Chapters (48)
- also by patricia cornwell
- title page
- copyright
- dedication
- contents
- prologue
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- thirteen
- fourteen
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- thirty-eight
- thirty-nine
- forty
- two nights later
- credits
I remove a damp cloth from a ceramic bowl and check on the dough, and Marino is sitting on the floor. His big legs are stretched out as he leans against the wall, at home inside my kitchen with a rangy-looking German shepherd puppy, a rescue Lucy airlifted out of a pig farm she and Janet shut down the other day. All paws, with huge brown eyes and cocked-up ears, black and tan, maybe four months old, curled up in Marino’s lap, my greyhound, Sock, on the rug next to them.
“Cambridge was all set up to get a K-nine, and then they didn’t approve the budget.” Marino reaches for his beer, and he’s different with the puppy.
Marino’s gentle. Even his voice is different.
“The problem’s paying overtime for whoever has the dog, but in my case I can do it for free and it’s not a union problem or whatever because I don’t work for them. You want to grow up to be a cadaver dog?” he says to his puppy.
“What an ambition.” I divide the dough into three balls.
“Then he could come to work with me. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Come to my big fancy building every day,” he says to the puppy in a voice that can’t be described as anything but silly, and it licks his hand. “That would be okay, right, Doc? I’ll train him, take him to scenes, teach him to alert on all kinds of things. That would be really cool, don’t you think?”
I don’t care anymore. Sleeping over in an AeroBed, a dog in the office, none of it seems important anymore. I’ve played it out so many times and can’t answer the most fundamental question. Would I have cut him badly enough to save myself? It’s not that I wouldn’t have tried, because I have no doubt I was going to slash at his face, but a scalpel blade is very short and narrow, and can break off from the handle.
I had one slim chance that it turns out I didn’t need, but I can’t stop thinking about it because it’s just one more reminder that the tools of my profession don’t save anyone. Even as I’m thinking this I know it’s not entirely true, and I need to snap out of this damn mood.
“I’ve been making myself crazy trying to come up with a name,” Marino says. “Maybe Quincy. How about I call you Quincy?” he says to the puppy, and I hate it when I’m negative.