In truth, he hated anything around his girth and had come to wear his pants so low I marveled that his hips could keep them up. Paper crackled as he dug two Hardee’s biscuits out of a bag stained gray with grease. Cigarettes bunched in his shirt pocket, and his face had its typical hypertensive flush. When I had moved to Virginia from my native city of Miami, he was a homicide detective as obnoxious as he was gifted. I remembered our early encounters in the morgue when he had referred to me as Mrs. Scarpetta as he bullied my staff and helped himself to any evidence he pleased. He had taken bullets before I could label them, to infuriate me. He had smoked cigarettes with bloody gloves and made jokes about bodies that had once been living human beings.

I looked out my window at clouds skating across the sky and thought of time going by. Marino was almost fifty-five, and I could not believe it. We had defended and irritated each other almost daily for more than eleven years.

“Want one?” He held up a cold biscuit wrapped in waxy paper.

“I don’t even want to look at it,” I ungraciously said.

Pete Marino knew how much his rotten health habits worried me and was simply trying to get my attention. He carefully stirred more sugar in the plastic cup of coffee he was floating up and down with the turbulence, using his meaty arm for suspension.

“What about coffee?” he asked me. “I’m pouring.”

“No thanks. How about an update?” I got to the point as my tension mounted. “Do we know anything more than we did last night?”

“The fire’s still smoldering in places. Mostly in the stables,” he said. “A lot more horses than we thought. Must be twenty cooked out there, including thoroughbreds, quarter horses, and two foals with racehorse pedigrees. And of course you know about the one that ran the Derby. Talk about the insurance money alone. A so-called witness said you could hear them screaming like humans.”

“What witness?” It was the first I’d heard of it.

“Oh, all kinds of drones have been calling in, saying they saw this and know that. Same old shit that always happens when a case gets a lot of attention. And it don’t take an eyewitness to know the horses would have been screaming and trying to kick down their stalls.” His tone turned to flint. “We’re gonna get the son of a bitch who did this. Let’s see how he likes it when it’s his ass burning.”

“We don’t know that there is a son of a bitch, at least not for a fact,” I reminded him. “No one has said it’s arson yet, although I certainly am assuming you and I haven’t been invited along for the ride.”

He turned his attention out a window.