The way he’d said it had given Lucy a sick feeling she couldn’t shake, and she’d had a hard time concentrating on anything since. Berger had been sitting next to her in the loft when they’d read the alleged interview in which Scarpetta supposedly told Terri Bridges that she drank liquor that cost far more than Terri’s schoolbooks. Why hadn’t Berger said anything? How could she have the same extremely rare and expensive whiskeys in her own bar and not mention that detail to Lucy?

It was Berger who drank the stuff. Not Scarpetta. And more unsettling than that was Lucy’s fear about who Berger might drink it with. That was what had entered her mind when Morales had noticed her noticing the bottles in the bar. He was almost smirking, and whenever he looked at her now, there was a glint in his eyes as if he’d won a contest Lucy knew nothing about.

Bacardi and Scarpetta were arguing, and had been at it for a while.

“No, no, no, Oscar couldn’t have done my two.” Bacardi was shaking her head. “I hope I’m not offending anybody when I say dwarf, but I can’t get used to saying little people or little person. Because I’ve always called myself a little person because I’m not the longest drink of water, like we say down south. I’m an old dog. No new tricks, can barely hang on to the ones I got.”

She might be relatively short, but she wasn’t little. Lucy had seen countless Bacardis in her life, almost all of them on Harleys, women on the downhill side of five feet who insisted on having the biggest touring bike, about eight hundred pounds of metal, their boots barely touching the pavement. In one of her earlier manifestations with the Baltimore PD, Bacardi had been a motorcycle cop, and she had a face that went with it, one that had enjoyed too much intimacy with the sun and wind. She squinted a lot, and did a fair amount of scowling, too.

She had short dyed red hair and bright blue eyes, was sturdy but not fat, and probably thought she’d gotten dressed up when she’d decided on her brown leather pants, cowboy boots, and snug scoop-neck sweater that exposed the tiny butterfly tattooed on her left breast and plenty of cleavage whenever she’d bend over to dig into her briefcase on the floor. She was sexy in her own way. She was funny. She had an Alabama accent as thick as fudge. She wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone, and Marino hadn’t stopped looking at her since she’d walked through the door carrying three boxes of files from the homicides that had been committed five years ago in Baltimore and Greenwich.