13. Trace (2004) by Patricia Cornwell

Author:Patricia Cornwell [Cornwell, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Suspense, Fiction
ISBN: 9780748109685
Google: UyHuBzrmtwsC
Amazon: B0074VTH34
Barnesnoble: B0074VTH34
Goodreads: 16441394
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2004-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

26.

| | | MARINO HEAPS SUGAR into his coffee. He must be in very bad shape to take refined white sugar, because it is off-limits in his diet, absolutely the worst thing he can put into his mouth right now.

“You sure you want to do that to yourself?” Scarpetta asks. “You’re going to be sorry.”

“What the hell was she doing here?” He stirs in another spoonful of sugar. “I walk in the morgue and there’s the kid’s mother walking down the hallway. Don’t tell me she was viewing Gilly, because I know she isn’t viewable. So what in the hell was she doing here?”

Marino is dressed in the same black cargo pants and windbreaker and LAPD baseball cap, and he hasn’t shaved and his eyes are exhausted and wild. Maybe after the FOP lounge, he went out to see one of his women, one of those lowlife women he used to meet in the bowling alley and get drunk with and sleep with.

“If you’re going to be in a mood, maybe it’s better you don’t go into the meeting with me,” Scarpetta says. “They didn’t invite you. So I don’t need to make matters worse by showing up with you when you’re in a mood. You know how you get when you eat sugar these days.”

“Huh,” he says, looking at the closed conference room door. “Yeah, well, I’ll show those assholes a mood.”

“What’s happened?”

“There’s talk going around,” he says in a low, angry voice. “About you.”

“Talk going around where?” She hates the kind of talk he means and usually pays little attention to it.

“Talk about you moving back here, and that’s really why you’re here.” He looks accusingly at her, sipping his poisonously sweet coffee. “What the hell are you holding back from me, huh?”

“I wouldn’t move back here,” she says. “I’m surprised you would listen to baseless, idle talk.”

“I ain’t coming back here,” he says, as if the talk is about him and not her. “No way. Don’t even think about it.”

“I wouldn’t think about it. Let’s don’t think about it at all right now.” She walks on to the conference room and opens the dark wooden door.

Marino can follow her if he wants, or he can stand out by the coffee machine, eating sugar all day. She isn’t going to coax or cajole him. She’ll have to find out more about what’s bothering him, but not now. Now she has a meeting with Dr. Marcus, the FBI, and Jack Fielding, who stood her up last night, and whose skin is more inflamed than when she saw him last. No one speaks to her as she finds a chair. No one speaks to Marino as he follows her and pulls out a chair next to hers. Well, this is an inquisition, she thinks.

“Let’s get started,” Dr. Marcus begins. “I guess you’ve been introduced to Special Agent Weber from the FBI Profiling Unit,” he says to Scarpetta, calling the unit by the wrong name. It is the Behavioral Science Unit, not the Profiling Unit.

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