bided his time in a maximum-security Texas prison, saying nothing to anyone. It was the Chandonne family and its massive web that Benton tangled with, and now, from thousands of miles away, Monsieur Chandonne sips his fine wines and never doubts that Benton has paid the ultimate price, a terrible price. Monsieur Chandonne was foiled, but in a way, he wasn’t. Benton died a fake death to save himself and others from dying real ones. But the price he pays is Promethean. He may as well be chained to rocks. He cannot heal because his guts are torn out daily.
“Wolfman,” as Marino usually refers to Jean-Baptiste, “says he’ll finger everyone from his daddy on down to the butlers, but only under certain conditions.” He hesitates. “He ain’t fucking with us, either, Benton. He means it.”
“You know that for a fact,” Benton blandly says.
“Yeah. A fact.”
“How has he communicated this to you?” Benton’s eyes take on a familiar intensity as he goes into his mode.
“Letters.”
“Do we know who he’s been writing, besides you?”
“The Doc. Her letter was sent to me. I haven’t given it to her, see no point.”
“Who else?”
“Lucy.”
“Hers also sent to you?”
“No. Directly to her office. I got no idea how he got the address or knew the name The Last Precinct, when she doesn’t list it. Everybody thinks her business is called Infosearch Solutions.”
“Why would he know that people like Lucy and you refer to her business as The Last Precinct? If I logged on to the Internet right now, would I find any mention of The Last Precinct?”
“Not the one we’re talking about, you wouldn’t.”
“Would I find Infosearch Solutions?”
“Sure.”
“Is her office phone number listed?” Benton asks.
“Infosearch Solutions is.”
“So maybe he also knows the listed name of her business. Called directory assistance and got the address that way. Actually, you can find just about anything on the Internet these days and for less than fifty bucks, even buy unlisted and cell phone numbers.”
“I don’t think Wolfman has a computer in his death-row cell,” Marino says in annoyance.
“Rocco Caggiano could have fed him all kinds of information,” Benton reminds him. “At one time he had to have Lucy’s business number, since he planned to depose her. Then, of course, Jean-Baptiste pled.”
“Sounds like you keep up with the news.” Marino tries to divert the conversation away from the subject of Rocco Caggiano.
“Did you read the letter he wrote to Lucy?”
“She told me about it. Didn’t want to fax or e-mail it.” This bothers Marino, too. Lucy didn’t want him to see the letter.
“Any letters to anybody else?”
Marino shrugs, sips his beer. “Not a clue. Obviously, he ain’t writing to you.” He thinks this is funny.
Benton doesn’t smile.
“Because you’re dead, right?” Marino assumes Benton doesn’t catch the joke. “Well, in prison, if an inmate marks his outgoing letters Legal Mail or Media Mail, it’s illegal for officials to open them. So if Wolfman’s got any legal and media pen pals, the information’s privileged.”
He begins picking at the label on his beer bottle, talking on as if Benton knows nothing about the inner workings of penitentiaries, where he has interviewed hundreds of violent criminals during his career.
“The only place to look is his visitors list, since a lot of the people these squirrels write also come visit. Wolfman’s got a list. Let’s see, the governor of Texas, the president . . .”
“As in president of the United States?” Benton’s trademark is to take all information seriously.
Marino says, “Yup.”
It unnerves him to see gestures and reactions that are the Benton of the past, the Benton he worked with, the Benton who was his friend.
“Who else?” Benton gets up and collects a legal pad and pen from tidy stacks of paperwork and magazines next to the computer on the kitchen table.
He slips on a pair of wire-rim glasses, very small, John Lennon–style, nothing he would have worn in his former life. Sitting back down, he writes the time, date and location on a clean sheet of paper. From where Marino sits, he makes out the word “offender,” but beyond that, he can’t read Benton’s small scrawl, especially upside down.
Marino answers, “His father and mother are on the list. Now that’s a real joke, right?”
Benton’s pen pauses. He glances up. “What about his lawyer? Rocco Caggiano?”
Marino swills beer in the bottom of the bottle.
“Rocco?” Benton says with more emphasis. “You going to tell me?”
Fury and shame dart across Marino’s face. “Just remember, he ain’t mine, didn’t grow up with me, don’t know him, don’t want to know him, would blow his fuckin’ brains out just as easy as any other dirtbag’s.”
“Genetically, he’s your son, whether you like it or not,” Benton replies matter-of-factly.
“I don’t even remember when his birthday is.” Marino dismisses his only child with a wave of a hand and a last slug of Budweiser.
Rocco Marino, who changed his surname to Caggiano, was born bad. He was Marino’s shameful, dirty secret, an abscess he showed to no one until Jean-Baptiste Chandonne loped onto the scene. For most of Marino’s life, he believed that Rocco’s curdled choices were personal—the harshest punishment he could levy on the father he despises. Oddly, Marino found some comfort in that. A personal vendetta was better than the humiliating and painful truth that Rocco is indifferent to Marino. Rocco’s choices have nothing to do with Marino. If anything, Rocco laughs at M
arino, his father, and thinks he is a Keystone-Kop loser who dresses like a pig, lives like a pig and is a pig.
Rocco’s reappearance in Marino’s world was a coincidence—“a funny as hell coincidence,” in Rocco’s own words—when he stopped long enough to speak to his father outside the courtroom door after Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s arraignment. Rocco has been in deep with organized crime since he was old enough to shave. He was a toady, scumbag lawyer for the Chandonnes long before Marino had ever heard of them.
“We know where Rocco’s spending his time these days?” Benton asks.
Marino’s eyes turn as dark and flat as old pennies. “Possibly—very possibly—we will soon enough.”
“Meaning?”
Marino leans back against the couch, as if the conversation pleases him and pumps up his ego. “Meaning he’s got tin cans tied to his ass this time and don’t know it.”
“Meaning?” Benton asks again.
“Interpol’s flagged him as a fugitive, and he ain’t aware of it. Lucy told me. I’m confident we’re going to find him and a lot of other assholes.”
“We?”
Marino shrugs again, tries to take another swallow of beer and gulps air. He belches, thinks about getting up for a refill.
“We is collectively speaking,” he explains. “We as in us good guys. Rocco’s going down because he’s gonna traipse through an airport and his little Red Notice is gonna pop up on a computer and next thing, he’s got a nice pair of shiny handcuffs on and maybe an AR-fifteen pointed at his head.”
“For what crimes? He’s always gotten away with his dirty work. That’s part of his charm.”
“All I know is there are warrants on him in Italy.”
“Says who?”
“Lucy. I’d give anything to be the one who points that AR-fifteen at his head, only I’d pull the trigger for sure,” Marino says, believing he means it, but unable to envision it. The images won’t come.
“He’s your son,” Benton quietly reminds him. “I suggest you get yourself ready for how it will feel if you have anything at all to do with whatever might happen to him. I’m not aware that your pursuit of him or any other Chandonne operatives is your legal jurisdictional right. Or are you now working undercover for the feds?”