Patricia Cornwell – Scarpetta11 – The Last Precinct

She nods. “It was part of his cover. You saw…” Her eyes jump to me. “You saw him. His dyed hair, the earring, all the rest. Mitch played the role of a sort of, well, wild party guy and he did like the women. He never pretended to be, uh, faithful to me, to his so-called girlfriend. It was part of his cover. But it was also him. Yeah. I worried about it, okay? But that was Mitch. He was a good agent. I don’t think he did any­thing dishonest, if that’s what you’re asking. But he didn’t tell me everything, either. If he got onto something going on at the campground, for example, he might have started poking around. He might have.”

“Without letting you know,” Marino confirms.

She nods again. “And I was out doing my thing, too. It’s not like I was here every minute waiting for him. I was working in the office at Overland. Part-time, anyway. So we didn’t always know what the other was up to every hour of every day.”

“I’ll tell you this much,” Marino decides. “Mitch stumbled onto something. And I’m just wondering if he wasn’t out at the motel around the time Matos showed up, and maybe what­ever Matos was into, Mitch had the misfortune of being spot­ted in the area. Maybe it’s just that simple. Somebody thinks he saw something, knew something, and next thing, he gets picked up and gets the treatment.”

No one argues, Marino’s theory, actually, is the only one so far that makes any sense.

“Which brings us back to what Matos was doing here to begin with,” Pruett comments.

I look at Stanfield. He has wandered out of the conversa­tion. His face is wan. He is a nervous wreck. His eyes drift to me and quickly move away. He wets his lips and coughs sev­eral times.

“Detective Stanfield,” I feel compelled to say to him in front of everyone. “For God’s sake, don’t tell any of this to your brother-in-law.” Anger sparks in his eyes. I have humili­ated him and don’t care. “Please,” I add.

“You want to know the truth?” he angrily retorts. “I don’t want nothing to do with any of this.” He slowly draws himself to his feet and looks around the room, blinking, his eyes glaz­ing over. “I don’t know what this is all about, but I don’t want no partI mean, no part of it. You feds are in it already, up to your eyeballs, so you can just have it. I quit.” He nods. “You heard me right, I quit.”

Detective Stanfield, to our amazement, collapses. He falls so hard the room shakes. I spring up. Thank God, he is breathing. His pulse is running wild, but he is not in the grips of a cardiac arrest or anything life-threatening. He simply has fainted. I check his head to make sure he hasn’t injured himself. He is all right He comes to. Marino and I help him to his feet and get him on the couch. I make him lie down and prop several pillows under his neck. Most of all, he is embarrassed, acutely so.

“Detective Stanfield, are you diabetic?” I ask. “Do you have a heart condition?”

“If you just got a Coke or something, that would be good,” he says, weakly.

I get up and head into the kitchen. “Let me see what I can do,” I say as if I live here. Inside the refrigerator, I get out or­ange juice. I find peanut butter in a cabinet and scoop out a big spoonful. It is while I am looking for paper towels that I no­tice a prescription bottle by the toaster oven. Mitch Barbosa’s name is on the label. He was taking the antidepressant Prozac. When I return to the living room, I say something about this to Mclntyre and she tells us that Barbosa went on Prozac several months ago because he was suffering from anxiety and de­pression, which he blamed on the undercover assignment, on stress, she adds.

“That’s interesting,” is all Marino has to say about it.

“You said you’re going back to the motel when you leave here?” Jay asks Marino.

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