Isle of Dogs Cruel and Unusual Body of Evidence: Gift Set by Cornwell Patricia

Author:Cornwell, Patricia [Cornwell, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007643516
Amazon: 0007643519
Goodreads: 1713802
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2001-11-05T08:00:00+00:00

11

A freezing rain began to fall past midnight, and by morning the world was glass. I stayed in my house Saturday, my conversation with Al Hunt replaying in my mind, startling the solitude of my private thoughts like the thawing ice suddenly crackling to the earth beyond my window. I felt guilty. Like every other mortal who has ever been touched by suicide, I had the fallacious belief that I could have done something to stop it.

Numbly, I added him to the list. Four people were dead. Two deaths were blatant, vicious homicides, two of them were not, and yet all of the cases were somehow connected. Perhaps connected by a bright orange thread. Saturday and Sunday I worked in my home office because my downtown office would only remind me that I no longer felt in charge—for that matter, I no longer felt needed. The work went on without me. People reached out to me and then were dead. Respected colleagues like the attorney general asked for answers, and I did not have anything to offer.

I fought back in the only feeble way I knew how. I stayed in front of my home computer typing out notes about the cases and poring over reference books. And I made a lot of phone calls. I did not see Marino again until we met at the Amtrak station on Staples Mill Road Monday morning. We passed between two waiting trains, the dark, wintry air warmed by engines and smelling of oil. We found seats in the back of our train and resumed a conversation we had started inside the station.

“Dr. Masterson wasn’t exactly chatty,” I said about Hunt’s psychiatrist as I carefully set down the shopping bag I was carrying. “But I’m suspicious he remembers Hunt a lot more clearly than he’s letting on.”

Why was it I always got a seat with a footrest that didn’t work?

Marino yawned voraciously as he pulled down his, which worked just fine. He didn’t offer to exchange seats with me. If be had, I would have accepted.

He answered, “So Hunt would’ve been eighteen, nineteen when he was in the bin.”

“Yes. He was treated for severe depression,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I guess so.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“His type’s always depressed.” “What is his type, Marino? “‘Let’s just say the word fag went through my mind more’n once when I talked to him,” he said.

The word fag went through Marino’s mind more than once when he talked to anybody who was different.

The train glided forward, silently, like a boat from a pier.

“I wish you’d taped that conversation,” Marino went on, yawning again.

“With Dr. Masterson?”

“No, the one with Hunt. When he dropped by your crib,” he said.

“It’s moot and it doesn’t matter,” I replied uncomfortably.

“I don’t know. Seems to me like the squirrel knew an awful lot. Wish like hell he’d hung around a little longer, so to speak.” What Hunt had said in my living room would have been significant were he still alive and not armored in alibis.

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