“No, ma’am, it wasn’t him. I was up on the ladder limbing the loquats, could see the man on the chopper over the fence. He didn’t see me. Maybe nothing.” The clippers snap, and side shoots called suckers fall to the ground. “Anybody been bothering you, ‘cause I’d like to know about it.”

“What was he doing?”

“Turned in and rode real slow about halfway, then turned around and went back. Looked to me like he had on a do-rag, maybe orange and yellow. Hard to tell from where I was. His chopper had bad pipes, rattled and spit like something about to quit. You should tell me if I should know something. I’ll be looking.”

“You ever seen him before around here?”

“I’d recognize that chopper.”

She thinks about what Marino told her last night. A biker threatened him in the parking lot, said something bad would happen to her if she didn’t leave town. Who would want her gone so badly as to pass on a message like that? The local coroner sticks in her mind.

She asks Bull, “You know much about the coroner here? Henry Hollings?”

“Only his funeral home business been in the family since the War, that huge place behind a high wall over there on Calhoun, not too far from here. I don’t like the thought of someone bothering you. Your neighbor sure is curious.”

Mrs. Grimball is looking out the window again.

“She watches me like a hawk,” Bull says. “If I might say so, she’s got an unkindness about her and don’t mind hurting people.”

Scarpetta goes back to work. Something’s eating the pansies. She tells Bull.

“There’s a bad rat problem around here,” he replies. It seems prophetic.

She examines more damaged pansies. “Slugs,” she decides.

“You could try beer,” Bull says with snaps of the pole cutter. “Put out saucers of it after dark. They crawl in it, get drunk, and drown.”

“And the beer attracts more slugs than you had before. I couldn’t drown anything.”

More suckers rain down from the oak tree. “Saw some raccoon droppings over there.” He points with the pole clipper. “Could be them eating the pansies.”

“Raccoons, squirrels. Nothing I can do about it.”

“There is, but you won’t. You sure don’t like to kill nothing. Kind of interesting when I think what you do. Would assume nothing much would bother you.” He talks from up in the tree.

“It seems what I do causes everything to bother me.”

“Uh-huh. That’s what happens when you know too much. Those hydrangeas over where you are. Put some rusty nails around them and they’ll turn a pretty blue.”

“Epsom salts will work, too.”

“Hadn’t heard that.”