“I really think I should go.” She repeated herself and we overruled her. “He wanted the three of you here. I don’t think I should be.”
“He would have wanted you here had he known you,” I said.
“Nobody leaves.” Marino said it like a cop drawing
down on a room full of suspects. “We’re all in this together. Goddamn.”
He got up from the table and rubbed his face in his hands.
“I sort of wish he hadn’t done that.” He looked at me. “Would you do that to me, Doc? ‘Cause if you got any ideas, I’m telling you right now to forget it. -I don’t want no words from the crypt after you’re gone.”
“Let’s put this pizza on,” I said.
We went out on the patio and I worked the dough off a cookie sheet and placed it on the grill. I spread sauce and sprinkled the meats, vegetables and cheese on top of it. Marino, Lucy and Jo sat in iron rocking chairs because I would not let them help me. They tried to keep a conversation going but no one had the heart for it. I drizzled olive oil over the pizza, careful not to make the coals flare up.
“I don’t think he brought you together just so you could be depressed,” Jo finally said.
“I’m not depressed,” Marino said.
“Yes, you are,” Lucy countered.
“About what, wiseass?”
“Everything.”
“At least I’m not afraid to say I miss him.”
Lucy stared at him in disbelief. Their sparring*had just drawn blood.
“I can’t believe you just said that;” she told him.
“Believe it. He’s the only goddamn father you ever had, and I’ve never heard you say you miss him. Why? ‘Cause you still think it’s your fault, right?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Well, guess what, Agent Lucy Farinelli:’ Marino wouldn’t stop. “It ain’t your fault. It’s fucking Carne Grethen’s fault, and no matter how many times you blow the bitch out of the sky, she’ll never be dead enough for you; That’s the way it works when you hate someone that bad.”
“And you don’t hate her?” Lucy pushed back.
“Hell.” Marino swilled what was left of his beer. “I hate her worse than you do.”
“I don’t think it was Benton’s plan for us to sit around here talking about how much we hate her or anybody;” I said.
“Then how do you handle it, Dr. Scarpetta?” Jo asked me.
“I wish you would call me Kay.” I had told her this many times. “I cant’ on. That’s all I can do.”
The words sounded banal, even to me. Jo leaned into the light of the grill and looked at me as if I held the answers to every question she had ever asked in life.
“How do you go on?” she asked. “How do people go on? All these bad things we deal with every day, yet we’re on the other side of it. It’s not happening to us. After we shut the door, we don’t have to keep looking at that stain on the floor where someone’s wife was raped and stabbed to death, someone’s husband’s brains blown out. We lull ourselves into believing that we work cases and won’t ever become cases. But you know better.”
She paused, still leaning into the light of the grill, and shadows from the fire played on a face that looked far too young and pure to belong to someone so full of such questions.
“How do you go on?” she asked again.
“The human spirit is very resilient.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Well, I’m afraid,” Jo said. “I think all the time about what I would do if something happened to Lucy.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” Lucy said.
She got up and kissed Jo on the top of the head. She put her arms around her, and if this clear signal about the nature of their relationship was news to Marino, he didn’t show it or seem to care. He had known Lucy since she was ten, and in some measure, his influence on her had a lot to do with her going into law enforcement. He had taught her to shoot. He had let her drive the streets with him and even put her behind the wheel of one of his sacred trucks.