“Oh really?” Marino asked, pulling on rabbit fur-lined gloves. “And where was yours truly?. “Cause that ain’t going to happen if I’m in the house.”
“You weren’t here.”
He gave her an odd look as he realized she was serious.
“What the hell’d you eat last night?”
“It was like a movie. It must have gone on for hours.”
She looked at me, and her eyes were puffy and exhausted.
“Would you like to come to the office with me?” I asked.
“No, no. I’ll be fine. The last thing I feel like being around right now is a bunch of dead bodies.”
“You’re going to get together with some of the agents you know in town?” I uneasily said.
“I don’t know. We were going to work with closed-cycle oxygen respiration, but I just don’t think I feel up to putting on a wet suit and getting in some indoor pool that stinks like chlorine. I think I’ll just wait around for my car, then leave.”
Marino and I didn’t talk much as we drove downtown, his mighty tires gouging glazed streets with clanking teeth.
I knew he was worried about Lucy. As much as he abused her, if anyone else tried to do the same Marino would destroy that person with his big bare hands. He had known her since she was ten. It was Marino who had taught her to drive a five-speed pickup truck and shoot a gun.
“Doc, I got to ask you something,” he finally spoke as the rhythm of chains slowed at the toll booth. “Do you think Lucy’s doing okay?”
“Everyone has nightmares,” I said.
“Hey, Bonita,” he called to the toll taker as he handed his pass card out the window,
“when you going to do something about this weather?”
“Don’t you be blaming this on me, Cap’n.” She returned his card, and the gate lifted.
“You told me you’re in charge.”
Her mirthful voice followed us as we drove on, and I thought how sad it was that we lived in a day when even toll booth attendants had to wear plastic gloves for fear they may come in contact with someone else’s flesh. I wondered if we would reach a point when all of us lived in bubbles so we did not die of diseases like the Ebola virus and AIDS.
“I just think she’s acting a little weird,” Marino went on as his window rolled up. After a pause, he asked, “Where’s Janet?”
“With her family in Aspen, I think.”
He stared straight ahead and drove.
“After what happened at Dr. Mant’s house, I don’t blame Lucy for being a little rattled,” I added.
“Hell, she’s usually the one who looks for trouble,” he said. “She doesn’t get rattled.
That’s why the Bureau lets her hang out with HRT. You ain’t allowed to get rattled when you’re dealing with white supremacists and terrorists.
You don’t call in sick because you’ve had a friggin’ bad dream.”
Off the expressway, he took the Seventh Street exit into the old cobblestone lanes of Shockoe Slip, then turned north onto Fourteenth, where I went to work every day when I was in town. Virginia’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, or OCME, was a squat stucco building with tiny dark windows that reminded me of unattractive, suspicious eyes. They overlooked slums to the east and the banking district to the west, and suspended overhead were highways and railroad tracks cutting through the sky.
Marino pulled into the back parking lot, where there was an impressive number of cars, considering the condition of the roads. I got out in front of the shut bay door and used a key to enter another door to one side. Following the ramp intended for stretchers, I entered the morgue, and could hear the noise of people working down the hall. The autopsy suite was past the walk-in refrigerator, and doors were open wide. I walked in while Fielding, my deputy chief, removed various tubes and a catheter from the body of a young woman on the second table.
“You ice-skate in?” he asked and he did not seem surprised to see me.
“Close to it. I may have to borrow the wagon today. At the moment I’m without a car.”