As he’d lain in her guest room bed trying to figure out where she might have tucked it out of sight, he decided he’d never find it, was too sick to find it, and he could always shoot himself later because he had a couple extra guns in his fishing shack, but it would have to be a precision shooting because the worst scenario of all was to end up in an iron lung.

When he’d eventually contacted Benton at McLean and confessed all this, Benton matter-of- factly informed him that if an iron lung was the only thing stopping him, he had no worries unless he tried to kill himself with polio. That was exactly what he’d said, adding that most likely, if he did a bad job shooting himself, he’d end up with brain damage that profoundly compromised him but left him vaguely aware of why he’d wanted to off himself in the first place.

What would be really shitty luck, Benton had said, was an irreversible coma that became a discussion among Supreme Court justices before someone got the go-ahead to pull the plug. While he’d said it wasn’t likely Marino would have any awareness that this was going on, no one knew for sure. You’d have to be the person who was brain-dead to know for sure, he’d said.

You mean I could hear people saying they were going to take me off that … ? Marino had asked.

Life support, Benton had said.

So it wouldn’t breathe for me anymore, and I might be aware of it but nobody knows I am?

You wouldn’t be able to breathe anymore. And it’s within the realm of possibility you might be aware that you were about to be taken off the respirator. Have the plug pulled, in other words.

Then I could literally watch the person walk to the wall and pull it out of the socket.

It’s possible.

And I’d instantly start smothering to death.

You wouldn’t be able to breathe. But hopefully loved ones would be there helping you through it, even though they wouldn’t know you were aware of them.

Which brought Marino right back to his fear of smothering, and the grim reminder that the only loved ones he had were the very people he’d just fucked over, most of all, her, Scarpetta. It was at this point in a motel room near the Boston Bowl Family Fun Center where he and Benton had been having this discussion that Marino decided not to kill himself but to take the longest vacation he’d ever had in his life, at the treatment center on Massachusetts’s North Shore.