“But no cream because it’s in those pitchers, so I couldn’t get it. I don’t think either of you drink it with cream, unless that’s changed. They’re in the console in back. Jaime Berger’s up front. You might not be able to see her, it’s so dark, so don’t start talking about her.”

Trying to be funny.

“Thank you,” Scarpetta said as she and Benton got into the car. “How are you?”

“I’m doing good.”

He slid behind the wheel, his seat back so far it was touching Scarpetta’s knees. Berger turned around and said hello, and she didn’t act as if the situation was unusual. That was better. It was easier.

Marino pulled away from the hospital, and Scarpetta looked at the back of his head, at the collar of the black leather bomber-style jacket. It was classic Hogan’s Heroes, as Lucy used to tease him, with its half-belt, sleeve zippers, and plenty of antique brass hardware. On and off over the twenty years Scarpetta had known him, he’d get too big to wear it, especially around the gut, or more recently, too bulked up from the gym and, in retrospect, probably steroids.

During the interim without Marino in her life, she’d had a lot of space to think about what had happened and what had led up to it. Insight came to her one day not that long ago, after she’d reconnected with her former deputy chief, Jack Fielding, and hired him. Fielding had practically ruined his life with steroids, and Marino had been witness to much of it, but as he had gotten more disgruntled and frightened about a growing sense of powerlessness that Scarpetta couldn’t seem to do anything about, he’d become obsessed with his own physical strength.

He’d always admired Fielding and his bodybuilding physique, all the while critical of the illicit and destructive means he used to obtain it. She was convinced Marino began taking steroids several years before the more recent sexual-performance drugs, which would help explain why he turned aggressive and, frankly, mean, long before his violent eruption in her carriage house last spring.

The sight of him pained her in ways she hadn’t anticipated and probably couldn’t explain, bringing back memories of the long span of their lives spent together when he’d let his graying hair grow long and would comb it over his baldness, Donald Trump-style, only Marino wasn’t the sort to believe in gels or hairspray. The slightest stir and long strands would drift below his ears. He’d started shaving his head and wearing a sinister-looking do-rag. Now he had fuzz shaped like a crescent moon, and he wasn’t wearing an earring and didn’t look like a hard-riding Outlaw or Hells Angel.