Chaos. Patricia Cornwell

off, and the connection is pretty bad.

      “I don’t think so,” I puzzle as I bake on the bricks.

      “Why are you walking? Nobody should be out walking in this shit.” He’s curt and sounds irritated, and I’m instantly alerted this isn’t a friendly call. “So what the hell got into you?”

      “Errands.” I feel on guard, and his tone is annoying. “And I’m walking to meet Benton.”

      “Meeting him for what reason?” Marino asks as our cellular connection continues to deteriorate from good to spotty, back to okay and then fractured before it’s better again.

      “The reason I’m meeting my husband is to eat dinner,” I reply with a trace of irony, and I don’t want a tense time with yet another person today. “Is everything all right?”

      “Maybe you should be the one telling me that.” His big voice suddenly booms painfully in my right ear. “How come you’re not with Bryce?”

      My chatterbox chief of staff must have informed Marino about my refusing to get back into the car at Harvard Square, about my violation of protocol and reckless disregard for safety.

      Before I can answer, Marino begins confronting me as if I’m a suspect in a crime. “You got out of the car about an hour and a half ago, were inside The Coop for maybe twenty minutes,” he’s saying. “And when you finally exited the store on Mass Ave? Where’d you go?”

      “I had an errand on Arrow Street.” The sidewalks in the Yard form a brick spiderweb, and I find myself constantly making adjustments, taking the most efficient path, the quickest and coolest.

      “What errand?” he asks as if it’s any of his business.

      “At the Loeb Center, picking up tickets for Waitress, the Sara Bareilles musical,” I reply with forced civility that’s beginning to waver. “I thought Dorothy might like to go.”

      “From what I hear you were acting as squirrelly as a shithouse rat.”

      “Excuse me?” I stop walking.

      “That’s the way it’s been described.”

      “By whom? Bryce?”

      “Nope. We got a nine-one-one call about you,” Marino says, and I’m stunned.

      He informs me that his police department was contacted about “a young guy and his older lady friend” arguing in Harvard Square about 4:45 P.M.

      This young guy was described as in his late twenties with sandy-brown hair, blue capri pants, a white T-shirt, sneakers, designer sunglasses, and a tattoo of a marijuana leaf. The tattoo isn’t right but the rest of it is.

      Supposedly the concerned citizen who called the police recognized me from the news, and it’s disturbing that my clothing description is accurate. I do in fact have on a khaki skirt suit, a white blouse, and tan leather pumps. Unfortunately it’s also correct I have a run in my panty hose, and I’ll strip them off and toss them when I get where I’m going.

      “Was I mentioned by name?” I can’t believe this.

      “The person said words to the effect that Doctor Kay Scarpetta was arguing with her pothead boyfriend and stormed out of the car.” Marino passes along another outrage.

      “I didn’t storm. I got out like a normal person while he stayed behind the wheel and continued to talk.”

      “You sure he didn’t get out and open the door for you?”

      “He never does and I don’t encourage it. Maybe that’s what someone saw and misinterpreted it as him being angry. Bryce opened his window so we could talk and that was it.”

      Marino lets me know that next I became abusive and physically violent, slapping Bryce through the open window I just described while repeatedly jabbing him in the chest with my index finger. He was yelling as if I was causing him injury and terror, and to put it succinctly, what a crock of shit. But I don’t say anything because of the uneasiness in my gut, a hollow tight feeling that’s my equivalent of a red warning flag.

      Marino’s a cop. I may have known him forever but Cambridge is his turf. Technically he could give me a hard time if he wants, and that’s a new and insane thought. He’s never arrested me, not that there’s ever been a good reason. But he’s never so much as given me a parking ticket or warned me not to jaywalk. Professional courtesy is a two-way street. But it can quickly become a dead end if you’re not careful.

      “I admit I might have been a little out of sorts but it’s not true that I slapped anyone—” I start to say.

      “Let’s start with the first part of your statement,” Marino the detective interrupts me. “How little’s a little?”

      “Are you interviewing me now? Should you read me my rights? Do I need a lawyer?”

      “You’re a lawyer.”

      “I’m not being funny, Marino.”

      “I’m not either. A little out of sorts? I’m asking because he said you started yelling.”

      “Before or after I slapped him?”

      “Getting pissy doesn’t help anything, Doc.”

      “I’m not pissy, and let’s be clear about who you’re even referencing. Let’s start with that. Because you know how Bryce exaggerates.”

      “What I know is supposedly the two of you were fighting and disturbing the peace.”

      “He actually said that?”

      “The witness did.”

      “What witness?”

      “The one who called in the complaint.”

      “Did you talk to this witness yourself?”

      “I couldn’t find anybody who saw anything.”

      “Then you must have looked,” I point out.

      “After we got the call, I cruised the Square and asked around. Same thing I usually get. Nobody saw a damn thing.”

      “Exactly. This is ridiculous.”

      “I’m concerned someone might be out to get you,” he says, and we’ve been through this so many times over the years.

      Marino lives and breathes his phobic conviction that something horrible is going to happen to me. But what he’s really worried about is his own self. It’s the same way he was with his former wife Doris before she finally ran off with a car salesman. Marino doesn’t understand the difference between neediness and love. They feel the same to him.

      “If you want to waste taxpayer dollars you can check the CCTV cameras around the Square, especially in front of The Coop,” I suggest. “You’ll see I didn’t slap Bryce or anyone else.”

      “I’m wondering if this has to do with your talk at the Kennedy School tomorrow night,” Marino says. “It’s been all over the news because it’s controversial. When you and General Briggs decided to make a presentation about the space shuttle blowing up maybe you should have expected a bunch of fruit loops to come out of the woodwork. Some of them think a UFO shot down the Columbia. And that’s why the space shuttle program was canceled.”

      “I’m still waiting for a name of this alleged witness who lied to one of your nine-one-one operators.” I’m not interested in hearing him obsess about conspiracists and the pandemonium they might create at the Kennedy School event.

      “He wouldn’t identify himself to the operator who took the call,” Marino says. “He was probably using one of those track phones you can buy right there at the CVS. It’s one of those numbers you can’t trace to anyone. Not that we’re done trying, but that’s how it’s looking, and it’s pretty much what we’re up against these days.”

      I