Now as he talked to a woman he’d never met who had a name that made him happy, he realized he hadn’t been doing all that badly, really, until he’d stopped being a real cop. When he’d finally left Richmond PD, and had gone to work as a private investigator for Lucy, and then as a death investigator for Scarpetta, he’d lost enforcement powers and all self-respect. He couldn’t arrest anybody. He couldn’t even have some asshole’s car ticketed or towed. All he could do was muscle his way into situations and issue empty threats. He might as well have had his dick cut off. So what did he do last May? He had to show Scarpetta he still had a dick, because what he was really doing was proving it to himself and trying to take his life back. He wasn’t saying what he’d done was right or should be excused. He’d never said that, and he sure as hell didn’t think it.

“I’ll get you whatever you need,” he said to Bacardi.

“That’d be great.”

He took perverse pleasure in imagining Morales’s reaction. Marino was talking to the Baltimore homicide investigator, doing whatever he wanted.

Fuck Morales.

Marino was a sworn NYPD cop. More than that, he worked for the elite DA squad, and Morales didn’t. What made that poor man’s Puff Daddy in charge? Just because he was on duty last night and responded to the scene?

Marino said to Bacardi, “You sitting in front of your computer?”

“Home alone, Happy New Year. Fire away. You watch the ball drop in the Big Apple? Me? I ate popcorn and watched The Little Rascals. Don’t laugh. I got the complete set of originals.”

“When I was a kid, you could name something Buckwheat and not have Al Sharpton up your ass. I had a cat named Buckwheat. Guess what. She was white.”

He opened a big envelope and pulled out his copies of the police and autopsy reports, and then opened the envelope of photographs, which he pushed around on the Formica countertop, covering a couple of cigarette burns and pot rings, until he found what he wanted. Cordless phone tucked under his chin, he inserted a photograph into the scanner attached to his laptop.

“You should know there’s some political bullshit here,” he said.

“You only got some?”

“Point being, just you and me need to be talking about this right now, and nobody else involved. So if anybody besides me gets in touch—I don’t care if it’s the NYPD police commissioner—I’d appreciate it if you’d not mention me, but let me know. And I’ll handle it. Not everybody in the mix is—”

“You’re telling me the grass is green and the sky is blue. No worries, Pete.”