“I got you a plain egg biscuit, but there’s a few steak, egg, and cheese ones, too, if you’re hungry,” he says. “And there’s water in a cooler.” He pokes a thumb toward the backseat. “No olive oil at Bojangles’, so you just have to make do. I know how you feel about butter.”
“I love butter, which is why I stay away from it.”
“Jesus. I don’t know what the hell it is about craving fat. But I just go with it now. I’m learning not to fight some things. If you don’t fight them, they don’t fight you back.”
“Butter fights me back when I try to button my pants. You must have stayed up all night. When did you find time to get this thing fixed and give it a bath?” I ask.
“Like I said, I found a mechanic, got his home number off the Internet. He met me at his shop at five this morning. We swapped out the alternator, balanced the tires, cleaned out the wheel wells, tightened the plug wires, and I replaced the wiper blades while we were at it, and cleaned it up a little,” he says, as we drive along West Bay, past restaurants and shops of stucco, brick, and granite, the street lined with live oaks, magnolias, and crepe myrtles.
Marino is dressed for the field, but he was sensible in what he selected for himself, the CFC summer uniform of khaki cargo pants and beige polo shirt in a lightweight cotton blend, and he wears tactical nylon mesh and suede trainers instead of boots. A baseball cap protects the top of his bald head and the tip of his sunburned nose, and he has on dark glasses and sunblock that is watery white in the deep creases of his sweaty neck.
“I appreciate your thinking to pack my field clothes,” I say to him. “I’m wondering when you did that?”
“Before I left.”
“That much I deduced on my own.”
“I should have brought you the khakis. You must be hot as hell. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Probably that you would take what you could find when you rummaged, and it’s been a bit too chilly in Massachusetts for warm-weather uniforms, since we’ve had an unusually cold spring. My khakis are in a closet at my house. If you had asked Bryce …”
“Yeah, I know. But I didn’t want him involved. The more involved he gets, the harder it is for him to keep his mouth shut, and he makes such a big thing out of whatever it is. He would have turned packing into a fashion show and sent me down here with a steamer trunk.”
“You packed for me before you left,” I repeat. “And when might that have been, exactly?”
“I pulled a few things together the last time I was in the office. I don’t know, the fourteenth or fifteenth, not that I was positive what would happen when I got down here.”
He turns onto US-17, heading south, the air blowing through our open windows as hot as an oven.
“I think you were absolutely positive what would happen,” I correct him. “Why don’t we just come clean about it?”
I open the glove box for extra napkins and spread them in my lap before retrieving our breakfast from the bag between our seats.
“It would be helpful if you’d admit that when you decided to take a last-minute vacation, you knew you were coming down here to assist Jaime,” I say to him. “You also knew I soon would follow without the benefit of the real reason why and would arrive with little more than the clothes on my back.”
“I’ve tried to make you understand why you couldn’t know in advance.”
“Yes, you’ve tried, and I’m sure you’re convinced of your reasoning even if I’m not. In fact, I shouldn’t call it your reasoning. It’s Jaime’s reasoning.”
“I don’t know why you don’t care if the FBI’s spying on you.”
“I don’t believe it. And if they are, they must be bored. Now, which one of these am I opening for you?” I examine warm biscuits in yellow wrappers slick with butter.
“They’re all the same except yours.”
“Okay, I think I can figure out mine, since it’s half the weight of the others.” I open more napkins and drape them over Marino’s thigh. “I would like a little clarity. And not about the FBI but about you.”
“Don’t get pissed again.”
“I’m asking for clarity, not a disagreement or a fight. Had you already rented your apartment in Charleston before Jaime called the CFC two months ago and you took the train to New York to have a secret meeting with her?”
“I’d been thinking about it.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I unwrap a chicken-fried steak, egg, and cheese biscuit, and he takes it in his huge hand and a third of it is gone in one bite, buttery crumbs snowing down on his napkin-covered lap.
“I’d been looking into it,” he says, as he chews. “I’d been checking out rentals in the Charleston area for a while, more of a pipe dream, really, until I talked to Jaime. She told me about her work in the Lola Daggette case and that she could use my help, and I’m thinking this is kind of amazing, sort of like it was meant to be. It’s the same part of the world where I was just looking for something to rent. But it makes sense when you realize that most places with good fishing and motorcycle riding also have the death penalty. Anyway, I decided she was right. It might be smart to become a private contractor.”
“Her suggestion. Of course.”
“Well, she’s smart as hell, and it made sense. You know, I can pick and choose my hours a little better, pick and choose where I want to be, earn a little more money, maybe.” He takes another bite of his biscuit. “I told myself it’s now or never. This is your chance. If you don’t try to make things turn out the way you want right now when it’s under your nose, you probably won’t get asked twice.”
“Did Jaime go into detail about what happened to her in New York? About why she quit?” I ask.
“I guess she told you what Lucy did.”
“I thought you said she hadn’t mentioned Lucy to you.” I open my egg biscuit, and although I usually don’t eat fast food and certainly don’t share Marino’s addiction to all things fried, suddenly I’m starved.
“She didn’t, exactly,” Marino says, and we are on the Veterans Parkway now, making very good time through long stretches of forests, the sky huge and a whitish blue that augurs a scorching day. “All she mentioned was the Real Time Crime Center, that its security was compromised and Jaime basically got blamed. No one officially accused her, but she said comments were being made about how coincidental it was that here she is claiming NYPD is skewing crime stats at the same time their computer system is broke into and it just so happens she’s in a relationship with a well-known computer hack.”
“That’s not the story Lucy tells,” I reply. “She says it wasn’t the Real Time Crime Center. It was one precinct where they allegedly were bumping down felony grand larcenies to misdemeanors and changing burglaries to criminal-mischief complaints.”
“That’s bad enough.”
“I don’t know exactly what she got into or how, but yes, it’s bad enough. And I’m sorry if that’s how Lucy is described, as a well-known computer hack. If that’s what people think of her.”
“Well, shit, Doc, she’s always going to do it,” Marino says. “If she can get into something, she’s going to get into it, and there isn’t much she can’t get into. I know you know that by now, so why pretend it’s ever going to change? Maybe I’d be the same way if I was like her, do what’s needed to get what you want because you can. Legalis just moguls on a black-diamond slope. Something you go over and around, and the more of them and the more difficult they are, the more Lucy likes it.”
I look out my open window at tawny marshes and snaking estuaries and creeks, the hot air blowing in the rotten-egg smell of pluff mud.
“Not that Lucy really gives a shit what anybody thinks of her.” Paper crinkles as he wads up his biscuit wrapper.
“I’m sure she’d like you to believe she doesn’t give a shit. She cares about a lot of things more than you might think she does. Including Jaime.” I take a bite of my biscuit. “I know I’m going to regret it, but this is
pretty good.”
“I’d better have another one in case we don’t get lunch.”
“You look like you’ve lost weight, and I don’t know how.”
“I only eat when my body’s hungry instead of when I am,” he says. “It took me half my life to figure it out. It’s like I wait until I’m hungry at a cellular level, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t have a clue.” I hand him another biscuit.
“It really works. No shit. The goal is not to think. When you need food, your cells will let you know, and then you take care of it. I don’t think about meals anymore.” He talks with his mouth full. “I don’t plan on having this or that or not having this or that or feel I have to eat at a certain time of day. I let my cells tell me and go with it. I’ve lost fifteen pounds in five weeks, and I’m toying with the idea of writing a book about it. Don’t Think You’re Fat, Just Eat.A play on words. I’m not really telling people not to think they’re fat. I’m telling them not to think about it at all. I believe people would go for it. I probably could dictate it and get someone to type it up.”
“I’m worried you’re smoking again.”
“I don’t know why the hell you keep saying that.”
“Someone’s been smoking in your van.”
“I think it smells pretty good in here.”
“It didn’t smell pretty good yesterday.”
“A couple fishing buddies of mine. Something about driving with the windows wide open when it’s hot as hell. People feel like lighting up.”
“Maybe you could be a bit more evasive,” I reply.
“What’s all this shit about cigarettes? Like suddenly you’re the smoking police.”
“You remember what Rose went through.” I remind him of my secretary Rose’s miserable death from lung cancer.
“Rose didn’t smoke, not even once her whole life. She didn’t have any bad habits and still got cancer, and maybe that’s why. I’ve decided if you try too hard, everything gets worse, so what’s the point in depriving yourself so you can die prematurely in good health? I wish she was still around. It’s not the same. Damn, I hate missing people. I still walk in your office and think she’s going to be there with that old IBM typewriter and an attitude. Some people should never be gone, and those that should hang around forever.”
“You recently were diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma and had several lesions removed. The last thing you need is to start smoking again.”
“Smoking doesn’t cause skin cancer,” he says.
“It triples your chances.”
“Okay. So now and then I bum a cigarette when someone else is lighting up. It’s no big deal.”
“ Don’t smoke cigarettes anymore. Just bum them.Maybe that’s another book you can write. People probably would buy that, too.”
“The shit Lucy worries about will never be proved.” He goes back to that because he doesn’t want to be lectured. “Nobody’s been accused or is going to be. Jaime’s gone for good from the DA’s office, and that’s what people like Farbman wanted, plain and simple. He must feel like he won the lottery.”
“Jaime certainly doesn’t feel that way, despite her protests to the contrary.”
“She seems pretty happy with what she’s doing now.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“She just doesn’t like how it happened, because she was forced. How would you feel if someone ran you off from your career after all you did to get there?”
“I’d like to believe I wouldn’t entice someone I supposedly love to do something destructive because I wanted out of the relationship,” I answer.
“Yeah, but breaking up with Lucy doesn’t have anything to do with Jaime getting run out of the DA’s office.”
“It has everything to do with it. Jaime uncreated herself,” I reply. “She didn’t like what she saw, and she smashed it, destroyed it, so she could start all over. But that doesn’t work. It never does. You can’t rebuild yourself on the foundation of a lie. You helped her with the security and camera system. Is she carrying a gun now, too?”
“I’ve given her a couple of shooting lessons at an indoor range here.”
“Whose idea?”
“Hers.”
“Most New Yorkers don’t carry guns. It’s not part of their culture. It’s not a natural default. Why does she suddenly think she needs a gun?”
“Maybe from being down here, where she doesn’t exactly belong, and let’s face it, anything related to Dawn Kincaid is scary. I think what she’s doing now has spooked her, and she got used to guns from Lucy, who’s always armed. She probably takes her Glock into the friggin’ shower. Maybe Jaime got used to guns because of living with them.”
“Just like she got used to having an LLC called Anna Copper that started out as a somewhat spiteful joke because Lucy was hurt? Yes, Groucho Marx, who was heavily invested in Anaconda Copper, a mining company that tanked during the Great Depression and is blamed for polluting the environment. You don’t see what’s going on here, do you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I do.”
“You invest in something that seems hugely valuable but is toxic, and you lose everything. It almost does you in.”
“You ever listen to those old radio programs of his? You Bet Your Life.You know, what color is the White House or who’s buried in Grant’s tomb, that sort of thing. He was pretty funny. You shouldn’t worry about Jaime’s shit.”
“I should worry about her shit, and so should you. It’s one thing to offer objective assistance in a case, and it’s another to be drawn into an agenda, especially a vindictive one, a highly personal one, a dysfunctional one. Jaime has all the incentive imaginable to make some big point, to re-create herself with a vengeance. There are other factors as well. I think you know what I’m referring to.”
Marino makes loud crumpling noises as he digs into the Bojangles’ bag, pulling out more napkins, as we cross a bridge that spans the Little Ogeechee River.
“I just hope you’re careful,” I continue, lecturing him again. “I’m not going to interfere if you choose to consult with other people, if you change your professional status with the CFC, but you need to be very cautious when it comes to Jaime. Do you understand why it might be difficult for you to be completely clearheaded about her?”
He wipes his mouth and fingers as we pass over Forest River now, where shrimp boats are moored and seagulls are congregated on a long wooden pier.
“It’s dangerous when people are propelled by powerful motivations they aren’t aware of. That’s all I need to say.” I don’t expect him to understand or to be persuaded.
Jaime feeds his ego in a way I don’t, because I refuse to manipulate him. I don’t charm and flatter him into doing what I want. I’m blunt and honest, and for the most part it annoys him.
“Listen,” he says. “I’m not stupid. I know she’s got other things going on and Lucy complicated everything. She’s so damn wide open, and I remember her coming into the DA’s office, acting like what was going on between them not only wasn’t a secret, it was something to brag about.”
Just ahead is the Savannah Mall, where I ate a seafood lunch with Colin Dengate last time I was here, and I try to remember when that was. Maybe three years ago, when I was still in Charleston and he was battling a spate of hate crimes in coastal Georgia.
“It shouldn’t have needed to be a secret,” I reply. “In fact, it should have been something to brag about if two people love each other.”
“Well, let’s be honest,” Marino says. “Not everybody feels the way you do. The two of them getting together isn’t the typical fairy-tale couple. It’s not like they’re Prince William and Kate. It’s not like everybody celebrated Jaime and Lucy. Just my opinion, but I think Jaime wanted out of it because it was causing her big problems. All that shit on the Internet, like suddenly she’d been voted off some reality show. Dyke DA, Lesbo Law. It was ugly, and she bailed, and now she’s sorry, even if she won’t admit it.”
/> “I’m interested in why you think she’s sorry.”
We’re on a narrow two-lane road called Middle Ground Drive, winding through a state-owned tract of land thick with underbrush and pines, not a sign of human habitation. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation keeps the location for their medical examiner’s office and forensic labs as isolated as possible for a reason.
“Shit. You think she’s happy with the life she’s picked?” Marino says. “I’m talking personally.”
“I’d rather hear what you think.”
“After they broke up, Jaime started dating men, including that guy from NBC, Baker Thomas.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“I still got friends at NYPD. When I went to see Jaime a couple of months back, I hooked up with a few of them and heard stuff. Point is, you think she could be more obvious? Going out with a TV correspondent who’s considered one of New York’s most eligible bachelors. Even though I got my theory about him. It’s not an accident he’s never been married. Lucy used to see him in the Village in the kind of bars Bryce would like.”
The Coastal Regional Crime Laboratory is tucked in trees and surrounded by a high privacy fence topped by anti-climb spikes. A metal gate bars the entrance, and to the left of it is a camera mounted on top of an intercom.
“What time is Jaime supposed to meet us?” I ask.
“She thought it would be good to give you a chance to look through the cases first.”
“You’ve talked to her today?”
“Not yet. But that’s the plan.”
“I see. I go through them first, and she doesn’t need to show up until it suits her, if she bothers at all.”
“Depends on what you find. I’m supposed to call her. Damn, this place has almost as much security as we do.”
“Hate crimes,” I comment. “Years and years of them, going back to when the lab was first built. Colin’s been quite vocal about it. One case in particular that was all over the news when we had the office in Charleston. You might remember it.”
Marino slows down and eases the van up to the intercom. “Lanier County, Georgia. African American named Roger Mosbly, a retired schoolteacher engaged to a white woman,” I continue. “He was driving home late at night, and as he pulled into his driveway, two white men stepped out in front of his car.”
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