“Let’s don’t punish anybody. There’s been enough punishment, enough of people not getting along and fighting each other’s battles and making each other’s decisions and paying people back. Indirectly, that’s why Terri’s dead. That’s why Eva’s dead. If Terri hadn’t been paying everybody back … Well, if Marino wants to go after his former lamebrain therapist, let him do it himself.”

“You’re probably right,” Benton said. “And they’re here.”

He got up so Marino would see him in the crowded dark, and the party of four, which included Marino’s new girlfriend, Bacardi, who did have a first name—it was Georgia—and also Berger and Lucy, squeezed their way through the crowded dining room and paid their respects to Elaine and bantered about things Scarpetta couldn’t hear. Then everyone was pulling out chairs and sitting down, and seemed in fine spirits. Lucy had on a Red Sox baseball cap, probably to tease Berger, who naturally hated the Red Sox, but mainly to cover a small shaved spot.

That was it. An insult to Lucy’s vanity, the bullet wound on the back of her head healed, the minor contusion to her brain gone. Marino had rather much summarized as only he could that Lucy was a-okay because there was nothing up there to hit but bone.

Louie was back with plates of Elaine’s famous calamari, and he took orders without writing anything down, and Berger and Lucy wanted to try his special stash of Scotch, and Bacardi didn’t live up to her name and asked for an apple martini, and Marino hesitated, then shook his head and looked uncomfortable. Nobody paid any attention, and Scarpetta knew what had happened. She reached behind Lucy and touched Marino’s arm.

He leaned back and his wooden chair creaked, and he said, “How ya doin’?”

“Have you ever been here?” she asked him.

“Not me. Not my kind of joint. I don’t like having private conversations with Barbara Walters two tables away.”

“That’s not Barbara Walters. They have Red Stripe, Buckler, Sharp’s. I don’t know what you’re drinking these days,” Scarpetta said.

She wasn’t encouraging him to drink or not drink. She was saying she didn’t care what he was drinking, and that only he should care about it, and what she cared about was him.

Marino said to Louie, “You still got Red Stripe?”

“You bet.”

“Maybe a little later,” Marino said.

“Maybe a little later,” Louie repeated along with the rest of the orders, and was gone.

Berger was looking at Scarpetta, and she cut her eyes toward the man in the white Stetson sitting by the window.

“You know what I’m thinking,” Berger said to her.

“It’s not him,” Scarpetta said.

“I almost had a heart attack when I walked in the door,” Berger said. “You have no idea. I thought, How can that be possible?”