“Hey, what do you think?”
“He was a close friend.”
“We worked Homicide together, fished together, we were on the same bowling team.”
“I know his death was hard for you.”
“Yeah, well, the case wore him down. Working all hours, no sleep, never home, and that sure as hell didn’t help matters with his wife. He kept telling me he couldn’t take it no more and then he stopped telling me anything. One night he decides to eat his gun.”
“I’m sorry,” I said gently. “But I’m not sure you can blame Waddell for that.”
“I had a score to settle.”
“And was it settled when you witnessed his execution?”
At first Marino did not reply. He stared across the kitchen, his jaw rigidly set. I watched him smoke and drain his drink.
“Can I refresh that?”
“Yo. Why not.”
I got up and did my thing again as I thought about the injustices and losses that had gone into the making of Marino. He had survived a loveless, impoverished childhood in the wrong part of New Jersey, and nursed an abiding distrust of anyone whose lot had been better. Not long ago his wife of thirty years had left him, and he had a son nobody seemed to know anything about. Regardless of his loyalty to law and order and his record of excellent police work, it was not in his genetic code to get along with the brass. It seemed his life’s journey had placed him on a hard road. I feared that what he hoped to find at the end was not wisdom or peace but paybacks. Marino was always angry about something.
“Let me ask you this, Doc,” he sand to me when I returned to the table. “How would you feel if they caught the assholes who killed Mark?”
His question caught me by surprise. I did not want to think about those men.
“Isn’t there a part of you that wants to see the bastards hung?” he went on. “Doesn’t a part of you want to volunteer for the firing squad so you could pull the trigger yourself?”
Mark died when a bomb placed in a trash can inside London’s Victoria Station exploded at the moment he happened to walk past. My shock and grief had catapeuted me beyond revenge.
“It’s an exercise in futility for me to contemplate punishing a group of terrorists,” I said.
Marino stared intensely at me. “That’s what’s known as one of your famous bullshit answers. You’d give them free autopsies if you could. And you’d want them would cut real slow. I ever tell you what happened to Robyn Naismith’s family?”
I reached for my drink.
“Her father was a doctor in northern Virginia, a real fine man,” he said. “About six months after the trial, he came down with cancer and a couple months after that was dead. Robyn was the only child. The mother move to Texas, gets in a car wreck, and spends her days in wheelchair with nothing but memories. Waddell killed Robyn Naismith’s entire family. He poisoned every life he touched.”
I thought of Waddell growing up on the farm, image from his meditation drifting through my mind. I envisioned him sitting on porch steps, biting into a tomato that tasted like the sun. I wondered what had gone through his mind the last second of his life. I wondered if he had prayed.
Marino stubbed out a cigarette. He was thinking about leaving.
“Do you know a Detective Trent with Henrico?”
“Joe Trent. Used to be with K-Nine and got transferred into the detective division after he made sergeant a couple months ago. Sort of a nervous Nellie, but he’s all right.”
“He called me about a boy -”
He cut me off. “Eddie Heath?”
“I don’t know his name.”
“A white male about thirteen years old. We’re working on it. Lucky’s is in the city.”
“Lucky’-s?”
“The convenience store where he was last seen. It’s off Chamberlayne Avenue, Northside. What did Trent want?”
Marino frowned. “He gotten word that Heath ain’t going to pull through and is making an appointment with you in advance?”
“He wants me to look at unusual injuries, possible mutilation.”