Page 81 of Unnatural Death

“Truth is, it would be helpful having you around,” Marino says. “I’m here only a few minutes longer, and I don’t have confidence in whatever Norm ends up doing. Which usually is nothing.”

“Do you mind if I move my truck inside the bay?” Faye walks us to the door.

“Help yourself,” I reply. “I’d do it now if I were you.”

Marino and I head back toward the elevator, and I’m seething inside even as I don’t show it.

“What Patty Mullet is doing has gone too far.” I pass along details I shouldn’t have been told.

“It’s really dangerous for her to be saying shit like that to someone who works in the labs,” Marino says.

“Or to anyone.”

“Loose talk like that can spread like wildfire,” he says. “At least Faye can be trusted. But who else is hearing that Lucy might be involved with terrorists? The answer is, a lot of people, I’m betting, and then they tell everyone else. Next thing you know, the FBI is at Lucy’s door with a no-knock warrant. This is how people end up dead for no good reason …”

As he continues painting the grim scenario, I’m envisioning agents in ballistic gear raiding the guest cottage on my property. My niece has guns in every room, and there would be a tragic outcome. I don’t know who would get shot, but somebody would. Maybe everyone. I don’t want Lucy dying the way she lives, always in danger and on the edge of the abyss.

I can’t help but worry about the choices she’s been making from day one, wondering how much of it is my fault. I’ve never stopped questioning the influence I’ve had while raising her as my own. I know some of what she’s absorbed and emulated is positive. But not all of it. How many times have I heard my sister blame me?

She’ll say that Lucy would have turned out differently if I were a teacher, perhaps the head of a biology department in a graduate school. Perhaps I’d be a better influence if I were a physician whose patients weren’t dead. Or a research scientist in a commercial lab.

“Doc …?”

What if I helped invent cures instead of chasing after killers? But what bothers Dorothy most is that Lucy chose to be nothing like her.

“Earth to Doc …?”

“I’m sorry.” I tune back in to what Marino is saying. He puts on his jacket, zipping it up to his chin as we follow the second-floor hallway.

“It’s like you were in a trance.” He puts on a plaid hat that has Elmer Fudd built-in earflaps. “You’ve been halfway beamed out ever since we got abducted by the intelligence community.”

“I’m somewhat preoccupied as a result.”

“You and me both. I hate being lied to. It’s all I can think about.”

“Plus, I’m a little sleep deprived. Both of us are,” I say to him, and we’ve reached the illuminatedEXITsign. “I could use some real food. As could you, I’m sure. Everything seems to be crashing in at once. Tomorrow will be better.”

“I wonder if Lucy knows what’s being spread about her all over the place,” he says. “I hate to think what she might do about it. I wouldn’t want to be Patty Fish Bait.”

“I wouldn’t want to be her for any reason,” I reply.

I open the door and we head down to the ground level, our feet scuffing on metal-edged steps.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Lucy’s gotten word of it,” I add. “She has a knack for finding out things. And if she hasn’t, she’s going to hear it from me as soon as I see her. I’m going to pass along everything that Faye told me. I’ll relay everything Patty Mullet is saying, the rumors she’s starting.”

“Unlike how we’ve been treated these past seven years, right? Lucy, Benton and Tron lying to our faces,” Marino says, the air dusty, our voices bouncing off concrete. “Meanwhile we don’t hesitate filling them in when there’s something they should know. Even when we’re told not to? We tell them. And they can’t return the favor.”

“Hopefully we’ll have a better understanding once we have a chance to talk to them without a host of other people around.”

“How are we supposed to trust them after this?”

“The same way we always have. Nothing’s really changed. It just feels that way.”

“At the end of the day it’s you and me against everybody. Always has been,” Marino says, and a part of him wishes that were true. Another part of him believes it.

CHAPTER 31

WE’RE NOT ALONE,” I say to Marino. “We really aren’t. We have people who care about us.” I open the stairwell door at the morgue level.

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