"The headache better?"

"You ever been to a shrink?" he suddenly asks. "'Cause that's what I'm feeling like. Like I'm sitting in a room with a shrink. But since I ain't never been to a shrink, I don't know if it feels like this. I thought you would know." He isn't sure why he said it, but it came out. He looks at her, helpless and angry and desperate to do anything that keeps him out of the heaving darkness.

"Let's not talk about me," she replies. "I'm not a shrink, and you know that better than anyone. This isn't about why you did what you did or why you didn't. This is about what. What is where trouble lies or doesn't. Psychiatrists don't care much about what."

"I know. What is it. What sure as hell is the problem, all right. I don't know what, Doc. That's the God's truth," he lies.

"We'll back up a little. You got to her house. How? You didn't have the rental car."

"You have the receipt?"

"Probably in my coat pocket."

"It would be good if you still have it," she suggests.

"It should be in a pocket."

"You can look later. What happened next?"

"I got out and walked to the door. I rang the bell, she came to the door and let me in." The heaving darkness is right in front of his face now, like a storm about to break open on top of him. He takes a deep breath and his head throbs.

"Marino, it's all right," she says quietly. "You can tell me. Let's find out what. Exactly what. That's all we're trying to do."

"She… uh, she was wearing boots, like paratrooper boots, like steel toed black leather boots. Military boots. And she had on a big camouflage t-shirt." The darkness swallows him, seems to swallow him whole, swallows more of him than he knew he had. "Nothing else, just that, and I was just sort of shocked, and didn't know why she was dressed like that. I didn't think nothing of it, not the way you might think. Then she shut the door behind me and put her hands on me."

"Where did she put her hands on you?"

"She said she'd wanted me the minute we walked in that morning," he says, embellishing a little, but not a lot, because whatever her exact words were, the message he got was just that. She wanted him. She had wanted him the first instant she saw him when he and Scarpetta showed up at her house to ask about Gilly.

"You said she put her hands on you. Where? What part of your body?"

"My pockets. In my pockets."

"Front or back pockets?"

"Front." His eyes drop to his lap and he blinks as he looks at the deep front pockets of his black cargo pants. | \

"The same pants you have on now?" Scarpetta asks, her eyes never leaving him.

"Yeah. These pants. I didn't exactly get around to changing my clothes. I didn't exactly get back to my room this morning. I got a cab and went straight to the morgue."

"We'll get to that," she replies. "After she put her hands in your pockets, then what?"

"Why do you want to know all this?"

"You know why. You know exactly why," she says in that same calm, steady tone, her eyes on him.

He remembers Suz's hands digging deep into his pockets and her pulling him into her house, laughing, sa'ying how good he looked as she pushed the door shut with her foot. A fog swirls in his thoughts like fog swirling in the headlights as the taxi drove him to her house, and he knew he was heading into the unknown, but he went, and then she had her hands in his pockets and was pulling him into the living room, laughing, dressed in nothing but a camouflage t-shirt and combat boots. She pressed against him and he knew she could feel him and she knew he could feel her soft and tight against him.

"She got a bottle of bourbon out of the kitchen," he says, and he listens to his voice but he isn't seeing anything inside the hotel room as he tells Scarpetta. He's in a trance as he tells her. "She poured us drinks and I said I shouldn't have any more. Maybe I didn't say that. I don't know. She had me going. What can I tell you? She had me going. I asked her what's the thing with the camouflage, and she said he was into that, Frank was. Uniforms. He used to get her to dress up for him and they would play."

"Was Gilly around when he would ask Suz to wear uniforms and play?"

"What?"

"Maybe we'll get to Gilly later. What did Frank and Suz play?"

"Games."

"Did she want you to play games last night?" Scarpetta asks.

The room is dark and he feels the darkness, and he can't see what he did because it is unbearable, and all he can think about as he tries to be truthful is how the fantasy will die forever. She will imagine him and it will never happen, never, and there will be no point in his ever hoping again, remotely hoping, because she will know what it might be like with him.

"This is important, Marino," she says quietly. "Tell me about the game."

He swallows and imagines he feels the pills in his throat, deep inside it and burning. He wants more tea but can't move and he can't bear to ask her to get him tea or anything else. She is sitting straight in the chair but not tensely, her strong, capable hands on the armrests. She is erect but relaxed in her mud-spattered suit. Her eyes are keen as she listens.

"She told me to chase her," he begins. "I was drinking. And I said what do you mean by chase. And she told me to go into the bedroom, her bedroom, and hide behind the door and to time it. She said for me to wait five minutes, exactly five minutes, and then start looking for her like… Like I was going to kill her. And I told her it wasn't right. Well, I didn't really tell her." He takes another deep breath. "I probably didn't tell her, because she had me going."

"What time was it by now?"

"I'd been there maybe an hour."

"She puts her hands in your pants the minute you walked through the front door at approximately ten-thirty and then an hour passes? Nothing happened during that hour?"

"We were drinking. In the living room, on the couch." He won't look at her now. He will never look at her again.

"Lights on? Curtains open or closed?"

"She'd built a fire. The lights were off. I don't remember if the curtains were open." He thinks about it. "They were closed."

"What did you do on the couch?"

"Talked. And made out, I guess."

"Don't guess. And 1 don't know what that means. What does it mean when you say you made out?" Scarpetta replies. "Kissing, fondling? Did you take your clothes off? Did you have intercourse? Oral sex?"

He feels his face turn hot. "No. I mean, the first part we did. Kissing, mostly. You know, making out. Like people do. Making out. We were on the couch and talked about the game." His face burns. He knows she can see how hot his face is and he refuses to look at her.

The lights were out and the light from the fire moved over her flesh, her pale flesh, and when she grabbed him, it hurt and excited him, and then it simply hurt. He told her to be careful because it hurt, and she laughed and said she liked it rough, liked'it very rough, and would he bite her, and he said no, he didn't want to bite her, not hard. You'll like it, she promised, you'll like biting hard. You don't know what you're missing if you've never done it rough, and all the while she talked her flesh caught the light of the fire as she moved, and he tried to keep his tongue in her mouth and please her while he crossed his legs and maneuvered himself so she wouldn't hurt him. Don't be such a sissy, she kept saying as she tried to shove him down hard on the couch and force his zipper, but he managed to keep her from getting to him. He was thinking about her teeth showing white in the firelight and what it would be like if she got those white teeth on him.

"The game began on the couch?" Scarpetta asks from her distant chair.

"That's where we talked about it. Then I got up and she took me into the bedroom and told me to step behind the door and wait five minutes, like I said."