“Besides you?” He swats her ass.

The offices are on the first floor, Marino’s the classiest he’s ever had, with heart-of- pine floors, chair rails, and fancy molding. “See, back in the eighteen hundreds,” he tells Shandy as they walk in, “my office was probably the dining room.”

“Our dining room in Charlotte was ten times this big,” she says, looking around and chewing gum.

She’s never been in his office, never inside the building. Marino wouldn’t dare ask permission, and Scarpetta wouldn’t give it. But after a late decadent night with Shandy, she ripped into him again about being Scarpetta’s slave and his mood turned spiteful. Then Scarpetta called to tell him Lucious Meddick had a flat tire and would be late, and then Shandy had to rag on him about that, too, go on and on about Marino’s rushing around for nothing and he may as well give her a tour like she’s been asking him to do all week. After all, she’s his girlfriend and should at least see where he works. So he told her to follow him on her motorcycle north on Meeting Street.

“These are genuine antiques,” he brags. “From junk shops. The Doc refinished them herself. Something, huh? The first time in my life I ever sat at a desk older than me.”

Shandy settles in the leather chair behind his desk, starts opening the dovetailed drawers.

“Me and Rose have spent a lot of time wandering around, trying to figure out what’s what, and pretty much decided her office was once the master bedroom. And the biggest space, the Doc’s office, was what they called the sitting room.”

“Kinda stupid.” Shandy stares inside a desk drawer. “How can you find anything in here? Looks like you just cram shit in your drawers because you can’t be bothered filing.”

“I know exactly where everything is. Got my own filing system, stuff sorted according to drawers. Sort of like the Dewey decibel system.”

“Well, where’s your card catalogue then, big fella?”

“Up here.” He taps his shiny shaved head.

“Don’t you have any good murder cases in here? Maybe some pictures?”

“Nope.”

She gets up, readjusts her leather pants. “So the Big Chief’s got the sitting room. I want to see it.”

“Nope.”

“I got a right to see where she works, since she seems to own you.”

“She don’t own me, and we’re not going in there. Nothing for you to see in there anyway, except books and a microscope.”

“Bet she’s got some good murder cases in that sitting room of hers.”

“Nope. We keep sensitive cases locked up. In another words, ones you’d think was good.”

“Every room’s for sitting, isn’t it? So why was it called a sitting room?” She won’t shut up about it. “That’s stupid.”

“Back in the old days, it was called a sitting room to differentiate it from the parlor,” Marino explains, proudly looking a round his office, at his certificates on the paneled walls, at the big dictionary he never uses, at all the other untouched reference books Scarpetta has passed down to him when she gets the newest revised editions. And, of course, his bowling trophies—all neatly arranged and brassy-bright on built-in shelves. “The parlor was this real formal room right inside the front door, where you stuck people you didn’t want staying around very long, whereas the opposite is true of the sitting room, which is the same thing as a living room.”