Marino might be a crude, poorly educated man, but he wasn’t a sex offender. He wasn’t a bad human being. But how was Scarpetta supposed to know? He didn’t fix it the morning after, didn’t make even a feeble attempt at it when she appeared in the guest bedroom with dry toast and coffee. What did he do? He faked amnesia. He complained about the bourbon she kept in her bar, as if it was her fault for having something in her house that could cause such a wicked hangover and a blackout.

He acknowledged nothing. Shame and panic had made him mute because he wasn’t exactly sure what he’d done, and he wasn’t going to ask. Better if he figured it out on his own, and over weeks and months of investigating his own crime, he finally fit the pieces together. He couldn’t have gone but so far, because when he awakened the next morning, he was fully dressed, and the only body fluid detectable was his cold, stinking sweat.

With clarity, he remembered only fragments: pushing her against the wall, hearing the ripping of fabric, feeling the softness of her skin, her voice saying he was hurting her, and she knew he didn’t want that. He clearly remembered she didn’t move, and now he understood it and wondered how her instincts could have been so right. He was completely out of control, and she was smart enough not to incite him further by fighting. He remembered nothing else, not even her breasts, except his vague recollection that he had been surprised by them but not unpleasantly. Rather, after decades of elaborate fantasies, they didn’t look quite the way he had envisioned them. But then, no woman’s did.

It was a realization that came with maturity and had nothing to do with intuition or common sense. As a horny little boy whose only point of reference was the dirty magazines his father hid in the tool shed, Marino couldn’t possibly know what he eventually discovered. Breasts, like fingerprints, have their own individual characteristics that aren’t necessarily discernible through clothes. Every breast he’d ever been intimate with had its own unique size, shape, symmetry, slope, with the most obvious variable being the nipple, which really was what the timeless attraction was about. Marino, who considered himself a connoisseur, would be the first to say that big was better, but once he got beyond the ogling and fondling, it was all about what he put in his mouth.