“Refresh my memory. And that thing’s a hood ornament.” She indicates the helmet. “For show, and worthless if you have an accident on that donorcycle of yours.”

He tosses a file onto her desk. “ASan Franciscodoctor with an office here inMiami. Had a place inHollywoodon the beach, he and his brother. Not far from the Renaissance, you know, those twin high-rise condo buildings nearJohnLloydState Park? About three months ago at Thanksgiving while he was at his place down here, his brother found him on the couch, dead from a shotgun wound to the chest. By the way, he’d just had wrist surgery and it didn’t go well. At a glance, a straightforward suicide.”

“I wasn’t at the ME’s office yet,” she reminds him.

She was already the Academy’s director of forensic science and medicine then. But she didn’t accept the position of consulting forensic pathologist at the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office until this past December when Dr. Bronson, the chief, started cutting back his hours, talking about retiring.

“I remember hearing something about it,” she says, uncomfortable in Marino’s presence, rarely happy to see him anymore.

“Dr. Bronson did the autopsy,” he says, looking at what’s on her desk, looking everywhere but at her.

“Were you involved?”

“Nope. Wasn’t in town. The case is still pending, because the Hollywood PD was worried at the time there might be more to it, suspicious ofLaurel.”

“Laurel?”

“Johnny Swift’s brother, identical twins. There was nothing to prove anything, and it all went away. Then I got a phone call Friday morning aboutthree a.m., a weird-ass phone call at my house that we’ve traced to a pay phone inBoston.”

“Massachusetts?”