“I'm sorry,” I said gently. “But I'm not sure you can blame Waddell for that.”

“I had a score to settle.”

“And was it settled when you witnessed his execution?”

At first Marino did not reply. He stared across the kitchen, his jaw rigidly set. I watched him smoke and drain his drink.

“Can I refresh that?”

“Yo. Why not.”

I got up and did my thing again as I thought about the injustices and losses that had gone into the making of Marino. He had survived a loveless, impoverished childhood in the wrong part of New Jersey, and nursed an abiding distrust of anyone whose lot had been better. Not long ago his wife of thirty years had left him, and he had a son nobody seemed to know anything about. Regardless of his loyalty to law and order and his record of excellent police work, it was not in his genetic code to get along with the brass. It seemed his life's journey had placed him on a hard road. I feared that what he hoped to find at the end was not wisdom or peace but paybacks. Marino was always angry about something.

“Let me ask you this, Doc,” he sand to me when I returned to the table. “How would you feel if they caught the assholes who killed Mark?”

His question caught me by surprise. I did not want to think about those men.

“Isn't there a part of you that wants to see the bastards hung?” he went on. “Doesn't a part of you want to volunteer for the firing squad so you could pull the trigger yourself?”

Mark died when a bomb placed in a trash can inside London's Victoria Station exploded at the moment he happened to walk past. My shock and grief had catapeuted me beyond revenge.

“It's an exercise in futility for me to contemplate punishing a group of terrorists,” I said.