He got up from his chair and collected his soggy paper plate, his napkin, his empty Sharp’s bottle. The kitchen was no more than six steps away, with a small window above the sink that afforded him a view of artificial turf-covered concrete and aluminum tables and chairs surrounded by a chain-link fence—what was advertised as the apartment building’s backyard.
On the counter was his computer, and he read the gossip column from this morning that he’d saved on the desktop, determined to discover who was behind it, then find the scumbag and do something that would rearrange his or her body parts permanently.
No investigative tool he knew of worked. He could Google Gotham Gotcha until the cows came home, and nothing that popped up told him a damn thing he didn’t already know. It was useless trying to trace the columnist through the advertising companies that paid to push foods, liquor, books, electronics, movies, and TV shows. There was no pattern, only the validation that millions of fans were addicted to a fucking gossip column that this morning had made the worst episode of Marino’s life its centerpiece.
His phone rang.
It was Detective Mike Morales.
“What’s up,” Marino said.
“Data mining, bro,” Morales said in his slow, lazy way.
“I’m not your bro. Don’t waste your rapper-talk shit on me.”
Morales’s MO was to come across as half asleep and bored, and doped up on sedatives or painkillers, which Marino doubted, but then again, he didn’t know. Behind Morales’s haze was a snobby bastard who had gone to Dartmouth, then Johns Hopkins, where he’d completed medical school and decided he’d rather be one of New York’s finest, a cop, which Marino didn’t take at face value. Nobody who could be a doctor would end up a cop.
Besides, he was a bullshit artist who circulated all sorts of wild stories about himself and laughed his ass off when other cops believed him. Supposedly, his cousin was the president of Bolivia, and his father had moved the family to America because he believed in capitalism and was tired of herding llamas. Supposedly, Morales had grown up in the projects of Chicago and had been a pal of Barack Obama until politics interfered, which seemed reasonable to those who didn’t know better. No presidential candidate would want to be friends with someone who used words like bro and looked like a member of a street gang, right down to his half-mast baggy jeans, big gold chains and rings, and cornrow hair.
“Been running queries all day—not to be confused with homos, bro,” Morales said.
“Got no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Queer-ies? I forgot you got no sense of humor and barely finished high school. Looking for the usual patterns, trends, modus operandi, complaints, from here to Dollywood, and I think I hit on something.”
“What besides Berger?” Marino said.
“What is it about women like her and Kay Scarpetta? It might be worth dying to have her hands all over me. Goddamn. Can you imagine doing her and Berger at the same time? Well, who am I talking to? Of course you can imagine it.”