The entrance of the gunshot wound to his head had left a half-inch hole in the skull that showed internal beveling of the bony fracture. It had entered behind the right ear causing radial fractures and impacting and terminating in the right petrous region.
He had a slight diastema between the maxillary centrals. I had always loved that subtle space between his front teeth. It made his smile more endearing because he was so precise in every other way, his teeth otherwise perfect because his perfect, proper New England family had made sure he wore braces .
. . . Suntan pattern of swimming trunks. lie had left for Hilton Head without me because I was called to a scene. If only I’d said no and gone with him. If only I’d refused to work the first in what would prove to be a series of horrendous crimes that would eventually claim him as the final victim.
None of what I was looking at was manufactured. It couldn’t be. Only Benton and I knew about the two-inch linear scar on his left knee. He had cut himself on glass in Black Mountain, North Carolina, where we had first made love. That scar had always seemed a stigma of adulterous love. How odd it was spared because soggy insulation from the roof had fallen on it.
That scar had always seemed a reminder of a sin. And now it seemed to turn his death into a punishment that culminated in my envisioning everything the reports described because I had seen it all before, and those images knocked me to the floor, where I sat crying and mumbling his name.
I did not hear the knocking of the door until it turned to pounding.
“Who is it?” I called out in a husky, ruined voice.
“What’s wrong with you?” Marino said loudly through the door.
I weakly got up and almost lost my balance as I let him in.
“I been knocking for five minutes . . .” he started to say. “Jesus-fucking-Christ. What the hell’s the matter?”
I turned my back to him and walked over to the window.
“Doc, what is it? What is it?” He sounded frightened. “Did something happen?”
He came over and put his hands on my shoulders, and it was the first time he’d ever done that in all the years I’d known him.
“Tell me. What are all these body diagrams and shit on the bed. Is Lucy okay?”
“Leave me alone,” I said.
“Not until you tell me what’s wrong!”
“Go away.”
He removed his hands and I felt coolness where they had been. I felt our space. He walked across the room. I heard him pick up the faxes. He was silent.
Then he said, “What the shit are you doing? Trying to make yourself crazy? Why the hell do you want to be looking at something like this?” His voice rose as his pain and panic did. “Why? You’ve lost your mind!”
I wheeled around and lunged for him. I grabbed the faxes. I shook them in his face. Copies of body diagrams, and toxicology and submitted evidence reports, the death certificate, toe tag, dental charts, what had been in his stomach, all of it drifting and scattering over the rug like dead leaves.
“Because you just had to say it,” I yelled at him. “You just had to open your big, rude mouth and say he wasn’t dead! So now we know, right? Read it your goddamn self, Marino.”
I sat down on the bed and wiped my eyes and nose with my hands.
“Just read it and don’t ever talk to me about it again,” I said. “Don’t you ever say anything like’that again. Don’t you say he’s alive. Don’t you ever do that to me again.”
The phone rang. He snatched it up.
“What” he blurted out. “Oh, yeah?” he added after a pause. “Well, they’re right. We are making a fucking disturbance, and you send fucking security up, I’ll just send ’em right back down ’cause I’m a goddamn-fucking cop and I’m in a goddamn-fucking-shitty mood right now!”
He slammed down the receiver. He sat down on the bed next to me. Tears filled his eyes, too.