“He’s not going to come within a million miles of Aunt Kay again. I’ve taken care of him, because I don’t trust you to do it. His chopper’s old. A piece of junk with ape-hanger handlebars. I don’t think it’s safe.”

Marino won’t look at her now. He says, “I didn’t use to be like this.”

She opens the front door.

“Why don’t you just get the hell out of our lives,” she says from his porch, in the rain. “I don’t give a shit about you anymore.”

The old brick building watches Benton with empty eyes, many of its windows broken out. The abandoned cigar company has no lights, its parking lot completely dark.

His laptop computer is balanced on his thighs as he logs in to the port’s wireless network, hijacks it, and waits inside Lucy’s black Subaru SUV, a car not generally associated with law enforcement. Periodically, he looks out the windshield. Rain slowly slides down the glass, as if the night is crying. He watches the chain-link fence around the empty shipyard across the street, watches the shapes of containers abandoned like wrecked train cars.

“No activity,” he says.

Lucy’s voice sounds in his earpiece. “Let’s hold tight as long as you can.”

The radio frequency is a secure one. Lucy’s technological skills are beyond Benton, and he’s not naive. All he knows is she has ways of securing this and that, and scramblers, and she thinks it’s great she can spy on others and they can’t spy on her. He hopes she’s right. About that and a lot of things, including her aunt. When he asked Lucy to send her plane, he said he didn’t want Scarpetta to know.

“Why?” Lucy asked.

“Because I’ll probably have to sit in a parked car all night, watching the damn port,” he said.

It would make matters worse if she knew he was here, just a few miles from her house. She might insist on sitting here with him. To which Lucy offered that he was insane. There was no way Scarpetta would stake out the port with him. In Lucy’s words, that’s not her aunt’s job. She’s not a secret agent. She doesn’t particularly like guns, even though she certainly knows how to use them, and she prefers to take care of the victims and leave it to Lucy and Benton to take care of everybody else. What Lucy really meant was that sitting out here at the port could be dangerous, and she didn’t want Scarpetta doing it.

Funny that Lucy didn’t mention Marino. That he could have helped.