Flesh and Blood. Patricia Cornwell

yeah? We’ll see about that.”

      Marino stalks around the truck, inspecting it. He pulls out a notepad and makes a big production of writing down the truck’s plate number. Next he photographs it with his BlackBerry.

      “I find anything I’ll write you up for damaging city property,” he threatens, the veins standing out in his neck.

      A shrug. He isn’t scared. He doesn’t give a shit. He’s even smiling a little.

      Marino gets back in and resumes driving. “Fucking asshole.”

      “Well you made your point,” I reply dryly.

      “What the hell’s wrong with kids these days? Nobody raises them right. If he was mine, I’d kick his damn ass.”

      I don’t remind him that his only child, Rocco, who is dead, was a career criminal. Marino used to kick his ass and a lot of good it did.

      “You seem very agitated today,” I comment.

      “You know why? Because I think we’re dealing with some type of fucking terrorist who’s now in our backyard. That’s my gut and I wish to hell it wasn’t, and me and Machado are having a real beef about it.”

      “And you started thinking this when exactly?”

      “After the second case in Jersey. I got a real bad feeling Jamal Nari is the third one.”

      “Terrorists generally claim responsibility,” I remind him. “They don’t remain anonymous.”

      “Not always.”

      “What about enemies?”

      I get back to the reason my vacation is being delayed and possibly ruined. More to the point, I need Marino to focus on what’s before us and not on connections he’s making to cases in New Jersey, to terrorism or to anything else.

      “I would imagine that after the storm of publicity Jamal Nari must have gained a few detractors,” I add.

      “Nothing to account for this that we know about so far.” Marino turns on Irving Street.

      A light wind stirs hardwood trees and their shadows move on the sunny pavement. The traffic is intermittent, a couple of cars, a moped, and a boxy white construction truck that Marino tailgates and blares his horn at because it’s not going fast enough. The truck pulls over to let him pass and Marino guns the engine.

      He’s in a mood all right and I doubt it’s solely related to his so-called beef with Machado. Something else is going on. Marino might be scared and going out of his way to act like he’s not.

      “And the highly publicized problem with the FBI was about this time last year?” I’m asking him. “Why strike now? A lot of people have forgotten about it. Including me.”

      “I don’t know how you forget after the way he treated you at the White House. Accusing you of selling body parts, saying autopsies are for profit and all that bullshit. Kind of an irony that the very thing he went after you about is now going to happen to him.”

      “Did he live alone?” I ask.

      “Second marriage. Joanna Cather. She was one of his students in high school and now works there as a psychologist.” Marino has gone from angry to subdued. “They started dating a couple years ago when he got divorced. Needless to say she’s much younger. She kept her name when they got married for obvious reasons.”

      “What obvious reasons?”

      “The name Nari. It’s Muslim.”

      “Not necessarily. It could be Italian. Was he Muslim?”

      “I guess the Feds thought he was which is why they went after him.”

      “They went after him because of a computer error, Marino.”

      “What matters is the way it looks and assumptions they make. If people thought he was Muslim, maybe that has something to do with why he’s been murdered. Especially with Obama coming here and the fact that Nari met him at the White House last year. Since the marathon bombings there’s a lot of sensitivity around here about jihadists, about loser extremists. Maybe we’re dealing with a vigilante who’s taking out people he thinks should die.”

      “Jamal Nari was a Muslim and now suddenly he was a jihadist or extremist Islamist upset about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?”

      He clams up, his jaw muscles clenching.

      “What’s going on with you, Marino?”

      “I’m not objective about it, okay?” he erupts again. “The Nari thing is pushing my wrong buttons and I can’t help it. Because of who and what he was and the fucking reward he got? A trip to the fucking White House? He gonna be on the cover of Rolling Stone next?”

      “This isn’t about him, it’s about the bombings. It’s about the murder of an MIT police officer who was minding his own business, sitting in his patrol car on a night when you were on duty. It could have been you.”

      “Asshole terrorists, and if the Bureau had bothered telling us they were in the Cambridge area …? I mean a detail like that and no cop is going to be sitting in his car, a damn sitting duck. I’m not back in policing even six months and something like that goes down. People killed in cold blood and their legs blown off. That’s the world we live in now. I don’t see how you get past it.”

      “We don’t. But I’m asking that you put it on hold right now. Let’s talk about where Jamal Nari lived.”

      “A one-bedroom apartment.” Marino’s Ray-Bans stare rigidly ahead. “They moved in after they got married.”

      “This part of Cambridge is expensive,” I reply.

      “The rent’s three-K. Not a problem for them for some reason. Maybe because after he was suspended from teaching he sued the school for discrimination. Figures, right? I don’t know the settlement but we’ll find out. By all appearances so far he did a little better than your average high school teacher.”

      “This is from Machado?”

      “I get info from a lot of places.”

      “And where was Joanna Cather this morning when her husband died?”

      “New Hampshire, heading to an outlet mall, according to her. She’s on her way here.” Sullen again, he refuses to look at me.

      “Are you aware that by nine a.m. it was already on the Internet that a Cambridge man on Farrar Street possibly had been shot? It was retweeted before the alleged shooting had even occurred.”

      “People are always screwing up the time they think something happened.”

      “Regardless of how people screw up things,” I answer, “you should know exactly what time the nine-one-one call was made.”

      “At ten-oh-two exactly,” he says. “The lady who noticed his body on the pavement said she’d seen him pull up and start getting groceries out of his car around nine-forty-five. Fifteen minutes later she noticed him down on the pavement at the rear of his car. She figured he had a heart attack.”

      “How did anyone get the information before the police were even called?” I persist.

      “Who told you?”

      “Bryce.”

      “Maybe he’s mixed up. It wouldn’t be a first.”

      “Unfortunately, these days you have to worry about students,” I say as we slow at a four-way intersection. “If you’re a teacher or work in a school you could be targeted by a teenager, by someone even younger. The more it happens the more it will.”

      “This is different from that. I already know it,” he says.

      A jogger goes by in the crosswalk and starts to turn onto Farrar Street but apparently notices the emergency