“I guess that’s why you’re an FBI agent. You can figure out things like that.” His fingers worked their way down to my hand and he began to stroke it with his thumb. I had always known our path one day would lead to this. When he had asked me to serve as his consultant at Quantico, I had been aware of the danger. I could have said no.
“Are you in much pain?” I asked him.
“I will be in the morning, because I’m going to have a hangover.”
“It is the morning.”
I leaned back and shut my eyes as he touched my hair. I felt his face move closer as he traced the contours of my throat with his fingers, then his lips. He touched me as if he had always wanted to, while darkness swept in from the far reaches of my brain and light danced across my blood. Our kisses were stolen like fire. I knew I had found the unforgivable sin I had never been able to name, but did not care. We left our clothes where they landed and went to bed. We were tender with his wounds but not deterred by them, and made love until dawn began to around the horizon’s edge. Afterward I sat watching the sun spill over the mountains, coloring the leaves. I imagined his helicopter lifting and turning like a dancer in air.
6
In the center of downtown, across the street from the Exxon station, was Black Mountain Chevrolet, where Officer Baird delivered Marino and me at 7:45 a. m. Apparently, the local police had been spreading word throughout the business community that the “Feds” had arrived and were staying “under cover” at the Travel-Eze. Though I did not feel quite the celebrity, neither did I feel anonymous when we drove off in a new silver Caprice while it seemed that everyone who had ever thought of working for the dealership stood outside the showroom and watched.
“I heard some guy call you Quincy,” Marino said as he opened a steak biscuit from Hardee’s.
“I’ve been called worse. Do you have any idea how much sodium and fat you’re ingesting right now?”
“Yeah. About one third of what I’m going to ingest. I got three biscuits here, and I plan to eat every damn one of them. In case you’ve got a problem with your short-term memory, I missed dinner last night.”
“You don’t need to be rude.”
“When I miss food and sleep, I get rude.”
I did not volunteer that I had gotten less sleep than Marino, but I suspected he knew. He would not look me in the eye this morning, and I sensed that beneath his irritability he was very depressed.
“I didn’t sleep worth a damn,” he went on.
“The acoustics in that joint suck.”
I pulled down the visor as if that somehow would alleviate my discomfort, then turned the radio on and switched stations until I landed on Bonnie Raitt. Marino’s rental car was being equipped with a police radio and scanner and would not be ready until the end of the day. I was to drop him off at Denesa Steiner’s house and someone would pick him up later. I drove while he ate and gave directions.
“Slow down,” he said, looking at a map.
“This should be Laurel coming up on our left. Okay, you’re going to want to hang a right at the next one.” We turned again to discover a lake directly ahead of us that was no bigger than a football field and the color of moss. Its picnic areas and tennis courts were deserted, and it did not appear that the neatly maintained clubhouse was currently in use. The shore was lined with trees beginning to brown with the wane of fall, and I imagined a little girl with guitar case in hand heading home in the deepening shadows. I imagined an old man fishing on a morning like this and his shock at what he found in the brush.
“I want to come out here later and walk around,” I said.
“Turn here,” Marino said.
“Her house is at the next corner.”
“Where is Emily buried?”