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`'Right after you called this morning, Senator Lord did," she quietly told me. "It about shocked the entire field office, I might add"

"I bet it did."

".`He told me to get on a plane immediately and come here..."

"If only you minded me so well." I was getting shaky inside again.

"That you needed me."

"I can't tell you how glad I am . . :' My voice caught as I tumbled back down into that frigid, dark space.

"Why didn't you tell me you needed me?"

"I didn't want to interfere. You're so involved down there. You didn't seem to want to talk."

"All you had to say was, l need you."

"You were on a cell phone."

"I want to see the letter," she said.

I laid the knife on the cutting board and wiped my hands on a towel. I gave Lucy my eyes and she saw the pain and fear in them.

"I want to read it alone with you," she said.

I nodded and we went back to my bedroom and I got the letter out of the safe. We sat on the edge of my bed and I noticed the Sig-Sauer 232 pistol tucked in an Uncle Mike's Sidekick ankle holster peeking out of the cuff of her right pants leg. I couldn't-help but smile as I thought about what Benton would say. Of course he would shake his head. Of course he would go into some phony-baloney psychologizing that would leave us weak with laughter.

But his humor was not without its point. I was aware of the more somber, foreboding side of what I was seeing right now. Lucy had always been an ardent worshiper of self-defense. But since Benton's murder, she had become an extremist.

"We're in the house," I said to her. "Why don't you give your, ankle a rest?"

"Only way to get used to wearing one of these things is to wear it a lot," she replied. "Especially stainless steel. It's so much heavier."

'Then why wear stainless steel?"

"I like it better. And down there with all that humidity and saltwater."

"Lucy, how, much longer are you going to be doing this undercover thing?" I blurted out.

"Aunt Kay." She met my eyes and put her hand on my arm. "Let's don't start that again."

"It's just . . ."

"I know. It's just that you don't want one of these letters from me someday."

Her hands were steady as she held the creamy sheet of paper.

"Don't say that:' l said with dread.

"And I don't ever want one from you," she added.

Benton's words were just as powerful and alive as they had been this morning when Senator Lord had brought them to me, and I heard Benton's voice again. I saw his face and the love in his eyes. Lucy read very slowly. When she was done, she could not speak for a moment.

Then she said, "Don't you ever send me one of these. I don't ever want one of these."

Her voice shook with pain and anger.

"What's the point? So you can just upset someone all over agdin?" she said, getting up from the bed.

"Lucy, you know his point." I wiped away tears and hugged her. ""Deep down, you know."

I carried the letter into the kitchen and Marino and Jo read it, too. His reaction was to stare out the window at the night, his big hands listless in his lap. Hers was to get up and hover in the room, not sure where to go.

"I really think I should go." She repeated herself and we overruled her. "He wanted the three of you here. I don't think I should be."

"He would have wanted you here had he known you," I said.

"Nobody leaves." Marino said it like a cop drawing down on a room full of suspects. "We're all in this together. Goddamn."

He got up from the table and rubbed his face in his hands.

"I sort of wish he hadn't done that." He looked at me. "Would you do that to me, Doc? 'Cause if you got any ideas, I'm telling you right now to forget it. -I don't want no words from the crypt after you're gone."

"Let's put this pizza on," I said.

We went out on the patio and I worked the dough off a cookie sheet and placed it on the grill. I spread sauce and sprinkled the meats, vegetables and cheese on top of it. Marino, Lucy and Jo sat in iron rocking chairs because I would not let them help me. They tried to keep a conversation going but no one had the heart for it. I drizzled olive oil over the pizza, careful not to make the coals flare up.

"I don't think he brought you together just so you could be depressed," Jo finally said.

"I'm not depressed," Marino said.

"Yes, you are," Lucy countered.

"About what, wiseass?"

"Everything."

"At least I'm not afraid to say I miss him."

Lucy stared at him in disbelief. Their sparring*had just drawn blood.

"I can't believe you just said that;" she told him.

"Believe it. He's the only goddamn father you ever had, and I've never heard you say you miss him. Why? 'Cause you still think it's your fault, right?"

"What's wrong with you?"

"Well, guess what, Agent Lucy Farinelli:' Marino wouldn't stop. "It ain't your fault. It's fucking Carne Grethen's fault, and no matter how many times you blow the bitch out of the sky, she'll never be dead enough for you; That's the way it works when you hate someone that bad."

"And you don't hate her?" Lucy pushed back.

"Hell." Marino swilled what was left of his beer. "I hate her worse than you do."

"I don't think it was Benton's plan for us to sit around here talking about how much we hate her or anybody;" I said.

"Then how do you handle it, Dr. Scarpetta?" Jo asked me.

"I wish you would call me Kay." I had told her this many times. "I cant' on. That's all I can do."

The words sounded banal, even to me. Jo leaned into the light of the grill and looked at me as if I held the answers to every question she had ever asked in life.

"How do you go on?" she asked. "How do people go on? All these bad things we deal with every day, yet we're on the other side of it. It's not happening to us. After we shut the door, we don't have to keep looking at that stain on the floor where someone's wife was raped and stabbed to death, someone's husband's brains blown out. We lull ourselves into believing that we work cases and won't ever become cases. But you know better."

She paused, still leaning into the light of the grill, and shadows from the fire played on a face that looked far too young and pure to belong to someone so full of such questions.

"How do you go on?" she asked again.

"The human spirit is very resilient." I didn't know what else to say.

"Well, I'm afraid," Jo said. "I think all the time about what I would do if something happened to Lucy."

"Nothing's going to happen to me," Lucy said.

She got up and kissed Jo on the top of the head. She put her arms around her, and if this clear signal about the nature of their relationship was news to Marino, he didn't show it or seem to care. He had known Lucy since she was ten, and in some measure, his influence on her had a lot to do with her going into law enforcement. He had taught her to shoot. He had let her drive the streets with him and even put her behind the wheel of one of his sacred trucks.

When he first realized she didn't fall in love with men, he had been the consummate bigot, probably because he feared his influence had fallen short of what, by his standard, mattered most. He may even have wondered if he were somehow to blame. That was many years ago. I couldn't remember the last time he'd made a narrowminded comment about her sexual orientation.

"But you work around death every day," Jo gently persisted. "Aren't you reminded . . . of what happened, when you see it happen to someone else? I don't mean to, well, I just don't want to be so afraid of death."

"I don't have a magic formula," I said, getting up. "Except you learn not to think too much."

The pizza was bubbling and I worked a big spatula under it.

"That smells good," Marino said with a worried 'look. "You think it's gonna be enough?"

I made a second, then a third one, and I built a fire and we sat before it with the lights out in the great groom. Marino stuck with beer. Lucy, Jo and I sipped a white burgundy that was crisp and clean.

"Maybe you should. find somebody," Lucy said, the light and shadow of flames dancing on her face.

"Shit!" Marino erupted. "What is this all of a sudden? The Dating Game? Maybe if she wants to tell you personal stuff like that, she will. You shouldn't be asking. It ain't nice."

"Life isn't nice," Lucy said. "And why should ;you care if she plays The Dating Game?"

Jo silently stared into the fire. I was getting fed up. I was beginning to wonder if I might have been better off staying alone tonight. Even Benton hadn't always been right.

"Remember when Doris left you?" Lucy went on.

"What if people hadn't asked you about it? What if no one had cared what you did next or if you were holding yourself together? You sure wouldn't have volunteered anything. Same goes for the idiots you've gone out with since. Every time one of them didn't work out, your friends had to jump in again and pry things out of you."

Marino set the empty beer bottle on the hearth so hard I thought he might break the slate.

"Maybe you ought to think about growing up one of these days," he said. "You gonna wait until you're thirty before you stop being such a goddamn, stuck-up brat? I'm getting another beer."

He stalked out of the room.

"And let me tell you another thing," Marino threw back at her, "just because you fly helicopters and program computers and bodybuild and do all the other friggin' shit you do doesn't mean you're better than me!"

"I've never said I was better than you!" Lucy yelled after him.

"The hell you haven't!" His voice carried from the` kitchen.

"The difference between you and me is I do what I want in life," she called out. "I don't accept limitations."

"You're so full of shit, Agent Asshole."

"Ah, now we're getting to the root of the matter," Lucy said as he reappeared, gulping beer. "I'm a federal agent fighting big bad crime on big bad streets of the world. And you're in uniform riding around baby-sitting cops at all hours of the night."

"And you like guns because you wish you had a dick!"

"So I can be what? A tripod?"

"That's it," I exclaimed. "Enough! The two of you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Doing this . . . of all times . . ."

My voice splintered and tears stung my eyes. I was determined I wouldn't lose control again, and I was horrified that I no longer seemed able to help it. I looked away from them. Silence was heavy, the fire popping. Marino got up and opened the screen. He stirred embers with the poker and tossed on another log.

"I hate Christmas," Lucy said.

he next morning, Lucy and Jo had an early flight and I could not bear the emptiness that would return with the shutting door. So I went out with them, briefcase in hand. I knew this day was going to be awful.

"I wish you didn't have to go," I said. "But I guess Miami might not survive another day if you stayed here with me."

"Miami's probably not going to survive anyway," Lucy said. "But that's what we get paid to do-fight wars already lost. Sort of like Richmond, when you think about it. God, I feel like shit."

Both of them were in scruffy jeans and wrinkled shirts and had done nothing more than push gel through their hair. All of us were exhausted and hung over as we stood in my driveway. Carriage lanterns and streetlights had gone out as the sky turned dusky blue. We could not see each other well, just our shapes and shining eyes and foggy breath. It was cold. Frost on our cars looked like lace.

"Except the One-Sixty-Fivers aren't going to survive;" Lucy talked big. "And I'm looking forward to that."

"The who?" I asked.

"The gun-trafficking assholes we're after. Remember, I told you we call them that because their ammo of choice is one-sixty-five-grain Speer Gold Dot. Real high end, hot stuff. That and all sorts of goodies-AR-fifteens, twotwenty-three-caliber rifles, fully automatic Russian and Chinese shit-coming in from maggot-promise land. Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Puerto Rico.

"Point is, some of this is being smuggled piecemeal by container ships that have no idea," she went on. "Take the port in L. A. It unloads one cargo container every one and a half minutes. No way anybody can search all that."

"Oh, that's right." My head was throbbing.

"We're real flattered to get the assignment," Jo added dryly. "A couple of months ago, the body of some guy from Panama eventually linked to this cartel turned up in a South Florida canal. When they did the autopsy, they found his tongue in his stomach because his compatriots cut it off and made him eat it."

"I'm not sure I want to hear all this," I said as the poison sped into my mind again.

"I'm Terry," Lucy let me know. "She's Brandy." She smiled at Jo. "U of M girls who didn't quite graduate, but hey, who needs to because during our hardworking semesters of being dopers and getting laid, we learned some pretty good addresses for home invasions. We've developed a nice social relationship with a couple One-SixtyFivers who do home invasions for guns, cash, drugs. We're setting up a guy .on Fisher Island right now who's got enough guns to open his own damn gun store and enough coke to make it look like it's fucking snowing:"